<story><title>The frontpage with a threshold of 100 points</title><url>http://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=100</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pg</author><text>&lt;i&gt;why is the UI so completely neglected?&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Because when I spend time on HN my top priority is features that will make the content better.  I believe that matches the priorities of the users-- that users would rather use a site with good stories and comments and a primitive UI than one with a slick UI and worse stories and comments.  And time is a zero-sum game.  Spending more time on UI = spending less on quality.&lt;p&gt;The focus on content quality above all is the reason you find yourself saying later &quot;If there were any other community like this...&quot;&lt;p&gt;You&apos;re simply wrong about the moderation.  Nearly every story that gets killed is either autokilled, or a dup, or flagged to death by users.  I would guess moderators manually kill less than 10 non-dup stories a day.  You&apos;re also wrong that YC cos get special privileges.</text></item><item><author>andrewljohnson</author><text>Not that this type of experiment is bad, but why is the UI so completely neglected? Is this a matter of thinking it&apos;s not important, because it&apos;s not fun work, or because it can all be customized with grease monkeys? Or what?&lt;p&gt;I think the quality of stories on HN is pretty good. What I&apos;d much prefer to see any amount of attention given to is things like:&lt;p&gt;1) Let me take back a vote. Particularly on mobile, I misclick those tiny arrows a lot.&lt;p&gt;2) Let me comment inline. Having other comments, besides the parent around for examination while commenting would probably help overall comment quality.&lt;p&gt;3) Fix the mobile interface. It&apos;s impossible to use HN on mobile iPhone and Android handhelds. Making a slightly modified styled sheet with JavaScript is trivial.&lt;p&gt;4) Support someone making an app, or commission one. As far as I can tell, the current HN apps are all kind of buggy and have little updating. There are lots of young neophytes who&apos;d love to work on this, particularly if sanctioned, and a funded effort would lead to a better product.&lt;p&gt;These basic UI improvements don&apos;t even seem to be on the radar. Also, I&apos;ll add, the story-killing on this site is pretty heavy-handed, yet capricious. Same with the title-editing. What constitutes a &quot;hacker-centric&quot; story changes with the mood of the moderators, and the tendency to just change each title to the original headline is misguided. I also think that the special privileges given to YC companies corrupts the whole system.&lt;p&gt;If there were any other community like this, people would be driven away by the neglected UI and the Star Chamber that governs the content. But there isn&apos;t, so there&apos;s no pressure to do anything but midnight HN science experiments. I should just pray for some competition I guess...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>andrewljohnson</author><text>1) I could accept I&apos;m wrong about stories being killed by humans, but I know the titles get edited by humans. I remember one story I posted about some really ancient, accurate maps, and I made the title something like &quot;Accurate maps from the 1500s unearthed.&quot; And then some moderator made it the story headline instead &quot;Named building in DC hosts map show&quot; or something equally uninformative.&lt;p&gt;2) I&apos;m positive YC companies get at least one special privilege - the ability to post jobs.&lt;p&gt;3) I&apos;ve been told YC accounts are excluded from anti-spam measures, but I can&apos;t prove it.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Also, regarding the zero-sum-game argument. All of us developers know we have limited time to spend on things. But a HUGE change to a non-priority that takes almost no time (for example improving the CSS on mobile) should be squeezed in between these experiments that may or may not make the content better, and take hours.</text></comment>
<story><title>The frontpage with a threshold of 100 points</title><url>http://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=100</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pg</author><text>&lt;i&gt;why is the UI so completely neglected?&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Because when I spend time on HN my top priority is features that will make the content better.  I believe that matches the priorities of the users-- that users would rather use a site with good stories and comments and a primitive UI than one with a slick UI and worse stories and comments.  And time is a zero-sum game.  Spending more time on UI = spending less on quality.&lt;p&gt;The focus on content quality above all is the reason you find yourself saying later &quot;If there were any other community like this...&quot;&lt;p&gt;You&apos;re simply wrong about the moderation.  Nearly every story that gets killed is either autokilled, or a dup, or flagged to death by users.  I would guess moderators manually kill less than 10 non-dup stories a day.  You&apos;re also wrong that YC cos get special privileges.</text></item><item><author>andrewljohnson</author><text>Not that this type of experiment is bad, but why is the UI so completely neglected? Is this a matter of thinking it&apos;s not important, because it&apos;s not fun work, or because it can all be customized with grease monkeys? Or what?&lt;p&gt;I think the quality of stories on HN is pretty good. What I&apos;d much prefer to see any amount of attention given to is things like:&lt;p&gt;1) Let me take back a vote. Particularly on mobile, I misclick those tiny arrows a lot.&lt;p&gt;2) Let me comment inline. Having other comments, besides the parent around for examination while commenting would probably help overall comment quality.&lt;p&gt;3) Fix the mobile interface. It&apos;s impossible to use HN on mobile iPhone and Android handhelds. Making a slightly modified styled sheet with JavaScript is trivial.&lt;p&gt;4) Support someone making an app, or commission one. As far as I can tell, the current HN apps are all kind of buggy and have little updating. There are lots of young neophytes who&apos;d love to work on this, particularly if sanctioned, and a funded effort would lead to a better product.&lt;p&gt;These basic UI improvements don&apos;t even seem to be on the radar. Also, I&apos;ll add, the story-killing on this site is pretty heavy-handed, yet capricious. Same with the title-editing. What constitutes a &quot;hacker-centric&quot; story changes with the mood of the moderators, and the tendency to just change each title to the original headline is misguided. I also think that the special privileges given to YC companies corrupts the whole system.&lt;p&gt;If there were any other community like this, people would be driven away by the neglected UI and the Star Chamber that governs the content. But there isn&apos;t, so there&apos;s no pressure to do anything but midnight HN science experiments. I should just pray for some competition I guess...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lacker</author><text>At least some types of UI changes would affect content quality. For example changing the size and color of the up and down arrows could have a big impact on voting frequency. Making the submit link more or less prominent could have a big impact on submission frequency, as well as providing tools like submission bookmarklets. And if at some point the majority of HN usage is mobile, it&apos;ll really change the sort of stories that people upvote.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s not clear which direction you would want those metrics to move to improve quality, but it at least seems like UI vs quality is not a zero-sum tradeoff.</text></comment>