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Just want to say how much I thank YCom for not f'ing up the HN interface, and keeping it fast. I distinctly remember when Slashdot committed suicide. They had
by hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
Just want to say how much I thank YCom for not f'ing up the HN interface, and keeping it fast.
I distinctly remember when Slashdot committed suicide. They had an interface that was very easy for me to scan and find high value comments, and in the name of "modern UI" or some other nonsense needed to keep a few designers employed, completely revamped it so that it had a ton of whitespace and made it basically impossible for me to skim the comments.
I think I tried it for about 3 days before I gave up, and I was a daily Slashdot reader before then.
- Eji1700 1y agoInformation density and ease of identification is the antithesis of "engagement" which often has some time on site metric they're hunting. If you can find what you want and read it you might not spend 5 extra seconds lost on their page and thus they can pad their stats for advertisers. Bonus points if the stupid page loads in such a way you accidentally click on something and give them a "conversion". Sadly financial incentive is almost always towards tricking people into doing something they don't want to do instead of just actually giving them what they fucking want.
- KPGv2 1y agoThe one and only thing I'd do is make the font bigger and increase padding. There's overwhelming consensus that you should have (for English) about 50–70 characters per line of text for the best, fastest, most accurate readability. That's why newspapers pair a small font with multiple columns: to limit number of characters per line of text. HN might have over 100 chars per line of text. It could be better. I know I could do it myself, and I do. But "I fixed it for me" doesn't fix it for anyone else.
- stevage 1y agoIncreased padding comes at the cost of information density. I think low density UIs are more beginner friendly but power users want high density.
- jorvi 1y agoHigh information density, not high UI density. Having 50 buttons and 10 tabs shoved in your face just makes for opaqueness, power user or not.
- portaouflop 1y agoThere are dozens of alternative HN front ends that would satisfy your needs
- NobodyNada 1y agoA narrow column of text can make it easier to read individual sentences, but it does so by sacrificing vertical space, which makes it harder to skim a page for relevant content and makes it easier for me to lose track of my place since I can't see as much context, images, and headings on screen all at once. I also find it much harder to read text when the paragraphs form monotonous blocks spanning 10 lines of text rather than being irregularly shaped and covering 3-5 lines. I find Wikipedia articles much harder to read in "standard" mode compared to "wide" mode for this reason. Different people process visual information differently, and people reading articles have different goals, different eyesight, and different hardware setups. And we already have a way for users to tell a website how wide they want its content to be: resizing their browser window. I set the width of my browser window based on how wide I want pages to be; and web designers who ignore this preference and impose unreadable narrow columns because they read about the "optimal" column width in some study or another infuriate me to no end. Optimal is not the same for everyone, and pretending otherwise is the antithesis of accessibility.
- accoil 1y agoWhy would shorter lines be regular? I use hn with `max-width: 60rem;`, and I get a ragged right (which I very much prefer over justification), while also getting a line length easier for my eyes to follow.
- NobodyNada 1y agoMy eyes seem to navigate by paragraph more so than by line. It's hard to try to overanalyze how I read, but I think "corners" of a paragraph are landmarks that I latch onto, and when I reach the end of a line of text I don't scan back along the the line horizontally back to the left, I "jump" back, using the boundaries of the paragraph to estimate the start of the next line, and continue reading from there. This means that I have a difficult time reading text with very large paragraphs. If a paragraph goes on for 10+ lines, I'll start to lose my place at the end of most lines. This is infuriating and drastically impairs my ability to read and comprehend the text. It's interesting to me that you mention preferring a ragged right over justification, because I literally do not notice the difference. This suggests to me that we read in different ways -- perhaps you focus on the shape and boundaries of a line more than the shape of a paragraph. This makes intuitive sense to me as to why you would prefer narrower columns. I don't think that I'm "right" for preferring wider columns or that you or anyone else are "wrong" for preferring narrower columns. I think it's just how my brain learned to process text. I have pretty strong opinions on what's too wide of a column and what's too narrow of a column, so I won't fullscreen a browser window on anything larger than a laptop. Rather, I'll set it for a size that's comfortable for me. If some web designer decides "actually, your preferred text width is wrong, use mine instead" then I'm gonna be pretty annoyed, and I think rightfully so, because what those studies say is "optimal" for the average person is nigh unreadable for me. (Daring Fireball is the worst offender I can think of off the top of my head. I also find desktop Wikipedia's default view pretty hard to read, but the toggleable "wide" mode is excellent).
- amiga-workbench 1y agoI use HN zoomed in at 133%. Its a lot more comfortable even when I'm wearing my glasses.
- AnonC 1y agoI agree. In my experience, the default HN is terrible for accessibility (in many ways). I’ve just been waiting for dang and tomhow to get a lot older so that they face the issues themselves enough times to care.
- KronisLV 1y agoI’d very much prefer more padding between the clickable UI elements on mobile in particular, because the zoom in -> click upvote -> zoom out, or the click downvote by accident -> try to unvote -> try to upvote again, well, it gets pretty old pretty fast. The text density, however, I rather like.
- andsoitis 1y ago> Sadly financial incentive is almost always towards tricking people into doing something they don't want to do instead of just actually giving them what they fucking want. Northstar should be user satisfaction. For some products that might be engagement (eg entertainment service) while for others it is accomplishing a task as quickly as possible and exiting the app.
- nashashmi 1y agoIs that when they went fully xhtml?
- cyanydeez 1y agoIve wanted tp poll HN about how many people actively track usernames. With IRC its basically part of the task, but every forum i read, its rare that i ever consider whose saying what.
- stevage 1y agoYep. Dang is basically the only one I notice.
- fuzzfactor 1y agoIt helps having the username in a lighter font than the comment.
- tialaramex 1y agoI routinely notice a handful of people, such as Thomas Ptacek, whose opinions I have opinions about, and then in context I notice e.g. Martin Uecker for C and especially the pointer provenance problem (on which he has been diligently working for some years), or Walter Bright (for the D language), or Steve Klabnik (Rust) There are people who show up much less often and have less obvious usernames, Andrew Ayer is agwa for example, and I'm sure there are people I blank on entirely. Once in a while I will read something and realise oh, that "coincidental" similarity of username probably isn't a coincidence, I believe the first time I realised it was Martin Uecker was like that for example. "Hey, this HN person who has strong opinions about the work by Uecker et al has the username... oh... Huh. I guess I should ask"
- altairprime 1y agoI don’t even slightly.
- jandrese 1y agoHN goes to some lengths to de-emphasize the usernames, leaving them small and medium grey against a light grey background. It's not easy to track usernames here. Some other forums put far more emphasis on them, even letting users upload icons so you can tell who is who at a glance.
- 1y ago
- MawKKe 1y agoSimilar thing happened (to me) with Hackaday around 2010-2011. I used to check it almost daily, and then never again after the major re-design.
- FlyingSnake 1y agoHN is literally the website I open to check if I have internet connectivity. HN is truly a shining beacon in the trashy landscape of web bloat.
- kikoreis 1y agoOh it's lwn.net for me!
- throwawayexmple 1y agoI find pinging localhost a bit more reliable, and faster too. I blame HN switching to AWS. Downtime also increased after the switch.
- dang 1y agoWhen did you notice HN switching to AWS, and what changed? (Those are trick questions, because we haven't switched to AWS. But I genuinely would like to hear the answers.) (We did switch to AWS briefly when our hosting provider went down because of a bizarre SSD self-bricking incident a few years ago...but it was only for a day or two!)
- inopinatus 1y agoI like to use example.com/net/org bonus, these have both http & https endpoints if you needed a differential diagnosis or just a means to trip some shitty airline/hotel walled garden into saying hello.
- scrollaway 1y agohttps://neverssl.com https://neverssl.com :)
- fragmede 1y agohttpS://neverssl.com?
- abrookewood 1y ago
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoThat, and all the trolls that piled on, when CNN and YouTube started policing their comment sections.
- HarHarVeryFunny 1y agoI don't think it was UI that killed Slashdot. The value was always in the comments, and in the very early years often there would be highly technical SMEs commenting on stories. The site seemed to start to go downhill when it was sold, and got into a death spiral of less informed users, poor moderation, people leaving, etc. It's amazing that it's still around.
- phkahler 1y agoIt's not bad. I still read it, but less than HN.
- cruffle_duffle 1y agoFor me, Slashdot became full of curmudgeons. It’s pretty tiring when every “+5 Insightful” on a hard drive article questioning why you’d ever want so big of a drive, or why you’d require more than 256 colors or whatever new thing came out… like why are you even on a technology enthusiast site when you bitterly complain about every new thing? Basically either accept change or get left in the dust and slashdot’s crowd seemed determined to be left in the dust… forever loosing its relevance in the tech community. Plus Rusty just pushed out Kuro5hin and it felt like “my scene” kind of migrated over. As an aside, Kuro5hin was the only “large” forum that I ever bothered remembering people’s usernames. Every other forum it’s all just random people. (That isn’t entirely true, but true enough)
- sien 1y agoKuro5hin was far less about technology though. It was interesting in a different way though. Like Adequacy. Did you also move over to MetaFilter ?
- cruffle_duffle 1y agoNever really “got” MetaFilter. Adequacy was awesome.
- postalcoder 1y agoIt’s not modern UIs that prevent websites from being performant. Look at old.reddit.com, for instance. It’s the worst of both worlds. An old UI that, although much better than its newer abomination, is fundamentally broken on mobile and packed to the gills with ad scripts.
- fHr 1y agoHN interface is goated
- frutiger 1y agoThe HN UI could do with some improvements, especially on mobile devices. The low contrast and small tap areas for common operations make it less than ideal, as well as the lack of dark mode. I wrote my take on an ideal UI (purely clientside, against the free HN firebase API, in Elm): https://seville.protostome.com/ https://seville.protostome.com/.
- hn_throwaway_99 1y agoTo each their own, but I find the text for the number of points and "hours ago" extremely low contrast and hard to read on your site. More importantly, I think it emphasizes the wrong thing. I almost never really care who submitted a post, but I do care about its vote count.
- frutiger 1y agoThat’s all totally fair. I actually never care about the vote count but have been on this site long enough to recognise the names worth paying attention to. Also the higher contrast items are the click/tap targets.
- dang 1y agoAnyone who goes to the trouble of making their own HN front end is entitled to complain as much as they want, in my book! Nicely done.
- apaprocki 1y agoIt’s hilarious to me that I find this thread. I read the comment you’re replying to before I saw who wrote it. I exclusively read HN on iOS using https://hackerweb.app/ https://hackerweb.app/ in dark mode precisely because I found it to be the most pleasing mobile experience. And here’s dang replying to my co-worker who commented that he wrote his own HN reader because the actual site isn’t the best on mobile. I could literally reach out my hand, show my phone and share my mobile HN experience with him, except I’m 99% remote. (But I did sit at his desk just last Thursday when he was remote.) Just goes to show that all of us reading HN don’t actually share with each other how we’re reading HN :) Too funny… thank you!!
- riffic 1y agoorange site still doesn't support markdown link tags though.
- dang 1y agoWhat's a markdown link tag?
- xnx 1y agoI'm assuming [Example link text](https://example.org https://example.org) I don't know what use that would be for a text comment though.
- mrngm 1y agoIf anything, it allows hiding long URIs... especially those with tracking elements that visitors here may want to exclude when clicking on it.
- qingcharles 1y agoWhat changes have been made to the HN design since it was launched? I know there are changes to the moderation that have taken place many times, but not to the UI. It's one of the most stable sites in terms of design that I can think of. What other sites have lasted this long without giving in to their users' whims? Over the last 4 years my whole design ethos has transformed to "WWHND" (What Would Hacker News Do?) every time I need to make any UI changes to a project.
- SatvikBeri 1y agoThe only one I remember is adding the ability to collapse comment threads
- jq-r 1y agoSlashdot looked a lot like HN with high information density. It was fast and easy to read all the comments. Then a redesign happened because of web 2.0 or "mobile-first" hype and most of the comments got hidden/collapsed by default, sorted almost randomly etc. So a new user would come there and say "wtf this is a dead conversation" or would have to click too many times to get to the full conversation. So new user would leave, and so would the old ones because the page was so hard to use. It just lost users and that was that. All because of the redesign which they never wanted to revert. Sad really because I still think it had/has the best comment moderation by far.
- qingcharles 1y agoLooks like I've had my Slashdot account over 20 years. I remember the original UI being much simpler - much more like HN. Did the membership collapse because of the UI changes they made or because Digg and Reddit took its place?
- jq-r 1y agoI think it was mostly because of the UI, but I don't think anyone has any data on that so it probably was a timing and combination of things. The UI redesign really was a hot topic for weeks/months on slashdot but unfortunately they stuck to their guns and got what they've deserved.
- wldlyinaccurate 1y agoIt brings me genuine joy to use websites like HN or Rock Auto that haven't been React-ified. The lack of frustration I feel when using fast interfaces is noticeable. I don't really get why so many websites are slow and bloated these days. There are tools like SpeedCurve which have been around for years yet hardly anyone I know uses them.