But forget about my thoughts. I’m just looking for yours…
If you could change HN, which features would you love to bring in? Which features would you remove? What is your perfect HN?
I am very aware that this submission is likely to be ‘disappeared’ in minutes. This is why I feel a little scared too scared to attach my main profile with thousands of karma to this post. HN in 2024 is not the HN of 2016 in my view. Eggshells!
There must be dozens (hundreds?) of developers on HN who could help implement a dark mode. On the one hand I'd be great if somebody built a prototype that can be easily copy&pasted (HN whole CSS is tiny). On the other hand YCombinator is attached to literal billion dollar company so why do work for free?
Remove: Maybe move the /jobs and even the monthly threads to a separate website. Jobs postings aren't really articles, shouldn't require upvoting/ranking or comments.
HN submissions are almost never 'disappeared' so that awareness is probably misplaced. The question itself, in various forms, pops up quite frequently - here's one thread from a few months ago and you can find piles more with the search interface.
If you've got a surplus, there's certainly no harm in risking a few points?
It's a very different HN now. HN is now a major tech news site with a large userbase and a large lurker population. That's very different to the medium sized, highly engaged userbase of before.
It's nothing you can change. Spaces with large userbases work and feel differently than spaces with smaller userbases. Discord, Bluesky, and Xitter in that order are where I spend my time more these days. On Discord nobody is going to try to dunk on me because they're jaded or angry or whatever, Bluesky has rich enough moderation that I can ignore the haters, and Xitter gives me the breadth that neither Discord nor Bluesky can. HN is a minority of my time. I just treat it as the "angry tech people site."
I looked at a related metric recently - unique users/N comments (i.e. how many unique users per, say, 100k consecutive comments). This number hasn't changed at all for many years.
Comment counts haven't changed but text post creation absolutely has. Given that no more stories are being flagged than usual, in fact if you amortize this over new user counts a lot less per user, I'm going to say that it's genuinely new text accounts that want to engage with HN by making text posts.
As the very least, down votes should require a comment. Even "false", "not true" or "disagree" would help.
My sense is, there's a network of HN users who attempt to manipulate the exposure of ideas by downvoting them (to the point those comments aren't even exposed).
Don't get me wrong, there are comments that deserve DV'ing. Moi? I can't be bothered. I just scroll on. But for those who aspire to be the HN police - especially then it's at the option (not fact) level - they should have to pay for that privilege.
This may be a bad idea. Think about the recursive effect: Someone downvotes, and gives an explanation. Someone downvotes the downvote, and gives an explanation. That's a worse discussion, because it has no more real comments, but all these downvote comments (or worse, comment chains).
Down voting and not adding context because you simply don't like an idea (which on HN happens more than it should). That is, a very subjective DV.
Is not the same as an objective DV. That is, the statement is false and that should be known.
Again, the current system is too easy to manipulate. See an idea that doesn't fit your (narrow?) sociopolitical lens and you can make it disappear. Not because it's objectively incorrect, but simply because you don't agree with it. That's childish, at best.
Profiles should show up votes given and down votes given. As well as up votes received and down votes received.
The current single "score" is too vague. It lacks context.
If I had to change one thing about HN, architecturally (since trying to change the culture is a fool's errand) it would be better curation. This would go against one of the design goals of HN, having a "non-fragmented" community where everyone sees the same site and the same content. But I would argue that the community is already fragmented. The size and diversity of the userbase is such that people already experience completely different versions of Hacker News depending on when they arrive and what they follow.
Being able to whitelist or blacklist accounts, domains, keywords, etc and curate one's account would improve the subjective quality of the forum across the board. People who want Hacker News to only be strictly technical and startup content can have that. People who want rough-and-tumble politics and debate can have that. And never the twain should meet.
I really do think there is an interesting design space between Twitter and traditional threaded forums that might make for an interesting experience.
And if I had to change a second thing about HN it would be getting rid of voting/karma, because it clearly isn't serving its intended purpose.
No it's not. If that were true, cultures would never change. Except they do, so clearly something is happening in that area.
HN used to be a place where you could read a post from a position that you disagreed with, and still learn something. Posts had more thought and more interesting points. Users had more tolerance for those who disagreed with them. Those who disagreed had more thoughtful reasons for why they disagreed - it wasn't just "is not".
You can't fix that by changing the code. The problem is the users have changed.
HN has more users now. First, that means that the old users are in the minority, if they stuck around. Second, it means that HN has become a more useful platform for ideological battle, and therefore that more ideological battle gets pushed here, even though it's completely against the intent of the site.
And, maybe, some of the old users have changed, too - become more sharp and less tolerant.
I don't think you can fix HN without first fixing society. I wish I had a more optimistic answer.
I would like to see the statistics of how many 'downvotes' are used on a daily basis in 2024 compared with previous years, as I have a suspicion that it is just being used at the detriment of good conversation (heated or otherwise). And if this is the case, just remove the feature if it no longer works like it used to.
Edit: There we go with people downvoting. Couple more and you can hide away my opinion (which has no place on HN, evidently).
