The idea of compressing voting down to a single unitless dimension seems like there's a whole lot of information loss going on.<p>The fact that this dimension doesn't even have an agreed upon unit vector makes it even worse.<p>There are many dimensions, with different degrees of orthogonality<p><pre><code> true / false
funny / serious
insightful / wrong
kind / hurtful
agree / disagree (useful for votes)
</code></pre>
I haven't got a clue how a good UX would deal with it, let alone the ranking for display purposes, but I do know the trinary up/neutral/down vote is a big issue.
I've actually been considering this over the last week. I've been a user since the beginning, but I find that I am maybe clicking on one or two links from the first two pages. Seems the value of the content is feeling very bland these days. Which is surprising seeing as we are in such an amazing time technologically. Where has the quality interesting content gone?
Less transphobia and general lack of social consciousness. I'm often on the edge of not reading HN as it is for those reasons, but unfortunately there isn't anything else like its better sides.
I've been reading HN daily for over a decade and what's been tempting me to quit lately is the realization of just how <i>stagnant</i> discussion is around here. Privacy dead-enders, soliloquies for the "dream of the open internet", Google cancelling projects, ad blocking, piracy, the "spirit of free speech"... i'm sick of it! It's a nasty combination of smug and boring.<p>One of the things that I've come to appreciate about Twitter is the prominence of the person associated with each tweet. On HN (and reddit) everyone is an amorphous grey blob. On Twitter at least I can find and follow interesting people, and mute/block people that are uninteresting or obnoxious.
Feed filtering is the must have feature for our times. All this subscribing and no built-in fine grain negative control is absurd. Right now the number of sites I block per page on HN hovers around 15% to 30%. The front page is always much lower (3%-8%) which tells me the mods actions align with mine about what shouldn't be on the HN front page.<p>I'm settled in to ride out the inevitable decline as I've done for all feed based aggregators like twitter, medium, reddit et al. From experience, when it reaches ~50% block worthy I will stop trying to upvote solid posts and prolong the suffering of others.
I'd like a better "hide" mechanism - swipe. I'd like to swipe away comments and submissions that I am done with but have them revive if enough points or comments come in after. Eventually the front page would only show new posts or those jumping in popularity (or be empty as I dismissed everything); no infinite scroll.
I would like to see more of the "invisible web" showing up on the front page. As primarily tech people we should be more familiar with the older and wiser corners of the web and not just a slew of attention grabbing headlines.<p>I have found some of the most fascinating and thought provoking gems on HN over the years which would have otherwise been lost to antiquity. That is something unique that HN brings to the table as opposed to the multitudes of curated headline feeds out there.<p>As other commenters state here, the paywalled MSM stuff should take a backseat.<p>Old timers should be encouraged to submit some of their time-tested and well-worn articles to foster a more stable grounding in the tech industry for the newcomers.
The community in Ask HN is far too pessimistic and sociopathic. I think there's a lot of very ambitious and intelligent people here who have become cynical and narrow focused.<p>There are certain topics that have to be avoided. Ironically the attitude is very anti-startup and against newer, unproven technology.<p>I'd actually love to see a community where we could discuss startups and new tech. Subbreddits tend to swing too young - opinions are strong but unfounded, and there's a strong bias against the tried and true. Something like Indie Hackers attract the idealists who have big dreams but do not act on them.
Instead of asking "How can I get some participants from Hacker News?", why not ask "Who is out there to serve that doesn't like HN, SlashDot, etc?"<p>There are a lot more people in the second group.
I would stop using HN if it turned into Reddit - from a comments perspective. I already see it happening on some threads so it's probably a matter of time.
Everything I like, and hate, about this place comes down to the community. Features don't mean much either way.<p>That said, I'd like to be able to change my username and be able to archive or delete my content at will. Even a pseudonymous identity and history on any platform can be a liability these days.
I don’t think you’ll move anyone away with a simple feature such as profile pics or whatever.<p>There is so much goodwill and history and HN attracts great people. Also say you built something better than HN - people won’t leave HN for that they’ll probably use both.
Tough to beat, so long as you stay out of the comments section for anything non-related to tech, it's the best source for almost everything to bootstrappers, solo founders, etc.
The "downvote due to disagree" thing really annoys me. That and making the text become washed out. I hate it. Especially when I've seen excellent unpopular comments disappear because they were simply unpopular due to politics. Its anti-intellectual. I want to see unpopular comments because they often reveal something interesting.<p>People should be downvoting because its not appropriate intellectually (adds nothing, eg provides no evidence to back up a claim that obviously needs it). Flagging should be because it is simply inappropriate for usually offensive reasons.<p>I rarely comment now. I often don't see the point.<p>I've also often considered a tool to only provide the RSS feed for interesting article discovery then mostly ignore the comments completely. Comments on the ask/show sections are usually more signal than noise. Sometimes even the noise is interesting.<p>Upvotes should exist to make interesting content rise. Uninteresting content then simply sinks to the bottom.<p>But votes are a difficult problem to solve. I'm sure there are too many corner cases I've no idea about.
As soon as the whole front page is links to paywalled MSM sites, I already check the (source) before clicking.<p>If I wanted to read the headlines and first paragraph of articles in the NYT I'd just sign up for their daily email digest.
All links being to freely accessible articles, i.e.<p>No paywalled sites.<p>No sites that require sign-up, even if just using FB/Google/etc login.<p>No sites that demand that I remove ad-block.