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HN? :-) If Reddit is "Spartan but functional", HN is positively Hittite. "We'll impale you on an iron stake and let you die slowly outside the city gates if yo
by swombat 16y ago
HN? :-)
If Reddit is "Spartan but functional", HN is positively Hittite. "We'll impale you on an iron stake and let you die slowly outside the city gates if you don't like it" user friendliness.
Oh well, at least it keeps the barbarians out.
- smiler 16y agoWhat is horrible about it? It doesn't get in your way and allows you to post quickly. This is the only place I've engaged in online conversation for years and that's because it's just so quick and simple. Compared to forums and commenting on blogs & entering captcha's it's very usable!
- Zev 16y agoHave you ever tried using HN on a mobile device? I've been tempted to hack up yet another iOS app for HN, but A. I don't have the time to do it in what i would call the Right Way(tm) -- or a Hacked-Up Way(tm) either and B. it would really be better off as a separate style than a separate app.
- smiler 16y agoYes. I have a Nokia E51, it's just a standard T9 phone with wifi / 3g, as I don't need anything fancy. I've loaded HN on it and can skim the articles for anything interesting when I'm out and about. True I wouldn't write a comment, but it works fine for me for what I need.
- J3L2404 16y agoI use http://ihackernews.com http://ihackernews.com for mobile and it is very readable. The same developer wrote ViewText, which is a nice readability bookmarklet.
- AdamGibbins 16y agoI often browse HN on my android phone (as I am now) with no problems. Page automatically resizes to fit the screen, works nicely.
- billswift 16y agoI like most of the HN interface. The one part I really hate is that when you click the Reply button, most of the context you are replying to, excepting only the direct parent comment, disappears. This is really irritating, and HN is the ONLY site that I visit that does this.
- smiler 16y agoI would agree on that point. Yes, that is my one annoyance.
- loumf 16y agoThat might be on purpose. The HN commenting interface is meant to discourage back-and-forth arguments.
- billswift 16y agoThe problem is that it makes it hard to summarize a set of arguments; for example, to focus on points of agreement or disagreement. Which I think tends to encourage back-and-forth arguments.
- swombat 16y agoHow often have you mis-clicked on an down arrow instead of an up arrow (or vice versa)? Have you ever asked someone who's not a regular to upvote something? That's obviously not something that should be done (but I guess we all sin sometimes... call it a wild unruly youth), but if you do, you'll find that most people don't even see the voting arrows, let alone figure out what they mean. If advanced users still make fairly critical usage errors because of small, opposite buttons right next to each other, and newbies can't learn the fundamentals of the interface, i'd say that makes it fairly bad. On the other hand, as I said, it keeps the barbarians out.
- bendmorris 16y agoMaybe that improves the results. Your score is not a straight up vote from everyone, it's just a sampling from the subset of HN users that can figure out what the buttons do.
- dejb 16y ago> it's just a sampling from the subset of HN users that can figure out what the buttons do Or those who don't experience layout problems. Often there is a significant part of the down arrow that results in an upvote or vice versa. Generally happens in FF for me. I feel like I need to check the URL before clicking.
- smiler 16y agoI can use my mouse, I haven't managed to misclick once.
- simonft1 16y agoWhy do some people have down arrows?
- grayrest 16y agoYou gain the ability to downvote once you've crossed a certain karma threshold.
- jarin 16y agoTake a look at your settings page sometime. Would you have any idea what notifo, showdead, noprocrast, maxvisit, minaway, and delay meant if you didn't look them up or goof around until you figure out what they do?
- smiler 16y agoI haven't really looked at them no - I guess I haven't needed to because it just works?
- araneae 16y agoYeah, I learned my lesson from randomly putting high numbers in there :(
- AdamTReineke 16y agoNew HN user here, and I still have no clue. I even looked for mouseover text. :-(
- cubicle67 16y agoyou have no idea how glad I am that HN doesn't look like StackOverflow or Digg
- swombat 16y agoOh, I do. As I said, it keeps the barbarians out of the city gates.
- KishoreKumar 16y agoI'm new to Hacker News, I've been searching but couldn't find the "save story" or "favourite" button
- xentronium 16y agoStories you upvote are saved in your profile.
- edanm 16y agoAbsolutely agree: HN's UI is bad. I'm not talking about ugly or beautiful, I'm talking about very specific usability problems. For example, it's very hard to tell when someone replies to you, which means I would just drop out of conversations if they didn't appear on my "threads" page. (Although there is a solution nowadays, notifo). HN also has problem with the voting, like being unable to change votes, etc. That said, HN still rocks. Does the incredibly limited UI have anything to do with it? I don't know. But I wouldn't mess around with HN too much: why mess with something that works?
- arethuza 16y agoNo - I think it is minimalistic, not bad. At one level the need to check your comments to see who has replied to you seems bad - but the resulting behavior patterns it results in seems quite productive to me.
- djacobs 16y agoReally the only thing I don't like about HN's UI is how the comment lines aren't formatted to a readable width -- they run about twice as wide as a standard book line and maybe 4/3 as long as a normal online article. What's more, comments are really difficult to read on a mobile phone, which is surprising, given that they are basically just plain text which should have the virtue of being easily reworkable. That said, HN rocks, so I can't complain too much.
- greyboy 16y agoI would argue that it's hard to tell when someone replies at all. While I appreciate minimalism I think the comments page is lacking. Let me preface my complaint with the fact that HN is probably the only site I visit frequently, due to the quality of posts and commenters. My biggest complaint is this: I enjoy reading the comments of submissions, oftentimes more than the submissions themselves. It's really frustrating to read a post with many comments in the morning (lets say, 40), then come back at lunch and browse the same comments when there are more (say, 45 - I often leave interesting posts open in tabs to look at later). Obviously these numbers are arbitrary - think of 10 new comments on a page with 100 or more! Without a clear indication of what is new after a page refresh, I have to re-read every comment and compare post times (or effectively recall reading that comment previously) in order to see what's new. Compounding that is that the post order can change. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of anything that can be done to fix this. To me, that is a usability defect. Enough for me to stop visiting? No!
- Dramatize 16y agoI love the way HN looks and feels.
- cousin_it 16y agoHN feels quite usable to me. The only problem is the few remaining links based on closures (x?fnid=...), because they expire and it's just dumb. I may be mistaken, but I think closure-based links have been slowly phased out over the lifetime of HN, and now they seem to be used only for "more" and "logout". Why not throw them away completely? About possible enhancements: ajaxifying the "reply" link, as billswift suggested, would help. Ajaxifying the "edit" and "delete" links would definitely help. LW does both and it's much more convenient. Making the vote buttons light up on hover would make the interface feel more consistent, because links already react to hover. One thing HN does very right (compared to Reddit and LW) is that users' "comments" pages are threaded, not flat.