42 ms·
Hot take: I think the lack of mobile support is a feature, not a bug. Mobile interfaces are responsible for much of the noise of mainstream social media, they e
by mostlysimilar 4y ago
Hot take: I think the lack of mobile support is a feature, not a bug. Mobile interfaces are responsible for much of the noise of mainstream social media, they encourage short form content creation because the interface is too simplistic and typing on a tiny touchscreen keyboard is unpleasant and error-prone. By making the only viable interface a desktop interface you put up an additional barrier to that type of noise.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y agoI’m reading this on a phone, right now, and it’s perfectly usable.
- tppiotrowski 4y agoI think parent meant that mobile phone creation should be discouraged. Mobile phone consumption is no issue.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y agoFair 'nuff, but creating any kind of text content is a big fat pain, on most mobile devices. I'm not sure how much site design can help. This site is about as good as you'll get, there.
- raverbashing 4y agoYeah, it's very usable on mobile It uses very little data, making it also useful to test those "is my connection bad or is it the website that's down?" cases
- asdff 4y agoOK now try and upvote this comment without missing the arrow. If you do, you have a lot more dexerity than I do at least. Its usable but certain elements are a little too small where it makes me misclick.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y agoYeah, the arrows could be a bit bigger, and have more gutter. I agree.
- quickthrower2 4y agoI zoom to upvote
- capableweb 4y agoIf you look at the HN stylesheet (https://news.ycombinator.com/news.css https://news.ycombinator.com/news.css) there is actually some minor work being done to make it easier to use on mobile. It used to be much worse than what it is today. I use HN for both browsing and commenting on my phone plenty, although it could always be easier and there are some warts.
- asdff 4y agoThe HN interface is mostly fine but the vote buttons certainly need to increase by 100% for mobile versions. I can't reliably hit them without zooming in quite a lot. It wouldn't dumb down the UI or anything to make the hitbox larger for these arrows if your viewport is so large.
- gardenhedge 4y agoAgreed. Anything that has a mobile user base is pretty awful. See: Twitter, Reddit, TikTok, FB