Ask HN: Why is hackernews so old-fashioned?
As a web developer, it's always seemed strange to me that a tech incubator would have such an old-fashioned website.
It's nice in some respects - pages load extremely quickly and the layout is compact and to-the-point. I was starting to think it was just minimalist by choice and not actually outdated, but then someone mentioned that async requests are done through an <img> tag instead of ajax, so now I'm wondering what the story is there?
Has it just been left alone because it's not broken? Or because they're worried people would get upset about changes? Or for maximum backward-compatibility? I'm not complaining; I'm just really curious.
63 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] threadIf any sweeping redesign occurred the entire userbase would surely be angry.
Most people seem to end up doing it 4chan style, sans the highlighting 4chan provides.
Other than that though, yea- HN isn't in dire need of changes. There are alternative frontends if you want them, though. I like the chronological fixation of http://hckrnews.com
Eric S. Raymond blamed it on an attempt to simulate having tabstops in every column, i.e. 1 character wide tabs.
* http://catb.org/jargon/html/email-style.html
e.g. Nested layout tables, using images for padding, multiple media queries to set comment widths, repeated font-family definitions — all unnecessary.
Neither of these are dealbreakers, but it definitely could be improved IMO.
HN was created as part- YC project, part- functional demo of Arc, a lang Paul Graham developed (a Lisp, in Racket).
http://paulgraham.com/arc.html
#1 is probably due to Arc.
#2 is probably due to Arc doing such a good job, still.
(please correct me if I'm wrong, @dang)
Ohh and and one last thing everyone. Does anyone here who groks Arc want to make it their priority to start hacking around with Paul Graham's Arc code, which helps render our extremely popular social forum for hackers, with content that loads on both desktop and mobile at blazing speeds, and with nothing in particular actually broken?
(I don't imagine a lot of hands going up)
Literally almost no other site loads in under a whopping minute, because all of them slam 10MB of transpiled javascript, and another 20MB of CSS, background images and high resolution sprite sheets for widgets I'll never even click on. Not to mention the pixels and third-party ad-tech, which may or may not be baked into the initial JS payload.
Then the document.ready() kicks in, and maybe a hundred other resources are invited to the party, and the videos try to autoplay with sound, while all the gifs start their loops.
You say old fashioned, but even wikipedia is bloated and horrible when my bandwidth allowance gets throttled by my mobile carrier. If HN didn't load, I'd either have to find a hobby and talk to people (The Horror), or cough up like $90 a week (what would actually happen) because every other web page tries to show me 2GB of video in ads alone, as if I'm going to patronize any business that blasts a cacaphony of unwanted sound in my face when I'm trying to read, all of which I suspect might be a concerted effort orchestrated as part of a conspiracy between advertisers and ISP's to poison net neutral rate plans and price gouge the hell out of anyone using their phone for internet related things, aka: everyone.
First of all, that very mindset is the foundation of the bloat we see everywhere else. Complicate a non-problem with a non-solution, because behind the trend is really a desire to shun open standards, in favor of obfuscating intellectual property as an effort to lock user behaviors, and prevent scrapers from ripping off designs that aren't even innovative. An example of the backlash against this sort of thing was the re-adoption of semantic and/or restful URL paths, because so many back-end goons were packing query strings with hundreds of CGI variable parameters, to control page state that no one could paste or email links to each other, and even advertisers started framing a renormalization of URLs under the SEO buzzword, because they saw their page rank taking hits from the drop in sharability.
Second, once you introduce $ajax(), not only does backwards compatibility hang in doubt (as you mentioned) but cross-browser compatibility and forward compatibility may also be sacrificed. Not to mention, you branch into an entirely different area of development. Because in order to make sure everything works everywhere, all the time, you'll need an ajax library, but which one? Choose carefully, you may seal you fate, if the maintainers disappear. Not only that, any JS error for any reason at all, including async resource errors, could kill alllllllllll of your images. So now we need unit tests and a QA team? Is that right? Gee, why not just use <img/> tags, like every browser has supported by default, since... oh... the mid 90's?
However, Hacker News does use AJAX, and I don't think it even uses whatever img tag trick OP is referring to. The only img tags on the page are the icon and the vote arrows. If it's there, I couldn't find it.
But read the javascript yourself - AJAX support is just a single, simple function. No unit tests and QA team, no depending on some flaky maintainer. Maybe they do unit tests, I don't know, this place is kind of a black box sometimes.
And all code is a moving target - nothing is future proof, especially where javascript is involved, but AJAX seems a lot more future proof than hacking image tags to do something other than loading images. It's baked into front-end templates and the caching strategies of the biggest sites on the web so it's not likely to go anywhere anytime soon.
The web world would be a much better place if you web developers would rather ask "Why are modern websites so shitty and bloated" instead of wondering why one of the few useable sites left have not yet been "modernized".
Screen resolutions and pixel density have increased dramatically since HN was designed. It could at least use a fresh coat of paint :)
About 99.98% of HN readers are capable of writing custom CSS rules.
I'd be sympathetic if people were saying HN isn't accessible.
Many here seem do read between those lines, but modernity and bloat are not synonymous, although for some reason Hacker News seems to believe so, despite knowing better.
This site does get updates, though, and many seem to lead people to clutch their pearls for fear that the staff changed one thing too many and the spell is broken and the slide towards Reddit is inevitable. Links used to break if they sat in your cache for too long - that was a bug, the staff admitted it was a bug, yet people here insisted it was necessary to maintain intellectual quality. This community fetishizes the layout of this web forum to a weird degree.
Yes, the site is minimalist and loads quickly. It would also be minimalist and would load quickly with modern HTML and a more readable stylesheet.
You said it yourself
The negative sentiment usually comes from front-end oriented folks that have things twisted. I'm not disparaging, simply noting on my observation.
If you make an account on the website they also have a function that allows you only to use it for a certain time duration daily (or something of that nature) Because they realize that the world around us is already distracting to a very dark degree, and it's meant to be enjoyable but never to consume your attention at a level that effects your work.
It's fresh, it's simple and beautiful.
I don't see any problems with this site that need a design solution to improve. Information is legible and easy to digest, it's quickly accessible on every device I have, and there's no unnecessary fluff that causes distractions or additional load times.
What issues have you identified that need solutions?
Not saying it doesn't work or event that these things makes it a 'bad' website.
When I first visited HM, my sentiments were the same.
'What on earth is this fucking thing? A site... for developers... that looks like it was written as a HTML text editor without the frills?'
Over time my position has completely changed and I now adore HN for the charm of it's minimalist impression.
Don't fix what isn't broken.
Why is there no search function? You have to go to a third party site to search hacker news. Why can you only go back 3-4 pages of articles? Why is there no mention of the formatting available to you when writing a post? I think you have to browse the FAQs to get that data?
Even just now I had to login after writing this post and clicking "add comment", once I logged in the post I had written was no longer in the form! This is basic stuff guys.
Those are some issues which would be as true today as they were 10 or 20 years ago.
> So the most important thing a community site can do is attract the kind of people it wants. A site trying to be as big as possible wants to attract everyone. But a site aiming at a particular subset of users has to attract just those—and just as importantly, repel everyone else. I've made a conscious effort to do this on HN. The graphic design is as plain as possible, and the site rules discourage dramatic link titles. The goal is that the only thing to interest someone arriving at HN for the first time should be the ideas expressed there.
(http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html)
No one is drawn to a particular website merely because of the stylesheet or UI, it's always because the content and the community interests them - vapid and mainstream that content may be. There would be no rush of mainstream users to Hacker News with a more modern layout, nor would mainstream users be repelled by its simplicity. Mainstream users don't come here because they don't even know the site exists and if they did, it would have nothing to interest them. Yet apparently PG thinks most web users are basically magpies drawn to shiny things.
I was. The minimalism of the site has always appealed to me.
Internet forums are not only their content and community, but also their mechanics and their rules.
There are a lot of sites with good content I don't visit. Much of the reason is they'll eat my mobile battery, data, or both. If I'm in a place with poor signal I can still browse HN in general. The snappyness and content keep me coming back.