What I wish for would be some kind of frontend for viewing hacker news (specifically the comment section) in a way that imageboards behave. I've never adapted to the reddit-style comment system for two reasons:
1. nested/indented comments are confusing. Perhaps it's connected to how I don't like programming languages that rely on indents for defining blocks of script instead of curly brackets, but I think that the reasons are unrelated. When you have a large tree of comments, it's simply hard to keep track which comment replies to which. It's easy when you have a couple comments, but I simply can't process a large tree of, say, 20 comments, I'll forget the context of the parent by the time I read the 5th one. Also sometimes it's hard to recognize if the next comment is indented 1 or 2 times to the left. I don't know why is this design so popular, someone even wrote a frontpage for 4chan that displayed its posts in this manner. I'd love to have a frontpage for hackernews that displayed its posts like on an imageboard! if you know such, please let me know. At least HN provides the next/prev/parent buttons, but they lack the onhover rendering of the post like on 4chan. These buttons also don't exist on hckrnws.com frontend which I tend to use, but it's a minor nitpick.
2. upvotes. I really like the 4chan way of bumping and making comments with a lot of replies the ones that stand out instead of those that a lot of people agree with. I think it encourages more diverse opinions. But on the other hand, perhaps the upvote system is somehow key to the pretty high level of discussion on HN, can't really tell.
I find it easy to use by going depth first and collapsing each nested level as it’s completed. Each time you collapse, you can reread the parent context if needed.
I like HN generally, but there are a handful of things I wish it had:
* The ability to save comments, as well as posts
* Ideally a separate 'favorites' and 'read later' category
* Some kind of [tags] on posts, ideally something
individuals can contribute to. It would be easy to add from an existing set of tags, adding a unique new tag would be harder and require maybe an older account or more 'points' or whatever.
* Maybe some kind of 'bump' system when linking to things that have already been posted? It feels a bit silly for there to be like 10 duplicates of a post from different time periods. But maybe that's better than the alternative, not sure.
> * Maybe some kind of 'bump' system when linking to things that have already been posted? It feels a bit silly for there to be like 10 duplicates of a post from different time periods. But maybe that's better than the alternative, not sure.
I kind of enjoy it. Some posts have become like a yearly/bi-yearly occurrence, and if I enjoyed the discussions the previous times, I'll most likely enjoy the discussions this time too.
As long as it's not the same stuff every day, I'm fine with things being re-posted once a year or so, long enough for me to forget I read the previous one.
And it actually does avoid duplicates in the short term, as long as the submitted url is identical. I'm not sure what the time threshold is exactly, but I know if you resubmit something that has been submitted in the past few days, it will count it as a vote on the original instead.
I appreciate it, as it helps me to not 'favorite' many comments, but only those that actually strike me as worth saving when they are so detailed as to be a post of their own!
In a lot of ways, HN's intentionally aescetic design works against itself. People can be here for years and not notice features because the grey on grey layout encourages feature-blindness.
Most of the time I'd choose to hide posts tagged AI. (No disrespect to people posting/discussing AI, it's just not a topic that I have much intellectual curiosity for.)
Unfortunately sometimes I'd choose to sort by "drama", and get my rant on about the latest Ruby shitfight, or whatever Matt/Automattic or Elon/Grok/X are doing. And me giving in to that temptation would probably make the site objectivity worse, so perhaps it's better the way it is?
I've used Reddit since before subreddits, and I would never want this place to go down that route. But it seems like there is a desire for some of those features Reddit had in its early years.
For me, a touch more Markdown like for text links would be nice, but no image support or anything like that, though. As cool as the [0] is, the <a href=> tag and its predecessors were invented early on for a reason.
Just occasionally I do really want to respond with an image because it explains a comment a lot better than text might. The same problem exists on Reddit and I think the potential for misuse is potentially too high but it feels to me to support the idea of high quality comments. At a certain point a high quality argument requires a graph or diagram to explain a more complex thing.
At the moment the only way this type of discussion really works is that people post on their own sites and we sometimes see that more detailed response. The risk of images descending into meme exchanges I think is quite low given the participants. Not sure to the extent more formatting would be good but I can definitely see its value and I use it on Reddit sometimes.
Linking to Imgur [0] when needed should be sufficient. HN allowing direct image inclusion would likely end up being quite a mess. HN being text-only (and emoji-free) is one of the things I appreciate about it.
[0] or whatever the recommended alternative is nowadays
One thing I really miss in HN is having a tagging system to filter content better. Sometimes, the things I want to follow or ignore don't have any clear hints in their titles. Having tags would really help customize the content for each user.
https://lobste.rs/ has a tag system. I asked some months ago why HN doesn't. The answer was that it adds complexity and is hard to remove if not worth it. They want to protect HN's minimalism.
There are still a select few subreddits where this is true as well. I genuinely miss 10 years ago getting into random shit like double edge razors, home brewing and woodworking and how supportive those communities were to get into. Some communities _do_ exist, but once they get past a certain size it becomes worthless
>> The best part? No politics, trivia, or spam. Mainstream media news is rare
Boy what incredibly different universes we live in.
If anyone already has the infrastructure set up for this already, I really, really, wish for something where the top X HN stories can be input to AI sentiment analysis and graphs automatically created which shows, per time period, the % of submissions it classifies as "political" and the % classified as "mainstream news".
In the top 100 posts on any given day it has to be a significant percentage. I flag all political posts I see and I'm constantly flagging. The AI analysis wouldn't be perfect, but it would at least be fairly impartial, and automated. Why not collect the data?
Flagging ability is scaled - it takes multiple "regular users" with flag privileges to raise a [flag] and further more to tip posts to [dead] (there are other paths to [dead]).
Some users are granted 'instant' [flag] -> [dead] privileges (if they consistently only flag obvious spam), their work is looked at, if they start showing a bias that ability is degraded.
Part of the moderation task at HN is weighting user feedback by looking at individual behaviour.
A big problem is high karma accounts are allowed to constantly politically flamebait But the nobodies get snuffed out pretty quickly, often for much less.
Not surprisingly, various groups often grant those with greater tenure and more connection leniency. I just despise the lies.
If the shareholders of ycombinator like your sentiment, you'll flourish. Ycombinator is a business don't forget. We're all here to discuss, usually in good faith. But I can't help but get the impression that submissions that are made popular are reviewed and measured, that's just my tinfoil hat maybe.
I personally don't think YC the company has much to do with the dynamics of this site at all -- but many users here are likely fans of or aspiring participants in the program.
There is no shortage of comments and posts heavily critical of people associated with YC, though. Search comments for 'Gary Tan' and you'll see what I mean.
Not involved with YC at all, but I wonder if they might promote the site to the applicants of their accelerator program and encourage them to sign up here.
Agree. What I think the parent is observing is more the userbase collectively becoming an avatar for Silicon Valley talking points sometimes. It isn't always overt; it's more of a sense of disproportionately rewarding discussion points that mesh with the current zeitgeist (e.g. pro-AI posts doing better overall).
Only a minority of the userbase is in SFBA. There is no one consistent HN attitude towards any specific policy (I think it would be fair to say that there are HN styles of argumentation, though, not all of them good.)
Yeah, but you can also browse /new with dead unhidden. I'd say they doing a favor moderating more often than not. But there is of course an intuitive bias. They are a business after all.
Well yes. They have 2 brilliant guys running an incredibly popular site with a business model of replacing recruiters for their companies, most of which are of interest to an average HN reader.
Let's be conservative and imagine that YC gets them both for a fully loaded total of only half a million per year. (Could be half that, could easily be twice that.) These two run the site and moderate it both. That's already damn impressive. Let's imagine hosting costs YC nothing, somehow. (Apparently it's only run on one machine.)
For the low low price of free you and I are getting a high performance site with astonishingly good moderation and relatively few ads, certainly none that beg for an ad blocker. Of course I expect it to comply with YC's needs but in fact there's an immense amount of criticism of YN and its cohorts.
Now tell me where there's another site with quality this high that's free and keeps its prejudices to a minimum (I say that as a person with politics that probably run afoul of most HN readers).
Even with your tinfoil hat on I'm pretty sure you'll find nothing else remotely close to this good on the web for free.
> They have 2 brilliant guys running an incredibly popular site
Well that's not the reality thankfully.
> Now tell me where there's another site with quality this high that's free and keeps its prejudices to a minimum
I agree with you, but I'm biased towards this type of community where there is a real discussion, I've been proven wrong many times here and it never felt personal.
I only put my tinfoil hat o because when something is free these days, it's usually you as the product. I'd never want to lose the community but back in my day there was IRC servers with packed channels, there was Usenet. These days it's a rarity instead of the norm. Maybe I'm just getting too old.
> When a post is down-voted or flagged, a self-cleaning procedure is triggered by other users, so quality posts and comments tend to float to the top.
The first part is correct, the second part is correct in theory, but any place that has "upvotes" (like HN or reddit) ends up with the community putting straight up incorrect stuff as the "top comment".
So while "far up in the comment thread" can signal quality, accuracy and truth, you'd be mistaken to automatically assume so. HN is, after all, just another community on the website filled with humans who can be wrong.
The thing that's hard about the intellectual curiosity part is knowing what comments are from actual experts and what are very smart people opining outside the edges of their circle of competence - while still sounding smart.
There was a discussion here where a professor with a specialty on the underlying subject was 'corrected'/crowded out by very detailed comments that sounded cogent, had buzzwords in them but ultimately were incorrect.
Seeing that makes me wonder about the discussion here on topics I know nothing about. Vetted flair for subject matter expertise for users would help. I'm still interested in what a chip designer has to say about astronomy but it would make it easier to weigh the contribution.
You can assume that for any subject other than CS, unless someone specifically mentions their credentials in the field, most commenters won't know what they're talking about. Hacker News has a reputation for "aggressive ignorance" outside of its wheelhouse.
Remember, HN isn't exactly checking anyone's CV at the door. All it takes to post here is knowing how to fill out a web form. The culture here tends to believe the simplistic design somehow draws deep technical intellects like moths to a flame but it really doesn't.
> As far as I know, it is the only "social network" that allows you to grow intellectually through participation. This is probably the highest compliment an internet platform can receive in 2025.
Eh. It’s garbage in, garbage out, mostly like any other platform. It’s still easy to degrade the site if the users are determined enough.
How you choose to use it dictates your takeaway more than most social media platforms I suppose, which is actually the best thing about it IMO. That much is worth contrasting with the other options out there, no question.
HN was better 15 years ago. There was actual diversity of opinion. Founders who made it big used to post here still. There's the odd interesting thing here still but now it's a major echo chamber.
Odd to say there isn't mainstream news media. All major news stories break here. And with the tight approach to maintaining the ship and fast moving nature it is one of the best places to keep abreast of everything.
What I wish for would be some kind of frontend for viewing hacker news (specifically the comment section) in a way that imageboards behave. I've never adapted to the reddit-style comment system for two reasons:
1. nested/indented comments are confusing. Perhaps it's connected to how I don't like programming languages that rely on indents for defining blocks of script instead of curly brackets, but I think that the reasons are unrelated. When you have a large tree of comments, it's simply hard to keep track which comment replies to which. It's easy when you have a couple comments, but I simply can't process a large tree of, say, 20 comments, I'll forget the context of the parent by the time I read the 5th one. Also sometimes it's hard to recognize if the next comment is indented 1 or 2 times to the left. I don't know why is this design so popular, someone even wrote a frontpage for 4chan that displayed its posts in this manner. I'd love to have a frontpage for hackernews that displayed its posts like on an imageboard! if you know such, please let me know. At least HN provides the next/prev/parent buttons, but they lack the onhover rendering of the post like on 4chan. These buttons also don't exist on hckrnws.com frontend which I tend to use, but it's a minor nitpick.
2. upvotes. I really like the 4chan way of bumping and making comments with a lot of replies the ones that stand out instead of those that a lot of people agree with. I think it encourages more diverse opinions. But on the other hand, perhaps the upvote system is somehow key to the pretty high level of discussion on HN, can't really tell.
I find it easy to use by going depth first and collapsing each nested level as it’s completed. Each time you collapse, you can reread the parent context if needed.
I like HN generally, but there are a handful of things I wish it had:
* The ability to save comments, as well as posts
* Ideally a separate 'favorites' and 'read later' category
* Some kind of [tags] on posts, ideally something individuals can contribute to. It would be easy to add from an existing set of tags, adding a unique new tag would be harder and require maybe an older account or more 'points' or whatever.
* Maybe some kind of 'bump' system when linking to things that have already been posted? It feels a bit silly for there to be like 10 duplicates of a post from different time periods. But maybe that's better than the alternative, not sure.
> The ability to save comments
Click on a comment’s timestamp and then 'favorite' at the top.
> * Maybe some kind of 'bump' system when linking to things that have already been posted? It feels a bit silly for there to be like 10 duplicates of a post from different time periods. But maybe that's better than the alternative, not sure.
I kind of enjoy it. Some posts have become like a yearly/bi-yearly occurrence, and if I enjoyed the discussions the previous times, I'll most likely enjoy the discussions this time too.
As long as it's not the same stuff every day, I'm fine with things being re-posted once a year or so, long enough for me to forget I read the previous one.
And it actually does avoid duplicates in the short term, as long as the submitted url is identical. I'm not sure what the time threshold is exactly, but I know if you resubmit something that has been submitted in the past few days, it will count it as a vote on the original instead.
To favourite a comment, click its timestamp and then click "favourite" just after "flag".
You can view your favourited comments from your profile page.
Wow. That is very not intuitive. It's like an anti-pattern.
Good to know though, thank you!
I appreciate it, as it helps me to not 'favorite' many comments, but only those that actually strike me as worth saving when they are so detailed as to be a post of their own!
In a lot of ways, HN's intentionally aescetic design works against itself. People can be here for years and not notice features because the grey on grey layout encourages feature-blindness.
* sort by controversial
Most of the time I'd choose to hide posts tagged AI. (No disrespect to people posting/discussing AI, it's just not a topic that I have much intellectual curiosity for.)
Unfortunately sometimes I'd choose to sort by "drama", and get my rant on about the latest Ruby shitfight, or whatever Matt/Automattic or Elon/Grok/X are doing. And me giving in to that temptation would probably make the site objectivity worse, so perhaps it's better the way it is?
I've used Reddit since before subreddits, and I would never want this place to go down that route. But it seems like there is a desire for some of those features Reddit had in its early years.
For me, a touch more Markdown like for text links would be nice, but no image support or anything like that, though. As cool as the [0] is, the <a href=> tag and its predecessors were invented early on for a reason.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Href?useskin=vector
Just occasionally I do really want to respond with an image because it explains a comment a lot better than text might. The same problem exists on Reddit and I think the potential for misuse is potentially too high but it feels to me to support the idea of high quality comments. At a certain point a high quality argument requires a graph or diagram to explain a more complex thing.
At the moment the only way this type of discussion really works is that people post on their own sites and we sometimes see that more detailed response. The risk of images descending into meme exchanges I think is quite low given the participants. Not sure to the extent more formatting would be good but I can definitely see its value and I use it on Reddit sometimes.
Linking to Imgur [0] when needed should be sufficient. HN allowing direct image inclusion would likely end up being quite a mess. HN being text-only (and emoji-free) is one of the things I appreciate about it.
[0] or whatever the recommended alternative is nowadays
Cool. I don't disagree.
Looking forward to The Bad Parts.
It’s a fashionable opinion to dunk on HN nowadays, but frankly there is nothing else like it, or even close.
(In my experience, the ones dunking on it are the ones spending most time on it…)
One thing I really miss in HN is having a tagging system to filter content better. Sometimes, the things I want to follow or ignore don't have any clear hints in their titles. Having tags would really help customize the content for each user.
That's an anti-goal of HN; everybody shares the same front page here.
https://lobste.rs/ has a tag system. I asked some months ago why HN doesn't. The answer was that it adds complexity and is hard to remove if not worth it. They want to protect HN's minimalism.
As far as I know, it is the only "social network" that allows you to grow intellectually through participation.
This describes Wikipedia more than HN.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia with a kinda-social-network-ish-in-the-broadest-possible-definition attached.
HN actually is a social network.
There are still a select few subreddits where this is true as well. I genuinely miss 10 years ago getting into random shit like double edge razors, home brewing and woodworking and how supportive those communities were to get into. Some communities _do_ exist, but once they get past a certain size it becomes worthless
What was that weightlifting sub that worshiped "Brodin" and "The Church Of (Something? Maybe Iron?)"
I am not a weightlifter, but I'd occasionally visit that sub just because of how welcoming and supportive it was.
AskHistorians is still pretty great too.
Turns out gatekeeping works
Absolutely. Why wouldn't it? All the useful forums are "gatekept" in some fashion; AskHistorians just has an especially legible set of gates.
>> The best part? No politics, trivia, or spam. Mainstream media news is rare
Boy what incredibly different universes we live in.
If anyone already has the infrastructure set up for this already, I really, really, wish for something where the top X HN stories can be input to AI sentiment analysis and graphs automatically created which shows, per time period, the % of submissions it classifies as "political" and the % classified as "mainstream news".
In the top 100 posts on any given day it has to be a significant percentage. I flag all political posts I see and I'm constantly flagging. The AI analysis wouldn't be perfect, but it would at least be fairly impartial, and automated. Why not collect the data?
Do you have any examples. I don't think I would classify more than a handful posts as political myself
> I flag all political posts I see and I'm constantly flagging.
I think your ability to flag should be immediately taken away for this reason.
Flagging ability is scaled - it takes multiple "regular users" with flag privileges to raise a [flag] and further more to tip posts to [dead] (there are other paths to [dead]).
Some users are granted 'instant' [flag] -> [dead] privileges (if they consistently only flag obvious spam), their work is looked at, if they start showing a bias that ability is degraded.
Part of the moderation task at HN is weighting user feedback by looking at individual behaviour.
A big problem is high karma accounts are allowed to constantly politically flamebait But the nobodies get snuffed out pretty quickly, often for much less.
Not surprisingly, various groups often grant those with greater tenure and more connection leniency. I just despise the lies.
If the shareholders of ycombinator like your sentiment, you'll flourish. Ycombinator is a business don't forget. We're all here to discuss, usually in good faith. But I can't help but get the impression that submissions that are made popular are reviewed and measured, that's just my tinfoil hat maybe.
[delayed]
I personally don't think YC the company has much to do with the dynamics of this site at all -- but many users here are likely fans of or aspiring participants in the program.
There is no shortage of comments and posts heavily critical of people associated with YC, though. Search comments for 'Gary Tan' and you'll see what I mean.
Not involved with YC at all, but I wonder if they might promote the site to the applicants of their accelerator program and encourage them to sign up here.
Agree. What I think the parent is observing is more the userbase collectively becoming an avatar for Silicon Valley talking points sometimes. It isn't always overt; it's more of a sense of disproportionately rewarding discussion points that mesh with the current zeitgeist (e.g. pro-AI posts doing better overall).
Only a minority of the userbase is in SFBA. There is no one consistent HN attitude towards any specific policy (I think it would be fair to say that there are HN styles of argumentation, though, not all of them good.)
Yeah, but you can also browse /new with dead unhidden. I'd say they doing a favor moderating more often than not. But there is of course an intuitive bias. They are a business after all.
> Ycombinator is a business don't forget.
Well yes. They have 2 brilliant guys running an incredibly popular site with a business model of replacing recruiters for their companies, most of which are of interest to an average HN reader.
Let's be conservative and imagine that YC gets them both for a fully loaded total of only half a million per year. (Could be half that, could easily be twice that.) These two run the site and moderate it both. That's already damn impressive. Let's imagine hosting costs YC nothing, somehow. (Apparently it's only run on one machine.)
For the low low price of free you and I are getting a high performance site with astonishingly good moderation and relatively few ads, certainly none that beg for an ad blocker. Of course I expect it to comply with YC's needs but in fact there's an immense amount of criticism of YN and its cohorts.
Now tell me where there's another site with quality this high that's free and keeps its prejudices to a minimum (I say that as a person with politics that probably run afoul of most HN readers).
Even with your tinfoil hat on I'm pretty sure you'll find nothing else remotely close to this good on the web for free.
> They have 2 brilliant guys running an incredibly popular site
Well that's not the reality thankfully.
> Now tell me where there's another site with quality this high that's free and keeps its prejudices to a minimum
I agree with you, but I'm biased towards this type of community where there is a real discussion, I've been proven wrong many times here and it never felt personal.
I only put my tinfoil hat o because when something is free these days, it's usually you as the product. I'd never want to lose the community but back in my day there was IRC servers with packed channels, there was Usenet. These days it's a rarity instead of the norm. Maybe I'm just getting too old.
It's interesting how much Slashdot has receded, but I really like its predicate scoring system, as well as the ability for people to post anonymously.
Good post. Also, Bear Blog is great. I just set up one myself. It's nice and minimal, and I can add as much or as little as I want to the CSS.
Just want to pop in to agree with the author. Thanks for making this a great virtual space, everyone!
I've always just described HN as a more focused version of a sub-reddit with a start-up/technology/engineering angle.
it's basically what digg should've been
careful comparing the orange site to Reddit; you'll anger the natives
See also: the last paragraph of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> When a post is down-voted or flagged, a self-cleaning procedure is triggered by other users, so quality posts and comments tend to float to the top.
The first part is correct, the second part is correct in theory, but any place that has "upvotes" (like HN or reddit) ends up with the community putting straight up incorrect stuff as the "top comment".
So while "far up in the comment thread" can signal quality, accuracy and truth, you'd be mistaken to automatically assume so. HN is, after all, just another community on the website filled with humans who can be wrong.
The thing that's hard about the intellectual curiosity part is knowing what comments are from actual experts and what are very smart people opining outside the edges of their circle of competence - while still sounding smart.
There was a discussion here where a professor with a specialty on the underlying subject was 'corrected'/crowded out by very detailed comments that sounded cogent, had buzzwords in them but ultimately were incorrect.
Seeing that makes me wonder about the discussion here on topics I know nothing about. Vetted flair for subject matter expertise for users would help. I'm still interested in what a chip designer has to say about astronomy but it would make it easier to weigh the contribution.
You can assume that for any subject other than CS, unless someone specifically mentions their credentials in the field, most commenters won't know what they're talking about. Hacker News has a reputation for "aggressive ignorance" outside of its wheelhouse.
Remember, HN isn't exactly checking anyone's CV at the door. All it takes to post here is knowing how to fill out a web form. The culture here tends to believe the simplistic design somehow draws deep technical intellects like moths to a flame but it really doesn't.
> As far as I know, it is the only "social network" that allows you to grow intellectually through participation. This is probably the highest compliment an internet platform can receive in 2025.
Eh. It’s garbage in, garbage out, mostly like any other platform. It’s still easy to degrade the site if the users are determined enough.
How you choose to use it dictates your takeaway more than most social media platforms I suppose, which is actually the best thing about it IMO. That much is worth contrasting with the other options out there, no question.
Things to add to hackernews:
Emojis, Images and GIF posts, Profile Pictures, Followers/Following, Sponsored posts
…if you wanted to destroy hackernews
Anything you'd do on Reddit don't do here :). Occasionally a Reddit like humour is allowed though.
HN was better 15 years ago. There was actual diversity of opinion. Founders who made it big used to post here still. There's the odd interesting thing here still but now it's a major echo chamber.
Odd to say there isn't mainstream news media. All major news stories break here. And with the tight approach to maintaining the ship and fast moving nature it is one of the best places to keep abreast of everything.
>All major news stories break here.
No, they don't.
This is a link aggregator. By definition stories posted here have already been posted (and broken) elsewhere.
...and there was the A.I. posts.