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

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

#791

Post by rabidsnail »

The culture of HN seems to be drifting slowly away from technical subjects and towards more "5 easy ways to make your shit smell like roses" Business-Insider-type posts. This has been going on for a long time. It's one of the biggest sources of friction in the HN community in my opinion.

I'm not saying that these posts are bad per se, but I would bet that most HN users like either one type of post or the other and not both. I would also bet that the Techcrunch-types outnumber the LtU-types, so trying to move the discussion towards more technical topics is a losing battle in the long run.

So here's what I'm suggesting:

1. Let submitters add tags to their posts along with their titles.

2. Let people whitelist the tags that show up on their homepage.

3. Using data from 2, it should be possible to cluster tags together, and make ad-hoc subreddits. I'm not entirely confident that subreddits are a good idea, but having the tag co-occurrance matrix would indicate whether it is or not.

Adding tags this way is much less drastic than diving straight in to subreddits, and it has a path to end up at subreddits in the end if that ends up making sense. And if subreddits don't make sense, it should at least make search work better.

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

#793

Post by rolux »

Low-hanging fruit:

The byline of this thread currently reads "2041 days ago", and it's really hard to make sense of that, since dividing by 365 usually takes more than a split-second.

Thus for submissions and comments older than X days, change the byline from "X days ago" to "Month DD, YYYY".

Both 100 and 365 would be okay values for X.

EDIT: Alternatively, extend the current pattern of "minutes ago", "hours ago", "days ago" to "months ago" and "years ago".

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

#795

Post by Zenst »

Relocation of down vote icon per post

-------------------------------------

Currently the downvote icon is directly below the upvote icon. This gives a small margin for error and I have noticed a few times were people have accidently downvoted an artcle due to this. Instead of the layout we have now ( A= Upvote icon and V= downvote icon):

A Name n minutes/hours ago | link

V

I propose that a layout such as this:

A Name n minutes/hours ago | link V

At least to me it would make more sence from a usibility regard to avoiding misclicking and more useful for those upon smaller screen sizes as well.

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

#796

Post by jcr »

If a text based submission gets above some threshold (points, user history, replies, ...), parse the links in the submission. If the submission gets any flags, then stop parsing the links.

Also, rendering text normally (black) rather than grayed-out when a text based submission gets above some threshold would be beneficial.

Sure, parsing links on text based submissions will allow manipulative people to put their comment in a privileged position, but the current implementation detracts from discussion. For example, it's typical to see a follow-up reply for the sole purpose of having clickable links, but due to reply ranking, one usually finds the reply too late. Another issue is mobile devices where a copy-and-paste of a plain text URL is painful.

Obviously, I don't know the stats necessary to grasp whether or not you're fighting with flag-bots or even users who flag too aggressively, but I know you have code running to deal with these two issues (you publicly mentioned how the weighting works eons ago). Since you have the capacity to roughly determine good flagging from bad, a single good flag should be enough to reverse the decision to parse links. This should be enough stop the "privileged positioning" problem.

As for combating the "link harvesting/spamming" side of problem, I think the most you could do is mark the parsed links as "nofollow" in the text based submissions (as usual). It's not a perfect solution, but it's still better than nothing, and it's equivalent to how you handle link based submissions.

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

#797

Post by daveog3 »

Could a tick box be implemented beside each title on the main page as I don't alway have time to read the full article linked at a particular time, and if its a couple of days before I get a chance to do so it is difficult to find the article again. Then put an option for the user when they come back to the page to have it display the articles they previously ticked.

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

#798

Post by ricardo »

I'd love an iOS home screen icon.

Since iOS allowed saving web pages as icons on the home screen, I've had a link to Hacker News on the first page of apps on my iPhone. iOS looks for an image in a specific location and will use that as the icon for the bookmark. If it can't find one, it'll take a screenshot of the home page.

Since updating to iOS 6, my home screen bookmark icon for Hacker News has started changing to the icons for websites that HN links to. For example, my icon currently is a purple 'Slate' logo after reading a story at Slate.com. The only way to change this is to recreate the bookmark until this happens again.

It'd be great if we could get a HN icon that iOS would use instead of failing to the default and now changing often.

Implementing this is as easy as placing specifically named and sized images in the root directory of the domain.

Specific naming and sizes can be found here: http://gigaom.com/apple/how-to-create-ios-device-home-screen...

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

#800

Post by kgill »

It would be great if the links on HN automatically open in new tabs. This would clearly imply that the clicked link is on a different domain. In addition, the user won't need to remember to go back to HN page, because it would be always open in the first tab. (Similar to Google News)
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