I don't believe this is an actual feature, but I've noticed a trend that I've been calling "twos", where, at any given moment, a particular subject (present as a word or phrase in the article's title) will show up twice on the front page.
Funnily enough, currently the "twos" subject is "Hacker News", with this article and "What I've Learned from Hacker News" both being present in the front page at the same time.
Number of all possible topics is N, number of news on FP is 30. For example if N is 365, you would expect 70% chance that two separate items on FP mention the same topic.
Although, HN recurrence probably a bigger contributor. When a person gets reminded of some previous highly upvoted link and re-submits it. The highly upvoted link gets upvoted again and now you have two items on FP with similar keywords.
That's how I interpret it as well. I also think interesting articles on a topic jog people's memory and cause them to re-submit interesting articles from the past on that topic.
Just one comment about vouch, which seems to have have changed behaviour fairly recently.
Used to be that if a shadowbanned user posted a clearly substantive comment a vouch would always (nearly always?) restore it. Now it never does - I guess vouch is now just a vote that needs x votes.
Suspect that's going to unintentionally have even more people talking to themselves, because they've not yet noticed the shadowban.
they notify you when you get banned. i’m currently one of them. I didn’t notice for a few days though because the site doesn’t have an obvious way of notifying you when you get a reply.
One feature I’d like to see is the split between upvotes and downvotes on a comment. It’s a measure of controversiality which I would find more interesting than the net score.
Well you don't get to see other people's comment scores anyway. What I meant is for your own comments, seeing a score of +1 doesn't carry the same information than +15/-14.
There's a potential downside; some commentators may attenuate a strongly held opinion if they discover it is more polarising than they believed. Watering down debate isn't (usually) healthy.
(Rationally speaking, none of us will lie on our deathbeds wishing we'd collected more points in the internet popularity contest, but it's only human to change behaviour in response to external measures)
While we are on the subject of downvotes, I'd love to have it require a comment (reason) to downvote. Not knowing why something gets downvoted is super frustrating. The comment doesn't have to be visible in the default listing; it perhaps can be a side option/listing or pop-up.
It's not going to happen; it's part of the ethos of the site to downvote in lieu of writing insubstantial criticisms, a policy Paul Graham actually wrote out once long ago.
It's the right policy, I think. The last thing we need are dozens more one-line "why this sucks" comments on each thread.
> I'd love to have it require a comment (reason) to downvote
This has been something I’ve wanted to see in Reddit for a while now. I just recently learned that lobste.rs has this feature, and some other interesting stuff like a public mod-log.
But I think that would lead to people preferring vote manipulation. If I agree with a title but I see it close to 50% upvotes/downvoted, I’m more prone to upvote it. Whereas I’m reality I might not upvote it anyways.
Unfortunately the site still has no way of doing bullet lists. If you try this is the result:
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You can do this but it isn't clear that it is even a bulleted list (particularly with real content):
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It does support code blocks but that has strange boxing behavior making them hard to read even for actual code. For example:
- Super long line that will box strangely for some reason... ! Long Line Long Line.
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As you move further down a reply thread the box around code blocks shrinks and scrolling increases. If you access the comments with increased font size, a mobile device, or a smaller browser window it also gets worse/happens sooner.
There's also now anti-hammering protection on the site (posting/replying/voting too fast) but it is far too easy to trigger. Just voting for a comment and hitting reply to that same comment can easily trigger it.
Lots of people posting random feature requests in here, but is HN even developed any more? The last significant changes I remember were two and a half years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073675) and I think even those were the first ones in a long time.
It's interesting to see that question show up, because we work so hard on the code. It makes sense that you'd ask it, though, because most of the changes are either not visible (like anti-spam or anti-voting-ring features), or are subtle. For example, you may have noticed more capitalized titles on the front page in the last couple days—but this is an experiment we're going to roll back.
One reason we don't do a lot of visible changes is that HN's minimalism is one of its biggest assets. Another is that users don't like things to change, and the internal pressures that cause companies to do arbitrary redesigns are thankfully not in play here.
What kind of changes to the internals do you all do? And would you do a post on the architecture?
I assume there's been lots of work to make the site more efficient/reduce cost. "No [few] internal pressures" sounds like a great recipe for an interesting design.
A well designed official API would go a long way toward letting a thousand flowers bloom. I know there's web and mobile apps already out there, but IMO the average quality is not great. Which is not surprising, given the awkwardness of the existing firebase API, which probably keeps many developers away and eats too much of the efforts of those devs that do try their hand.
There's quite a bit that could be added, without even touching the site's overall mechanics at all.
The markdown support is extremely minimal and doesn't support a lot of basics like quotes (which causes many people to "quote" by using a code block, which has issues).
A basic private messaging system would be really helpful in a lot of cases. Right now people always have to post email addresses publicly.
It would be nice to have some built-in visibility into things like title changes, link changes, etc. that mods do, instead of needing them to comment manually about everything they do.
They could implement some scraping to automatically add the year to older stories, instead of users needing to flag it and get the mods to do it manually all the time.
My only wish is that dupes weren't marked as dupes. It's not like you are submitting with the intention of creating a duplicate link (normally), it should just take you there instead of a [dupe] mark on your submission.
I'd like to see a "rolling thread" feature where dupe threads (and links) are automatically merged into an existing thread, with older comments and subthreads being deleted over time.
Hacker News doesn't do a good job of avoiding duplicates anyway, might as well make that a feature.
The software already does that when it can. The [dupe] marks are added by moderators, or in some cases by user flagging. I'm sorry if it feels like a stigma—that's not the intention!—it's rather that otherwise a lot of complaints arise about why the story is buried.
I should add a section on dupes to the list, as the policy is a bit inconsistent (for example, a post on a subject that gets a lot of upvotes but is not the original source, might have the original source submission duped to that later submission.)
- Overhauled voting system. Comment votes are effectively "like/dislike" buttons, and some people use them to help promote/discourage comments central to the discussion. If you get downvoted or upvoted you do not know why, and that helps no one. Slashdot implemented a useful feature for this over 20 years ago.
- Tags on submissions, which would enable very simple filtering by topics.
- New hidden sections to let us dig into dead or controversial stories (maybe /dead and /deadnew?). If you watch /newest, you'll sometimes notice information that is interesting or meaningful, but it's auto-killed. There's no way to only show dead info except to page back through /newest. It would also be neat if we could actually vote on these, even if they remain dead. I don't even need comments to work on them, I'd just like to occasionally look at content that either a bot or overzealous human deems 'inappropriate'.
On the last one, here's an example: I just found this dead article in /newest (https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Renewable-Energy/The...) talking about the world's largest battery being built in Texas. It was submitted by protomyth, number 55 on the HN leaderboard. Of their past 30 submissions, 5 are dead, 1 has >100 votes, and 1 has >200 votes.
You can't easily find articles like this, because you have to keep paging back and paging back to find 30 or more dead articles. And you can't see the highest voted dead articles, so ones that might be interesting but were killed for some reason are also hard to find.
Not sure if this applies but new functionality will show up in your profile if you make it far enough in the YC application process. Our team landed an interview for the S2014 batch. There is a whole part of the site that you would only see during this process. I had questions in my profile during the application process (which normally does not appear) and when we were invited to interview there was scheduling tool where you could see the open slots over the four days of interviews. In our batch, they interviewed four teams at a time in 15-minute intervals and you could pick your time in this scheduling grid.
Readit News
Funnily enough, currently the "twos" subject is "Hacker News", with this article and "What I've Learned from Hacker News" both being present in the front page at the same time.
Number of all possible topics is N, number of news on FP is 30. For example if N is 365, you would expect 70% chance that two separate items on FP mention the same topic.
Although, HN recurrence probably a bigger contributor. When a person gets reminded of some previous highly upvoted link and re-submits it. The highly upvoted link gets upvoted again and now you have two items on FP with similar keywords.
Example: reddit.com/r/redditDayOf
Deleted Comment
Used to be that if a shadowbanned user posted a clearly substantive comment a vouch would always (nearly always?) restore it. Now it never does - I guess vouch is now just a vote that needs x votes.
Suspect that's going to unintentionally have even more people talking to themselves, because they've not yet noticed the shadowban.
So have others noticed a change, or did I accidentally flag my own account somehow?
(Rationally speaking, none of us will lie on our deathbeds wishing we'd collected more points in the internet popularity contest, but it's only human to change behaviour in response to external measures)
It's the right policy, I think. The last thing we need are dozens more one-line "why this sucks" comments on each thread.
This has been something I’ve wanted to see in Reddit for a while now. I just recently learned that lobste.rs has this feature, and some other interesting stuff like a public mod-log.
https://lobste.rs/about
I’d like to add a disclaimer that there may be very good reasons not to do this on Reddit or HN, of which I am not aware.
- One - Two - Three - Four
You can do this but it isn't clear that it is even a bulleted list (particularly with real content):
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
It does support code blocks but that has strange boxing behavior making them hard to read even for actual code. For example:
As you move further down a reply thread the box around code blocks shrinks and scrolling increases. If you access the comments with increased font size, a mobile device, or a smaller browser window it also gets worse/happens sooner.There's also now anti-hammering protection on the site (posting/replying/voting too fast) but it is far too easy to trigger. Just voting for a comment and hitting reply to that same comment can easily trigger it.
• one
• two
• three
• four
One reason we don't do a lot of visible changes is that HN's minimalism is one of its biggest assets. Another is that users don't like things to change, and the internal pressures that cause companies to do arbitrary redesigns are thankfully not in play here.
I wasn't trying to diminish the work being done, but I couldn't find a more recent official update announcement than the one I linked from 2016.
I assume there's been lots of work to make the site more efficient/reduce cost. "No [few] internal pressures" sounds like a great recipe for an interesting design.
But which features are missing?
The markdown support is extremely minimal and doesn't support a lot of basics like quotes (which causes many people to "quote" by using a code block, which has issues).
A basic private messaging system would be really helpful in a lot of cases. Right now people always have to post email addresses publicly.
It would be nice to have some built-in visibility into things like title changes, link changes, etc. that mods do, instead of needing them to comment manually about everything they do.
They could implement some scraping to automatically add the year to older stories, instead of users needing to flag it and get the mods to do it manually all the time.
And so on.
Hacker News doesn't do a good job of avoiding duplicates anyway, might as well make that a feature.
No, don't delete comments! Hide them if you must, but I always like being able to enjoy and send people link to comments from years ago.
- Overhauled voting system. Comment votes are effectively "like/dislike" buttons, and some people use them to help promote/discourage comments central to the discussion. If you get downvoted or upvoted you do not know why, and that helps no one. Slashdot implemented a useful feature for this over 20 years ago.
- Tags on submissions, which would enable very simple filtering by topics.
- New hidden sections to let us dig into dead or controversial stories (maybe /dead and /deadnew?). If you watch /newest, you'll sometimes notice information that is interesting or meaningful, but it's auto-killed. There's no way to only show dead info except to page back through /newest. It would also be neat if we could actually vote on these, even if they remain dead. I don't even need comments to work on them, I'd just like to occasionally look at content that either a bot or overzealous human deems 'inappropriate'.
On the last one, here's an example: I just found this dead article in /newest (https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Renewable-Energy/The...) talking about the world's largest battery being built in Texas. It was submitted by protomyth, number 55 on the HN leaderboard. Of their past 30 submissions, 5 are dead, 1 has >100 votes, and 1 has >200 votes.
You can't easily find articles like this, because you have to keep paging back and paging back to find 30 or more dead articles. And you can't see the highest voted dead articles, so ones that might be interesting but were killed for some reason are also hard to find.
https://github.com/joseph-adam/YCombinator-Application-S14