HN Explorer

Poll: Would you like to have "hide" button for stories

29 points by markokocic ↗ HN
Ability to hide submissions from the front page is the thing I miss the most on HN. Sometimes, I'm just not interested to 10 Tesla articles or 20 Apple articles that clutter front page, but don't have a way to remove them from my view other that not visiting HN. I don't have that that articles don't belong there, it's just that I don't see any value in them.

What do you think, would you use the "hide" button if it were ever implemented?

50 comments

[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 53.9 ms ] thread
edent
Yes - but I'd rather it was "mark as duplicate". Sometimes having identical stories (often from the same website) is really annoying.
niggler
There is a URL based check but it matches the string in verbatim (so appending a # is treated as a separate link)
jstanley
Also, while you're at it: making the link I just looked at more obvious would be nice. Quite often I click a link, read the article, and like it and want to find the comments. So I use the back button and then have to try to scan through the entries to find the one I was on.

EDIT: And if you need a data point: Chromium 20, Ubuntu 12.04.

Tichy
I'd like that because it would prevent me from rescanning the homepage over and over again, and eventually reading even the stuff I don't really want to read because I am procrastinating. I'd like to decide once "don't want to read" and be done with it.
niggler
Many people have proposed a mechanism to combine the stories into one discussion.

I wonder if removing the karma for those stories would help (if only the first post earned karma from links, I suspect later stories might not be submitted unless they had something to add)

SeanDav
I am quite happy to do my filtering manually. Not hard to skip a title if it does not interest.
DanielStraight
I like this idea. I think it might also get more eyes on interesting topics that otherwise would just miss the front page. Once you've hidden a few stories, others would presume move up to fill in the gaps. So someone who uses the hide feature will see slightly lesser ranked stories on their front page, and thus be more likely to read them, more likely to vote for them, and more likely to get them to the real front page.
eli
I think anytime you poll people and ask if they want an optional feature to do X, you will get mostly "yes" answers. Not sure that means it should be implemented.
h2s
This is because people who aren't interested in the idea simply move on and look at the next link on the page. It's an enormous selection bias and it makes the results of this poll absolutely meaningless.
fbeans
Perhaps what actually happens is that the people who actually care, the ones that have a strong opinion either way, will take the time to vote and comment. In terms of this feature, if it is done correctly, those who don't want to use it, won't find their experience changing much, those who want to use it can. Perhaps implementing it, even with an "opt-in" option for a short time will allow for a better poll. "Do you use the feature?" rather than "would you?". I can't really see a negative effect of adding this feature. Just a positive for some, perhaps many.
bobsy
I would prefer it if you could collapse comments. Often the top comment has like 40 replies which makes it difficult to spot the next top level comment.
doomlaser
I agree. Comment thread collapsing would provide the most bang for its buck. It'd help facilitate more threads of discussion immensely.
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yuxt
I couldn't find the source (website appears to be down) but here is a bookmarklet that gives you an ability to collapse comments http://pastebin.com/382fvsqt
kushti
Probably best feature request
Laremere
Hide is a bit messy. I would prefer a link on each comment which scrolled the page to the next comment in that comment level.
sageikosa
I had a similar impression today: that you either need to be among the first to post a comment, or must comment in reply to an already highly placed comment, lest your comment be relegated to scroll-bar irrelevance.
bjhoops1
God, yes. I often hesitate to even look at the comments because the 1st comment is inevitably some hyper-snarky rebuttal with a thousand sub-comments.

Please add this.

flexie
That is something I have wanted for a while too.
nsns
Agreed! A comment with many replies is essentially a new "sub-post" with a life of its own.
etcet
My extension, Hacker News Enhancement Suite [0] does this along with other things. Unlike other extensions, I chose to place the collapse icon before the username so it's in a predictable place.

The extension also changes the entire style of HN so some people may not like that. I am working on creating an option to use the classic style.

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhanc...

lbatista
I'd like a "hide until tomorrow" feature.
samwillis
I think it would be damaging to the community, that is what HN is. We collectively curate the (to borrow from reddit) the "front page of the hacker internet", HN isn't your news reader it is a community driven homepage. If there were things that people were not seeing due to personal filtering they wouldn't be exposed to the "tone" of the site.

There are certainly things that show up on the homepage that I am not interested in and don't always read about but occasionally I am exposed to something that if there was filtering I may not have seen and learn from it. I believe that being exposed to the other things people are interested in is important for both the community and each of us individuality.

I think it is this global exposure that has helped tune HN in to the grate community that it has become.

panacea
For the simple reason that US culture/politics/news etc. can be so tempting to delve into needlessly as a non-usasian (and it rises to the top so consistently because of userbase), when it often doesn't have any impact on my life outside of boards such as these, I'd appreciate the ability to hide such distracting content from time to time.

Not a blanket filter, just a "yeah that sounds interesting/topical but I'd rather hide the noise (as it relates to me) on this one".

samwillis
Anything politics/news related is generally considered Off-Topic by the community guidelines http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and people are encouraged not to up-vote them, and I think you are generally ok to flag these items as well if you believe they don't contribute to the "hacker" nature of the site.
niggler
The problem is the ranking system and algorithm itself. The karma system incentivizes posting similar articles to the top articles either on the same day or a few days later thus creating a front page covering the same topic. And people seem to up vote every article on the topic ...

In a strange positive feedback cycle, the fact that the poster's karma is considered in placement effectively ensures that the voices of a few (the top 25 or so based on karma) dominate the flow (both of comments and of posts), rendering HN the front page of the few with sufficient karma.

I am unable to find the link at the moment, but tptacek explicitly noted that one of his comments were pegged to the top but some other comment, that he admitted was better and should have been at the top, wasn't rising naturally. That type of situation should never happen.

samwillis
That may be the case with comments but I don't believe it is the case with stories. The only thing that may be a factor is the age of the account, if it is a very new account (minuets old) then it may be harder to get on to the homepage but I don't believe your karma has any impact.
jpwagner
A lot of times I think I'm not interested from the title, only to find that an hour later a submission has 950 pts and 65 comments, so then I end up checking it out.
markokocic
It could be easily implemented that you have your own "hidden submissions" page that will let you review what you have hidden, and "unhide" when you change your mind.

"hide" could even work as a downvote, which we don't have now for submissions.

DanBC
This is the kind of thing that you can code yourself.

Or you could even ask someone on Bountify to do it for you, I guess.

There are already extensions for thread collapsing. (I'm using one, and it's pretty neat.)

(https://userscripts.org/scripts/show/130027)

etc etc.

huhtenberg
Tried in FF18, got "element is null", line 30.
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DanBC
I'd prefer a "hide username until 24 hours" extension.
DanBC
There's a whole bunch of HN applets, extensions, scripts, bookmarklets, apps and readers - has anyone created a list of all of them anywhere?
alan_cx
Hide or user configured filter? If its just hide, then you have to go through the "clutter" to hide it. Damage is already done though.

Personally filtering is problematic. Yeah, most of the time I'm not reading Apple articles either, but if there is one that is about Apple and child labour, Im interested. But filtering out Apple would hide such an article from me. So, then we get in to complex filters, and constant messing about setting them up right.

In the end though, I assume that if implemented it would be up to us users to use or not use. Perhaps have it as a turn on-able option, so that the extra clutter of a hide or filter mechanism, button, link whatever is not cluttering up the page.

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dfxm12
Does no one read HN via RSS or am I doing it wrong?
nollidge
It's not going to change. The only changes I have seen in ~4 years are A) hiding the up/down vote counts on comments, and B) adding the search bar at the bottom.

I'm not complaining, by the way. There's plenty of extensions out there if you want to change cosmetic stuff.

WayneDB
I would prefer to never see "expired or unknown link" again.