haha ok keep your tilde... if it's just a few selected special chars that's easy - but I have seen terrible stuff in the past in some projects... so that's the standard recommendation.

1.3) It's not really a high prio task.

In general all the ideas are just written down while randomly checking stacker.news...

1.1) + 1.4) and in general things to reduce "not really relevant URLs from search engine user's perspective are good ones to start with. 1.7) too

And maybe as a first step to become more news like offer not just "link" and "discussion" but also "article" with maybe min. 200 words. title. description. image, ... (need to look up in detail what's needed)