[pajju]

Additional feedback:

5. Use of better colors: For following keywords or topics & colors for users by active | top | influencers etc.

6. Verified accounts.

7. Use of on Demand Badges like: Trustworthy User Badge, Looking for(Badge), Looking for co-founder, Hiring, Remote jobs etc.

All these can be grouped under a Paid plan? I would definitely pay for value & additionals, even a good mobile app experience is missing.

8. There is lack of networking and peer discovery in HN.

They should add community managers & make this evolve. Take it to the next level.

9. Follow options: Follow this discussion, Alert-me's, Follow Posts by keywords.

10. Finally, there is lot of scope to Improve.

HN team & YC should Rise up to the expectations and deliver richer experiences. What are they doing?

11. Add a separate Top Link: Voice-UP your concern.

This is for: Alerting, finding loopholes in the system(gaming the system etc), User Site feedback, new interface ideas.

Creating a vibrant HN ecosystem is the way looking forward. Lets do it.

[Gustomaximus]

With 5. I'd be inclined not to colour influencers or other user accounts. I'd be concerned it would exacerbate hivemind as 'these are the opinions I should upvote and follow'. I like in HN that I typically read a comment before I note someones username on this vs reddit type interface where the username is highlighted.

[cantankerous]

Agree with you. HN has been (seems to be) moving away from indicators that can influence upvoting (for example, folks upvoting a comment already substantially upvoted because its upvoted while downvoting dissenting views). Coloring influencers could assign undue heft to persons of a particular color over others and influence conversations in ways orthogonal to the dialogue.

Also I'm told that YC-Alums can see each other's user name on HN as a particular color and non-YC-Alums don't see this. So I guess that's already a thing.

[pajju]

overall reputation he/she has earned in the HN ecosystem.

A light (grey shade)color underline can shown up as his overall reputation, function of his contributions, activity in HN etc.

[Tiksi]

Reputation is a great judge of quality and for certain things, and absolutely awful for others. For things that take a great deal of base knowledge to properly evaluate, like cryptography, quantum physics, etc. relying on reputation is generally the best bet unless you've studied the topic for years. There is simply no way to objectively and properly evaluate them for a significant majority of people. On the other hand, on topics that are inherently subjective, or topics that most people understand and end up having conflicting, subjective viewpoints, reputation is an awful way to evaluate the quality of content.

Most of the time on HN, reputation only contributes to the problem. Comments and posts should be evaluated based on their content, not on the person posting them. Reputation only fans the flames of "groupthink", "the hive mind", or whatever you want to call the inevitable tribalism that exists in every sufficiently large community. Reputation has a way of turning subjective opinions into de facto truths, even on things that are unrelated to the source of the reputation, and how could you possibly have an dissenting opinion on the truth ? Giving a popular, well known, "reputable" name priority has a chilling effect on discussion, since going against them is a surefire way to catch some heat from the rest of the community. If reputation and the popularity of a name didn't affect people's views, celebrity endorsements wouldn't be a thing.

The best system I know of is the one 4chan has. Everyone is anonymous, previous comments have no influence on current ones, and the only thing there is to evaluate is the content of your post. Since posts are ranked by time, not by score, every post has an equal opportunity, and it's incredibly difficult to cheat. Obviously that system also has problems, and a lack of threading is annoying at best, but at least it doesn't suffer from stifling discussion and punishing anyone who dissents.

The ideal system would be one where users have a per-topic reputation score, and the poster's handle isn't shown. This way eg. an expert on crytography doesn't have any sway in a discussion about marketing. The fact that someone is revered for their knowledge of networking says about the validity of their thoughts on economical issues, and should have no weight in those discussions. However I imagine this would be incredibly difficult to actually implement in a reasonable way, and could probably still be gamed, though it would be better than what we currently have.

Side Note: I didn't (and can't) downvote you, and I'm not sure why people feel your comment doesn't deserve to be seen.

[galfarragem]

I don't agree with you but I upvoted your comment (that was already being downvoted) - it adds value to the discussion.

The simplicity of HN is something innegociable IMHO. As I understand you are proposing to evolve HN into a mix of Reddit-social network for hackers/entrepreneurs.

[pajju]

Thanks.

It was an open opinion & you understood it well. Others simply downvoted it.

I don't feel anything for downvotes, but opinionated things gets often misunderstood and the whole discussion stops there.

The Idea that someone brings a new conscious(new topic) open for discussion is also gone down by downvoting. The essence of further discussion is thus diluted, because of first few downvotes or no enough upvotes.

This is still a persistent problem in HN, if there is a downvote, there can be fair explanation too(as you did) or don't push it so down, so others might re-consider this topic to be validated.

Nice, these kind of open discussions is the way looking forward.