Is it a strength that HN's UI has not changed over many years?
I find myself lately gravitating back to older communities that survived the social media wave on the Internet because they seem to be a bit better at keeping track and promoting visibility of meaningful conversations, despite traditional functional flaws, screen sizing, and often dreadful large threaded views. I think a major strength is that most of these traditionally designed sites/apps still emphasize chronological order for content and posts, which makes the experience less prone to manipulation and more timely.
It also seems with older sites like HN and online bulletin boards, content can be bookmarked, and it's easier to correspond with users on a more regular basis. I think the most frustrating trend on modern sites and apps is that content I want to see simply disappears into a sea of other things I don't want to see, and that searching to find that content is futile, as results are often gamified and spammed into oblivion.
I miss IRC now, I miss bulletin boards despite all the flaws, I miss old school web sites that had the same content in the same place even after hitting refresh.
In my opinion, traditionally highly effective, favorable, and functional user-experience-based design has been thrown out the window lately as a trend; apps now are very often geared towards tracking, sponsored post placement, and profit/revenue optimization goals, rather than towards creating favorable user experiences.
It makes me wonder (despite some issues of course) if HN is still one of the best places to communicate and post serious matters BECAUSE it's UI/UX hasn't changed (In major ways) for many years?
Is it a strength that it looks the same and has the same core functionality?
Yes. The site is fast, using it is fast, the information is clear. It performs the function it sets out to perform very well.
Is it a strength that the feature set (mostly) hasn't changed?
Yes and no. It's mostly a good feature set for me, but I know plenty of people who don't use HN, and who could potentially be in the target market. HN does not need to grow, but the realities of business is that most companies do need to (HN obviously not a company itself), and so it is generally good for new users that features are changing in order to grow as the product is theoretically more applicable to them.
There's another aspect that you touch on with the algorithmic timeline argument. Services we use are becoming smarter, and for the most part people like this. Search is a good example of this, HN's search is basic keyword-based search, and I find it practically unusable because I don't always know the right keywords. A significantly smarter version, of the calibre that FAANG style companies could put out, would be great! Of course it would take more effort than it's worth for this user base to create it because investment like that only makes sense at scale.
Resisting the urge to allow embedded media in posts and comments is probably the single biggest factor in keeping the experience streamlined. I’m sure it greatly simplifies content moderation as well.
Still wishing for official support for dark mode, though.
It's pretty nice. Loads super fast, super usable. And the parts that actually matter (e.g. the search function) have improved significantly in recent years.
However there are some things that could improve.
For example, in text posts (like this one), the font color is a relatively light grey which has rather bad contrast. Also, my mind is trained to ignore grey comments since those are usually quite downvoted so I have a hard time focusing on the text post.
I just want one new feature and then HN would be perfect. I want to be able to collapse and leave a thread from any point in the thread.
Nobody really cares about UI as long as the moderation (and => content) is amazing.
It's a bit annoying to use on phones but I think that might actually be a (completely unintentional) advantage.
It seems to only be the only website that ever seems to load on rubbish train WiFi, so it's definitely an advantage.
My real gripe with the site is the font size, it's way too small. I usually have it zoomed in 150% on desktop. But maybe I ought to get some glasses as my eyesight is awful anyhow.
> if HN is still one of the best places to communicate and post serious matters
citation needed.
Other than that, I would love to see a bit better semantic markup, not because I'm some sort of HTML purist who demands everything to be pure, but because it would make it easier to style with CSS (which I did, to add dark mode, bigger font sizes and max widths). Currently, it's nested tables with occasional classes and ids, but not for everything.
I would like to have more touch friendly buttons, but that's about it. It's not a nice experience to press the wrong button, often.
I think it's fair to say that there are a large number of front-end and "full-stack" (insert whatever definition of full-stack works for you) who frequent HN. If you were to ask a group of lawyers which part of HN could use the most attention - they might suggest stronger wording in the TOS or Privacy Policy. If you asked a group of ML/data scientists, they might suggest an improved API for programmatic access. If you ask a group of front-end devs, it might be perfectly obvious to them that it needs the latest whiz-bang stack - and a custom Electron client too!
And I'd disagree with all of them. HN is great because it does one thing and does it well. It might not have found the global maximum, but any deviation from this particular local will likely involve a lengthy exploration of minimums.
Overall, it works, with one caveat. Blocking and muting have become essential tools for managing one's social-media experience. Yes, I know well the dangers since I was the "victim" in a rather famous incident involving that on LambdaMOO many years ago. Nonetheless, that was then and this is now. Without those features, we get a lot more of people engaging in new rounds of brinksmanship with their favorite antagonists, staying just barely within the guidelines as they try to provoke a flaggable offense. Blocking and muting would actually reduce moderator load and (real or perceived) moderator unfairness, in addition to improving the overall tone of most discussions.
Two desires:
- dark mode
- comment reply notification (yes, I know there are third party work around a here)
Why break what ain't fixed.
It works, looks inoffensive, and it's not a pain point, so I'd call it a strength.
> I miss IRC now, I miss bulletin boards despite all the flaws, I miss old school web sites that had the same content in the same place even after hitting refresh.
Why miss them? They all still exist. I constantly have my IRC client open and connected to about two dozen channels on Libera (only about five that I actively monitor). Non-Reddit forums for various topics exist too, though, granted, not quite in the quantity that they used to.
I think so. I think a lot of people on HN are going to lean towards it being a strength though. It's fast, to the point, and I never have to figure out where something was hidden in a menu since yesterday.
Spotify is the absolute worst when it comes to senseless UI updates. They had it all covered for me back in 2016, and nothing I use has actually changed in functionality, just where the hell they move everything and how slow it is on my phone. I understand I have a cheap Android phone, but there's no reason an app to play music should be so slow. I use Podcast Addict for podcasts, and sometimes I'll just give up on Spotify because it won't load and listen to a podcast or Audible instead.
HN has never put up a fight. Fastest site I use, and the only time I run into an issue is 9AM PT since there's usually a spike and things might load a bit slower, but it's never a huge deal, especially for a completely free site.
There are incremental improvements they could make (user @latchkey enumerates quite a few in his linked repo), but it's basically fine.
It would be a mistake to do what most link aggregators have done in the past, and burn the whole thing down to do a complete redesign from scratch (cf. Reddit, Digg).
If the tendency is to do the latter, I'd prefer HN did nothing instead.
I mean the HTML is in the worst tradition of mid-90s web pages - table-based layout, spacer GIFs, inline styles and generally awkward mark-up that I'd reject if it were in a PR. My user style has a bunch of rules like ".ind img[width = "40"]" just to change the indentation of nested comments lol.
Writing a new comment and editing an existing one work differently if done in a new tab, which is a minor niggle, more so having even the simplest of AJAX-based inline comment posting would be lovely.
Could we get some comment styling improvements though? Using backticks for `inline code`, ~~strikethrough~~, block quoting with > and code blocks using ``` - especially with highlighting by specifying a language - would just make communication richer without changing the site's tone IMO.
No. Well, maybe, but if anything i think that it's in spite of the UI/UX.
The UI/UX is pretty bad on mobile, which is the majority of internet traffic (no idea about HN specifically, it probably isn't because it's just annoying) with the small buttons. I'm also not a fan of the POST redirects for basic things we have had AJAX for for literally more than a decade, but I'm probably in a minority here. I really don't think the 0.5s saved by not having the JS code for that are worth the back and forth blocking POSTs.
The lack of dark mode is another annoyance.
And the part which is the saddest, IMHO, is that if the code were open source, there'd be a PR/MR within minutes fixing each of those problems. If it were a commercial site, they would have already added those feature for growth and etc. But it's neither, so it lingers.
I am a big fan of the "UX" at HN. I recently discovered indiehackers.com and while I like the content a lot I am having a hard time hanging out there. The site is too dark and there is too much noise, on HN there is just one feed which is nice.
The more relevant question to ask is how has the cultural zeitgeist impacted HN since its inception? And is the way content is curated and weighted, and moderated acceptable?
I've seen some great conversations nipped in the bud by overly heavy moderation of the comments, especially regarding criticism of crypto whilst it was hot.
Another question worth asking: is it a conflict of interest for Y Combinator to be so closely linked to the community all these years later? Is it not time to put it on its own domain with an appropriate privacy policy, and trade the "Guidelines" in favour of a serious T&Cs?
The only feature I'm missing is dark mode. On all my desktop browsers I've got custom stylesheets I hand-wrote to keep HN from burning my eyeballs, but on mobile there's nothing I can do about it.
The fact that it doesn't need to change is because it is under the aegis of YC. Anyone else doing the same thing would have been long relegated to the dustbin of irrelevance. Imagine if one day Warren Buffet offers a co-investment opportunity in a new hedge fund, but you will have to physically fly to Panama and manually file the paperwork by hand to participate. Many people would still do it, not because they are willing to accept poor service, but because of the authority who is running the show.
Reading HN on mobile web is a challenge sometimes. Quotes and indented text require horizontal scroll and deep threads get complicated to follow.
The lack of a dark mode is also very annoying.
I would pay money for target="_blank" to be added to the links. $50 cash on the barrelhead for any Ycombinator employee who wants to take on the challenge.
Are there stats on PC vs mobile for HN? I expect its much higher than most other social media and this format is great on a proper screen.
Any kind of change is going to bother people who've been using a site for a long time. There's always a tradeoff between appealing to new and to old users, HN values old users more. This is also reflected in the fact that you need a certain karma to downvote and flag.
This UI is a haven in the web. It may act as a filter but a different UI would filter (a different demographic) also.
A myriad of HN frontends already exist. HN team seems to naturally accept their existence and prosperity. So, everything's good.
The HN board doesn't profit from advertising (at least not in the common, public way). If you're asking why others have changed and this didn't, I think that's the reason.
The one issue that I have with HN is that the vote buttons are too small on mobile. Apart from that, the page is clean, fast and accessible. Others should take notes.
It works. I like it. If I could change one thing, though, I would make the collapse button next to the voting buttons, so that they are lined up.
as someone who still uses the legacy reddit UI, yes.
If we could just fix navigating back to the homepage on Safari scrolling to the top of the page :(
The best UI is the one that doesn't make its users change their habits.
Canonical and Apple should take note.
It’s great, but the buttons/links hit targets are too small for touch screens.
It’s a universal law that a site redesign makes the site worse.
Sameness promotes inertia, which is always part of keeping an audience.
It certainly isn't because large threads are unreadable on my tablet or that the vote controls are so tiny.
IRC still exists. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Mostly yes, except it is missing some important features: HN does not have a cookie banner in the EU, and it does not have an unsubscribe functionality that erases all your posts (right to be forgotten).
> if HN is still one of the best places to communicate
It lacks in 'communicate' part
> post serious matters
That depends on whom you talk, not the UX, though yes, there is an overlap
> highly effective, favorable, and functional
The right question is the half of the answer. Half of it is 'and profit/revenue optimization goals'