There was a question recently, about why you don’t improve the HTML of HN, where you said "When the HTML is the most important thing to work on."(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4927231)
I agree that the markup is relatively unimportant compared to features that I think could really improve the functionality and quality of the site, and I bet you have a long wishlist of features yourself.
But between the lines I interpreted that that list might be way longer, than the time that is available to you, allows you to work on it.
So why don’t you open source HN? I get that with a project that is important to someone, it’s hard to give away control. But you can still be the project lead, you could still have the last call and I feel to open up the project will lead to great feature discussions and ultimately a better hn.
Have you ever considered open sourcing it? And what’s the thought process on your decision?
I'm really happy that HN isn't your typical constantly-mutating, constantly growing news site, adding a new social share button and 2KB of new Javascript every week. Please, pg, don't start taking pull requests or anything like that, it's great the way it is.
Edit: look at the current top story. A pretty but not especially functional Facebook redesign, proposed as the latest in a long line of changes that the users pretty much always disliked. There's my point.
- You can't take away an upvote. Misclick is just bad luck
- user settings have some really obscure settings that aren't explained like showdead / noprocrast / maxvisit / minaway
- The "Unknown or expired link" is just a bad solution, either redirect me to the front page when that happens, or find an alternative way to deal with it.
There's "not having time to work on it" and then theres "complete abandonment."
I do sort of agree with OP that at least adding a few more people onto a team would be good, if not full on opensourcing it.
But hey, Reddit is always open source. And someone could always open their own site out of its source code and try to one-up HackerNews. Competition breads innovation.
When i open HN, i open the links that interests me in new tabs. And immediately click on "More" to see the next page.
That being said, I'd prefer no change to the HN system.
pg could open source HN and then never ever accept a pull request, and he would still have made a positive change in the world.
[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.manuelmaly...
but think about it from a different perspective: there is a feature that many people agree would make the site better. e.g. a new job board for non-YC-companies, like discussed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4993571. lets assume that after openly discussing the problem, pg and the majority of the community agrees upon a solution. now lets assume that there are more features like this, and that pg hasn't the time to implement them all. wouldn't it be nice if the community could help out?
(a) HN is the front-end and back-end of a bunch of YC business processes.
(b) The voting ring and antispam features rely on obscurity; they are game-able.
The code for older versions of HN is available, but you'd be better off with the code for lobste.rs.
instead i'm proposing that building _this_ site becomes an community effort, with open feature discussions and people committing code to the HN code base.
there is an army of people who deeply care about HN, and are very skilled to help out. i think it would be smart to use that asset.
Lamer News is similar to HN and community driven, so if you have energy to spare that's as good a place as any to put it. If pg wanted HN to evolve, it would evolve. Most people are happy with it as-is, tech-wise.
It is so very common for projects to inflate with new features until they become useless piles of filth. The fact that HN is a bit clunky is a feature not a bug. It will only attract and retain a certain type.
HN is kind of a double-edged sword because while it is educational it's also distracting and addictive. If making HN better also makes it more of a time-suck, the exercise could be a net negative for the community.
Considering this, it's probably not a service that can be "open sourced" as the number of people who can actually work on it appears to be PG. And PG is probably too busy to even act as the project lead.
[0]: It's not so experimental anymore...
A) There are plenty of people already tweaking hn in the form of "add ons" like hnnotify.com. That piece already exists and without being the kind of problem that this approach would become.
B) People seem to routinely miss that hn is part of the yc business process. (I honestly don't get how anyone can miss that but posts like this one clearly do. I was a homemaker for eons and I get it.) You know, that is just slightly relevant to how and why things get done the way they are (aka central to the decision making process). This doesn't make good business sense, for reasons other more informed members have already covered.
I'm certainly not against open source - just trying to provide a possible answer.
The HTML for HN is ultra simple so, there you already have a front-send pretty much done.
This reply box is pretty simple as well: a input box and a submit button.
Add some filters/sorts and other misc features and you have your own version of HN.
Not saying it's 'easy', but it's not that difficult.
But to have the hacker news itself the product of an open source project, HELL NO. I can't even think of one way that would be a good thing.
Hacker news is perfect the way it is.
I think that's the main reason why it's not. It's fine as it is. The minimal features list and quirky HTML is part of HN identity.
