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Tell HN: New features and a moderator

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Tell HN: New features and a moderator

#322
post #253
post #242

How do you reverse a hide on the homepage? I am not seeing anyway to do that.

You have to go to the /hidden page. We'll add a link to that from your profile (but it's not there yet). It would be nice if there were a way to do this from the front or newest page themselves but that's kinda inconsistent with hiding the thing.

Hah. Well now I see that that /hidden was in the parent post but who rtfm's? I know others have said this but would also suggest putting a hidden link at the top in addition to a link in the profile. (Intuition says to look at the header imo).

Re: Tell HN: New features and a moderator

#324

These mostly seem like bad ideas: #1 This is the only good feature listed. It helps people skim comment threads for a relevant discussion. #2 Without this feature, people are encouraged to think before voting, and only vote when they mean it. #3 Without this feature, people are encouraged to use HN as a transient source of news and intellectual discussion, and not twitter. #4 Without this feature, people are encourag…

>#2 Without this feature, people are encouraged to think before voting, and only vote when they mean it.

People weren't doing that before. When they weren't voting for any pedantic or pettyreason they wanted, they were also unintentionally voting the wrong way because the arrows are just too small. Having a feature be irreversible doesn't somehow cause people to be more thoughtful about using it.

>#3 Without this feature, people are encouraged to use HN as a transient source of news and intellectual discussion, and not twitter.

People might be interested in what stories certain people find interesting. But it's just making a public version of an existing private feature (saving stories when you upvote them) so I don't think it would be that big a change in the way people have been using the site for a while now.

>#4 Without this feature, people are encouraged to go away and do real stuff until enough time has passed that the front page is new again.

Again - they weren't really doing that before. They were, however, complaining endlessly about stories they didn't want to see overwhelming the front page and comments section. Now that's a solvable problem. You don't have to see stories or comments on stories you don't want to see, and the people who want to see them don't have to deal with arguments about those stories' legitimacy.

>#5 Without this feature, people are encouraged to read or discuss an article based on its own merits, not just what appeals most to hivemind upvotes.

Maybe, although if they really want to encourage people not to act according to the hivemind (or, really, hiveminds, since there's more than one) they could do things like getting rid of visible scores, or letting users choose default sorts other than karma, or introduce more randomness into the front page (although dang said he tried that and the results weren't good.)

Or a really hard problem - how to get people to actually read the articles and not comment on the titles alone?

Re: Tell HN: New features and a moderator

#326
Thank you so much for #1. When you're scrolling a deeply nested comment thread it's hard to tell what branch you're on sometimes because all the indent levels sort of just meld together to the eye. In the past I often would open a comment on its own page just to isolate its children.

Re: Tell HN: New features and a moderator

#327
post #155

I have a piece of feedback. The new collapse button is at the end of the comment. This means that the collapse button's position on the page changes based on username length and duration wording (hours Vs. minutes, etc). One nice thing about other websites which I won't name, is that you can read and collapse all of the top comments without having to "seek" the collapse button constantly. You can literally scroll and…

The argument against that is that with the collapse button so close to the vote arrow, we would be guaranteed to get misvotes, especially on mobile. The undo vote feature would no doubt help with that some, but only so much.

The HN app I use lets you click anywhere in the heading line to collapse/expand. Could you do the same here?

Re: Tell HN: New features and a moderator

#329

I have a piece of feedback. The new collapse button is at the end of the comment. This means that the collapse button's position on the page changes based on username length and duration wording (hours Vs. minutes, etc). One nice thing about other websites which I won't name, is that you can read and collapse all of the top comments without having to "seek" the collapse button constantly. You can literally scroll and…

I've been using this handy Chrome extension for years. It places the collapse button in front of the username.

https://github.com/andrewheins/HN-Comment-Hider

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