I can tell you one issue I observe as someone living in a different timezone. HN ranking highly depends on timing. As a consequence during hours the US is asleep my impression (I have not investigated this thoroughly) is that front page stories are dominated by old stories and new submissions don't make enough votes to get to the front page. Then once the US wakes, New stories get enough votes and make it to the front page. This leads to biases in the news, which I find unfortunate, because I believe everyone would benefit from news being geographically (for lack of a better word) broader.

I certainly welcome someone playing with different algorithms to see how they affect ranking.

If you're interested in investigating timing effects: We collected a dataset last year where we took a snapshot of the newest 1500 stories on HN every minute for several months which should contain the information required. Feel free to play around with it and get in touch with us if you find something interesting!

[1] Dataset: https://osf.io/bnysw/

[2] Exploratory analyses: https://github.com/social-protocols/hacker-news-data

My biggest gripe, which may not be solvable and isn’t unique to HN, is this vote/point system that ends up as “truth by consensus”. Controversial opinions, which may actually be the correct ones, are hidden and buried and even have their text slowly disappear and fade out which I think is ridiculous.

It promotes groupthink and encourages users to just repeat mainstream opinions.

Not as much as you may think.

“showdead” is a feature if you have enough karma and it’s usually easy to see why something is dead.

Controversial arguments made well, or at least to the best of your ability that fall within the guidelines can and do get upvoted. A lot of the dead comments I see are really just ad hominem attacks or near enough to it.

The only problem I have with HN is the endless content. I wish you could say, 'Show me stories that reached the front page', then hide or watch each story as you deem. That way I could clear out the front page like I do my inbox.

Sounds like https://hckrnews.com/ would be perfect for you.

Some feed readers like feedly have a fifo mode, where you, for example, can go through all the stories which appeared on hacker news best.

The problem certainly isn’t that HN content and conversation isn’t good. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be better.

The core problem we are teying to solve is that the community sometimes misses out on the opportunity to discuss content that many people would find valuable and that would engender quality discussion.