i like where you’re going here.

one thing to consider is how this feature works with or against the existing stacker news main page.

on stacker news, like reddit & hn, the best ideas get the most visibility.

on twitter, or other sites with follow buttons, the most popular people get the most visibility.

i wonder if it makes sense for these two ideas to be separated entirely on stacker news. too much cross-mingling could cause popular users to always end up on top of the main page, no matter what they write.

one way to split the two concepts could be with an opt-in subscribe feature where users only use it if they want to subscribe to people, and those users aren’t able to impact the ranking algorithm for the main site by upvoting subscriber content.

users who want to subscribe to other users would still get a timeline feed of interesting ideas from their favorite people, and users who don’t want to follow people wouldn’t even notice any changes to the site.