Do you think Hacker News is missing any features?
I use Reddit, Twitter, TikTok, and basically all the other social networks, but Hacker News stands out as a specifically targeted forum. I think of it as a subreddit basically.
This piqued my curiosity; are there any major product/platform features that Hacker News should have?
- Larger upvote (and downvote) buttons.
- A way to format lists without adding blank lines.
- On mobile (Android), the comment box lacks the attribute that allows word completion, etc.
I could consider upvote-capping: not in absolute terms, but maybe at 110% of the next most upvoted peer at the top-comment position.This would allow for more top-comment dynamics which currently is often runaway.
A killfile that lets me automatically hide stories from a list of domains.
(The site as a whole doesn't want to enforce "if they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic"[0] but I personally would like to, e.g. by not showing stories from CNN.)
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Being able to collapse a thread without having to scroll up and find the root parent would be awesome
How about an AI program to organize the 400 comments into a more logical sequence? I always think there’s a lot of intelligent commentary in nearly random order
I don't expect any of these features to get added but I've thought adding some myself with a wrapper script.
I find it hard to notice new comments if I revisit a discussion later. It would be nice to highlight all new posts since the last time I visited. Same for new stories on the main page so I waste less time skimming titles I already read earlier.
> On occasion, there's an interesting comment or post that's killed and then you're completely prevented from commenting on it. I'm not a fan of this system where just 1 overly emotional hothead can kill a great discussion. There's even a point to being able to comment on spam: like giving people information to protect themselves or report the spam to a particular web host/law-enforcement agency.
> Creating another account is trivial, but I suppose some form of anonymous posting might be useful in certain discussions. The admins would obviously know who your account belongs to, weeding out much of the potential for spam or abuse.
> I do enjoy text-based discussions, but there's occasions where posting a diagram could simplify many discussions. Without making HN into a full-fledged image board, I wouldn't mind some kind of limited use image uploading functionality built-in.
A dark mode would be nice.
SVG icon for the little ‘Y’ image in the corner. It looks blurred when you zoom in. And I always have HN zoomed in at 150% because the text is tiny on a full HD screen.
Being able to delete your account.
First-party support for seeing replies to your posts, without having to look through your entire post history by hand.
Seeing which posts were upvoted, when, and also an option to hide/disable the voting system and scores.
I guess the YC interface is a little outdated, but...
I think it should remain as it is. Looking at innovations in other social networks, I wish they would someday be the same as they used to be.
HN is only missing the anti-bot feature where web crawlers hosted in AWS are busy stuffing HN with mostly useless drivels.
Message tags; which would allow viewing all messages on a specific subject.
add an image to a post that will be displayed next to the title
A "delete account" feature would be nice.