How would you redesign HN?

* Do more to dampen the overwhelming point advantage given to mediocre quality comments that garner more upvotes only because they were posted early.

* Similarly, do something to curtail or discourage posts from getting hijacked by a mediocre early top level comment.

* Design comment ranking features with cognizance that users are trying to get visibility for their comments, and this incentive sometimes distorts the conversation. For example, I might wonder, what gives the most visibility for my comment, top posting, or posting right under this highly inflammatory comment that is getting a lot of attention, or posting under a mediocre comment that was early and was therefore voted to the top despite its low quality? I may choose according to my desire for visibility, instead of choosing according to where the comment fits best. Do something to counter this. I don't know exactly what, though… it would need more thought and possibly months of experimentation to find the right recipe for success here. But at least, as a basic starting point, recognize that this is a real dynamic, and then from that starting point, try to design comment ranking behaviors to address it.

* Lightly penalize comments that start with forms of "TBH" or "genuine question."

* Leave it text based, as is. The visual design is fine. Great, even.

* Auto save drafts so a stray touch on a touch bar or a mobile back button doesn't nuke what you've written so far.

Allow users to see that the writer of a comment they replied to upvoted their comment (if user foo writes a comment, user bar replies, and foo upvotes bars reply, bar (¿or all users?) should be able to see that.

That is a less noisy way to say ‘thanks’ that I think would get used more, and would inform users that they aren’t replying to a vacuum.

Very very little.

I find it annoying when someone asks a question with no description and never comes back to clarify. Just an ambiguous question in a headline. Like (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27801976). No idea on the best solution…

I find the discovery of past content a bit rough. Specifically search is either always doing the most recent or the highest voted submissions: never a combination of the both (aka something like hotness). So if I search on “Python”, I can choose recent uninteresting low votes stuff or 10 year old highest voted stuff that’s out of date. What I really want is “most recent, interesting Python stuff”.

But please don’t touch much else, it’s probably the most useful website and community I’ve used anywhere!

Provide a user configurable front end interface capable of display topics the individual is most interested in, while retaining the default page as another option. For example option headings might be specific coding languages, specific hardware, climate change, world news, etc. This could allow the user to be aware of information within their favourite subjects.

Have the second chance pool[0] sort by number of comments, ascending, to keep posts with the fewest comments on top. Automatically remove items from the pool with greater than some arbitrary number of comments, since they've already gotten traction.

Don't display comments on the newcomments page beyond a certain comment depth (which inevitably stray from the context of the original article) or which have been downvoted. In other words, curate it a bit so it doesn't provide as much low-hanging fruit for snipers.

I really wish the API would get an update. It would be nice to be able to do queries by range or to get entire threads at a time.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/pool

Remove the misfeature that submission titles get silently rewritten on submission.

If HN thinks it's necessary to use the "anti clickbait filter", they should at least do it like with too long titles: refuse the submission.

Rewrite the title and let the user click "submit" again.

Allow you to either downvote or post a comment, not both. Being able to do both doubles down on the negative sentiment that a comment receives, which can skew future reactions.

The most obvious thing would be a better mobile view. doesn't need to be fancy, but some things like the vote buttons really could use larger touch targets.

TBH I think it’s very fit for its purpose.

It’s also like almost the only website I use that works fine on a crappy LTE connection.

I would like to find ways to encourage conversations that are less rushed. Some of the most interesting replies come a day or two later, if there were a way to surface them, like threads but with the ability to skip threads with no changes since last checking, it would be nice.

Looking back through my threads, I'm surprised to learn that you can't reply after 15 days.

Someone ought to make a Proof of Concept MVP because if a picture tells a thousand words , then just imagine what a moving picture with responsive bells and whistles can do ! [Queue foreshadowing Musical Score as we Fade to Black...]

Allow 2-column format

- Add dark mode

- Add a convenient way to do bulleted lists

- AJAXify the flag command

- Clean up the horrendous HTML

Bigger fonts for fat fingers