"Finished" is the right word. Apart from small UI tweaks it's still the same site as in 2007...
And that's part of what makes HN great! I can't help but think that a team of Very Serious Expensive UX Professionals would have made a mess of HN thrice over by this time. (Can't you just imagine the 2010 rewrite in Java and GWT, and the 2014 redesign as an Angular SPA with sophisticated giant web fonts all over the place?)
I agree. The only changes I would make to the UX is a larger font by default and make the visited links a different colour. I find it hard to easily see what I visited when looking at the list.
I have to browse HN at 150% magnification but it zooms really well, since it's basically just text. The dark theme makes clicked on links pretty obvious, grey vs white.
They have also added a lot pop-ups, incredible amount of JS, suggestions to login (I use it mostly in incognito) and install their mobile app (if you use it on mobile). Such a mess.
When they did the redesign, the first thing I did was Google on how to get the old interface back. That, and some custom CSS, means I get to see Reddit how I like it.
They really dropped the ball, going for a single page application approach without emphasizing performance.
I mean I believe SPA's can be more performant and snappy than non-SPA's, but you have to have server-side rendering for the initial page load and minimize the amount of JS used. And then make sure rendering is fast; iirc they had inline styling everywhere a while ago (styled components?), and now nonsensical css classes (which, if they're unique, is probably good for css performance but probably still suboptimal).
Reddit's mobile site is also intentionally user-hostile to try to get them to use the app. Although that's not a part of the recent redesign, they had that for a long time now.
The whole pattern of ads that 'scale down' as you scroll is horrid. It's a jarring event, usually doesn't happen smoothly as intended, and it almost always heralds an object that's going to follow you down the page. Nothing except maybe tactful menu bars should follow a user scrolling down a page of static text.
It doesn't help that it was rolled out as the default well before simple existing features like "rankings other than 'hot' on user pages" were implemented.
But destroying old CSS and then not displaying sidebar text in the new default view is what's going to have serious consequences. For all the talk about customization and moderator tools, they've made it so that new users won't see sidebars of rules, useful links, or related subs. Talk about undermining engagement and useful contributions...
I never get the idea for avatars. And in fact I more than often use Adblock to block any of those on the websites I visit frequently. Can any one shed the light on why they like it?
It's a way to personalize your account and a way for people to easily recognize an online identity across comments, articles and communities. It helps you discover that @asaph on HN is the same person as @asaph on GitHub, Twitter, Stack Overflow, etc.
One of the features of HN is that identity is downplayed. Personally, I think that this encourages engaging with the arguments that someone makes, rather than who they are.
It's also a throwback to the old internet where pseudonymity was normal. It's refreshing to see usernames like AdmiralAsshat and TooMuchToDo.
The only real selling point is it allows you to distinguish users apart from one another really quickly in a threaded conversation.
Sometimes someone other than the original commentator replies and unless you're paying attention to the user names you may make a presumption based on assuming they're the same person.
It could be simpler to use a different color for their name, like with new users having a green color: When a user comments more than once in the same subtree, change the username color in all their comments. Leave single commenters as grey.
This should be pretty easy to do with a greasemonkey script.
I kind of like that on HN I read through without necessarily paying attention to who is who. I focus on the comment or discussion rather than the personalities, and if I want to argue with a person rather than a point I have to go back & look at which comments are theirs.
You can already do all of your examples. URLs are autolinked, bullet points just require \n\n, and there's a 4-space prefix for preformatted text.
I think extraneous formatting would just create more incentives to write long, pretentious, streams of consciousness comments where someone just screams from their soap box instead of actually engaging anyone.
I dislike them all, except for someone else's comment above about comment reply notifications - which doesn't even have to be active, just a number next to your username at the top when reloading a page.
I'm opposed to markdown for that reason. It's a bit of a shame that the existing formatting isn't aligned to markdown syntax, and I think lots of people don't know the
code trick.
But otherwise, I'm grateful to not have posts using headers, multipart essays with horizontal rules, or that "every word a hyperlink" style that people use when they want to intensify a statement by implying it's densely sourced or describing a common issue. The informal standards HN has worked out seem sufficient for the conversations I value most here:
- this is sufficient for bullets
- since people don't bullet whole paragraphs
1. this works for numbers
2. for the same reason
> And this is just fine for pseudo-blockquotes, which can be much longer.
And the lack of embedded links encourages human-readable URLs that are either sources[1], or inline links to a page people might want to visit after reading the comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
> but HN has always felt to me like a display of how working within constraints can improve quality.
Definitely in the same boat. When I started reading through this rare opportunity for legitimate meta discussion I was about to advertise the missing vote direction indication on the unvote button. Because it's so easy to hit the wrong direction on mobile and that would be an elegant way to fix it.
But now I think that even this might be more feature than bug: knowing that there is a chance that it might have been just clumsy upvoters makes it easier to do the right thing when getting downvoted.
Bringing over the markup for monospacing would actually be really nice, yeah. It is irritating that code can't be inlined and requires an unusual input like leading spaces to mark out.
> 2. More profile capabilities... link to your GitHub, Twitter, Stack Overflow, blog, etc.
All they really need to do for that is make URLs into links in the "about" section. They already do this for comments; I'm not sure why they don't do that for profiles.
I'd like to remove technical posts from my front page, since I'm not technical. Either I'd like to follow certain tags and only see content related to them, or at least be able to mark tags I don't want to see.
6. Responsive design so the site doesn't suck on mobile
What else?
Honestly there's probably a _ton_ of stuff that could be improved, but given how change-averse the typical HN user seems to be perhaps just leaving it as it is _is_ the best idea.
If they would add some hackernews enhancement suite extensions natively, that would be nice
I prefer userflairs over avatars. Ability to tag certain users would be convenient as well, incase I want to follow certain opinions.
I feel mixed about inbox system in hackernews. I prefer not having it actually. Because I don't feel like I have to read anything replied back to me, I do it of my own volition
I actually like hackernews as is, less features is better.
The only thing I miss are comment reply notifications. Someone might reply to something I wrote in comments a week ago and I have to visit my comment history periodically to check that.
It doesn't have to be an active notification. Just add a numeric field added to user account that means "you got N new replies" and show it in the top-right corner next to my username. Once I see it, I will go and browse through comments to find it. When you open your comments page, it would reset this number to zero.
I honestly don't mind the lack of comment reply notifications because I find that it makes conversations less aggressive than on sites like reddit which do that.
Less of a feeling of a mandated reply, more opportunities for other users to speak up on your behalf.
I like Quora for this. The threat of a BNBR ding is eternal and the panopticon unwavering. As a result every interaction becomes an opportunity for reflection.
My version of being Nice and Respectful tends to skew toward "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all".
Which topics still have a good experience on Quora? I find the quality of the discussion, especially the quality of many of the questions themselves, to be quite low. They need more aggressive community moderation to filter out duplicates, miscategorizations and nonsense before potential answerers are notified/requested. It makes the site look bad.
Almost every day I get an email that says something like "nerflad, so-and-so requested your answer to the question 'how dows computer work?'". Nearly all of the music questions are especially asinine and I just don't have the patience.
Like so many others, I have completely stopped using Quora. Yes, occasionally there are still diamonds in the rough and Alan Kay will pop in to say something, but these kinds of interactions are the exception rather than the norm.
Stack Overflow's moderation is considered Draconian by a lot of people, but it's their lifeblood in my opinion. Q+A sites need a hedge against the descent into Yahoo Answers madness.
> "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all"
I think this is the wrong model for productive discussions, since being afraid that somebody will be upset about merely being contradicted can tend to chill people from refuting things at all (which, to me at least, seems like the purpose of having conversations in the first place).
I'd say it's more "If what you're saying is hostile to your interlocutor rather than the argument, then it does not belong in the thread.", however it seems some moderators do not feel that this is sufficient, hence I am hellbanned.
I don't follow topics, I follow people. I'll read anything by Thierry Etienne Joseph Rotty, Dima Vorobiev, Franklin Veaux, Jenny Hawkins, Alex Cooper, among others. Following topics just gravitates you towards the cesspool that any large internet community has.
I'm really careful about getting into discussions with people, particularly because I'm often operating in the atheism-theism debate. My default response, like you, is to not engage. When I do, I try to pick my words carefully. The second the interaction turns hostile, I'll report if warranted but in any case immediately disengage.
Click your username-> comments, and you get above list of your comments, ordered by time. I think it’s perfect. I don’t like having little notification icons everywhere.
> I find that it makes conversations less aggressive
This is a really interesting perspective on it that I hadn't considered. I have long been annoyed by the lack of comment notifications but now that you put it that way I think you're right. This actually may be a feature of HN rather than a bug. Thanks for sharing that point.
No, mgiannopoulos[0], there is no limit on nesting replies that I'm aware of. I'm nesting another one now!
There is rate-limiting, though, which is probably what you hit. Wait a bit, and you can reply. Or click the "XX minutes ago", and I've found you can reply there.
Yeah, this is still at the top for me. Moving it along! I wonder how far it would have to go before it starts having problems. Or before apps start having problems. Doing this from my phone, and the comments are starting to get fairly difficult to read.
Agreed. At first, I thought I wanted notifications, but now I let it slide, and watch how the conversation moves, often to an unexpected direction.
I increasingly find that I'm happy to let it go that way, rather than 'defending a position'. This, of course, makes the need for comment notifications less important.
Someone might reply to something I wrote in comments a week ago
If you leave a lot of comments, going back a week to check your comments is quite the burden. In practice, this means you may never see such replies.
There used to be a 3rd party HN comment notify service and it went down. It was replaced with a different one. I seem to no longer be getting those either here lately. Not sure when it stopped, but recent-ish.
It doesn't matter that much for current, active discussions. But it does mean I am vastly less likely to have any idea that someone replied to something of mine from a few days back and that has to potential to have me ignoring someone asking a good faith question, among other things. That is something that somewhat bothers me.
I agree completely. I use https://hnnotify.xyz/ which emails me periodically with all my new replies (other similar services exist, my friend happened to make this one).
You should check out HN Replies (http://hnreplies.com). Not done by me and just a happy user. I don't comment a lot but it works pretty nicely whenever I do.
When you'd load the page, you'd see blank, gray bars where the text should go while a "now loading" icon spins for a good 5 seconds, slowly feeding in the text. On mobile, text would be so big it only fits 7 lines on screen, 5 words on each. The menu bar at the top would stay up there as you scroll and eat a good 20% of vertical space at all times. Articles would load in thumbnail images that sometimes break and push the text outside the window and you couldn't scroll to read it because that's disabled for some CSS hack.
The bottom half of the page would be covered by a popover that says, “Please download the mobile app. Pretty please?” And it would pop on your screen every time you view a new page.
It would scale to your screen, and tapping anywhere on the message body would take you to an app store. The 'close' button would be a fixed 10px square, grey on a black background. It would take at least 2 seconds to load in, and would jump around several times during that process with the button already active.
And once you manage to close out of that/click on it and back out of the app store there will be a small ovular request to open in the mobile app with an even tinier Close button.
Hey now, as a Don't-Take-Myself-Too Serious Moderately-Well-Paid UX Professional much of my job is trying to get sites to something as simple as this one.
I would do something about some of the text contrast here though. Maybe an additional form of feedback when editing a comment as well.
I'd only improve how it works on mobile devices, specifically making the collapse buttons [-] wider and some links larger. Just to make it easier to use for fatter fingers.
I wrote a firefox extension to do this for me, bit buggy but it helps a lot.
I can't help but think a solid UX pro would know that the site's audience is a bunch of coders who dream in .txt files and would have acted accordingly. Wasn't this site designed to attract the hoodie and conference Tee crowd to YC projects in the first place?
Agree. Techwise, interesting - what were some challenges that were solved? From the outside it seems like a webapp you could find in some PHP beginner's tutorial.
HN is a perfect example of an classic, evergreen product. Or call it a crocodile product, as crocodiles are somewhat location-loyal.
Are there more examples of products that did (on purpose) not change significantly?
If you consider the sentiment on the recent GMail redesign, Facebook, .. it often appears that product managers are the only ones that want to change the product and its appeal. I think Reddit also had the crocodile concept for long time. Google‘s main search page changed minor since the past 10 years. I guess there are more examples (Quora, Craigslist, Wikipedia..?)
@pavlov your examples capture the could-be quite well.
In the Netherlands an early very (1998) popular web page is http://www.startpagina.nl , and it's still popular with non-tech savvy people. http://www.nu.nl (1999) is the country's most popular news page, http://www.marktplaats.nl (1999) the most popular Craig's list / Ebay equivalent.
They have all tweaked their UI over two decades if you look closely but make sure they look more or less the same as ever.
Actually Teletext ( https://nos.nl/teletekst ) is still used by many and it looks exactly like it does on TV.
Teletekst is an outlier, because it did not start as a web page, but the design has been consistent over the years and I still use the site and the app for news, TV guide and weather forecast daily!
I don't know, Amazon seems pretty bloated at times. The page may look similar to old Amazon pages but there is just so much happening I'm overwhelmed. "Related Items" " People who bought this also looked at", multiple sections of "Sponsored Items", "Customers Also Bought", "Frequently Bought together". Sigh. Just show me this product and the information about it (specs, reviews, questions [and don't show me any questions which were just answered with "I don't know"])
The overwhelming is especially prevalent on AWS - I get super confused every time I do work there. So many buttons, services, etc. It's for that reason primarily that I prefer using GCP as it is kept a bit more similar.
Nope. The search box UI looks very similar, but the UX has changed a ton.
From not being able to use "+" in queries to how your queries are interpreted to what you actually get as your results (from map results to AMP articles, there's a whole spectrum), it's very much a different product these days.
As an avid redditor, I wish they preserved the crocodile concept. I can't bring myself to like their "new reddit" and always keep going back to "old.reddit.com/...".
Their leadership has this notion that people just don't like change, and that's why they use old. To me, I just don't like the new design. It's painful, old is simple, clear, and quick.
Counter opinion: I think of hn as a perfect example of a non-product. I can't think of anything positive about hn that isn't ultimately traceable to its nature of not being a product.
It's funded by a VC who has made billions off of being an early investor in e.g. dropbox, reddit, heroku, stripe, airbnb, firebase, gitlab, etc - they make a shitton, maybe not directly from HN but definitely indirectly.
This I definitely want to know. I figure PG has no problem funding HN but how much does it cost to run HN? It wouldn't surprise me if it's bills are footed by someone else though, like reddit or somebody whose grateful to ycombinator.
Are they any full time admins/mods of HN? Probably wrong, I get the feeling those who moderates are doing it during their idle time while working at YC?
1- Better comment markup support
2- More comments per page
3- Start page auto collapsed so only to level shows
4- verbatim sucks especially on mobile and too difficult to actual use for code
5- This was a list with numbers and is now trashed
6- make hiding work across devices
God, exactly. I don't come to news aggregators to see user profiles. I don't come for chat. I don't come for suggested articles. I don't come for any of the 'new' features people seem to want to cram into every god damned thing (Reddit, I'm looking at you).
I come because there will be insight into articles/stories that I won't get from any other site. And all you need for that is a simple threaded discussion.
And I'm still the only one in the last two jobs I've had that even knew of this sites existence, which he aptly points out in his tweet about the value of Reddit vs "Startup News".
One bug, which I think can be fixed in css, is losing scroll position on device rotation (iPhone). I think iOS should fix it for sites, but until then.
One feature that would be nice is seeing new comments in popular posts without having to look for them. (Not threads, just unrelated new ones)
Before using it, I was checking the website more frequently, fearing I might lose some popular post. Much like other social apps make you do - facebook, twitter, reddit...
But with the 'top 20' and 'top 10', I know I can be 2 days without checking it, and I will still see the most popular posts.
I don't like when apps incentivize/reward time on the app. It's the same reason why I've never played MMOs.
Aside undeadly.org the only other website on the internet in 2018 that doesn't leave any cookies in my browser. I am still amazed by that fact and applaud it.
I love how HN is actually done. How often does one give oneself permission to call anything but the smallest project done? I know I rarely do. It seems very healthy, for both the community and for Paul Graham individually, that something like HN can be done.
Hacker News can achieve perfection only after they figure out how to automate the merger of duplicate posts and their comments. This might be a problem for machine learning.
I happen to like its messy imperfection. Wo unto us should they ever achieve perfection and stop having tolerance for imperfect people and their endless typos, auto-corrupt BS, misreadings of what the other commenter meant and myriad other human shortcomings.
Wow, I wish I found HN when it launched. I can't begin to describe how much it has shaped my life, my outlook and my career in the few years I've been (mostly) lurking here.
I wish the login page, which contains two <form> tags, didn't have identical fieldnames in the two forms, "acct" and "pw" - it confuses 1Password, which always wants to fill in and submit the "Create Account" form when I'm trying go log in, which naturally then gives me an error "That username is taken. Please choose another."
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