Better moderation in submissions and comments is probably on top of my list.

Hacker News has a high minimum quality to its comments and an O.K. maximum quality.

It annoys me that no distinction is made between users. I'd like to have something to let me know who I am talking to: a "friend and foe" list, and something to set users in comments apart such as coloured names, non-hideous gravatars, etc.

I'd also like special people's names to be highlighted such as the OP's and admin's. And a better voting system. And a pony.

Could you link to a Twitter account, e-mail subscription of some sort? There's a 95% chance that I forget everything you just wrote after I close this tab, unless Techcrunch, Daring Fireball, and HN shower you with attention.

EDIT: If you want a good case study to learn from, see how Quora has failed to shape and teach its users how to use the service and post relevant, good content

EDIT2: A "report" button for individual comments would also be great. Moderators can't be everywhere; instead, they should just teach users to (properly) report comments and sift through these. It would also be beneficial to require a description of the infraction.

> I'd also like special people's names to be highlighted such as the OP's and admin's.

I like this. I sometimes find myself searching a page with the OP's name to check for responses. As for the rest though... I kind of like the "anonymity" of posting without a sig/avatar/anything because I don't do any pre-filtering of comments by user.

I usually disregard usernames (because it's too much of an effort to keep track of them in a conversation) so the whole thing reads as one large internal monologue of a really intelligent, well rounded but conflicted and wandering-minded person.

I sometimes get the feeling that I'm talking to the HN hivemind.

> Could you link to a Twitter account, e-mail subscription of some sort? There's a 95% chance that I forget everything you just wrote after I close this tab, unless Techcrunch, Daring Fireball, and HN shower you with attention.

I think the "threads" link works pretty well for this.

>A "report" button for individual comments would also be great.

Isn't this what flagging is for?

Every comment has a flag button, but you have to go to it with the link link to see it.

HNs best feature is the HN community, and that seems to have been grown out of 1) the seed users and 2) the guidelines. None of these things are technical features. What the website has contributed is simplicity - the site provides just enough features to start and maintain discussion, but otherwise gets out of the way.

The ranking algorithms, vote ring detection, spam filters, etc. are great features. Particularly since they don't get in the way.

These sites / my presence on them don't last forever anyway, something else would fill the void soon enough.

I'll probably leave eventually because of low quality stories - I really don't care to read that Gruber wrote a sentence telling us someone else wrote something, or fluff pieces from AOL blogs that we pretend aren't content farms.

When/as they gain critical mass I move along, just like the endless tables vs css crap bored me out of the webdev forums all those years ago, or blogs scraping pics and the powerful little cliques pushing the same content every day made digg boring for me, etc.

I'm outside USA and HN is the only 'real' connection with the startup world. So I guess I'd get a little depressed.

But I think if HN was shut down a new HN-like community would be immediately created.

The feature-set isn't the draw. The community is. The features are only a draw to the extent that they maintain the community.

I'm on HN for one reason: insightful news and commentary that can directly help my startup.

The minute that HN loses its insightful nature or somehow gets its value diluted will be the time I look for something else.

When you say "another demographic" what do you mean? Age? Language? Geographic location? or outside of the tech community? Since the community and content matters, changing the demographics might impact significantly whether something HN-like would succeed.

It'll be geared towards biological researchers.

I doubt you'll get the same type of community as here. Researchers and startup-minded technologists are two different types of geeks.

What I've found in my discussions with researchers is the ability for the discussion to get very deep, but a sense of politics pervades the conversation.

Will it be focused around something like YC? How would you envision some of the "Show HN" type posts?

I'd feel mystified at all the extra time I suddenly had.

HN's biggest feature is the community. Everything else is bloat.

It's possible that I'd finally move to one of those other communities like Quora, reddit, etc... /shrug

I like and prefer HN, but what happens happens, if it ever happens. There are alternatives, though HN is #1 in my mind.

feature set is unimportant. It's about the community.

Definitely, I agree, and I'll be working on building a great community. But surely there are features that even the most passionate of HN users have wanted that would enhance and leverage the relationships within this community.

Although I wish you luck, I think you underestimate the difficulty of predicting which features will help the conversation and which will hurt.

I would feel like replicating the site. The idea is too important to die.

How about "Meh... I'll move on."

It would be hard to find such a community, hence very disappointed...

I'd get more work done ... maybe

MORE PRODUCTIVE!

YES! I'd miss it big time, but I'd spend more time working. Reddit, etc don't have the same effect as HN! Seriously I want it to keep going.

i would light myself on fire, and once self immolated would then proceed to hurl myself off the top of the tallest building possible, but not until after i had run up 50+ flights of stairs (on fire). it would be a truly magnificent feat and a death worthy of hacker news.