211–220 of 239 posts
However, a related request would be an easy way to identify new comments on a conversation thread when you're on the threads page. Is that something that can be done?
If I have an active day on HN it can be difficult to determine which comments I've read and won't reply to from new comments I'd like to reply to.
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No problem :) As I said in a parallel reply, people not knowing when they get a response improves the discussion quality here.
In your opinion not knowing when a response occurs improves "discussion quality" Objectively, it reduces the opportunity for "discussion" - since you don't know someone is actually having a "discussion" (or trying to have one) with you Whether that correlates to better or worse "quality" is highly debatable :)
This has been addressed by dang before, one representative pastequote from a recent (ish) comment: Yes, I think we'll continue to avoid the notification system, not just because of flamewars but also because (relatedly) it's not so compatible with curiosity. Push notifications seem to jack up the nervous system in a way that's good for engagement but not necessarily for users—we all experience this elsewhere on the i…
Anything that would generate a notification requiring a swipe-down from the top of the screen, or making a noise, seeing what the notification is and either clicking on it or swiping it away, disable that entirely.
I also allow exactly zero websites to send push notifications via browser on my desktop/laptop workstation systems.
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I agree about the problem of quality conversations fading too quickly. Perhaps HN could add a /topconversations or /yesterdayconversations link that only highlights the best conversation threads from 24 hours ago. That way attention on good discussions could be maintained for an extra day.
https://news.ycombinator.com/front ?
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That you have to use one of what ...a dozen[ish] options I've seen posted today to get to what is a fundamentally standard part of every forum experience (except this one) shows how out of touch the HN devs are, imo
They aren't out of touch, they understand the culture. People here want Hacker News to feel like the last thirty years of the web didn't happen. They don't want Hacker News to be modern, least of all to be like other forums. They want the Bohemian indulgence of 90's era web ugliness with complete disregard for standards, and the ascetic purity of painfully minimalist UX that appeals to their contrarian, anti-modern s…
This has been addressed by dang before, one representative pastequote from a recent (ish) comment: Yes, I think we'll continue to avoid the notification system, not just because of flamewars but also because (relatedly) it's not so compatible with curiosity. Push notifications seem to jack up the nervous system in a way that's good for engagement but not necessarily for users—we all experience this elsewhere on the i…
Yeah as a reddit troll myself I enjoy the freedom of never caring and pursuing flaming here... people like me get addicted to the reaction and start writing only to trigger reactions. Here at least I post constructively sometimes.
If I see my karma go up, that usually tells me that someone may have replied to something I said. Otherwise, I'm glad there's no alert for new replies. Conversation should be intentional. If I'm gonna be reading what someone said in response to me, I better already have enough motivation to check back and see if someone replied. When I don't check back, it's probably because I've got something more important to focus…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They aren't out of touch, they understand the culture. People here want Hacker News to feel like the last thirty years of the web didn't happen. They don't want Hacker News to be modern, least of all to be like other forums. They want the Bohemian indulgence of 90's era web ugliness with complete disregard for standards, and the ascetic purity of painfully minimalist UX that appeals to their contrarian, anti-modern s…
The design is based directly on the design of several (what we now call) 'Web 2.0' sites so the idea it's a sop to the retro-hipster sensibilities of 90's-longing users itself feels like a bit of an overwrought personal indulgence.
“So the most important thing a community site can do is attract the kind of people it wants. A site trying to be as big as possible wants to attract everyone. But a site aiming at a particular subset of users has to attract just those—and just as importantly, repel everyone else. I've made a conscious effort to do this on HN. The graphic design is as plain as possible, and the site rules discourage dramatic link titles. The goal is that the only thing to interest someone arriving at HN for the first time should be the ideas expressed there”
I mean, you only have to read literally any thread on HN's design and features, or any of the nigh-weekly threads complaining about the modern web and its complexity, how commodification and capitalism have ruined its creativity and quirkiness, or how javascript exists, to see those sensibilities are alive and well and strongly culturally correlated to the layout of this site and the perception (somewhat inaccurate) that it exists frozen in amber.
I have an agent that watches the RSS feed for replies to my username.[2] Then the huginn agent sends me an email when new replies come in. The beautiful thing is, I can quickly change one setting and throttle down the emails. Only getting an email with a summary of all replies, every X hours, if I want.