Improving the Usability of HN?

Hi there,

I'm new to HN, so please bear with me here... coming from Slashdot (remember that?) and Stack, I found HN's discussions to be incredibly refreshing, a mixture of fascinating submissions and intelligent commentary. Reminds me of the good ol' days of the internet, especially compared to the post-apocalyptic wasteland that reddit has become.

That said, I also find HN's UX/UI pretty difficult to use. It's hard to see which stories have the most upvotes, for example, besides a tiny gray vote count under each story. There are no topic or time period filters. Inside the comments, there's no way to sort them (hotness, newness, top) or collapse them (either individual threads, or the whole chain to the top replies).

Now, none of those are dealbreakers, obviously, and I would never want to see HN turn into the acidic glop that reddit is now, with a bunch of meaningless icons and colors everywhere, like MySpace all over again. But some basic usability features would be very welcome. In the olden days, old.reddit.com had the "Reddit Enhancement Suite" browser extension, which made browsing & reading quite easy and pleasurable. Is there anything like that for HackerNews?

Or, has this ever been discussed for HN, either as a first-party change or a fork? Is syndicating the content and/or forking the code allowed? I know there are often coding exercise examples, like the "HackerNews example written in Vue" (https://vue-hn.herokuapp.com/top) that uses the HN Firebase API (https://github.com/HackerNews/API). Is it OK to just take this content and write a new interface for it and then make it public, as an alternative interface to consume the same content? Does that negatively affect HN monetization... is there even HN monetization?

Just trying to think of some ways to change the UI without annoying users who prefer it as-is.

Has this already been discussed to death? What does the community think?