Ask HN: What would it take for you to stop using Hacker News?

High signal to noise ratio, but Hacker News already does really well with this regard compared to other platforms.

Less transphobia and general lack of social consciousness. I'm often on the edge of not reading HN as it is for those reasons, but unfortunately there isn't anything else like its better sides.

The "downvote due to disagree" thing really annoys me. That and making the text become washed out. I hate it. Especially when I've seen excellent unpopular comments disappear because they were simply unpopular due to politics. Its anti-intellectual. I want to see unpopular comments because they often reveal something interesting.

People should be downvoting because its not appropriate intellectually (adds nothing, eg provides no evidence to back up a claim that obviously needs it). Flagging should be because it is simply inappropriate for usually offensive reasons.

I rarely comment now. I often don't see the point.

I've also often considered a tool to only provide the RSS feed for interesting article discovery then mostly ignore the comments completely. Comments on the ask/show sections are usually more signal than noise. Sometimes even the noise is interesting.

Upvotes should exist to make interesting content rise. Uninteresting content then simply sinks to the bottom.

But votes are a difficult problem to solve. I'm sure there are too many corner cases I've no idea about.

Give me the ability to hide certain sites (like Medium, the WSJ, and Substack) and I'll happily switch. HN gets too much spam from content farms, content marketers, and propaganda outlets owned by News Corp.

I would like to see more of the "invisible web" showing up on the front page. As primarily tech people we should be more familiar with the older and wiser corners of the web and not just a slew of attention grabbing headlines.

I have found some of the most fascinating and thought provoking gems on HN over the years which would have otherwise been lost to antiquity. That is something unique that HN brings to the table as opposed to the multitudes of curated headline feeds out there.

As other commenters state here, the paywalled MSM stuff should take a backseat.

Old timers should be encouraged to submit some of their time-tested and well-worn articles to foster a more stable grounding in the tech industry for the newcomers.