On the submit page, have a way to enter the URL and see if it has already been submitted, without having to devise a clever title. Once you are satisfied it is new, you then think about a title.
Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator
551–560 of 1001 posts
Re: Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator
#552A hacker/non-hacker toggle for each submission and a system for letting the community decide what is truly hacker-ish. It is the only way to prevent Hacker News from becoming Reddit with no sub-Reddts.
Re: Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator
#553Comments are a really interesting part of news.ycombinator for many, but it is still difficult to find the most interesting threads. The top-level comments page has degraded given that the traffic has grown considerably, so the result is many 1-upvote comments.
I am proposing to change the comments page linked at the top-level menu to a ranking scheme similar to the one that ranks threads in a submission's comments page, but favouring recently posted 1-vote comments less.
Comments are more interesting than submissions in many cases. Such a page would support bottom-up (comment to submission) navigation on the site better. I know there are some features for bottom-up navigation like the on: feature on the comments page, but isn't very useful unless the comments are good. This would allow me to explore articles I would have never found to be interesting looking at the main page but when framed in the right context with an excellent comment would be very interesting.
The usage statistics of the top-level threads and comments links could support or reject a rethinking of the functionality that those pages provide.
Re: Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator
#554Make username on log in not case-sensitive.
I just spent a while trying to log in because I didnt realize I needed to capitalize my username. I don't think its possible to create two usernames that differ only in capitalization, so Im not sure why case is considered while logging in.
Re: Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator
#555Collapsible Comment threads. (as described in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1864844)
Re: Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator
#556This is a bug. When I get to the older posts, around 200 or so, high-ranking posts are displayed twice, one after the other.
Here is a saved hacker news page illustrating this bug, with two examples in it:
http://pastie.org/pastes/1270964/download
It has already been reported in: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1630931
Re: Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator
#557I was wondering if you'd consider adding an opt-in setting that would make users' votes visible to others, both for comments and for submissions. I'm interested in it for a few reasons:
1) I'd like to see what people I respect are voting for, in the hopes of finding things I otherwise would have missed.
2) I'd like to someday make a recommendations system that would work for HN, and starting now to create a corpus of permission-cleared votes would help if I ever get to it.
3) I think it might have a positive effect on social dynamics. While there is in theory greater potential for retaliatory downvotes, I hope that instead people would act more considerately if they felt that others could review their behaviour. I don't see any way to test this other than by trying it out.
I think this option would best be a simple checkbox on each user's settings page: "Make my votes visible to others". The votes would then be visible from a link on that page for others to view. Ideally, it would also be possible to view these from an item-centric viewpoint, accessible from the 'link' page.
If the idea were to catch on, I'd eventually like to see an 'Open' list, parallel to 'Classic', whereby one could view the entire site as it would appear if ordered only by users with their votes set to be visible.
Thanks!
[Originally here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1878591]
Re: Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator
#558A simple request: change the location for the up and down arrows, in order to minimize misclick-voting (especially on mobile devices):
[up] 3 points [down] by author n hours ago
Re: Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator
#559Is there a way to make the links in the submissions (like Ask HN) be clickable after a certain threshold of upvotes? I understand why they shouldn't be links immediately, but if the submission is getting vetted by upvotes I don't see why we can't have clickable links.
Re: Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator
#560In addition to 'flag' add 'meta' on comments. There is no need for a 1/3 of each thread to be complaints about the title, whether it is HN worthy, etc.