Re:Alternate Hacker News Interface
by geuis on Wednesday September 30, 2009 @12:14PM
(#852813)
I don't like it. Usually the first paragraph of text is meaningless. Just look at the current entries for .hn from Wikipedia. Unless someone hand curates that kind of thing it's impossible to get right. It looks like you're trying to add in a link/subject/description model for submissions like Digg and all other social news sites. Sorry, but that isn't HN. Personally I prefer scanning the headlines. This blobby text insertion just makes that impossible. If you were going to put anything as a short description, it should be the highest rated comment currently on the thread. I'm also not sure why you replaced the upmod icon. That darn little thing has always been too small, but at least it indicates what it's for. If anything, make the icon bigger but don't change it's shape for no reason.
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I agree adding the comments would be great, but without html scraping Hacker News it's not possible. I didn't want to reproduce HN only show that adding more context around a link will change a user's behavior around that link.
I would disagree that the first paragraph is meaningless. The title alone is generally not enough to make an accurate guess on whether a link is useful.
I disagree about the first paragraph bit. In every case where showing something like that works, it's setup so the poster can add such a description. Examples would be Slashdot, which is often a long form summary, and Digg, which is short form. Here on HN there is no summary. This encourages short, accurate, descriptive subjects. The base argument I'm trying to express is that either model works well, as long as it's human edited. However, automatically grabbing a semi-random chunk of text and displaying that as the descriptive paragraph isn't useful and makes reading the headlines difficult.
The icon is changed because it doesn't do the same thing. Try the site again and click the +. It expands the article, it don't upmod the article. This is a little confusing, how would you handle it? Maybe put the + under the title?