| While I hope this doesn't split the HN community, I hope it also serves as a wake up call that HN needs to improve or it will die. Some parts of Lobsters are really really good for solving some of the problems that HN has: - invite only to prevent spam and increase accountability - tags are ideal for the problem where not everyone cares about everything - getting to be a major gripe you see a lot ("oh my god, do we have to have another discussion about X") - HN needs significantly better transparency in bans, title rewrites, etc. I don't believe that PG has an agenda or needs to protect YC companies, but the issue comes up so much that it needs to be addressed - reasons for downvotes are genius - private messages are worthwhile IMO - the domain indicator is actually useful (sick of seeing co.uk or github.com instead of myblog.github.com) Other things HN needs: - to work: the fact that "more" barely works is astonishing - an API for all the apps that want to provide a better or different experience - comment collapsing - an essential feature for actually reading past the first comment thread - a meta site where we can actually discuss this stuff without violating guidelines (meta.stackoverflow.com is one of the most innovative and important community tools ever, IMO) I've heard "there are no technical solutions to social problems" as reasons not to do a lot of these, but the same argument could apply to the downvote. HN needs to innovate to keep its community, and I hope it does. |