Ask HN: How would you improve Hacker News? - geckoquaint
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randycupertino
Mandatory flair when people submit posts so later everyone can search by
topic.

"machine learning" "health tech" "web dev" "biotech" "systems" ... etc.

There's just too much new content to constantly keep up and always spot
articles about one topic if you are interested. The search doesn't really work
for this either.

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krapp
Most of my "suggestions" have to do with the UX and some of them are probably
coming eventually, and a lot have been suggested by other people as well. Let
the metaposting begin ...

\- collapsible comments.

\- auto merging of identical stories into subtrees on the new/news pages so no
one story can overwhelm it

\- collapse comments on identical stories into subtrees on the new comments
page so no one story can overwhelm it

\- don't show comments from stories on the new comments page which are more
than two levels deep, because they're not likely to be directly relevant to
the OP (and it discourages fueling possible flamewars.)

\- don't show comments on the new comments page which have been voted down, to
discourage drive-by downvotes.

\- don't allow voting from the new comments page - if someone wants to vote
they should have to actually read the thread.

\- links to comments on the new comments page should lead to the parent of
that comment, where it exists, to include part of the context.

\- the ability to sort a thread chronologically.

\- a way to save threads and comments other than upvoting them.

\- a way to unsave threads and comments.

\- reversible voting.

\- remove the greying out of text posts.

\- remove the greying out of downvotes.

\- remove visible karma counts.

\- don't allow posts to be deleted after they've been replied to, _or_ auto-
kill or auto-prune replies to a deleted post.

\- an option to change your username.

\- display green usernames as a randomly generated hash. This would hopefully
discourage trolls adopting personas with ironic and insulting usernames, which
seems to happen a lot.

\- boards, hashtags, _some_ extra bit of abstraction to sort stories by.

\- replace shadowbanning with actual banning _or_ show a message to a banned
user when they're logged in informing them of their status and that their
comments will need community approval for the time being. Basically, no longer
expect it to work by fooling people.

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jelavich
better purging of identical topics. I see the same article or topic appear
several times over a few days.

~~~
greenyoda
Currently, this relies on moderators and users flagging duplicate articles,
which is very labor intensive. The automated software can kill duplicates with
identical URLs, but it would take some pretty sophisticated AI to reliably
figure out that two articles with entirely different titles are talking about
the same topic (and which of the articles is the primary or higher-quality
reference).

~~~
DrScump
A key aid would be a disincentive to posting duplicates, e.g. _lose_ rather
than gain karma points by doing so.

Many sites are trolling for extra hits by deliberately munging their URLs,
either appending random crap to the URL itself (e.g. gamedevdaily.io) or
appending fake fragment identifiers (medium, signalvnoise) to evade automatic
dupe detection using simple URL duplication.

In the meantime, dupes are "winners" for both the poster (intercepting
activity and, thereby, points) and the site (gaining more visibility, since
your site appears 2X-4X more in HN than it would otherwise).

