Why do people love the plain old UI of HN?

I would guess not many of us love the UI, just that it’s probably makes trade-offs that work for most of us. I would wager that just about everybody has some aspect they would change if they were running the place.

For me, I like that it’s fast, is all about threads, is compact enough, reasonably high contrast, and simple. The lack of a reply notification is especially brilliant IMHO. Reply notifications lead to lower quality by encouraging one-on-one arguments that are not interesting to most. If you want that experience, it’s available on Reddit.

The change I would make would be to limit the width. I don’t usually like reading wide lines.

It does the job, presenting the maximum amount of data in a readable form. I read mostly on a large-format tablet, and some designers (eg, reddit) forget that just because a viewer is on mobile doesn't mean they have a limited view. And it's not just because I'm an old stick-in-the-mud, either. I view slashdot using the old desktop URL but much prefer the mobile view for the comments.

My personal appreciation for the HN UI is that it's completely free of distraction.

It's clean and minimal, but with just enough GUI stuff to be easy on the eyes. I like text based UIs but if they're not done really well they can look like ass. For large volumes of text monospaced fonts perform poorly.

It works without any bs. Companies lay way too much focus and resources on UI these days.

Because HN devs is bad as CSS.

because it works!

Loads fast.