When I emailed mods to argue that the 'web' button should be restored[1], I was told by dang that he was actually considering removing 'hide' and 'favorite' too, because people rarely use those features. (I routinely use 'hide' but hardly ever use 'favorite'.)
Btw, 'favorite' may be lesser-known but it's certainly not hard to use.
Favorite is one of my most used features. Please don't remove it, dang! :(
I frequently go back to these stories, whereas I don't often care to find things I upvoted again. If the two features become conflated, I'll probably stop upvoting so that I can use upvoted stories and posts as a bookmarking system.
Please keep favorite stories and posts around.
If you're worried about feature utilization, maybe name it "save" for better discoverability. That's essentially what I use the feature for.
I don't trust or use browser bookmarks much anymore. HN favorites are high quality bookmarks that work across all my browsers and devices.
Save is a better name. OP has updated list of favourite stories and many of the Ask HN posts make the list because they often yield a lot of useful information in the comments. I use SQL on a daily basis so most of my favourites are SQL stories. I use favourite to bookmark post and comments.
Removing "hide" is the wrong call. People, especially in work environments, need to be able to hide links for all sorts of reasons. For example, if you work at Apple and there is an inflammatory article or if you've recently lost a family member to suicide and there is an article on a famous figure in the tech community committing suicide like Aaron Swartz, you probably don't want to see that on the homepage of HN for the day. It's one of the best features of Reddit and HN, imo.
Hide is super useful for threads you want to read but have the typical knee-jerk flamebait war responses at the top that turn into massive comment trees that you want to skip.
The population of commenters seems to be dominated by those whose goal is to argue and win, rather than to understand and learn. So many times I see comments that make no attempt to take context into account, and instead conflate all sorts of things, making it impossible to comment productively. (Basic example: Top comment has not replied to the thesis of the article, but to something else.) When one of these types of comments is at the top of the comments list I just hide the whole story, because there’s literally nothing to see but people talking past each other.
> was told by dang that he was actually considering removing 'hide' and 'favorite' too, because people rarely use those features.
That's something you do with a corporate site where you're constantly A/B testing and aggressively removing features that don't generate revenue. Hacker News isn't (or shouldn't be) run that way. It's perfectly fine to have features only a few people use.
Removing features to decrease maintenance overhead is also a pretty legit reason, and you don't have to be a corporate site for that to apply to you (I would say it applies even more to a hobby site).
That said, I really hope favorites isn't removed because even though I only discovered the feature a few years ago, I really cherish the comments I've favorited.
Also, “it’s not used frequently” is a really bad reason to remove a feature. Frequency of use is not a proxy for usefulness. I don’t use my backup software’s “restore” feature often but that doesn’t mean it should be removed.
Standard MO of software engineers is to rewrite code into the latest and greatest framework/language/style every couple of years to keep the resume fresh.
Yikes, what a horror: either no new features, or complexity increases forever. Fortunately we don't live in that prison. And what a dystopian reason you give for removing things!
The humane reason, of course, for removing features, is so you can add new ones while staying simple. I have always found this to be a deep part of, let's call it, healthy software development, at every level. If you remove things as well as add them—code, features, complexity–then the system can breathe over time. When I say "the system" I include the programmers and the community as well as the code—the whole thing. If you're only allowed to add, that's no longer a creative process, just agglutination.
>Yikes, what a horror: either no new features, or complexity increases forever. Fortunately we don't live in that prison.
And fortunately, I didn't suggest that we do, or that features should never be removed... rather that removing a feature that people use because not enough of them use it doesn't make sense for a site like this.
If you want more people to use new features, I think you need to put more effort than you do into making those features more visible. Feature discovery is a problem - there's plenty of anecdotal evidence here to attest to that.
I can think of a couple of possible solutions, such as having new features be bold for a while after being first introduced, so they're more easily noticed, or pinning a thread announcing new site features, or having something like a devlog listing possible and new changes and comments related to development, to better engage the community in the process (or at least raise their awareness that the site is still being actively worked on,) etc. Or all of those.
I'd personally find removing favorite rather frustrating as it's a nice way of differentiating posts than just upvoting so that I can easily find them again in the future...
Favorite gets indirectly used when an up vote cannot be given to a post and a thread is what I've noticed, which would beg the question what would happen if those buttons got removed? I think it would be a shame if hide and favorite were removed, it might be a minor feature but I have used it in the past to make it easier to ignore certain posts.
Why wouldn't it be? Unless you're trying to flag stuff a year after it's been posted, I would expect at least that a posted link would be accessible to read.
Unless what you mean is "inaccessible" in the sense of "not accessible to people with disabilities," in which case, good luck flagging a large percent of everything that gets posted. :/
Btw, 'favorite' may be lesser-known but it's certainly not hard to use.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23762479