One thing I really miss in HN is having a tagging system to filter content better. Sometimes, the things I want to follow or ignore don't have any clear hints in their titles. Having tags would really help customize the content for each user.
I like HN generally, but there are a handful of things I wish it had:
* The ability to save comments, as well as posts
* Ideally a separate 'favorites' and 'read later' category
* Some kind of [tags] on posts, ideally something
individuals can contribute to. It would be easy to add from an existing set of tags, adding a unique new tag would be harder and require maybe an older account or more 'points' or whatever.
* Maybe some kind of 'bump' system when linking to things that have already been posted? It feels a bit silly for there to be like 10 duplicates of a post from different time periods. But maybe that's better than the alternative, not sure.
> When a post is down-voted or flagged, a self-cleaning procedure is triggered by other users, so quality posts and comments tend to float to the top.
The first part is correct, the second part is correct in theory, but any place that has "upvotes" (like HN or reddit) ends up with the community putting straight up incorrect stuff as the "top comment".
So while "far up in the comment thread" can signal quality, accuracy and truth, you'd be mistaken to automatically assume so. HN is, after all, just another community on the website filled with humans who can be wrong.
If the shareholders of ycombinator like your sentiment, you'll flourish. Ycombinator is a business don't forget. We're all here to discuss, usually in good faith. But I can't help but get the impression that submissions that are made popular are reviewed and measured, that's just my tinfoil hat maybe.
> As far as I know, it is the only "social network" that allows you to grow intellectually through participation. This is probably the highest compliment an internet platform can receive in 2025.
Eh. It’s garbage in, garbage out, mostly like any other platform. It’s still easy to degrade the site if the users are determined enough.
How you choose to use it dictates your takeaway more than most social media platforms I suppose, which is actually the best thing about it IMO. That much is worth contrasting with the other options out there, no question.
I've used Reddit since before subreddits, and I would never want this place to go down that route. But it seems like there is a desire for some of those features Reddit had in its early years.
For me, a touch more Markdown like for text links [text](url) would be nice, not asking for image support or anything like that, though. As cool as the [0] is, the <a href=> tag and its predecessors were invented early on for a reason.
>> The best part? No politics, trivia, or spam. Mainstream media news is rare
Boy what incredibly different universes we live in.
If anyone already has the infrastructure set up for this already, I really, really, wish for something where the top X HN stories can be input to AI sentiment analysis and graphs automatically created which shows, per time period, the % of submissions it classifies as "political" and the % classified as "mainstream news".
In the top 100 posts on any given day it has to be a significant percentage. I flag all political posts I see and I'm constantly flagging. The AI analysis wouldn't be perfect, but it would at least be fairly impartial, and automated. Why not collect the data?
The thing that's hard about the intellectual curiosity part is knowing what comments are from actual experts and what are very smart people opining outside the edges of their circle of competence - while still sounding smart.
There was a discussion here where a professor with a specialty on the underlying subject was 'corrected'/crowded out by very detailed comments that sounded cogent, had buzzwords in them but ultimately were incorrect.
Seeing that makes me wonder about the discussion here on topics I know nothing about. Vetted flair for subject matter expertise for users would help. I'm still interested in what a chip designer has to say about astronomy but it would make it easier to weigh the contribution.
Odd to say there isn't mainstream news media. All major news stories break here. And with the tight approach to maintaining the ship and fast moving nature it is one of the best places to keep abreast of everything.
HN was better 15 years ago. There was actual diversity of opinion. Founders who made it big used to post here still. There's the odd interesting thing here still but now it's a major echo chamber.
What I wish for would be some kind of frontend for viewing hacker news (specifically the comment section) in a way that imageboards behave. I've never adapted to the reddit-style comment system for two reasons:
1. nested/indented comments are confusing. Perhaps it's connected to how I don't like programming languages that rely on indents for defining blocks of script instead of curly brackets, but I think that the reasons are unrelated. When you have a large tree of comments, it's simply hard to keep track which comment replies to which. It's easy when you have a couple comments, but I simply can't process a large tree of, say, 20 comments, I'll forget the context of the parent by the time I read the 5th one. Also sometimes it's hard to recognize if the next comment is indented 1 or 2 times to the left. I don't know why is this design so popular, someone even wrote a frontpage for 4chan that displayed its posts in this manner. I'd love to have a frontpage for hackernews that displayed its posts like on an imageboard! if you know such, please let me know. At least HN provides the next/prev/parent buttons, but they lack the onhover rendering of the post like on 4chan. These buttons also don't exist on hckrnws.com frontend which I tend to use, but it's a minor nitpick.
2. upvotes. I really like the 4chan way of bumping and making comments with a lot of replies the ones that stand out instead of those that a lot of people agree with. I think it encourages more diverse opinions. But on the other hand, perhaps the upvote system is somehow key to the pretty high level of discussion on HN, can't really tell.
There's a lot to like about HN, but it's worth acknowledging that the "good parts" are only half the picture. Anything that questions moderation or site culture is routinely flagged as "crankiness" and buried. You can participate for years and still never gain access to basic features like downvoting, since karma and visibility are as much about fitting in as about merit.
The system rewards intellectual curiosity until you direct it at HN itself. If you start asking questions about how moderation works or challenge the culture here, you'll find that dissent gets quietly penalized, and transparency only goes so far.
The other issue with HN is they seem to decide how you curate your own inputs into the site. Even deleting your own comments is not allowed after a time limit. I don't understand what benefit this brings, and it's certainly not communicated in the HN guidelines.
If a platform claims to foster intellectual curiosity, it should be able to tolerate that curiosity being directed at its own moderation choices. Otherwise, it's just managing its image, not building trust.
HN is the only place I can read comments that are genuinely disagreeable. And I know that sometimes that falls into some personalized negativity but it’s useful most of the time.
The other thing I appreciate about HN is it helps me practice writing.
Once graduating from University, there aren’t many built in ways to get regular writing practice and HN comments are it for me.
42 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 48.9 ms ] thread* The ability to save comments, as well as posts
* Ideally a separate 'favorites' and 'read later' category
* Some kind of [tags] on posts, ideally something individuals can contribute to. It would be easy to add from an existing set of tags, adding a unique new tag would be harder and require maybe an older account or more 'points' or whatever.
* Maybe some kind of 'bump' system when linking to things that have already been posted? It feels a bit silly for there to be like 10 duplicates of a post from different time periods. But maybe that's better than the alternative, not sure.
[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hack-for-hacker-news-yc-reader...
The first part is correct, the second part is correct in theory, but any place that has "upvotes" (like HN or reddit) ends up with the community putting straight up incorrect stuff as the "top comment".
So while "far up in the comment thread" can signal quality, accuracy and truth, you'd be mistaken to automatically assume so. HN is, after all, just another community on the website filled with humans who can be wrong.
Emojis, Images and GIF posts, Profile Pictures, Followers/Following, Sponsored posts
…if you wanted to destroy hackernews
Eh. It’s garbage in, garbage out, mostly like any other platform. It’s still easy to degrade the site if the users are determined enough.
How you choose to use it dictates your takeaway more than most social media platforms I suppose, which is actually the best thing about it IMO. That much is worth contrasting with the other options out there, no question.
This describes Wikipedia more than HN.
For me, a touch more Markdown like for text links [text](url) would be nice, not asking for image support or anything like that, though. As cool as the [0] is, the <a href=> tag and its predecessors were invented early on for a reason.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Href?useskin=vector
Boy what incredibly different universes we live in.
If anyone already has the infrastructure set up for this already, I really, really, wish for something where the top X HN stories can be input to AI sentiment analysis and graphs automatically created which shows, per time period, the % of submissions it classifies as "political" and the % classified as "mainstream news".
In the top 100 posts on any given day it has to be a significant percentage. I flag all political posts I see and I'm constantly flagging. The AI analysis wouldn't be perfect, but it would at least be fairly impartial, and automated. Why not collect the data?
There was a discussion here where a professor with a specialty on the underlying subject was 'corrected'/crowded out by very detailed comments that sounded cogent, had buzzwords in them but ultimately were incorrect.
Seeing that makes me wonder about the discussion here on topics I know nothing about. Vetted flair for subject matter expertise for users would help. I'm still interested in what a chip designer has to say about astronomy but it would make it easier to weigh the contribution.
1. nested/indented comments are confusing. Perhaps it's connected to how I don't like programming languages that rely on indents for defining blocks of script instead of curly brackets, but I think that the reasons are unrelated. When you have a large tree of comments, it's simply hard to keep track which comment replies to which. It's easy when you have a couple comments, but I simply can't process a large tree of, say, 20 comments, I'll forget the context of the parent by the time I read the 5th one. Also sometimes it's hard to recognize if the next comment is indented 1 or 2 times to the left. I don't know why is this design so popular, someone even wrote a frontpage for 4chan that displayed its posts in this manner. I'd love to have a frontpage for hackernews that displayed its posts like on an imageboard! if you know such, please let me know. At least HN provides the next/prev/parent buttons, but they lack the onhover rendering of the post like on 4chan. These buttons also don't exist on hckrnws.com frontend which I tend to use, but it's a minor nitpick.
2. upvotes. I really like the 4chan way of bumping and making comments with a lot of replies the ones that stand out instead of those that a lot of people agree with. I think it encourages more diverse opinions. But on the other hand, perhaps the upvote system is somehow key to the pretty high level of discussion on HN, can't really tell.
Looking forward to The Bad Parts.
(In my experience, the ones dunking on it are the ones spending most time on it…)
The system rewards intellectual curiosity until you direct it at HN itself. If you start asking questions about how moderation works or challenge the culture here, you'll find that dissent gets quietly penalized, and transparency only goes so far.
The other issue with HN is they seem to decide how you curate your own inputs into the site. Even deleting your own comments is not allowed after a time limit. I don't understand what benefit this brings, and it's certainly not communicated in the HN guidelines.
If a platform claims to foster intellectual curiosity, it should be able to tolerate that curiosity being directed at its own moderation choices. Otherwise, it's just managing its image, not building trust.
- the flag button needs a confirmation modal. It's way too easy to hit it by mistake when trying to hide a story.
- Support for autoformatting markdown style tables. I'm not asking for full markdown since I know people would just abuse headings, etc.
The other thing I appreciate about HN is it helps me practice writing.
Once graduating from University, there aren’t many built in ways to get regular writing practice and HN comments are it for me.