| 1. A home page that is less influenced by votes. There are often little gems that slip through because they don't get enough votes. Or, some threads can get excessively heated. The basic idea is to give more weight to the new-ness of a thread, and allow the homepage to be more dynamic across users (a specific logged-in user should get its homepage that doesn't change quite as often to give them time to navigate it). I was surprised to discover a (popular) social platform that is very good at providing a home page full of interesting threads without being too influenced by the very popular ones. So, I know that it is possible (although, it might be technically harder to implement). 2. Harder idea: I've noticed that HN users (and social platforms in general) have a tendency to be influenced by the company/product/service/brand being discussed. As a basic example, a news like "Company X did this good/bad thing" will be commented on differently depending on whether they like/dislike Company X. So, a feature that would be really cool is the ability to hide that name, and let people discuss purely based on the "facts". Then, after posting, the user can see what that name is... (Of course, there will be more details to iron out) |