8 ms·
Refined Hacker News
- EmilStenstrom 5y agoHacker news needs a redesign, the UI is horrible by basic accessibility standards: Very small click targets, horrible mobile experience, too small font size.
- chrischattin 5y agoDisagree. HN has one of the most usable designs on the internet. The last thing we need is more unnecessary JS bloat.
- detaro 5y agoGP in no way suggested "more unnecessary JS bloat".
- gumby 5y agoIt's a nice simple site. For example you can trivially tell your browser to adjust the font size because there isn't a lot of "modern" junk messing with the font handling.
- bondant 5y agoCompletely agree. The default font is too small for me to read it, so I set it at 150% and that's it. Everything works fine after this small customisation.
- adamrezich 5y agoI don't think it needs a redesign, but some of the smaller, less obtrusive tweaks in this extension for example, would be more than welcome. I used to use other HN apps and newsfeed-reskin websites but I have definitely come to appreciate the utter simplicity of HN's design.
- jamespullar 5y agoBrowsers support adjusting font size if that's an issue for you. They also tend to remember your font size of choice per site. I have no issue using Hacker News on mobile either. There are apps available if you prefer something mobile-centric.
- zylent 5y agoHN is an example of what used to be good about the internet. The page loads quickly without pulling in 100Mb of frontend dev navel-gazing. In my experience simple sites like this are much easier to modify locally for accessibility, via screen readers, or local style sheets to modify things like the small click targets. I think many in the HN crowd see it as a rejection of the modern bloat and straight up garbage code that many popular sites (particularly news aggregators, looking @ you reddit) tend to become.
- least 5y agoSupposing that all your disabled readers are also all programmers is a terrible approach to developing your website. It was developed a long time ago without any consideration for any of these things and simply hasn't changed to address these things; it's not with intent. I appreciate that hacker news is largely unchanged and I also appreciate a website that is more conservative about making unnecessary changes to it just for the sake of change, but addressing accessibility issues shouldn't be eschewed just for the sake of not changing. You might argue that anyone that is bothered by those changes could also just modify locally for their own personal taste, which seems much more reasonable.
- ebiester 5y agoThis is a false dichotomy. You can fix the small click targets without adding 100mb of react.
- schmorptron 5y agoI agree. It's the one site I can browse on a very limited mobile connection, and I'm very glad about it.
- 8ytecoder 5y agoIt’s a knee jerk reaction by those that don’t want change or’ worried the changes would go too far Personally I agree that accessibility needs huge improvement. Not just for those who have disabilities but even other users on a touch screen will benefit
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- justanotherhn 5y agoOne of the reasons why HN has stayed relatively under the radar for the majority of people is in part because of its perceived "bad design". I, for one, love the fact that it's not attracting a wider audience. You have reddit for that.
- greggturkington 5y agoThere's "bad design" (subjective) then there's "fails to meet accessibility standards" (objective). HN would not pass WCAG 2.0 AA for a large number of reasons. Tap targets and illegible text being big ones. It doesn't matter if you can zoom into text when downvoted comments have so little contrast with the background (#ddd over #f6f6ef). The "X minutes ago", "hide", "edit" comment header links even fail without zooming.
- Zababa 5y ago> Tap targets and illegible text being big ones. You can zoom, and the website reacts very well to zooming. > It doesn't matter if you can zoom into text when downvoted comments have so little contrast with the background (#ddd over #f6f6ef). That's on purpose. If you don't agree with it it's trivial to overload it with custom CSS.
- greggturkington 5y agoAgreed, it's not accessible; if you write your own accessible theme, it will have an accessible theme. Your apartment building doesn't have a wheelchair ramp? That's on purpose. If you don't agree with it it's trivial to buy a bag of concrete and build one.
- Zababa 5y ago> Your apartment building doesn't have a wheelchair ramp? That's on purpose. If you don't agree with it it's trivial to buy a bag of concrete and build one. That's a bad metaphor. First it's not possible to build a wheelchair ramp in your apartment building without affecting everyone else. Second, a custom CSS is very easy to make compared to a wheelchair ramp. Third, the comments being hard to read is, again, on purpose. I don't know the precise reason behind it, from what I understand it's part of the numerous tools that HN has to try to be a better place for discussion online than the rest. Some other tools seems to be: dead comments not being visible by default, new accounts having their names highlighted, the "reply" button not being here on "deep" threads in the "regular tree view". If you don't agree with this decision, that's fine but that doesn't mean everyone is aligned with you.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deeblering4 5y agoHN looks similar to how reddit did before the UI redesign, and reddit made many things significantly worse when redesigning. UI redesigns as a concept are in my opinion horrible. The approach linked to here is much better. Making incremental changes to the existing and well known UI. No need for a full redesign all at once.
- greggturkington 5y agoReddit had large, high-contrast text and tap targets. Downvoted comments did not have their color contrast reduced. If we're getting specific, HN does not look that similar.
- deeblering4 5y agoWhen I look at HN and old.reddit.com side by side they have a lot in common Anyways, when is the victorville film archive grand re-opening?
- xboxnolifes 5y agoMan, the replies to this somehow conflating improving accessibility and UX with adding 200ms of input delay and MBs of javascript really show a lack of understanding of the topic.
- tyingq 5y agoI was somewhat surprised at that too. HN comments, for example, aren't nested/threaded in any semantic way. Just spacer gifs in a <table>. I don't know how visually impaired readers follow comment threads here.
- avery42 5y agoBy default it's small, but all you need to do is zoom in and it's perfect. For example, on my 1440p monitor I'm at 213% zoom and it's working great for me.
- nicoburns 5y agoIt's actually excellent by accessibility standards. The small click targets and text can be easily solved by using your browsers built in zoom functionality.
- tailspin2019 5y agoWith respect, I don't think it needs a redesign. It could do with a few minor CSS tweaks to address some of those points you've listed (which I do agree with to a degree). But we are a long way from horrible by accessibility standards - I mean, it's literally text only for a start!
- forgotmypw17 5y agoI am on the mild end of the accessibility spectrum -- I am, for the most part, keyboard-only. HN's design is one of the best I've found on the Web, and one of the few places I still feel comfortable at.
- Zababa 5y agoIt doesn't "need" a redisign, precisely because this kind of website can easily be extanded by things like this extension.
- washedup 5y agoThese are some great additions. Thanks!
- ketanmaheshwari 5y agoI'd love to have dark mode feature.
- martinp 5y agohttps://github.com/darkreader/darkreader https://github.com/darkreader/darkreader is great for this. Adds dark mode to any site.
- codetrotter 5y agoChromium-based browsers, including Chromium, Google Chrome, Brave, and others have a native dark mode stylesheet that can be enabled in chrome://flags/#enable-force-dark It works to varying degrees of success depending on the site. Some sites become unreadable with it. What I personally do is I have this flag enabled in my primary browser on my main computer, Brave on a MacBook Pro. And for any site that is severely broken I either skip that site, or if the site is important then I open the page in question in my secondary browser, Safari, and read it with its normal default style.
- kitsunesoba 5y agoThis userstyle[1] installed with Stylus on Clonimums+Firefox and Cascadea on Safari has served me well. [1]: https://userstyles.org/styles/113994/hacker-news-dark https://userstyles.org/styles/113994/hacker-news-dark
- plibither8 5y agoHi, developer of the extension here! There is a "dark mode" preset available in the Custom CSS settings of the extension. Open the extension popup from the toolbar (list of extensions) and you'll know what I'm talking about :).
- jaytaylor 5y agoDiscussions on similar submissions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23804469 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23804469 Refined Hacker News (July 11, 2020 — 93 points, 40 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20173974 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20173974 Show HN: Browser Extension to Refine the HN Experience (June 13, 2019 — 259 points, 122 comments) (FD: Admittedly I got this from the Refined Hacker News add-on, which shows this info at the bottom of each post)
- alcover 5y agoI would greatly enjoy a comment-reply alert. Having to check my profile again and again to manually detect replies is not super efficient. Often I discover replies too late to engage an already gone replier.
- sloppycee 5y agoI get an email notification using this service: https://www.hnreplies.com/ https://www.hnreplies.com/
- alcover 5y agoThx but email is overkill I think. Much more efficient would be a small `unread replies` beacon in top bar.
- Stratoscope 5y agoPerhaps that beacon would be more efficient, but I think you may be waiting a long time for it. In the meantime, I do suggest trying hnreplies as sloppycee suggested. Unless you comment here a lot, it's not that many emails - and it has the advantage that you don't have to keep watching or reloading HN to see if you got any replies to a comment. Considering how fast stories drop off the home page, hnreplies gives me a chance to reply to a comment while people may still be looking at the thread. So give it a try - you can always unsubscribe if it's not for you.
- alcover 5y agoI hear you but to me, the beacon would better allow for effortless long-lived conversations. Whereas mail alerts demand more work : a filter/folder lest hnreplies will drown among unrelated mails + switching to browser on link. Reddit does it perfectly. You see alert and get ALL unread replies and pop them with a simple body click.
- billfor 5y agoI need a filter to only show technical info from HN, like it was ten years ago :-)
- trangus_1985 5y agoI don't think HN was ever about just "technical" stuff. There is Lobsters for that kind of thing. Out of curiosity, I brought up HN from 10 years ago on archive.org. I counted - 10 of the top 20 links were things that I wouldn't consider to be "technical".
- MauranKilom 5y agoYou don't have to go to archive.org! Here is the content on the HN front page 10 years ago to the day: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2011-09-27 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2011-09-27
- dpifke 5y agoFeature request: functionality to auto-hide articles from a user-configurable domain kill-list, for those of us who don't want to see articles from e.g. Politico or Buzzfeed. Bonus points if it could also filter stories with user-configurable keywords in the title. I've suggested this in the past to dang for the main HN UI, but they have limited resources for this sort of thing and there's a fear that if filtering is too easy, it'll split the community here.
- CyberDildonics 5y agoOr atlasobscura, or two words titles that have no context.
- drcongo 5y agoTechcrunch would be out of business within a week.
- jaytaylor 5y agoThis is a neat idea! I recommend submitting a GH issue. Previously, when I filed a bug the maintainer had committed a fix within literally a few minutes. Of course, one can't count on such things, but it's at least a strong indicator of project-developer care and interest level.
- plibither8 5y agoYep, please do open an issue on Github! Best way for me to keep track of it. And thanks for the kind words :)
- unraveller 5y agoHere's the userscript I use for blocking clickbait sites on HN. https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/433199-filter-hackernews-by-site-submissions https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/433199-filter-hackernews-b...
- yololol 5y agoInstead of requesting this or that, I would just like to say that this is great work presented in a very nice way. The effort put there is impressive :)
- plibither8 5y agoDeveloper of the extension here, thank you!
- plibither8 5y agoHi all, developer of Refined Hacker News here! Happy to see that it has been posted about again, thanks @jaytaylor! As stated in my previous Show HN for this extension, my philosophy behind the extension (as mentioned in the my comment) is: > There are many extensions out there that add quite a few features to Hacker News, but they also always do one thing, which I have realised, is a slippery slope: changing the minimalistic design and style of Hacker News. > I created this extension with one thing in mind: I am NOT going to mess around with the overall design or style of Hacker News. It's sacrosanct. Thanks, I'm up for discussion! :D