How would you re-design Hacker News?

1. Add a way to block users.

2. Customizable themes.

3. Some way to indicate responsess to your comments/threads.

Put the "more" link to the right corner, so it’s easier to reach one handed from a smart phone. That’s the one and only thing I’d change

Communication over a distance never works, there is no sympathy in it, because everyone is reduced to a persona, and everyone feels equal to the other which is terrible. Redesigning things won't change that.

Fairly satisfied with HN as is. The minimal medium makes for more signal, less noise. not no noise, that's impossible. (there is no spoon)

Can list lots of things that I think would be bad. Animated GIF user avatar images. inline images. Cryptocurrency schemes and "realtime chat" systems.

ooo. almost forgot: dedicated proprietary client. screw this "open web" stuff, lets add some encryption to nntp and charge $15/mo for a reskinned newsreader app to access it with! We can compile it to webasm and run it in electron on phones!

hn looks fine; not every site has to be embellished with modern design.

If you want some fresh looks, check Modern for Hacker News extension - https://www.modernhn.com/

A little scrolling ticker on the top bar showing posts on the front page. Sadly marquee was discontinued, so I doubt this could be done.

HN is nearly perfect as is IMO -- any changes would ruin a lot of what makes it special.

That said, the one change I would probably make is changing the click targets to be slightly larger on the upvote/downvote/collapse on comments. Would be a nice improvement for mobile users.

It should have notifications for replies.

the links are tiny targets for fat fingers on mobile screens.

there can be better spacing between links both on topnav bar and also the links next to each post on a thread.

same with links in user profile page.

spacing.

I want to preface this with the fact I've been on this site for over 15 years and I do not want to see a "redesign", just some tweaks.

1. The grey self post text is not accessible and hard to read. It needs to be darker. Same is true of user names, etc.

2. HN could improve the UI for mobile users by making clickable elements slightly larger and adding some extra spacing to prevent accidental miss-clicks.

3. Add an inline confirmation step screen when flagging a post – I accidentally flag posts all the time.

4. Change "favourite" to "book mark". Add it to the list view. Add a link to "book marks" in the top bar so they can easily accessed. Sometimes I see something that looks interesting but I don't have time to read. I don't want to click through to the comments just to "favourite" it, then need to remember to go to my profile and click on "favourites" later. I just want to quickly book mark posts and be able to easily access them later.

[delayed]

This website is unreasonably good. I would only make a few minor fixes:

- Bigger clickable elements on mobile.

- Support for bullet lists

- Slightly easier navigation

- Optional reply notifications

It works well. I would not redesign something that works well.

Browse/collapse with arrow keys

It’s fine as it is.

I would just make the upvote / downvote arrows a bit larger on mobile.

just one small change, clicking a link on a title should open a new tab instead of opening it in the same tab

The design is nicely minimal, but I would replace the nested table layout with nested lists (which is what the comment section is).

Also: add some way to highlight new messages since you last looked at a discussion.

I would like to see a hackernews for creatives, preferably done by completely different people. Just to clarify: Computer programmers can be creatives too, like writers, painters - anyone producing output.

I would keep the simplistic text based appeoach.

I’d remove flagging or hiding on mobile unless you click on the post because it’s easy to accidentally do it.

Automatically link Dupes into a single post and set of comments.

And add subsections or maybe a set of tags -nothing like all of Reddit but a handful something like Tech/Buisness/science/art as with ask and show.

At 7KB, the favicon often makes up over 10% of total page size. At 256x256px and having only two colours, I think there's plenty of room to slim it down.

I'm also curious why HTTP/1.1 is used as it's not 1999 any more.

Suggestion: black bars should be clickable to bring to a relevant post.

from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37197243

or more minimally have a tooltip that indicates the name of the person