Just put your email address in your profile. I already have email, myspace (which I ignore), and Facebook. I don't need yet another inbox.

I wouldn't object to a form on news.yc that would send a message via email without revealing the recipient's email address, in case people don't want to put their email address in their profile.

Or put your website in your profile and have your email or a contact page on the website (if you'd rather keep track of where your email address goes and take anti-spam measures).

Looking at my News.YC profile just now reminds me ... for websites in general, should /profile be the same page as /user/MYSELF? Some sites (like News.YC) have only the latter, or make them equivalent, but then you need to log out to see what your profile looks like to others. Not that it really matters for News.YC itself, because the profiles are pretty trivial.

(BTW, I sometimes use "Web Developer Toolbar, Disable Cookies" to pretend to log myself out. Handy.)

Other enhancements I've been thinking about...

Specific RSS feeds:

RSS feed of responses to your comments

RSS feed of leader stories (I think the existing one does this)

RSS feed of new stories

Is downmodding available? Sometimes I see it, but not other times.

Leading users shouldn't be based on lifetime, as some people have dropped off. It should be something like mean karma/day over the last month. Both rankings would be useful.

I don't think an inbox is needed. Perhaps just an open comment stream on each users page, with the option of privacy. You then should be able to have an RSS feed from your user page.

> You then should be able to have an RSS feed from your user page.

With the intent that others might want to read what others discuss with you. And individual threads would have the option to be private -- at the authors discretion.

"Perhaps just an open comment stream on each users page"

That's an interesting suggestion.

What would you use it for?

to ask someone an open question and discuss their ideas/plans if they're open about it.

Downmodding is disabled for news stories and replies to your own comments.

An useful stat would be karma/post.

If you comment on lots of new stories, where others don't comment, you would be less of a leader. That doesn't sound right.

Flip side is that users who comment a lot on popular stories but don't post much tend to get overcounted. My karma/post is like 25-30, but only because I get the majority of my karma from comments. My posts themselves average like 5 points.

I've picked up literally 100 karma in the last week or so, yet made only one submission in the last month. A couple popular comments can heavily distort the averages.

Sorry about the confusion: by post I meant either news stories or comments, no distinction.

We could use the median rather than the mean, but I see no problem in the fact that a few very popular comments can pump up your average. They boost your absolute count too. And that's OK. Karma measures popularity.

It's a tradeoff between rewarding volume or signal to noise ratio. I think showing both stats gives a more complete picture.

Did this come up after reading the "Kids say e-mail is, like, soooo dead" article on the front page now?