
How Hacker News can be improved, 3 things - KajMagnus
https://www.effectivediscussions.org/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-3-things
======
bosdev
These seem great, but I truely think the biggest thing they could do would be
add a line at the top of the page encouraging people to visit /newest. The
content that actually makes the front page is somewhat random. I've seen the
same thing posted several times, only to have the third posting be on the
front page all day. Its also true that much of the content which does make it
there is gamed by people who have their friends upvote. Getting more organic
votes to new traffic would make that much harder.

~~~
petercooper
Even just showing 2 or 3 items from /newest in a box at the bottom of the
front page would encourage me to vote on them. Maybe only show it to a handful
of logged in users with a nominal amount of karma to reduce any effects of it
in promoting spam on the front page.

~~~
deegles
I like this idea. Especially if it takes a random sample of what was submitted
in the last N minutes.

There could be a little banner saying "Do you think any of the below are
better than what's currently on the front page?" or similar.

------
LukeB_UK
I prefer that HN doesn't say the score of other people's comments, it means
you have more power to make your own mind up rather than the vote brigading or
"piling on" that can happen on Reddit

~~~
KajMagnus
What about _after_ one has made up one's mind, though? Then it could be
interesting to compare what one think oneself, with what others think. Then,
when one wants to do that, one could click the _show-how-other-people-have-
voted_ button, to find out.

~~~
noobermin
It depends on how much granularity you desire I suppose. If you downvote and
then see the post turn gray or see it turn gray a few minutes afterwards,
that's feed back in a sense. Same for if a vote rises to the top in a thread.
You get hints of how a comment does, just not a number. The uncertainty there
gives you an idea of the communities feelings while not allowing you to split
hairs "comment x in thread y has +4 while comment z in thread w (y!=w) has +3,
let me down x to make it consistent with z (I hate x's guts anyway)."

------
unimpressive
I'm not sure a recent comments sidebar would fit the _aesthetic_ of Hacker
News. The HN software is currently storing whether you've hidden certain
comment chains or not, so perhaps it could store what comments existed in what
thread when you last visited.

~~~
KajMagnus
Hmm. Not sure I understand this. How would this information be presented to
the user? And would the computer somehow assume I've read all comments
currently present on the page / in the current comment chain?

~~~
krapp
You could highlight the first comment of each new subthread, or have an option
to collapse the threads down to that point. You could even have a single
button that scrolls down to each consecutive new comment chain.

But it would probably have to be a lot more minimalistic than a new sidebar.

~~~
KajMagnus
Ok, that sounds like the Chrome extension that adds "orange lines next to new
comments since your last visit", mentioned in this comment (on this same
page):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12664187](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12664187)

A button to scroll down to the next unread comment thread sounds interesting.

------
kazinator
> _What if there was a button one could click, to find out what others think
> about a comment?_

How would that be different from comments which reply to the comment? What
someone thinks about a comment, when written down, becomes a comment.

Ah, but perhaps there could be special "annotating replies" which are hidden,
and anonymous; they could be used to write things like "I downvoted this
because ...".

A feature of these "annotating replies" could be that they are ephemeral; they
disappear after, say 24 hours. Say, around the same time when a posting
becomes ineligible for downvoting. If you access an old post, you woudln't be
able to view that material; it would be gone.

This quality would discourage people from trying to carry on discussion
threads in the annotating replies. Also replies to annotating replies would
not be featured: just one flat level.

~~~
KajMagnus
> How would that be different from comments which reply to the comment? What
> someone thinks about a comment, when written down, becomes a comment.

Well, yes, the thoughts about the comment, becomes a comment — and then the
upvote count, shows if many agree with those thoughts. (But not until _after_
one has made up one's own mind, and then clicked the show-upvotes button. Then
one can a little bit compare one's own view of the world, with what others
think)

Re annotating up/downvotes: I think people in general wouldn't want to spend
time explaining themselves, if they knew that what they wrote, would be
"invisible" to most other visitors. Perhaps a few "kind hearted" people would
explain why they downvoted, via annotations, but I'm thinking they'd be too
few for this feature to be well-spent-lines-of-code.

------
no_protocol
> 1\. Finding new comments

This extension adds orange lines next to new comments since your last visit:

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hckr-
news/mnlaodle...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hckr-
news/mnlaodleonmmfkdhfofamacceeikgecp)

~~~
KajMagnus
I suppose that jump-to-parent-&-back can also be implemented as an extension.

I'm thinking it'd make sense with both highlighting new comments, + a recent
comments list.

(If relying _only_ on [highlighting comments posted since the last page load],
then sometimes one will miss a few recent comments — because usually one
didn't read _all_ comments shown on the page, but the next time the page gets
reloaded, [previously shown but not-yet-read comments] will no longer be
highlighted.)

------
tptacek
We had publicly visible comment scores, years ago. They generated flame wars:
people would compare their scores to the scores of other comments, feel
outrage, and start meta-discussions about the scores.

Even today, if you follow 'dang and 'sctb (whose comments are the informal
moderator log of HN), you'll see a significant chunk of their work is just
reminding people not to go on and on about being downvoted.

I don't think public comment scores are coming back and I think the quality of
discussion is improved without them. There's an interesting phenomenon here
about the quality of discussion versus the convenience of _consuming_
comments; it may be that the site is better for _participants_ without the
scores, but better for _consumers_ with them.

I have fewer opinions about the first two suggestions. But it's worth keeping
in mind that HN has some design limitations that also serve as brakes on
runaway discussions. For instance: after a day or two, it's hard to hold on to
a back-and-forth debate, because the threads aren't especially easy to find.
Notice how HN has no feature to alert you to someone having responded to your
comment. Reddit has that, and it's a disaster; it's like the badge on Slack
that psychologically coerces you to read chat room messages you don't really
care about, except on Reddit there's also an implied demand that you _write a
new comment to respond_. Yech.

I _often_ want to see the newest comments on a thread (I find myself CMD-F
searching for "minutes ago"), but I worry that making it trivially easy to do
would have similar effects, of encouraging people to monitor threads waiting
for comments to jump on. I have to force myself not to do that sometimes on
threads where I have a lot of opinions about the subject.

So just some thoughts.

------
pcmaffey
I'd love to see a Trending section added. Something in between the front page
and New sections.

I often rely on comments to determine whether I want to read an article, but
the New section has none.

The front page on the other hand, is like fishing. A new post 'catching' there
is rather random. Paginating to 2nd 3rd etc is then a mismatch of popular
older topics and falling newer ones.

I want to see newish posts with a few comments, but not so popular that it's
on the front page, and not so old that I've likely already seen it before.

------
mjevans
A fourth improvement:

Put a VERY brief outline of the key parts of being a good contributor to the
HN community in the post input box as a reminder. Remind me what good content
here is. Have an AVOID line right above the add comment button. Remind me if I
should reply more than once with different parts of relevant discussion if
there are a few points that should each have their own reply from a parent
post/article. etc.

Also a link to HN formatting near the add comment button would be nice.

------
40acres
These suggest look good, especially the first one. I like to view and comment
on rising posts and can really have a hard time figuring out what's changed
once a post reaches 100+ comments.

I use Hacker News Enhancement Suite on Chrome which helps a bit but there isnt
an equivalent on mobile.

------
machiaweliczny
Why not modify
[https://vuejs.org/examples/hackernews.html](https://vuejs.org/examples/hackernews.html)
and have all these features for yourself?

~~~
KajMagnus
That one looks beautiful (i.e. the live demo, [https://vue-
hn.now.sh/top](https://vue-hn.now.sh/top)). (Personally I don't want to clone
& modify it — I've built something in React.js already.)

I wonder how the contents at HN is licensed. Is it Creative Commons or ...
what is it. I'm surprised HN let people pull the data via an API but don't
clarify under what license the data is available. (At least I cannot find it.)
— You don't happen to know anything about this? I suppose I can email HN and
ask. (Here I found the API announcement: [http://blog.ycombinator.com/hacker-
news-api](http://blog.ycombinator.com/hacker-news-api) — nothing about any
content license)

------
throwaway98237
This is me, as a "normal" user of HN, not reading this article because every
time I make any critiques of HN I'm down-voted or told I just don't get the
community. But to those of you who engage, I wish you the best of luck.

~~~
krapp
Who cares about being upvoted or downvoted on Hacker News? There are no
guidelines or standards for voting, so there's no context to glean from it,
unless a comment gets voted into near obscurity (those are usually objectively
bad.) Karma is a meaningless number that tells you little about the quality of
the person it's attached to.

This forum is full of programmers, designers and UX engineers. There's nothing
wrong with criticizing the site's layout or interface, that's a sign that you
actually care about it.

~~~
throwaway98237
If no one cares about being downvoted, why is it a thing... If it's a useless
thing, why, is it, a thing..?

~~~
type0
As I noticed - it forces newcomers to stay away from reddit style commenting,
also it moves down uninteresting and boring comments so that you can skip to
read the bottom lines.

------
lewisl9029
I would recommend getting rid of downvoting altogether.

Downvoting is overwhelmingly used as a means to express disagreement and enact
censorship (by reducing visibility), with no regards to the substance and
quality of the actual post. I think this is a poisonous feature, that will
eventually turn HN into yet another echo chamber if left unchecked.

Either flag a post for being off-topic, inappropriate or adding nothing of
substance to the discussion, or reply with a counter argument to express
disagreement to well-written posts that deserve it (AFAIK, with flagging,
unlike with downvoting, users are held to some level of accountability and are
liable to losing their flagging rights if they flag posts indiscriminately).
The ability to silence opinions different to your own with minimal effort and
no accountability can only hurt the quality of discussion here, in my opinion.

~~~
KajMagnus
Actually I currently believe that the downvote should be split into _three_
different votes:

1) Disagree. Just shows disagreement. Doesn't affect comment sort order.

2) Bury. So one can move "Me too" and "Thanks" comments downwards. _Ignored_
if there are any like votes (so people cannot use the _Bury_ vote to censor
others).

3) Unwanted. Only available to trusted core members & staff. The _Unwanted_
vote reduces the post author's karma, & moves the post downwards. It is used
to shape the contents & nature of the forum: via the Unwanted vote, the staff
can create an echo chamber, if they want to. Or an open-ended tolerant forum,
if they want to.

(I wrote a bit more about that here, a few days ago:
[https://www.effectivediscussions.org/-33/the-like-3-down-
com...](https://www.effectivediscussions.org/-33/the-like-3-down-comment-
rating-system) — I've actually implemented these 3 votes (Disagree, Bury,
Unwanted) already :- P )

~~~
alphapapa
That might be an improvement, but I don't think it would be better than simply
removing downvotes.

1) What's the purpose of this? If it makes no difference, what is it there
for? A honeypot to catch throwaway downvotes?

2) Slightly better, but if a comment is hit with some of these before any
likes, it might never be seen by people who would like it, which is just as
bad as the current downvote system.

3) The staff can already do this, right?

Just get rid of downvotes. Let good comments be voted up, and truly bad ones
(i.e. spam or rule-violating comments) be flagged. If someone disagrees with
something, but not enough to rebut it, then so what? Deny them the effortless
censor button. Or at least make downvoting reduce the voter's karma, so that
downvoting has a cost.

~~~
KajMagnus
1) Many disagree votes (in comparison to Like votes) result in a warning text
above the post: "Many people disagree with this comment". Then, if you read
the comment and agree with it / like it, you'll know it's important that you
_also_ read the _replies_ , so you'll find out why others disagree. — This is
how it looks (scroll up a tiny bit to see the "Many disagree" warning):
[https://try.effectivediscussions.org/-6#post-14](https://try.effectivediscussions.org/-6#post-14)

( Another purpose with Disagree is that, well, I'm curious — I _want_ to know
how many people like or disagree with something. Imagine that a friend of
yours makes a speech and you're listening. Afterwards, when you've formed your
opinion about what s/he said, I imagine you'd find it interesting to know how
many of those listening, agree or disagree with what s/he said in the speech.
)

2) Yes that's a problem. There can be a grace period before Bury votes take
effect. E.g. 10 people must have read a comment, before Bury takes effect.

3) You mean they can downvote already? Yes, and they should still be able to
do it, so this vote is (still) needed.

> "If someone disagrees with something, but not enough to rebut it, then so
> what?"

Many disagree votes tell the reader that there's likely a _good_ rebuttal
among the replies, so it's important to not just trust the comment because it
sounds convincing — it's important to continue reading the replies.

~~~
alphapapa
> Many disagree votes (in comparison to Like votes) result in a warning text
> above the post: "Many people disagree with this comment". Then, if you read
> the comment and agree with it / like it, you'll know it's important that you
> also read the replies, so you'll find out why others disagree. — This is how
> it looks (scroll up a tiny bit to see the "Many disagree" warning):

I think you are being overly optimistic. Seeing a warning that "many people
disagree with this" will mostly fuel bandwagoning and dogpiling. This is what
happens, e.g. on Reddit and Ars Technica, where heavily downvoted comments
attract more and more downvotes, even if the comments are entirely reasonable.
All it takes is a few initial downvotes and the snowball starts rolling.

> Another purpose with Disagree is that, well, I'm curious — I want to know
> how many people like or disagree with something. Imagine that a friend of
> yours makes a speech and you're listening. Afterwards, when you've formed
> your opinion about what s/he said, I imagine you'd find it interesting to
> know how many of those listening, agree or disagree with what s/he said in
> the speech.

Actually, no, that would not be interesting at all, because it's entirely
meaningless. On the Internet, you can always find _x_ people to disagree with
_y_. It means nothing without knowing _who_ those people are and why they
disagree. More importantly, just because a "dislike" button has been clicked a
certain number of times doesn't mean that that many people have read, thought
about, and disagree reasonably with the comment. It's just as likely that it's
a thoughtless, knee-jerk reaction or that it's a form of retaliation for some
other comment.

> Yes that's a problem. There can be a grace period before Bury votes take
> effect. E.g. 10 people must have read a comment, before Bury takes effect.

That can still be abused. Just don't bury anything. If it breaks a rule, flag
and delete it. Otherwise, let it stand on its own merits.

> You mean they can downvote already? Yes, and they should still be able to do
> it, so this vote is (still) needed.

No, I mean staff can flag and delete posts, etc.

> Many disagree votes tell the reader that there's likely a good rebuttal
> among the replies

No it doesn't. It tells the reader that a certain number of HTTP POST requests
have been made. It means nothing.

If there's a rebuttal that's better than the comment it rebuts, let it be
upvoted.

~~~
KajMagnus
And I think you're being overly negative :- ) I think there are lots of places
on the internet, where people are friends and want to help each other and are
honest.

I'm getting the impression that you think that by default, people mindlessly
copy the behaviour of others, and don't spend any time thinking themselves.
Perhaps contact their friends to downvote a comment. And that they try to game
the system & cheat, and fight with each other and want a revenge.

I don't think that happens as often as you seem to think. — For example, I
think downvotes here at HN works fairly okay, and at StackOverflow and related
sites. They're not perfect, but better than nothing IMO.

Also remember that all the Disagree vote does, is to show that many disagree.
It doesn't hide the comment. So in the cases it gets abused, it won't matter
much, in comparison to here at HN or Reddid, where it can be used to censor.

