The corrections I find the most frustrating are the ones that attempt to frame something that is reasonably a difference of opinion as a black/white, right/wrong issue.
A made up example using something that is about as subjective as possible: No, that's wrong, strawberries are awful.
(just changing that to "I disagree, ..." gets rid of a lot of the nonsense)
There also ends up being a lot of what is essentially squabbling, comments going back and forth over what someone meant, or pedantically squishing some point that had done a good enough job of transmitting the idea (I'm all for being careful when it matters, I'm pretty sure it doesn't matter all the time).
I have a sneaking suspicion that maybe, just maybe, the looks of HN have helped protect the community against trolls. Everybody knows internet commenting is crude, rude and awful more often than not. In my opinion HN is a glorious example of an online community done right and I'm not sure we should change the site.
But who knows, maybe it will even be better if it gets a little make-over.
I think features can benefit the individual without damaging the community. For example, AJAX enabled replies would leave me in the place I was reading, rather than taking me back to the top of the page, requiring me to hit 'back' twice after every comment. It would be nice if the 'next' link always worked too, instead of just throwing an error if you're browsing too slowly.
Email replies are covered by HN Notify, which, while hacky, does the job. It would be nice to have a simple Reddit-style red envelope, though, rather than clicking my username, then 'Comments' to see if I've had replies.
Of course, there are people who will say, "How much effort is it to click the back button?" but the irony is that these are exactly the kind of bad UX choices that the HN community would criticize any "Show HN" for.
I find the dissuasion away from multiple levels of replies as though in-depth discussion is a bad thing to be bewildering. Comments like "Replying here because I can't reply deeper" shouldn't need to exist. Apparently it's to prevent arguments, but collapsible comments would hide away anything you don't want to follow further.
"It would be nice to have a simple Reddit-style red envelope, though, rather than clicking my username, then 'Comments' to see if I've had replies."
I agree that a notification of replies would be useful. Small tip, instead of clicking your username then clicking on comments, which is something I did for a long time too, just click on the threads link at the top of the page. Takes you to the same content, but in one click rather than two.
I'm not sure what made reddit turn so bad (and I mostly mean the default subreddits and the subscribers rather than the site itself) but I hope that some care is taken to avoid it. HN is a breath of fresh air compared to reddit and I would endure a lot of bad UX if it helped keep it that way.
Popularity, I guess. It became a very general interest site that covers a wide range of interests, and therefore appeals to an equally wide range of visitors -- including those with, shall we say, poor taste and etiquette. HN, on the other hand, is largely centered around the working programmer, a group of people who, for the most part, are looking for something interesting rather than memetic jibber jabber.
I've noticed a big improvement since dang took off the invisibility cloak. All the famous attempts at replacing HN tried to solve community problems technologically (like public referral trees and user-based discussions), but they all fall short of just having a visible and active moderator.
It also helps that dang has been willing - eager, even - to issue a mea culpa and reverse a decision. In other words, he's willing to admit to mistakes, or if not mistakes, at least sincere and reasoned discussion. This goes a long way. He doesn't just say, "Hey, I decided, you live with it."
The site in general is good, but the user moderation system is utterly awful. A 'disagree' mod double-functions as a censor, and there's no need because there's also a separate flagging system. My profile page has a bit of a rant about the shortcomings of the mod system here with more detail.
The autodetection algorithms probably need tweaking as well - from time to time I see users with polite comment histories mysteriously getting shadowbanned. Sometimes another user will look into it and post a comment to that effect, but without a user-to-user messaging system or a method to reply to dead comments, there's no guarantee that a shadowbanned user will see a friendly message.
Not only does it censor, it gives some people undue power. A few days ago, I commented on a now flagkilled post. Within a couple of hours, some 15-20 other people had commented on it, and each and every post, except mine, was grayed out from downvotes. I had gotten a downvote too, but I had enough votes to counterbalance the briagading. I read the other comments, but did not notice anything nasty or disrespectful in there.
This abuse of power is ruining the system for those who have new accounts or only post occasionally.
"the looks of HN have helped protect the community against trolls."
Trolls just use the add-ons. Trolls will put in effort that normal users would not. A lot of online communities design based on the idea that trolls are lazy, and I think that has not served us well.
I would like to put the downvote to rest. The upvote seems like it would be sufficient? The better comments rise to the top. The lesser comments are left at the bottom.
There might be a correlation, but I doubt it's a strong one. Maybe there just aren't that many unique accounts here, and this isn't a particularly mainstream site. There are reasons to be turned off of Hacker News that go beyond the layout.
Imageboards can have pretty low-tech and annoyingly obtuse UX as well but trolls adapt and abound because there are no user accounts and they know they have an audience. Most of the trolling I think i've seen here has been done through throwaway accounts, so who knows whether or not those are sockpuppets of existing accounts or people showing up from /g/ to have some fun?
That's true if you assume that every feature moves the community forward. But not all of them do; many features regress us. For instance: unlike on Reddit, there's no indication when someone's responded to one of your questions. As a result, very few arguments last more than a few hours here.
I'm particularly leery of collapsible threads, although my understanding is we're about to get them anyways.
May I ask why? As someone who considers that the one change/improvement I'd like to see on HN I'm curious what there is to be leery of that I may not have considered.
Because this isn't like reddit where the most upvoted comments are elevated in otherwise collapsed threads. I've only read some of the most insightful and interesting comments and discussions on HN buried most of the way down the page because they were available for me to see despite their lack of being voted on. On HN, popularity isn't valuable, the ideas are, and non-precollapsed threads support that.
Sometimes the good stuff isn't even on the first page. For example, see [0] (scroll down to the follow up) and the HN discussion [1] referenced there. Also, collapsible threads doesn't have to mean pre-collapsed threads.
To me it seems like collapsible threads would help, not harm, in this case because more people would have collapsed the OT first thread and participated in the discussion about the actual topic. I realize there are two assumptions built in to the above that may not always be true: 1) OT threads are bad or less desirable and 2) more people in a discussion is better.
I'd argue that the main point of collapsible (not pre-collapsed) threads is to support what you're saying. When a comment spawns several pages of discussion on a topic you're not interested it, collapsing it would let you go directly to the next comment you are interested in, surely?
Right now, for me at least I often just scroll down to the next top-level comment because it's a bother to find the end of a comment tree that started several indentations in.
I use Reddit Enhancement Suite to collapse all child comments by default, then open interesting top-level comments in a new tab to read the full discussion. I probably miss a lot of good discussion on HN because it doesn't support something similar.
That concern could easily be remedied by having thread collapsing be an optional setting in your account. I personally think having every thread collapse after a certain depth would make it much easier to tell which threads are probably worth looking deeper into.
very few arguments last more than a few hours here.
Very few posts last more than a few hours here :)
There have been times where I've gone to bed, then checked HN in the morning, and some huge issue or release has happened, there's a quality thread with hundreds of comments, and it's largely inactive because everyone's had their say already, so they're not checking for new stuff.
I'm not supporting reply alerts as I also think they'll do more harm than good, just noting that posts come and go pretty quickly.
I'm subscribed to HN Notify, and personally, while I admit I sometimes use it to carry on unproductive arguments, I also often get replies that are positive or neutral in tone and contribute more information to the discussion; since they're replies to me and to whatever specific point I commented on, I'm generally interested in reading them even if the version of the entire discussion I originally read did a decent job of covering the topic. (Actually, scrolling through a list of my HN Notify emails, it seems non-negative replies are by far the most common case. I don't remember them as such, probably because involved arguments stand out more than random bits of discussion.) Therefore, I'm glad to have the service, and I'm skeptical that it would really be so bad to give it to users who aren't savvy enough to know that HN Notify exists.
I'm tempted to chalk that up to HN being, essentially, a pet project implemented in a toy language as a not entirely open source[0] forum maintained by volunteers. Of course, I don't know but that's my guess, that pg just didn't work very hard on polishing up the parts he didn't find personally interesting. For some reason, people seem to be weirdly elitist about HN's layout, and act as if any slight change to the UI is going to allow the barbarians of the internet to storm the gates, until Hacker News is aught but cat memes and ashes.
[0] The language and original forum are, obviously, open source. But AFAIK you can't make pull requests against the code HN is actually running, which has had tons of modifications made to it, because that's special sauce. There used to be a repo for making bug and feature requests but that seems to no longer be active.
Of course, you could roll your own minimalistic threaded forum, but getting people to move from HN anywhere other than lobste.rs[1] (if they want more moderation) or reddit (if they want less) might be difficult, unless you're serving some specific niche like DataTau[2].
Considering the audience you might be right. I'm not a typical audience member. I read in the evening on a phone with a slow 2.5g connection. For that reason I use opera mini. HN works perfectly on it and the combination of the browser and whatever it is HN does for layout means I can load a HN page faster than anything else on the web. It doesn't seem to matter how many comments there are. So I hope it doesn't change. But you are right. I'm not typical.
I disagree. A lot of HN's character and culture are a result of how unmodern/unconventional it is.
For example, not being able to get reply updates by email means you have to come back to the site to check, for example. Is that good or bad? I don't know the answer, but it selects a different audience. A modern HN would be a different HN community and culture.
However, that still makes it a conscious choice to engage with the service that way - the default way is still checking back, and that shapes the general usage patterns of the site, even if some people have concluded it benefits them more to modify their experience.
A made up example using something that is about as subjective as possible: No, that's wrong, strawberries are awful.
(just changing that to "I disagree, ..." gets rid of a lot of the nonsense)
There also ends up being a lot of what is essentially squabbling, comments going back and forth over what someone meant, or pedantically squishing some point that had done a good enough job of transmitting the idea (I'm all for being careful when it matters, I'm pretty sure it doesn't matter all the time).