Hacker News Reader

Comment by mewpmewp2 | Hacker News Reader

Some features would still be nice, like to know when someone has responded to you.

Most of the poor discussions I see on here are when one user tries to steamroll a thread, replying to most every single comment, doubling down on their own points of the discussion. It turns into a personal argument, not a discussion by the community.

So I think a lack of notifications is a great feature. It lets us say our piece and move on, and let the community discussion fall where it will.

Totally agree with this. I thought it was weird when I first joined, but over the years, I've grown to appreciate the lack of it.

Keeping track of your points is a decent indicator that activity has happened though. I just remember roughly where it was when I left, and then I know whether I should check /threads or not.

I think the intent is to discourage back and forth chatter which is a significant way that a flame war develops.

There are third party services though http://www.hnreplies.com/

Or just moving the collapse button next to the vote buttons, so collapsing multiple comment branches becomes easier. Would not change anything the GP mentioned and would probably be super easy to implement.

Easy enough to do it yourself via userstyle (for Stylus) or userscript (for TamperMonkey)? :).

I'm currently using both - userstyle for DIY dark mode, userscript on mobile for font size adjustment (no Stylus available on Firefox for Android yet). Plus uBlock Origin configured to nuke the karma counter.

True.

And though I don't have a relocated collapse control, there are modified light/dark mode HN styles linked in my HN profile, for those interested in either using those directly or as a starting point for your own restyle.

I could and probably will, but solving this on the server-side would be a huge time-saver for millions of users.

Is there a RES-style browser addon for HN with some of these little quality of life improvements?

Then again, it's hacker news. If the audience of this site won't individually hack the UX to match their preferences, who will?

With that logic, why not just provide an API. Everybody just hack together their own client. Being a hacker doesn't mean you never get to benefit from prior work, or never work together on something, or never share your work.

I get the appeal of providing a minimal service like HN, but unless I'm missing something, my proposed change is an absolute no-brainer considering it's effort-reward ratio.

<https://github.com/HackerNews/API>

Linked under "API" at the bottom of the page you're reading now.

Emphasis was on "just", as in: no web client.

That seems an unreasonable expectation.

There are and were message- and discussion-oriented protocols, most notably Usenet, of which you may be aware there were some persistent issues:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36194941>

<https://web.archive.org/web/20220321105208/https://old.reddi...>

The thought's occurred to me that among the conspicuous omissions from the HTML spec is of a threaded discussion (or more specifically, messages within a threaded context) as a first-order object, permitting arbitrary structuring of that content at the volition of the reader.

Though on reflection: if you're really interested in a technical discussion site, the speedbump of needing to code (or at least install) your own client might make for an interesting form of gating.

To that extent, your suggestion's somewhat growing on me.

Or search:

<https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=alternative+hacker+news+fro...>

"Alternative hacker news front ends".

No No … hell no

This is one of the features of HN that I appreciate most. The lack of notification means that you don't (typically) get a ton of back and forth sniping arguments like you do on sites like reddit.

I find this makes people put more effort into their first comment and keeps the arguments lower.

You can actually implement that yourself, or use what someone else did:

http://www.hnreplies.com/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com