Why can't I just have a button to dismiss a story of the front page? Not downvote it, just make it disappear from MY homepage?
It would be easy enough to do, but my gut tells me it would be a mistake, because it would make it easier for the site as a whole to deteriorate. As long as everyone has to see every story, there's a lot of pressure not to have bad stuff.
Paul Buchheit dislikes optional settings in software for similar reasons. He thinks they're usually just a way to punt on hard design decisions. Nearly everyone is going to use the defaults anyway, so you should just work hard to make those are right.
Well, with no ability to downvote I'm not sure how forcing everyone to see every story keeps the quality high. And there are certainly no incentives to prevent submission of low quality stories (as far as I'm aware). Just spam away and hope something will get upvoted.
But from a reading perspective once I read a story (and maybe some of the comments) from the front page I no longer care about it. Something I'll want to follow the comments (but to make that easy an option to see which stories have new comments instead of having to squint at the number of comments would work better anyway).
So usually over half the stories on the home page are links that I don't care about (either I upmoded them or want to ignore them and don't care to follow the comment thread).
Maybe this forces people to follow the new stream (of which an RSS feed would be extremely helpful).
But the guy was talking about a hide button, not a "hide it before I even see that it is there" (if that's even possible) button. Am I misunderstanding this?
I'm positive at least 20% of the stories do not appeal to each person, but the stories in that 20% are different for each individual (see what I mean?)
Lack of interest towards a subject matter in an individual at a specific time doesn't necessarily denote lack of suitability for the subject for HN.
Personally I'm getting quite irritated at the need to eyeball-scan the news because I'm rather keeping up with the new articles so I visit often but I always have like 15 stories I already decided I wouldn't check out...
It would be easy enough to do, but my gut tells me it would be a mistake, because it would make it easier for the site as a whole to deteriorate. As long as everyone has to see every story, there's a lot of pressure not to have bad stuff.
Paul Buchheit dislikes optional settings in software for similar reasons. He thinks they're usually just a way to punt on hard design decisions. Nearly everyone is going to use the defaults anyway, so you should just work hard to make those are right.