HN Explorer

Ask HN: Do you think Hacker News is missing any features?

15 points by jarrenae ↗ HN
I use Reddit, Twitter, TikTok, and basically all the other social networks, but Hacker News stands out as a specifically targeted forum. I think of it as a subreddit basically.

This piqued my curiosity; are there any major product/platform features that Hacker News should have?

30 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 88.4 ms ] thread
logicalmonster
> On occasion, there's an interesting comment or post that's killed and then you're completely prevented from commenting on it. I'm not a fan of this system where just 1 overly emotional hothead can kill a great discussion. There's even a point to being able to comment on spam: like giving people information to protect themselves or report the spam to a particular web host/law-enforcement agency.

> Creating another account is trivial, but I suppose some form of anonymous posting might be useful in certain discussions. The admins would obviously know who your account belongs to, weeding out much of the potential for spam or abuse.

> I do enjoy text-based discussions, but there's occasions where posting a diagram could simplify many discussions. Without making HN into a full-fledged image board, I wouldn't mind some kind of limited use image uploading functionality built-in.

Jtsummers
I think it takes multiple flags to flag kill a comment, but you can also vouch for them (I do this regularly). Click on the timestamp next to the comment and you'll get a vouch option. I think this takes a karma threshold, probably the same one as downvoting (500 or so).
EddieDante
A "delete account" feature would be nice.
josephcsible
First-party support for seeing replies to your posts, without having to look through your entire post history by hand.
Normille
You can do this [kind of] by clicking on your username on the top menu and then on the 'Comments' link in your profile.
josephcsible
That's what I meant by looking through my entire post history. Specifically, if someone replies to one of my comments from last week, I want to be able to see that without looking through all of the comments I've made in the last week.
Normille
Sorry I misunderstood what you were after. Yes. It's one of the most annoying features of HN. I have to mentally carry my karma score in my head and then, if I note that it's gone up or down a few points, I know one of my comments has provoked some kind of response and then have to look through my profile > comments to find out which. Not the most user-friendly UX.

Stangely, TheRegister[0] is similarly opaque --it must be a tech site thing!

[0]theregister.co.uk

dpifke
A killfile that lets me automatically hide stories from a list of domains.

(The site as a whole doesn't want to enforce "if they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic"[0] but I personally would like to, e.g. by not showing stories from CNN.)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

kbelder
This was the only thing that came to my mind. There's several sites I'd like to block, not on ideological grounds, but simply because of the technical irritations. Sign in barriers, irritating ads, frustrating UX, etc.

I always swear under my breath if I accidently click a medium link because I forgot to glance at the domain first.

helph67
The browser extension "uBound Origin" ensures you don't connect to sites it's told to avoid and it hides advertising!
Normille
This ^^ I've been wishing for years that someone would write an equivalent of the Google Hit Hider by Domain *monkey script [0] for HN.

As well as perma-blocking certain domains, I'd also like to be able to block submissions by certain users and, in an ideal world, be able to block submissions by keywords in title. For example, being able to block any article title containing 'cbd gummies' 'Evon Latrail' and 'scam or legit' would really improve the noise to signal ratio here!

[0] https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1682-google-hit-hider-by-d...

liberia
SVG icon for the little ‘Y’ image in the corner. It looks blurred when you zoom in. And I always have HN zoomed in at 150% because the text is tiny on a full HD screen.
t-3
Seeing which posts were upvoted, when, and also an option to hide/disable the voting system and scores.
richardatlarge
How about an AI program to organize the 400 comments into a more logical sequence? I always think there’s a lot of intelligent commentary in nearly random order
quux
Being able to collapse a thread without having to scroll up and find the root parent would be awesome
Jtsummers
At some relatively recent point "parent", "next", and "previous" were added to comment headers. You can follow the "parent" chain to the top which is more reliable than scrolling for larger threads.
OnionBlender
I don't expect any of these features to get added but I've thought adding some myself with a wrapper script.

I find it hard to notice new comments if I revisit a discussion later. It would be nice to highlight all new posts since the last time I visited. Same for new stories on the main page so I waste less time skimming titles I already read earlier.

jarrenae
I'm working on some mods here and there for the exact same reason. YC doesn't appear to have any interest in adding QOL updates to HN (which is good in some ways I think).

A couple web extensions could really improve the platform for heavy/regular users.

nine_k
- Larger upvote (and downvote) buttons.

- A way to format lists without adding blank lines.

- On mobile (Android), the comment box lacks the attribute that allows word completion, etc.

I could consider upvote-capping: not in absolute terms, but maybe at 110% of the next most upvoted peer at the top-comment position.This would allow for more top-comment dynamics which currently is often runaway.

wds
I made a uBlock Origin filter rule to double the size of upvotes from 10px to 20px:

  ! Hacker News large votes
  ycombinator.com##.votearrow:style(width: 20px !important; height:20px !important; background-size: cover !important; image-rendering: pixelated !important)
'image-rendering' is non-essential but I personally think it looks nicer :)
helph67
Message tags; which would allow viewing all messages on a specific subject.
jarrenae
As in posts, comments, or both? Would they be added by the poster or by other users later?
egberts1
HN is only missing the anti-bot feature where web crawlers hosted in AWS are busy stuffing HN with mostly useless drivels.
Kenneth39
I guess the YC interface is a little outdated, but...

I think it should remain as it is. Looking at innovations in other social networks, I wish they would someday be the same as they used to be.

lvqz
add an image to a post that will be displayed next to the title