[HN Gopher] The UI of Hacker News Is Perfect
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The UI of Hacker News Is Perfect
Just saw a few creators building better UI versions of HN. I
realize now, that one of the important factors that keep HN's
audience selective is its simple UI. IMO if we put the design and
UI/UX elements of modern social platforms, it may start to attract
a wider audience which certainly is not the intent of this
platform.
Author : Vishal19111999
Score : 60 points
Date : 2023-06-03 20:07 UTC (2 hours ago)
| wilg wrote:
| I hate the Hacker News UI. It is ugly, inaccessible, and
| confusing. I have some stupid Chrome extension just to make it
| dark mode.
| jmclnx wrote:
| Yes, I agree with this, the UI design is very good. I can uses it
| using many browsers even lynx when necessary.
|
| Plus as others indicated, there does seem to be any "nastiness"
| here.
| kennu wrote:
| What really bugs me nowadays is lack of dark mode support on HN.
| Quite many websites Will autodetect it when I turn dark mode on
| on my phone, but for some reason HN refuses to do that. It seems
| like a no-brainer feature to autodetect it.
| nordsieck wrote:
| IMO, support for more rich comment formatting would be very
| beneficial.
|
| While I would prefer if HN supported Reddit-flavored Markdown,
| just supporting a quoting syntax would probably provide 50% of
| the benefit.
| andrewmackrodt wrote:
| I browse HN mainly on mobile and it can feel quite cluttered,
| definitely useable but non idempotent operations like flagging a
| post have no confirmation. For the most part, I think I've
| noticed when I've accidentally flagged a post and unflagged it,
| but I feel I can't agree to call the UI perfect.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I keep logging out while trying to click my username.
| doctor_eval wrote:
| Yes, I wish some of the actions were larger and further apart.
| DLA wrote:
| I think HN's success is a mix of great people with incredible
| views and knowledge, good moderation, and the data-dense simple
| UI. Most social media sites and forums have a vastly lower
| content-to-noise ratio -- all the emoji madness, UI cards for far
| too many things, wasted space, infinite scrolling, etc. Here you
| have nice threaded discussions that focus on content above shiny,
| blinky, noisy UI distractions. Love HN and the excellent people
| who share here.
| malmz wrote:
| I keep seeing people praising the HN UI but just can't see it.
| The lack of padding makes it hard to differentiate between
| articles. The many low contrast links below look cluttered. Not
| to mention how horrible the site is to use on mobile.
| faebi wrote:
| You should try mailing lists...jokes aside, I wish the up/down
| votes would be more touch friendly. Too many accidental votes. At
| the same time I wish they could store my written comments in
| local storage until I submit it. Sadly scrolling up too far on
| iOS or closing the wrong tab happens seldom. A simple onchange
| callback would be enough. I wouldn't mind some minimal KISS
| improvements...
| ricardobeat wrote:
| I'd say it is _perfectly functional_. Far from perfect in terms
| of design.
|
| There have been minor improvements over the years, but just like
| other products with a long history, change becomes ever more
| expensive.
| karmakaze wrote:
| One aspect I really don't like is the slot-machine mechanic of
| mixing yesterday's (or day before's) top stories with today's
| trending stories. That makes me re-read so many titles, looking
| for that dopamine hit of something new and interesting. I like
| many have made a front-end that serves my own purpose and lists
| stories in reverse chronological order, only showing stories that
| made the cutoff of 'top' according to the API request.
| jasmer wrote:
| It's fast, does not have ads, doesn't have layout reflows,
| doesn't have popups, doesn't have marketing overheaad and BS.
|
| Those things alone would make 90% of sites better.
|
| My god man just give us the goods!
| rchaud wrote:
| The UI doesn't have anything to do with it. Hacker News is
| heavily moderated by smart people, that's why it's a nice place
| to visit. A poorly moderated HN would turn the site into
| influence-spamming hellscape like Quora.
|
| Amazon.com is the ugliest e-commerce site going, but they aren't
| worried about losing visitors to Wayfair.com, because they're not
| competing on looks.
|
| Same thing with HN, they are not in direct competition with any
| other site. The high quality of discussions (thanks to
| moderation) helps the site show up in search engines, which is
| how most people discover it.
|
| There are lots of alternative front-ends to HN, those are
| personal projects and not done to try to boost HN traffic, just
| to improve the UX for regular visitors. For example I use a
| browser extension that adds additional menu items to the HN
| orange bar, like "shownew".
| bigthymer wrote:
| > The UI doesn't have anything to do with it.
|
| I'm going to disagree somewhat...I think it has _some_ to do
| with it. I think the UI acts as a sort of pre-filter. I think
| just having a list of boring looking text (like HN) draws some
| types of people and repels others.
| basch wrote:
| I do like some things better about https://hckrnews.com/ as a
| front page.
|
| The left numbers almost act as a bar graph to tell you how
| popular something is, and it is otherwise chronological.
|
| High text interfaces are also _dense_ compared to modern
| mobile touch based interfaces trying to render on a desktop.
| https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1407-why-the-drudge-report-
| is...
| krapp wrote:
| >I think just having a list of boring looking text (like HN)
| draws some types of people and repels others.
|
| It is true that HN draws some types of people and repels
| others, but I think it's because of the culture more than the
| UI. I mean, old Reddit looked almost exactly like HN and it's
| as mainstream as a site could be. Craigslist was even more
| minimalist than HN.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| Old reddit was at least a bit more tech and intellectual
| adjacent than new reddit. The "mainstreamification" of
| Reddit came largely with the UI change and mobile app. Even
| with old Reddit it was more mainstream because of UI
| aspects YC doesn't have (social media sharing, video
| embedding, custom subreddit CSS)
| mey wrote:
| Thank you Dan. If I ever meet you in person, beverage/meal on
| me.
| rado wrote:
| Some buttons/links are too small for touch
| zephlower wrote:
| Hn loading in poor network conditions is maybe it's best modern
| ui feature.
| zephlower wrote:
| Though dark mode would be really nice. And seemingly pretty
| trivial to implement?
| leshokunin wrote:
| I was hoping for a thread with a UX deep dive on the pros/cons of
| a simple UI vs other equivalents (Reddit, Reddit Enhancement
| Suite, social networks, RSS readers).
|
| There's no way to say this is a perfect UI. We don't know if
| people churn because of the experience, or drop off because it's
| tedious. Maybe the lack of notifications is a problem? Maybe the
| archaic search is? Maybe the way the top items are rendered skews
| towards a certain type of interaction and reduces overall
| interactions?
|
| It's super arbitrary to say it's perfect, or that it meets the
| best goals it could achieve.
| pg5 wrote:
| I don't know about perfect. The tiny action button/links result
| in misclicks for me fairly often.
| Gualdrapo wrote:
| As a graphic designer myself I tend to be _attracted_ to some
| products because of its visual design or user interface. Case in
| point - I couldn 't wrap my head about Reddit only until they
| launched their infamous redesign. It seems many people like
| interfaces with a huge information density, but for me it was too
| overwhelming - the redesign has many negative aspects but its
| readability/scanneability is definitely a positive one.
|
| But that "attraction" doesn't guarantee one would keep using
| something, so in the end it's just a small ingredient.
| krapp wrote:
| The reason a wider audience doesn't come here is that this site
| is called "Hacker News", it's attached to a subdomain of a
| Silicon Valley startup incubator most people have never heard of,
| only a few people ever discuss it outside this forum, and most of
| those people are complaining about it when they do.
|
| The audience here has definitely grown over the years, but like
| any niche subreddit the reason the unwashed masses don't flock
| here is simply because they don't know about this place, and if
| they did, they wouldn't care, or they would be turned away by its
| reputation.
|
| And TBH the way people here sometimes fetishize this forum's
| layout is kind of creepy.
| jeanlucas wrote:
| > I realize now, that one of the important factors that keep HN's
| audience selective is its simple UI.
|
| Well... https://xkcd.com/552/
| mikojan wrote:
| > it may start to attract a wider audience which certainly is not
| the intent of this platform.
|
| Web sites on the front page are regularly collapsing under the
| load of visitors emanating from this place.
|
| You are not part of a small elite club
| nmeofthestate wrote:
| Speaking of the perfectness of the HN UI, the text size is very
| small on mobile. I assume this must be deliberate for some reason
| - maybe to put people off using it on their phones :)?
| PhilipRoman wrote:
| Can't reproduce, it's normal for me. Although the desktop
| version font does seem a bit small.
| pyrelight wrote:
| It's tiny on Desktop too on a my 27" 1440p main monitor. I have
| it permanently zoomed in at least ~150%. There's no need for
| the font size to be that small in today's environment of high
| res monitors.
| agumonkey wrote:
| less is more strikes again
| wackget wrote:
| Definitely not perfect. The default "collapse comment" buttons
| being right-aligned is pure insanity, IMO. They should be left-
| aligned so they're all in line with each other as you scroll down
| the page, so you barely have to move your mouse.
|
| Fortunately this extension[1] takes care of that.
|
| [1] https://github.com/insin/hn-comments-owl/
|
| Also, proper hyperlink support in comments would be appreciated.
| xrd wrote:
| Do you like this extension?
|
| I'm working on this:
|
| https://plzat.me/
|
| Would love to hear your thoughts if you have them.
| arp242 wrote:
| I have a userCSS for that as well: .togg {
| float:left; margin-right:.5em; letter-spacing:5px; } /*
| Collapse button to the left and larger */
| innagadadavida wrote:
| Please support reader mode on iOS. Or at least fix the small
| fonts.
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(page generated 2023-06-03 23:01 UTC)