Things to fix on YC News
6 comments
IMO comments shouldn't even be rated this way. Posts full of useful information score less than one-liners of opinion; controversy is an automatic point-killer. I'd just turn it off, or separate it into categories, like "agree with sentiment", "insightful", "funny","troll", etc., a bit like Slashdot. A score of 1 could mean anything from "nobody has read it" to "controversial"; it could be flamebait or very useful.
Voting stories up or down is also much less helpful than it could be. Some are a little bit useful, some are great, but you can only give them 1 point regardless.
Imagine IMDB: "103823 people liked this movie." "892 people liked this more obscure movie." A better rating system would make a lot more sense.
Voting stories up or down is also much less helpful than it could be. Some are a little bit useful, some are great, but you can only give them 1 point regardless.
Imagine IMDB: "103823 people liked this movie." "892 people liked this more obscure movie." A better rating system would make a lot more sense.
As a person who often catches the "post at 1 after an hour of people battling to push me up and back down again," I echo the sentiment that just showing the number doesn't mean too much. Controversial generally => lost points, whereas I actually believe controversial commenting is the only thing that keeps discussion interesting. Showing how many upvotes/downvotes something has (in addition to the raw score) would be a nice way to indicate controversy at a glance.
If they weren't rated at all, all that would be needed to keep order would be a "spam" flag.
These go here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363
Do you want bugs under Feature Requests too?
Wait, you marked it as "Dead" so now it's invisible on the NEW list to people other than myself? If I'm not logged in the submission text disappears and just says "dead".
That's pretty underhanded, pretending something is there for the user but killing it off for everyone else, for obvious non-spam. At least 3 people upmodded my comment before you deep-sixed the thread so nobody else would see it.
That's pretty underhanded, pretending something is there for the user but killing it off for everyone else, for obvious non-spam. At least 3 people upmodded my comment before you deep-sixed the thread so nobody else would see it.
Also, replying really shouldn't expire at all, let alone within an hour or two of the post being opened.
Unicode in comments would be good.
Better markup options. Quoting especially should stand out. You can't add literal asterisks for the most part. Code should be less of a pain -- you can't start a comment with code because leading whitespace is eaten.
Better user history (not just the last X comments, but all of them, so we can find what we wrote again)
Notification of responses so we don't have to check our own threads constantly
Private messaging, instead of responding to someone and hoping they check their own threads and read it
The ability to vote stories down -- this can help separate out blog spam from useful new submissions that just haven't gotten attention.
Similarly, the ability to vote down direct replies. The current lack is probably to prevent mere gainsaying, but it doesn't work because there's currently a disparity where someone else can vote you down and then reply, while you can't vote down what they are saying. First move loses. In both of the above cases this doesn't preserve karma as you can always vote down their other, unrelated comments; it just stops you from expressing your opinion.
You should be able to kill your own posts at any time. Restricting editing is one thing so someone doesn't twist something around on you, but you should be able to delete anything you post just in case (maybe you messed up with an NDA or other confidential information; realized you made a mistake on something an hour later; other legitimate reasons will occur to you).
Reddit is a pretty good model for the basics like this.
Others?