3 ms·

In terms of small items that would make HN better, would it be possible make the collapse/expand buttons larger on mobile? Because the site is so simple, it al

In terms of small items that would make HN better, would it be possible make the collapse/expand buttons larger on mobile? Because the site is so simple, it already works really well on mobile. But these tiny little buttons ruin the experience for me, and I'm sure others.

dang 6y ago
I recently changed the "expand" part to say "[N more]" when N is the number of hidden comments. Since that's much longer than "[+N]", I assume that helps? If so, we can change "[-]" to put some text in between the square brackets. In addition to being longer, that would also be nicely symmetrical. But what should the text be? "[collapse]" seems a bit too long, and also doesn't look right to me. Edit: I'm all in favor of this question because I was just thinking about it this afternoon—but I've also detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23199062 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23199062 since it's not the same topic as dark modes. Edit 2: ok, I made it use an n-dash ("[–]") instead of a hyphen ("[-]"), which expands it a tiny bit. I tried an m-dash but it looks too long.
- Sebb767 6y ago
  I've had the problem, too, and this change (the edit 2) helps a lot! The size is not ideal, but it's easily possible to zoom if required and resizing the whole line would probably have a slew of required changes with it, so kudos for finding a minimal 80% solution ;)
  - dang 6y ago
    I'm glad it helped! Making that simple change has floated in and out of my consciousness for years but I finally nabbed it.
_bxg1 6y ago
There are indeed lots of little things like that, but I don't see them as huge issues, whereas the lack of a dark mode is. So I'm personally going to respect the move-slow approach and only advocate the changes that I feel are truly essential :)
mkl 6y ago
I would love a way to collapse the parent of a comment (or all it's children) without having to scroll up and find it by carefully tracking indentation. Some sites do this by drawing the tree of comments directly with vertical lines going down beside siblings, which can be clicked to collapse. That's a much bigger target.
- dang 6y ago
  I agree that navigation is an issue, especially with large threads. From my perspective it's strictly a UI question. I don't want to spoil HN's minimalism. I've been thinking of experimenting with links in the comment line (the same place that the timestamp and "[-]" appear) which say things like "up" (to go to parent) and "next" to go to next sibling.
  - mkl 6y ago
    Those links would be good, but only if they don't add to the history and break the back button.
    - dang 6y ago
      Hmm - but what if you want to retrace your steps? Say you're reading child #5 of a very large subthread, you click 'up' to go to the parent, which scrolls to the top of that subthread—and now you change your mind and want to go back to where you were. This seems like what the back button is for. I'm all for not breaking the back button, believe me, but I fear that people may have very different notions of what that means.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

dang 6y ago

I recently changed the "expand" part to say "[N more]" when N is the number of hidden comments. Since that's much longer than "[+N]", I assume that helps? If so, we can change "[-]" to put some text in between the square brackets. In addition to being longer, that would also be nicely symmetrical. But what should the text be? "[collapse]" seems a bit too long, and also doesn't look right to me. Edit: I'm all in favor of this question because I was just thinking about it this afternoon—but I've also detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23199062 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23199062 since it's not the same topic as dark modes. Edit 2: ok, I made it use an n-dash ("[–]") instead of a hyphen ("[-]"), which expands it a tiny bit. I tried an m-dash but it looks too long.

Sebb767 6y ago
I've had the problem, too, and this change (the edit 2) helps a lot! The size is not ideal, but it's easily possible to zoom if required and resizing the whole line would probably have a slew of required changes with it, so kudos for finding a minimal 80% solution ;)
- dang 6y ago
  I'm glad it helped! Making that simple change has floated in and out of my consciousness for years but I finally nabbed it.

_bxg1 6y ago

There are indeed lots of little things like that, but I don't see them as huge issues, whereas the lack of a dark mode is. So I'm personally going to respect the move-slow approach and only advocate the changes that I feel are truly essential :)

mkl 6y ago

I would love a way to collapse the parent of a comment (or all it's children) without having to scroll up and find it by carefully tracking indentation. Some sites do this by drawing the tree of comments directly with vertical lines going down beside siblings, which can be clicked to collapse. That's a much bigger target.

dang 6y ago
I agree that navigation is an issue, especially with large threads. From my perspective it's strictly a UI question. I don't want to spoil HN's minimalism. I've been thinking of experimenting with links in the comment line (the same place that the timestamp and "[-]" appear) which say things like "up" (to go to parent) and "next" to go to next sibling.
- mkl 6y ago
  Those links would be good, but only if they don't add to the history and break the back button.
  - dang 6y ago
    Hmm - but what if you want to retrace your steps? Say you're reading child #5 of a very large subthread, you click 'up' to go to the parent, which scrolls to the top of that subthread—and now you change your mind and want to go back to where you were. This seems like what the back button is for. I'm all for not breaking the back button, believe me, but I fear that people may have very different notions of what that means.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]