Jason Shah |
I hope that my writing makes you think and changes us for the better. pm @ yammer previously built and sold ineedapencil.com, then hacked on techpolish. harvard '11, sociology + computer science. periodically advise early stage startups on product, design, and UX 
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3 Ways I Would Improve Hacker News
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So I’d like to make some suggestions that would make reading Hacker News a more valuable experience for community members. I say this knowing full well
1) HN is not pursuing perfect design
2) has limited resources/team members
3) already has a plethora of suggestions (including http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363), so I may overlap in my thinking
These are not intended to be the most popular or even most dramatic suggestions. Just ways I would improve HN.
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SURFACE AWESOME COMMENTS
So much of the value of HN is in the comments. But 1) comments are buried under the contents of the article, so you have to click through to each thread to see the comments (this is normal across the web, but for such high value content, comments are hard to discover) 2) there is little visual distinction between good and bad comments.
Right now click throughs are based largely on 1) whether something is on the front page 2) the sexiness of the title 3) and maybe the familiarity of the source, the username of the OP, and the number of comments.
But click throughs have nothing to do with the quality of the comments. And they should.
There could be a ‘comment ticker’ of the top comments but that would likely just clutter up the page.
FACILITATE INTERACTION AMONG COMMUNITY MEMBERS
Learning more about fellow HN’ers is hard. You can like someone’s link or comment, and then you have to visit their HN profile, and then probably click through one of the URLs the user has posted in their profile. But why can’t I just hover over a username, see the relevant info, and click through on one of the URLs straight from that tooltip.
Come to think of it, applying ‘Shuffle’ like Quora has, or as AngelList recently did with its Yearbook release, would be addictive for HN members. Constantly discovering awesome people in tech…sounds promising.
MAKE TECHNICAL LEARNING EASIERSo many terms and concepts are brought up on HN. I often find myself opening a separate tab to Google or Wikipedia anything from REST to Torvald to PyCon - I wish there were a more integrated way to learn about these valuable concepts.
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Just some thoughts. Hate ‘em? Love ‘em? Let me know.
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