I think the system at HN works as is, and I disagree with everyone who says that the quality of comments have been "sliding" downwards.
I'm a long-time slashdotter, and a recent reddit convert, and I still think that HN comments have the highest signal-to-noise ratio of any other forum.
Of course you're going to get opinions you don't agree with, and some of them may be harsh, and that's perfectly ok. I haven't seen the type of garbage I've seen on other sites like reddit where they start developing their own inside jokes and a thread spirals off-topic. HN keeps a good job in making sure most topics stay on target.
If we're talking about improving HN, the only minor comments I have are:
1) I wish pg would add collapsing comments on threads, like reddit. Having the ability to collapse comments means that I can exit out of a thread immediately if it starts to degrade in quality.
2) The other thing I would do is not allow throwaway comments to post for 24 hrs. This way you don't get people coming in and shitting all over a thread, and leaving with impunity.
3) As a "nice to have", I wish I could "close" articles on the feed so that more of the 2nd-page articles trickle up to my first page.
> 3) As a "nice to have", I wish I could "close" articles on the feed so that more of the 2nd-page articles trickle up to my first page.
I use the HN RSS feed, with Google reader; I never look at the HN front page ever. This works pretty well for me; I can very quickly skim though all new articles, and those I've seen are gone (but I can mark those I want to come back to later as "not read").
I'm a long-time slashdotter, and a recent reddit convert, and I still think that HN comments have the highest signal-to-noise ratio of any other forum.
Of course you're going to get opinions you don't agree with, and some of them may be harsh, and that's perfectly ok. I haven't seen the type of garbage I've seen on other sites like reddit where they start developing their own inside jokes and a thread spirals off-topic. HN keeps a good job in making sure most topics stay on target.
If we're talking about improving HN, the only minor comments I have are:
1) I wish pg would add collapsing comments on threads, like reddit. Having the ability to collapse comments means that I can exit out of a thread immediately if it starts to degrade in quality.
2) The other thing I would do is not allow throwaway comments to post for 24 hrs. This way you don't get people coming in and shitting all over a thread, and leaving with impunity.
3) As a "nice to have", I wish I could "close" articles on the feed so that more of the 2nd-page articles trickle up to my first page.