Lots of people posting random feature requests in here, but is HN even developed any more? The last significant changes I remember were two and a half years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073675) and I think even those were the first ones in a long time.
It's interesting to see that question show up, because we work so hard on the code. It makes sense that you'd ask it, though, because most of the changes are either not visible (like anti-spam or anti-voting-ring features), or are subtle. For example, you may have noticed more capitalized titles on the front page in the last couple days—but this is an experiment we're going to roll back.
One reason we don't do a lot of visible changes is that HN's minimalism is one of its biggest assets. Another is that users don't like things to change, and the internal pressures that cause companies to do arbitrary redesigns are thankfully not in play here.
Public changelogs can create their own form of community feedback pressure which easily stretches the sustainability of development resources. Not that I would complain about it if it existed, but I can see how it would be counterproductive when the development goal as expressed seems to prioritize stabilization.
>Public changelogs can create their own form of community feedback pressure which easily stretches the sustainability of development resources
They can, but don't have to. There's no business need being served here like there would be with a startup getting feedback from customers, and HN isn't open sourced, so there's no direct way to do pull requests or report issues.
They could literally just publish changes and ignore people's opinions on the matter, that would be perfectly valid given their small staff and available commitment.
Also, if they wanted to keep feature requests and complaints off of HN proper, having a changelog or request thread might be an effective way to quarantine that content.
What kind of changes to the internals do you all do? And would you do a post on the architecture?
I assume there's been lots of work to make the site more efficient/reduce cost. "No [few] internal pressures" sounds like a great recipe for an interesting design.
We've done a lot of work on Arc implementations in the last couple years, but the biggest work still hasn't rolled out yet. If it succeeds, it will buy us a lot more performance. But again, visible features wouldn't change, except that hopefully we'll be able to stop paginating large threads.
A well designed official API would go a long way toward letting a thousand flowers bloom. I know there's web and mobile apps already out there, but IMO the average quality is not great. Which is not surprising, given the awkwardness of the existing firebase API, which probably keeps many developers away and eats too much of the efforts of those devs that do try their hand.
IMO, the higher barrier to entry is a benefit to this site. Features that would lower friction increase content dilution. From what I understand, this site is not trying to become Reddit.
There is no high barrier to entry here. You literally just have to fill out an HTML form, which everyone knows how to do. It's easier to join HN than it is many other sites, which at least include a second auth factor through email to verify an account. Some sites now require a social media account or validation of a real identity. Lobste.rs won't even talk to you unless someone vouches for you, and they read your existing posts on HN and elsewhere, and decide you're worth letting in. Even 4chan has more friction than HN.
And an API, practically by definition, is not a benefit to membership or a draw for whatever HN considers a typical user, much less the sort of "normie" non-technical user HN wants to keep away. The quality of comments is not maintained to a high standard by the API being more difficult to query than it could be, nor would it be diluted by the API being easier to use.
And as far as Reddit goes, a lot of content gets posted here from Reddit, and a lot of the userbase here are also Reddit users, making the cultural contempt HN has for Reddit more than a bit hypocritical.
A lot of people here, pg included, seem to assume that the "low tech" nature of the featureset here is keeping some flood of unwanted users away but I submit that the title of the site being "Hacker News", it being on a subdomain and the lack of evangelism on mainstream social media do a far better job of gatekeeping than purposely adding "friction" to frustrate people.
I was more referring to the community than the staff or its policies.
A lot of people here seem to believe the site is supposed to be for technical users and technical content onlym even though that never was the case. The negative impressions people seem to have about "turning into Reddit" or non-technical content diminishing the sites' quality feed into that stereotype, as does the belief that adding "features that reduce friction" would somehow dilute content.
But... the guidelines do use the qualifier "anything that good hackers would find interesting" for determining what's on topic, which does lead people to fill in the blanks for what a "good hacker" should find interesting.
Fair enough, though for what it's worth, I'm not interested in making an HN app that would make it super-smooth, pretty, and compulsively browseable, but rather a couple of power tools to make it easier to participate in and track discussions, and to enable a bit of a "batched, offline" experience.
Good question. I'm not sure. Probably we'll produce a complete read API first and then consider a write one. Maybe with proper credentialing there would be some value in it, since people have written lots of scraping clients that do it anyway.
There's quite a bit that could be added, without even touching the site's overall mechanics at all.
The markdown support is extremely minimal and doesn't support a lot of basics like quotes (which causes many people to "quote" by using a code block, which has issues).
A basic private messaging system would be really helpful in a lot of cases. Right now people always have to post email addresses publicly.
It would be nice to have some built-in visibility into things like title changes, link changes, etc. that mods do, instead of needing them to comment manually about everything they do.
They could implement some scraping to automatically add the year to older stories, instead of users needing to flag it and get the mods to do it manually all the time.
Some people don't want to be contacted. If they want too, they add their email in their profile.
> The markdown support is extremely minimal and doesn't support a lot of basics like quotes (which causes many people to "quote" by using a code block, which has issues).
