7 ms·
Why is text of sumissions in low-contrast grey on HN?
Is this some accidental artifact, or intentional?
It strains the eye, it is pain to read asks for example.
- nextaccountic 3y agoIt seems that HN has a lot of anti-user features for the sake of it. Perhaps the rationale for graying out self posts is to make them not stand out (so that the post from OP doesn't get any undue advantage over the comments), but it's just an accessibility nightmare. It's as if people with poor eyesight were not welcome here. I use Refined Hacker News https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news which alleviates some pain points, but unfortunately it doesn't fix this issue.
- rob74 3y agoMaybe you can add some user CSS to change the text color for "toptext"?
- throwaway2990 3y ago[flagged]
- keepamovin 3y agoIn some cases I agree, but in this case it might be that making the top text darker would contrast too grossly with the bright white background of the textbox below, making it painful. I actually think it's rather balanced. It could also be observing the necessary humility of offering a submission to be judged and engaged with by the larger community. In this community "light slate gray", or thereabouts, is the "Hessian sack of humility".
- VikingCoder 3y agoDid the whole site's font change recently? Because I hate it.
- extraduder_ire 3y agoDo you have tracking protection set too high in firefox? That prevents sites from rendering text in "non-system" fonts. It's DejaVu Sans on my screen. I haven't noticed it change, if it did.
- packetlost 3y agoThat fact that my mid-20s eyes still require having HN at 110% zoom should be a clear sign that design is not a top priority for the site. It's fine, you can always do custom CSS, right /s
- nextaccountic 3y agoI use HN at 133% zoom and it's perfect. (unfortunately refined hacker news also don't fix the zoom)
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoOr you could hit ctrl-+ once and go on with your day?
- packetlost 3y agoThat's what I said? ctrl-+ increase the "zoom" of the page.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoYou said > It's fine, you can always do custom CSS, right /s Which seems rather excessive when it's a single keystroke to fix
- packetlost 3y agoThat is referring to design/accessibility not being a concern for the site.
- extraduder_ire 3y agoI do that too. Only needed to once I went from a (1080p) 27" monitor to a 24" one. Not required, but the size at 110% looks better to me. Recently discovered that firefox saves this value if you do it outside of a private browsing window, prior to which I did it on each browser restart.
- Tommstein 3y ago> It's as if people with poor eyesight were not welcome here. Or even good eyesight.
- kzrdude 3y agoI think it would be good to change. IMO I have learned that downvoted comments are gray, so unconsciously I associate gray comments with suspicion.
- michaelteter 3y agoExactly. So the submissions themselves are met with subliminal suspicion because of our training.
- gus_massa 3y agoI read grey comments and I upvote them if they are not offensive or extremely wrong (or huge walls of text). I downvote very seldom (like once per week). But I don't downvote grey comments, they are already downvoted. (The exemptions are extremely offensive comments or astronomical wrong comments (but I don't remember someone that was so wrong to deserve piled downvotes).)
- ketanmaheshwari 3y agoI'd also like to bring up why downvoted comments are increasingly dimmed? It is very difficult to read them. If the idea is to discourage users from reading them, why not just remove them after a few downvotes.
- wongarsu 3y agoThey are removed after a few downvotes, unless you turn on showdead in your profile
- cipheredStones 3y agoThere's a difference between downvoted posts and dead posts, I believe: > What does [dead] mean? > The post was killed by software, user flags, or moderators. > Dead posts aren't displayed by default, but you can see them all by turning on 'showdead' in your profile.
- topaz0 3y agoBut many downvotes is one of the main ways that they get picked to kill by "software, user flags, or moderators".
- gnicholas 3y agoIs this true? I thought dead was the result of flagging, not mere downvotes.
- cipheredStones 3y agoThis is one of HN's best features, IMO. Bad comments literally become less visible, in proportion to how bad they are, but without actually stopping anyone from reading them or leaving a context hole if someone makes a good reply.
- worthless-trash 3y ago"Bad" as in HN disagrees with, not "Bad" against the rules or incorrect.
- pmontra 3y agoI agree with you about the effect on the eyes. That's the default color of the page, set with body { font-family:Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size:10pt; color:#828282; } in https://news.ycombinator.com/news.css https://news.ycombinator.com/news.css It's also the color of the name and data of the people that write comments. Comments text has its own color, set with .c00, .c00 a:link { color:#000000; }
- formerly_proven 3y agoBecause this isn't reddit and blogposts should go, as the name suggests, on a blog.
- michaelteter 3y agoExplaining the submission title you've chosen with corresponding submission text is not blogging. Anyone who might attempt to use it as such would likely not see enough upvotes on the post for it to ever become an attractive blog system.
- gus_massa 3y agoThe guidelines ask to use the original title, so people are no supposed to choose the submission title. (There are some exemptions and special cases, more details in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html )
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoAsk HN:
- webmobdev 3y agoIt is intentional and meant to dissuade users from treating HN as a content publication platform. HN seeks to be an aggregator of quality links (on specific subjects) + topical discussions on the linked subjects. They don't want to degenerate into a Linked-In (or similar) type network which encourages users to create original posts on their platform.
- TheDong 3y agoHacker news is a site for "hackers", which is to say people who like to tinker and explore. Making the css awful is part of the experience. It encourages you to learn how to tinker with your way of consuming the web to be able to override that css and make it readable. I'm pretty sure the majority of iphone jailbreaks have been to allow customizing hacker news's css in ios safari.
- Warwolt 3y agoWhat an insane justification for making a site have accessibility issues. Hacking should be for the joy of it, not to undo someone else's poor judgement.
- gremlinunderway 3y agoLOL, HN is owned by a major VC-funder, its not some grassroots hacker website.
- fturst 3y agoUnrelated: Any 'grassroots hacker website' that doesnt echo the same thing over and over :/?
- TheDong 3y agoMay I suggest joining the fediverse and following the right set of people. You could try lobsters, but it's basically the same as this site, with maybe 30% fewer transphobic techbros.
- krapp 3y agoIt's also literally the MVP for pg's toy lisp implementation.
- phoe-krk 3y agoI guess it's a good place to start sharing userstyles for HN. https://userstyles.org/styles/92693/dark-hacker-news-solarized https://userstyles.org/styles/92693/dark-hacker-news-solariz...
- greggsy 3y agoAll I see are enormous album arrows filling the screen on iOS
- watashiato 3y agoJust letting you know, both stylish extension and with it userstyles.org have been largely left behind by the community due to past transgressions like tracking site visits. While that's mostly in he past afaik, they've been superseded by the stylus extension and userstyles.world
- phoe-krk 3y agoYes, I'm actually using Stylish - thank you for leaving some context for everyone reading this.
- tptacek 3y agoStories that are text, rather than links to articles or posts offsite, are disfavored. I think for awhile they had a ranking penalty, too? Like this one, they tend to be meta, and HN has a fairly low tolerance for meta on the front page.
- jonahrd 3y agoWhile we're at it, why is the 'hide' button so close to the submission link, with no confirmation? I often accidentally click hide, have to navigate to my profile, click 'hidden', click 'un-hide' then have to go back to the front page and find the post again. It could simply be replaced with an 'sure? yes / no' right before hiding and this problem would disappear. Same goes for 'flag'. In fact, sometimes I'm not even sure if I've hidden or flagged the link and I have to check both.
- JulianWasTaken 3y agoPerhaps proving https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/, that would be pretty disruptive to the way I use the hide button, as it's a good way to leave your cursor in the same spot and "dismiss" posts that I don't plan on reading one by one. Adding a confirmation, and therein forcing me to continuously move the mouse there and back, would completely break that. I agree with it shouldn't be so near to the link though (and with the broader topic that it seems HN prides itself somehow on having bad UX instead of just simplicity -- albeit perhaps because we couldn't all agree what to change and how!).
- jonahrd 3y agoI don't know why I'm even surprised, but this is very funny! Of course my "simple" solution has problems as well :) Maybe something you could opt into though?
- a1o 3y agoI wonder if someone wrote a blog post about the cost of adding options vs not for maintenance of some software in the long term.
- andai 3y agoCan keep the confirmation link in the same place as the hide link (e.g. make Sure clickable). Then it's just double click.
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago
- bloopernova 3y agoI use the following in ublock origin to change the look of HN. You can definitely restyle the site to your liking! news.ycombinator.com##html:style(filter:invert(95%) hue-rotate(200deg); background: white) Edited to add: screenshots here: https://gist.github.com/aclarknexient/c39c83f2f97c3c6b1c307c19e516ed6e https://gist.github.com/aclarknexient/c39c83f2f97c3c6b1c307c...
- warpspin 3y agoThank you. Never thought of doing quick'n'dirty CSS changes through uBlock.
- soggybread 3y agoI second that. Didn't even realize I could do that, just copied news.ycombinator.com##html:style(filter:invert(95%) hue-rotate(200deg); background: white) into My Filters section, refreshed the page and it worked. It's so simple.
- queuebert 3y agoI didn't realize CSS had such sophisticated transformations nowadays. How long until filter:llm("pontificate")?
- sproketboy 3y ago[dead]
- Brajeshwar 3y agoThere are a whole lot of front-end UIs for Hackernews but I never wanted to litter my primary browser with extras unless in dire need. I usually browse Hackernews in my Primary Browser on a rather large monitor. So, the first problem is that Hackernews is too spread out for comfort and I have a custom styles that forces the max-width within 960px (I know, OldSkool habit). If this is something you are comfortable with, I just set the text to be a little darker than the default light gray. FYI, `table#hnmain` where everything happens in HN. And one of the best articles to help you with this is at https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2021/custom-style-sheet-in-safari/ https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2021/custom-style-sheet-in-safa... To set the text to a darker color; :root { /* besides the other variables */ --color-700: #374151; } table.fatitem .toptext { color: var(--color-700) !important; }
- winternett 3y agoWhy is there still no Dark Mode? Sorry, it had to be said. :P
- queuebert 3y agoI, for one, miss the old plain HTML look, with blue unvisited links and purple visited ones and a font of my choosing through my browser settings. Let's return to Berners-Lee Chic.
- ploum 3y agoWell, that’s basically what we do on Gemini ;-) https://geminiprotocol.net/ https://geminiprotocol.net/
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- AnonC 3y agoEvery single part of HN’s inaccessibility is intentional, with a very strong and unshakable foundation beneath it. This is empirically proven by the fact that YCombinator hasn’t spent any effort on changing it for over a decade and a half. And it’s not for the lack of money or the lack of competence. Of all the things one could complain about HN, like the tiny fonts and the tiny buttons next to each other and the disregard for making it easier for those who use screen readers, the color of a text submission would be the very last thing that would get fixed. (This comment is partly sarcastic)
- satiric 3y agoAgreed 100 percent. Luckily third party apps and websites exist, because the one that YCombinator has made is worthy of all the ridicule it gets. Reddit gets a lot of hate around here but at least it's readable on a device made in the last decade. It's a shame because the community here is so great otherwise.
- pierat 3y agohttps://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented "Additionally, founders of YC companies see each other's usernames show up in orange, which — although not an explicit benefit — does allow fellow YC founders to immediately identify one another in discussions." The real features are hidden from us plebes.
- extraduder_ire 3y agoIs a list backing this available anywhere? Would be neat if someone ported that into a userscript or something.
- SkyBelow 3y agoMaybe I'm the odd one out, but I really like this design for getting a massive amount of comments on screen at once with minimal distractions (no avatars, less ability to add memes), compared to most any other forum or social media. The grey text OP mentioned is a bit of an oddity, especially when I consider someone who has vision issues but not to the extent they need a screen reader. If other forums I frequent decided to swap to a more HN inspired design, I think I would overall feel better using it. That said, I haven't tried using a screen reader on here so I can't speak to how well it works from that level of accessibility.
- phkahler 3y agoA better question is why websites in general feel the need to use custom colors and fonts for text. Users should set their own preferences in the browsers and that should be that. OTOH if I continue with that argument I should shun the pale background color which I actually kind of like. OTOH part of why I like it is because it sets the "page" apart from the unused portions of the browser window, which I'm not going to get into, as it really opens a huge can of worms that are mostly opinion ;-) (hint from me: why do we run everything maximized?)
- ploum 3y agoTake your point to its extreme conclusion and you will reinvent Gemini. That’s why I like Gemini so much (and developed my own command line browsers which display the content of a web page in the terminal without caring about CSS/colors/etc)
- ryandrake 3y agoI agree. User preferences should always override a site’s color, typeface, text size choices. The browser is the user agent after all, not the web developer’s agent. If I want a high contrast color scheme, or large fonts because of my vision, I should simply be able to set it in my browser’s settings and be done, not have to futz with extensions and injecting CSS into each site.
- andyjohnson0 3y agoI've always assumed it was to disincentivise posting text rather than links.
- dandrew5 3y agoI had the same question and made a browser extension that addresses many of the complaints in this thread (poorly-positioned elements, sizing, dark mode): https://github.com/dan-lovelace/hacker-news-pro https://github.com/dan-lovelace/hacker-news-pro. It lets you completely rebuild the layout however you'd like and has some pre-made themes that do a decent job without writing one from scratch.
- rob 3y agoThe font size is also incredibly small on large monitors; my default zoom on here is like 150% in my browser.
- nlitened 3y agoThe browser has per-website zoom controls, so it's probably wise to use those, and not bikeshed font sizes on websites.
- habibur 3y agoThis was done by Paul Graham himself in this forum's early days. At that time reddit was rising. PG didn't want to turn this forum one into another Reddit. To discourage posts with body he grayed out the body text. And then within the next few weeks he grayed out the texts gradually even more. Until it reached the point that you see now. Encouragement was to post interesting links and blogs. But not turn this one into a general discussion forum. That was may be in the late 2000s. As far as I can recall.
- pieter_mj 3y agoIn that same logic, ask and show HN in PG's mind is to be discouraged because they always contain body text. But the opposite should be true, ask and show (and others) should just be plain text and not greyed out.
- ezekg 3y agoMost regulars post with no body and then add a comment with more info.
- kzrdude 3y agoI'm reminded of the cognitive ease part of Thinking, Fast and Slow. The theory is supposedly we pay more attention to what we are reading if it's a bit hard to read. Was there any such idea behind lowering the contrast for these?
- kensavage 3y agoGreat memory.
- macinjosh 3y agoThe idiocy of HN's anti-feature features is laid bare when you realize a lot of them are easily fixed with a little bit of custom CSS, and it is a forum for hacker after all. I wager these sorts of tricks don't really do much but make dang and co. feel smart.
- bensecure 3y agoIf the goal of the feature is to affect user behaviour en masse, then it doesn't matter what can be done to disable them, as long as the majority of people don't disable them.
- midenginedcoupe 3y agoIt's a really shitty, user-hostile way to run a website and is a beacon of the tech-bro "screw you, I'm fine" attitude that I utterly detest around tech. Fix your styles, make it accessible. Don't be an a-hole. And I've resorted to a custom user style to make it readable. https://github.com/mgladdish/website-customisations/tree/main/news.ycombinator.com https://github.com/mgladdish/website-customisations/tree/mai...
- fuzzythinker 3y agoI mentioned this before. This kills show/launch-HNs that has long text that needed all the attention it needs. For these long posts, it is just unreadable in mobile, so I have to skip reading it until I get back to desktop, which often, its ranking dropped and/or I had forgotten about it. So HN is really preventing these show/launch-HNs from getting its needed attention.
- ImJamal 3y agoI'm on my phone so I can't check, but does HN still have the accessibility issue with having a hidden image that does the indentation?
- SoftTalker 3y agoYes, layout is done with tables and indent looks like: <td class="ind" indent="1"> <img src="s.gif" width="40" height="1"> </td>
- mdaniel 3y agoArgh, my life was so much better before I knew that :-(
- dbg31415 3y agoThere are so many accessibility issues on Hacker News! Ways to avoid the same mistakes? Easy... 1 - Make sure everyone involved from designers to developers to content creators to testers to... whatever your village has in it... has knowledge of WCAG. (New standards out a few weeks ago!) WCAG is the de facto law of the land now, and businesses are liable from damages if they don't make efforts to ensure all users receive "equal enjoyment" of their web properties. https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG22/ https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG22/ 2 - Incorporate Accessibility Testing into your design, build processes, and content creation processes. WAVE works great! Aim for 0 Errors and 0 Contrast Errors. (You will likely have to re-design anything where you're putting text directly on top of images.) https://wave.webaim.org/report#/https://news.ycombinator.com/ https://wave.webaim.org/report#/https://news.ycombinator.com... 3 - Incorporate Lighthouse into your design and build process. Aim for > 90s in all categories. https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/overview/ https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/overview/ 4 - Ensure your content stays your own by setting up your security headers. This step just ensures that you know where all the content is coming from and you've had a chance to validate it. https://observatory.mozilla.org/analyze/news.ycombinator.com https://observatory.mozilla.org/analyze/news.ycombinator.com https://securityheaders.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com&followRedirects=on https://securityheaders.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinato... And here are some browsers extensions that make it easy to build a CSP for your existing sites. Chrome - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/content-security-policy-c/ahlnecfloencbkpfnpljbojmjkfgnmdc https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/content-security-p... Firefox - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/laboratory-by-mozilla/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/laboratory-by...
- throwaway290 3y agoPosts with the body, like yours, are discouraged for a reason.
- ranger207 3y agoI use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hnes/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hnes/ which has a bunch of nice features
- lvncelot 3y agoI've been wondering this myself, also, since comments that are downvoted heavily get lighter and lighter, for the longest time I've assumed that the text submissions I was reading also were that controversial.
- syngrog66 3y agoHN is a bad site when it comes to UX in general. Riddled with known anti-patterns. Its the content that brings me back, despite bad UI/visual design, fundamentally unfair and unpredictable voting patterns, and nasty community behavior being far too common down in comment threads. Thats how good the content is on HN.
- justnotworthit 3y agoComputer people generally design terrible computer interfaces because they are not only willing to cope with something bad, they're pleased to. - Alan Kay, Personal Computing Historic Beginnings (I use hckrnews.com)
- Tommstein 3y agoDark Reader is your friend on this site. It also helps reading downvoted comments (which are often dumb, but not always, and I want to read and decide for myself).
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]