Love the positive thinking. The full screen comment feature alone allows for such a better experience when getting into discussion. Looking forward to a lot of great ideas coming out of this!
Well, I often zoom it on the desktop computers too (depending on OS/Browser settings). :)
It could be like killing two birds with one stone actually, because making it mobile friendly quite likely would make it friendlier for non-mobile uses too.
Also, a little more far-fetched: if you don't mind doing a bit of page-scraping, you might consider letting people link hnwishlist accounts to their HN account. Just have a profile field for an HN account, and let people prove their ownership of an account by putting something like "hnwishlist username: $NAME" in their profile temporarily. Then you could do things like offering upvotes and downvotes using the same karma thresholds as HN.
If there will ever come a day when I can ditch the Chrome's HN+ plugin to make HN look good, it will probably be with that. So I'm all for it. Great idea.
Maybe you weren't around awhile so you don't know the backstory. Link expiration is partly because the servers back then wasn't able to keep up with datascraping, for example when we made the only useable search engine for a few years.
Also, if the community is moving away from you (as is happening to me here), don't fight it; don't whinge; find the good discussions you still feel like contributing to, and let it go. Internet discussion sites and their communities are ephemeral, and to deny that is futile.
One thing I think more people should do is post contact info in their profiles. Remember, the email field doesn't get displayed!
And, of course, people should be more willing to contact each other outside of comments for whatever reason. I've had some very interesting, protracted side conversations from HN and they've all been great. That's also how I've met some very interesting people and seen some very interesting companies.
EDIT: Oh hey, reading through your linked post, it seems you have that exact point there, and I was just paraphrasing you. As you can guess, I agree with it wholeheartedly :P.
I'm sure most people will dismiss this with "just use email," but I'd love to have an inbox where people could message me. In situations where a comment thread is better suited for a one on one convo, it'd be great. Also a nice way to keep your email private unless necessary.
You know what? Improving HN is a waste of time. Why can't we just migrate to a better link aggregator, such as Reddit? It would basically fix everything (including design, mobile friendliness, lack of good apps, lack of API, etc), at no cost.
I'm sure it would be easier to convince Reddit to let subreddits behave like HN than trying to keep HN up to date with the modern world.
Having PG as a commenter, mod, and admin is a tremendous asset. HN also benefits from the close ties to YC in general--it'd be a bit tricky to tell all the YC folks that they need to post not on news.ycombinator.com but over at reddit.com/r/therealhackernews or whatever.
HN doesn't benefit from close ties to YC. YC benefits from close ties to HN.
YC folks will post to whatever is considered the de rigeur nerd/startup news site, which over the last couple of years has become HN - having migrated from reddit (and slashdot, before).
PG could do all those things on Reddit. YC folks could do all those things on Reddit. Just redirect news.ycombinator.com to reddit.com/r/hn2 and that's it.
I'm not against of migrating to a "better" HN when the time has come, but I doubt it will be Reddit.
I think it'll instead be something built from the ground up specifically for this community that serves its needs better than HN currently does.
That being said, as someone who's working on this very thing I can say that developing a "Better HN" is far from easy…
If you want another example, just look at Discourse (http://discourse.org). I think it took them one year with a 5 or 6-people team to get there, and I didn't see anybody jumping ship from HN to a Discourse implementation yet.
I really like the fact that your site seems to work well even with my reduced window width.
If you're looking to seed your site with other ideas there are many existing add-ons and clients and etc.
Searching Github for ["hacker news"] returns something like 700 hits. Obviously, most of those are not relevant, but different searches for ["hacker news" client] or ["hacker news" extensions] return over 100 projects where people have implemented features that they feel improve HN.
The Chrome webstore, and the Firefox add-ons page, also have many projects that people feel improve HN.
There's also the userscripts site, and userstyles site, also having many changes to HN.
I think Hacker News' name policy is just about right. Its public enough that we don't have things going on like 4chan, but its not public to the point people are afraid to comment their opinions.
This is all fantasy. PG runs this in his spare time off a single server. Every feature I saw on the list has viable workarounds. Yes, it'd be nice if they were supported out of the box. But I don't think the lack of native features is negatively impacting the content of HN, which is the most important part.
So what's the argument of the site? "Hey PG, we know you're busy funding startups and stuff, but we're mildly inconvenienced by some UX decisions you've made with that experimental site you run on the side, and were hoping that you could take the time to implement these seemingly-minor features that've been discussed on HN for years. In exchange our happiness while using the site will be somewhat increased, and we will instead whine about HN's lack of modern CSS and Twitter Bootstrappiness and what have you."?
Where? It talks about "improv[ing] Hacker News" by commenting and voting on HNW ideas--those aren't very concrete. It later admits that the chances of any of this making it into HN proper are "not very high". Half of the About section features the dev (righteously, I'm not complaining) advertising himself .
You asked "what's the argument of the site?". The About section makes it very clear that this is a fun side project built as a way to showcase what Telescope can do, and that I don't really expect these ideas to be implemented into the actual HN.
You seem angry at something that HNWishlist isn't trying to be at all.
Yes, PG would have to do all of this himself, because there's no way a hundred developers would leap at the chance to contribute to the HN source and make fellow developers happy.
>I use hnnotify, which works really well but relies on scraping. I'd love to see official functionality that works pretty much identically to hnnotify.
If it's working "really well", why do you care about the fact that its implementation is a kludge? It seems like we already have a good-enough solution.
Tagging has been requested here multiple times, is controversial, and has never been implemented.
I, for one, am very much in favor of it. I'd love to be able to filter out topics I don't find interesting. It would also effectively address a lot of griping about supposedly off-topic submissions.
Is there any interest in a 'RES' styled enhancement suite for HN? I'd like to think that many of these (and other previously proposed) suggestions/wish lists, someone has already created something to deal with the issues on a client side level rather than trying to get PG to try and change something that works good enough for him.
I'd like to see, if not both the up votes and down votes of a particular comment, a score of how "diverging" the ups and downs are. I think it would be very interesting to see when a particular comment is "divisive", (borrowing a common political buzzword)
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 97.1 ms ] threadIt could be like killing two birds with one stone actually, because making it mobile friendly quite likely would make it friendlier for non-mobile uses too.
The sign in box seems to break Firefox's ability to save the username and password.
When signed in, the "Change password", "My Account", and "Sign out" buttons have three different clashing visual styles.
Please consider adding downvotes; for instance, I'd like to downvote ideas like http://hnwishlist.com/posts/ae15555a-f3c1-43f3-8a80-cef2a22e... or http://hnwishlist.com/posts/54520ba4-f32e-473a-8590-365e893f...
Also, a little more far-fetched: if you don't mind doing a bit of page-scraping, you might consider letting people link hnwishlist accounts to their HN account. Just have a profile field for an HN account, and let people prove their ownership of an account by putting something like "hnwishlist username: $NAME" in their profile temporarily. Then you could do things like offering upvotes and downvotes using the same karma thresholds as HN.
Here's a good place to start:
http://edweissman.com/how-to-participate-in-hacker-news
UNKNOWN OR EXPIRED LINK
C'mon, this is 2013... paging dynamic results shouldn't be an issue.
What makes HN great does lie with us, but I strongly disagree that it's also the greatest opportunity for improvement.
And, of course, people should be more willing to contact each other outside of comments for whatever reason. I've had some very interesting, protracted side conversations from HN and they've all been great. That's also how I've met some very interesting people and seen some very interesting companies.
EDIT: Oh hey, reading through your linked post, it seems you have that exact point there, and I was just paraphrasing you. As you can guess, I agree with it wholeheartedly :P.
I'm sure it would be easier to convince Reddit to let subreddits behave like HN than trying to keep HN up to date with the modern world.
Just my two cents.
YC folks will post to whatever is considered the de rigeur nerd/startup news site, which over the last couple of years has become HN - having migrated from reddit (and slashdot, before).
There will be another one, in due time.
I think it'll instead be something built from the ground up specifically for this community that serves its needs better than HN currently does.
That being said, as someone who's working on this very thing I can say that developing a "Better HN" is far from easy…
If you want another example, just look at Discourse (http://discourse.org). I think it took them one year with a 5 or 6-people team to get there, and I didn't see anybody jumping ship from HN to a Discourse implementation yet.
If you're looking to seed your site with other ideas there are many existing add-ons and clients and etc.
Searching Github for ["hacker news"] returns something like 700 hits. Obviously, most of those are not relevant, but different searches for ["hacker news" client] or ["hacker news" extensions] return over 100 projects where people have implemented features that they feel improve HN.
The Chrome webstore, and the Firefox add-ons page, also have many projects that people feel improve HN.
There's also the userscripts site, and userstyles site, also having many changes to HN.
("Implement a real name policy")
Seriously? Why does anyone think this is a good idea? Can't we just stomp this one out for good?
I really miss noms de guerre. It saddens me that we moved away from handles and pseudoanonymity being a default.
Says the guy using his real name.
Did I miss something? I can't find any username policy in HN's guidelines.
The policy, then, is completely implicit: you can have any valid username which may or may not reflect your own name.
Oh, and you can't change them after the fact. As far as I know. That would be a nice feature...
So what's the argument of the site? "Hey PG, we know you're busy funding startups and stuff, but we're mildly inconvenienced by some UX decisions you've made with that experimental site you run on the side, and were hoping that you could take the time to implement these seemingly-minor features that've been discussed on HN for years. In exchange our happiness while using the site will be somewhat increased, and we will instead whine about HN's lack of modern CSS and Twitter Bootstrappiness and what have you."?
You seem angry at something that HNWishlist isn't trying to be at all.
If it's working "really well", why do you care about the fact that its implementation is a kludge? It seems like we already have a good-enough solution.
There's also the simple problem of discoverability. I never knew about hnnotify until now, since it's not part of the main site.
My suggestion is singular: Let posts be tagged for startups, and bootstrapping, so I can filter everything else out.
I'm happy to geek on my own time but what I come here is for startup content and less interesting/novelty stuff.
I, for one, am very much in favor of it. I'd love to be able to filter out topics I don't find interesting. It would also effectively address a lot of griping about supposedly off-topic submissions.