zlacker

>>jseip+(OP)
I find it really disheartening to learn that any article with "NSA" in the title is pretty severely penalized by HN's algos. This seems like one of the seminal issues of the decade, for this community in particular.

>>sethba+Xk
I think it's more there are SO many NSA articles it tries to make sure only the actually important and good ones get to the front.

>>clone1+Zm
That's as much of a problem as it is IMHO because hacker news doesn't appear to be designed to handle a wide variety of topics, a broad userbase and complexity of discussion.

The first is stifled by the lack of metadata (tags, categories, subboards, pick your poison) so everything rises or sinks within the same channel.

A broader userbase means groups of people who want to see posts about x and others who think x is destroying the community, and the strife caused by what may be the inevitable fact that some users want variety and others want bubbles.

This leading to the third problem, complex threads which can in practice be composed of more than 40 comments and more comments than upvotes without necessarily being a flamewar. Hacker news appears to be set up to promote upvotes and comments directly to the OP post, and discourage discussion between users. If that's what their ideal model represents then they should just move to a flat commenting system which makes it more obvious, visually.

>>krapp+YN
Are there any downsides to the subreddit approach? If not, wouldn't that be a good solution to the broad userbase problem?

>>mercer+Mw2
Downsides would probably be that the site as a whole might appear slower, and people might tend towards isolating themselves in sub-communities. Also if this is making money for pg as it is there's always the problem of killing the goose that lays the golden egg I suppose.

Tags for posts might serve the same purpose but allow the community to remain more cohesive.