Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator

It's one of the features of Slashdot that I like. The flip side of tags is that they make search a lot easier to implement.

1. A lack of focus and quality in the content. 2. No troll guards.

1. Lack of focus and quality In my experience, users frequent a site because it has quality content and they leave when the quality of the content declines. Digg and more recently Reddit, are experiencing a loss of focus and quality and as a result are losing their initial users. Digg’s quality is so bad it is now pointless to read and much to my chagrin, Reddit seems to be following suit. Reddit seems to be drowning in a rising tide of noobs. Apparently, there aren’t enough old users around to down-vote the crap posted by the noobal hoard. From a quick read of comments, it seems many long-time users are angry and feel disenfranchised. It’s because of this that those users whose content made Digg and Reddit popular in the first place are now leaving those sites and taking their great ideas with them.

2. No troll guards: Nothing poisons an online community quicker than a few nasty trolls. Another one of the reasons that I’m pulling away from Reddit is because it is getting mean. Both the links that are posted and the article forums are being destroyed by trolls stomping around unchecked. I hope Reddit can fix this problem. If not, I’m going to stop spending my time there.

The impression that I get, Paul, is that your goal is to make this YC News a start-up news site and a community of potential founders; not simply another social news site. The only way that I can see to maintain quality content and to filter out the trolls is to institute some form of moderation. Straight democracy leads to anarchy; that’s why I think a news site needs to be a republic. I don’t think, by any stretch of the imagination, that Slashdot is perfect, but they do have a system where moderators are selected from heavy and moderate users on a rotating basis. The system filters out new and spam accounts and gives preference to high karma users. It seems to keep the trolls in check. It also encourages people to take more ownership and to participate in the community.

Slashdot’s FAQ explains their moderation system here: http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml#cm520

There is also a brief discussion of their anti-troll rules here: http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml#cm2000

Thanks for setting up the site. It scratches an itch that I’ve had for a while.

2. Just like Reddit does, show the domain each link belongs to. Reddit has this in brackets after the headline, which works fine. Since I don't have much free time, there are some sites that have sub-par content which I avoid reading, and it helps to know where I would end up without having to hover over the link.

In any case, a very useful feature would be a way to track your comments in the different submissions and the stories that you voted up.

There are a lot of really great stories on here and sometimes I don't have the time to finish reading some. I'd like to be able to find the stories again quickly in my recent history.