HN Explorer

Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News

1831 points by ramphastidae ↗ HN
I’m currently in a country with low speed internet and the entire ‘modern’ web is basically unusable except HN, which still loads instantly. Reddit, Twitter, news and banking sites are all painfully slow or simply time out altogether.

To PG, the mods and whoever else is responsible: thank you for not trying to ‘fix’ what isn’t broken.

397 comments

[ 0.29 ms ] story [ 271 ms ] thread
cameronbrown
old.reddit.com is still usable if it helps!
mrweasel
I still can't use the redesigned Reddit, I not even sure that I would, if I could. It's still way to slow to be something I'd use on a regular basis. If they kill of the old.reddit.com, I don't think I'd continue to visit Reddit.

Imgur for instance isn't a site that I visit daily or even weekly any more. I really enjoyed the site, but after a redesign it just stopped being enjoyable. It's way to slow, to much Javascript. It's the only thing that will reliably force my MacBook to ramp up it's fans. How is it possible for a website to make a laptop heat up more than doing development work?

adamkittelson
The most frustrating thing to me about imgur is they way over-compress images on the mobile site. I always have to request the desktop site to get the original quality image. It's bad to the point that text on an image is often unreadable on the mobile site.
cameronbrown
Other than poor performance, the thing I'm most upset about is how each subreddit has lost its personality, and the fact they've closed the source. Being open is what made Reddit special, considering who founded it, it should never have gone closed source.
crusader1099
> Other than poor performance, the thing I'm most upset about is how each subreddit has lost its personality

What makes you say this?

cameronbrown
They axed custom subreddit CSS stylesheets. It was very much like unstyled Reddit was a base to build upon.
colmvp
Is PG even involved with HN anymore? He hasn't posted on his account in four years.
dangom
I'd suppose he'd use a throwaway if he'd want to post anything. Otherwise it'd draw too much attention and get too many upvotes and replies, essentially killing the small amount of neutrality we get here.
noident
I've seen posts by PG in some recent threads out in the wild, they don't show up in his post history. I would imagine this is intentional to prevent old comments being dredged up and used against him, much like Zuckerberg's old FB messages were automatically deleted from the recipients inbox.

Fine by me, but I wish HN would offer the same privilege to its users and allow us to delete our old posts

jddj
I believe Dang has said once or twice that this is something that can be achieved if you email them.
tim333
>At the end of March 2014, Graham stepped away from his leadership role at Y Combinator, leaving Hacker News administration in the hands of other staff members

Though he's still a major shareholder of YC which owns it. He tweets quite a lot these days.

B_Throwaway
For twitter you can disable JS and it will fallback to a ""degraded"" (a.k.a. Much faster & usable) experience.
burk96
It seems to fall back to the old mobile website for me? This is after clicking the fallback prompt.
boring_twenties
Yes, but you have to click past an annoying prompt[1] every time. Does that not happen for you?

[1]: https://i.postimg.cc/jjBSVmCX/Screenshot-at-2019-09-01-15-23...

dredmorbius
Once the cookie's set, I tend to go straight through.

That annoyance is considerably less than all the others a full-JS Twitter imposes. Including the motherlovin' account-creation nag that shows up all the motherlovin' time.

One click through at entry rather than random annoyance in the midst of reading? A net win. And an incredibly sad commentary on the state of the Web.

emersonrsantos
Amen. It’s the most pleasant site I use every day. Even Google search is beginning to slow down to a crawl in some hours (and Google used to be blazing fast).
LarryDarrell
There is lite.cnn.io as well.

I wish there were more.

overcast
I wish they would update the line-height to something more reasonable. ~1.5x font size would be go a long way in paragraph readability. Other than that, it's fast and stable. About all I require from a forum.

Edit: All my lovely responders, I appreciate the feedback, but I don't want to install addons/mods/hacks to fix line-height.

targonca
In Safari: View → Zoom In

It's smart enough to remember the zoom level the next time you open HN too.

overcast
That's not increasing line-height. I don't have a problem with my eyesight, I have a problem with poor typography.
CamperBob2
And I have a problem with acres of whitespace. Here's one vote for HN to leave the line height right where it is.
overcast
How do you live with a centered fixed-width table that is wasting 15% of the browser window with nothing but hectares of white space then? Bumping the line-height to 1.5ish the font size has minimal impact to space efficiency, and add tons to readability.
tripzilch
> And I have a problem with acres of whitespace.

We're talking about just 1.5x line height. Which is a perfectly reasonable default for nice reading. The browsers have a lower default line height because of historical reasons, doesn't mean it's the right one. People don't use the Times font very often either.

phoe-krk
HN is trivially editable with userstyles. I personally use one for a dark theme; I think you can install a userstyle of your choosing on all browsers from which you access HN.
krilly
Another awesome thing about simple sites like this is you can hack the CSS really easily with something like Stylus.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/styl-us/

Erlich_Bachman
You can literally do something like what parent comment wanted to do in three (3) minutes, including installing the addon. Stylus is great.
zzo38computer
Yes, it is good. (I tend to only use it for sites that already use CSS; for those that don't, the default is almost always good enough.) Even on Hacker News, I use that to do two things: to make all comment text black, and to display dotted lines for the comment indentation to make it more easily to be seen the indentation level (it is implemented as simply a tiling background picture). (For more complicated web pages, I often need to add a lot more stuff to make it work reasonably.)
blondin
my default zoom is 150%. this breaks a lot of websites. but maybe they don't care about accessibility anyway. like OP said, i have not had any issue with HN for years.

i recently started keeping dev tools's console open when i am using chrome. i have some JS to collapse comments here on HN.

i have seen some interesting things in the console, i just keep it opened now:

- some sites have st tons of JS errors and yet function as normal

- some companies put job ads in there for JS people (medium is doing it right now)

- some libraries show off their awesome ASCII logos in the console

- debug statements are left there unintentionally (i wonder if there is no tool that could strip these out)

Deimorz
Does your JS do something differently than HN's native comment-collapsing? You can just click the "[-]" at the end of each comment's "header".
zamadatix
What sites does zoom break? I've been on a 2x DPI screen for years and never noticed anything. The web is pretty good about this, even "pixels" are actually just length units not physical pixels.
GoblinSlayer
Very few work correctly with zoom. One of them is http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

And text has nothing to do with pixels, it's not raster.

zamadatix
Can you give an example of one that works poorly with zoom? Like I said literally all of the browsing I've done in the last couple of years on my work PC has been with 200% zoom and I've never noticed a site be broken/different to my 100% setup.

I suppose if you have e.g. a 720p screen and do 200% zoom you might run into some problems but that's got little to do with zoom and more to do with the lack of space on your screen to put content anymore.

GoblinSlayer
YC, reddit, wikipedia, github, SO (very horrible), all google sites.

Lack of space is not really a thing for html, rarely a page fits on screen without scroll and wrap.

vezycash
For PC Chromium based browsers - use the extension "Zoom Text only." Allows you to - well, the name is self explanatory.

For Firefox - no extension needed. Press alt to show the main menu. Go to View -> Zoom - then select Zoom Text only.

Now, zoom will only increase font size, instead of the whole page.

Semiapies
All my lovely responders, I appreciate the feedback, but I don't want to install addons/mods/hacks to fix line-height

I have, but it's a mark of frustration for me. It definitely falls under the heading of, "The user shouldn't have to do this."

userbinator
Edit: All my lovely responders, I appreciate the feedback, but I don't want to install addons/mods/hacks to fix line-height.

The line-height looks perfectly fine to me. AFAIK the HN CSS doesn't force any specific height but uses the defaults. In fact I'm sick of the "modern" absurdly-low-density design trend that just makes me need to scroll more to see less.

My browser has a zoom function, and so should yours. I don't understand the resistance against customising a site --- it is a user agent working for you, and the CSS spec even mandates a user-stylesheet (which I know some browser(s) blatantly disregard). Different users will obviously have different preferences.

arbuge
We have an ecommerce website in straight php we haven't redesigned since 2011. Works fine, very fast, and capable of handling very large traffic spikes without missing a beat.
exabrial
I loathe the modern web. Speed is a secondary to "hey look what we're doing with our frameworks".
dmix
Modern front-end toolsets are finally starting to address this by using automated critical css, SSR + "hydrating" on load for interactive elements, webpack treeshaking + chunking of assets into tiny js/css files and only loading code based on what the page/routes asks for, PurgeCSS to get rid of unused css, cssnano/uglify/htmlmin/imagemin, etc. Webpack and these various popular tools has done a lot to make the web better and are default in many starter kits. But we're just beginning to see it go mainstream.

The basic shift back to pre-rendering + delivering only what's needed on the actual page is a big deal which hasn't got enough attention yet IMO. We went completely in the other direction for over a decade because we thought networks and browsers could handle it, but it was too easy to abuse and mobile took over.

There's no reason even very advanced websites can't load quickly, without having to fully compromise back to the 90s non-interactive websites.

News sites and marketing teams still ruin it regardless with all the crap they add on top. But it's far far better than loading a giant blob of 20 jquery libraries plus a big old angular.js or backbonejs app (sometimes both at the same time) encompassing a whole site in one file, even though you just wanted to visit the contact page.

I also blame Themeforest type developers because they're still stuck in the "let's add a hundred JS files so I can parallax and animate two divs" mindset.

wolco
A modern css framework would increase the font size change the font type make the reply link a fat button. It would put a card around each parent reply thread.

Getting rid of unused css helps but the additional markup would make the page 4 or 5 times larger.

scrollaway
A "framework" doesn't do that. A designer does. Or whoever decides to implement it.
dmix
I see a trend away from that in 'trendy' CSS frameworks like http://tachyons.io/ and https://basscss.com

The Bootstrap stuff you seem bothered by is better for splashy big-headline marketing sites not high-density content like HN.

A lof of web designers cut their teeth designing marketing websites, not app UIs, so it's not surprising when I see it mindlessly used on sites like Reddit's new redesign.

liability
> news sites

It's really a sad state of affairs when an industry with such a strong historical connection with publishing is now reasonably cited as an industry worse at publishing than most others.

rangibaby
Newspapers have always been full of ads fwiw
liability
I'm talking beyond the matter of ads. On their websites I can use an adblocker, so in that respect the situation has actually improved.

They regularly fail on basic UX. Their ability to turn a kilobyte of text into 10MB of trash is astounding, as is their ability to cripple modern computer hardware, or simply readability, with their latest 'innovations' in totally unnecessary JS/CSS fuckery.

uMatrix blocking all JS, including first party, helps. But you've still got bullshit like floating headers that follow you when you scroll down the article to contend with. I find myself creating cosmetic filters to remove pointless floating clutter on news websites more than any other sort of site. The industry seems utterly incapable of presenting a clean and readable article online.

18pfsmt
I would advise using your browser's developer tools to find the irritating web page js, css, or domain/sub-domain responsible, and then using uMatrix/privoxy/hostfile to block that garbage. Many sites are usable by preventing js entirely.
jdnenej
Reader mode on browsers is the easiest way to make news websites usable
liability
I can often get the text of the article in Emacs, so I generally do that. My TTS integration is better in Emacs than Firefox anyway, so I actually prefer it for longer reading.

But regardless of our personal work-arounds or workflows, those websites shouldn't be like that. The general public is still subjected to the default experience and that bothers me.

Spooky23
Newspaper ads weren’t as noxious or ineffective as online advertising.

I don’t understand how online ads are as big a business as they are, other than the troll stuff on Instagram. The rest is pretty unremarkable and ineffective.

I can probably count on my hands they number of times I intentionally engaged with an ad in the last 25 years.

TeMPOraL
> I don’t understand how online ads are as big a business as they are

For one, they're on-line, = cheap to make and pretty much free to serve.

Two, with the amount of tracking done, on-line ads are attractive to advertisers because they can evaluate their effectiveness real-time, and often tell what ads are responsible for what real sales.

Three, with all the accrued complexity, it's a wonderland for third parties who help the advertisers navigate through on-line advertising landscape, and divine attribution. Now the trick is, if your customer (the advertiser) doesn't have even basic competence in statistics (they most likely don't), you can bullshit them with data to your heart's content. Which is what you're probably doing if your team doesn't have much statistical competence either. I've seen this happen.

jasonhansel
Yeah, but those fixes and workarounds are only almost enough to sometimes compensate for the code bloat that the frameworks themselves have caused.
dmix
People seem to be confusing web 2.0/bootstrap style design (see: Reddit's bad redesign) with the frameworks here but the component based approach combined with webpack/compilation steps, which are very much mainstreaming, are fundamentally different than top heavy JS frameworks I spent most of the last decade using.

I dont think people have really seen what server-side rendering (ala Next.js/Nuxt.js), decoupled components, modern treeshaking, minification, and chunking can do for performance. We've yet to have a full web framework designed entirely to encompass this from day one but they're coming and getting better at it.

Outside of the endless 3rd party crap the 'business' guys add, if anything, it's no longer the JS framework size and library cruft I'm worried about it's how many object watchers I've got at runtime via Vue.js and reactive style programming (which automatically adds Object.observe style watchers to all data) + component initializers (which can add overhead to simple HTML templates). Fortunately with the new Vue 3 function API there is a clear distinction between observed values vs static/immutable/config data. The amount of observers per page dropped dramatically. Otherwise looking at a Vue project in the performance tab shows it's highly async and efficient.

The new Vue functional API (allegedly) is also going to be far easier to treeshake so you really only ever get the library features you're using. Even for something like Lodash or Ramda where you might use only 10% of the functions it's a big deal.

I'm sure React is making similar progress in this direction and it was already smaller than Vue.

CSS Frameworks have some ways to go and PurgeCSS isn't perfect but using a functional CSS framework like Tailwind or Tachyons also helps in this regard, so all of the stuff isn't intertwined and can be stripped out.

This type of tooling really does massively improve the state of things automatically, even with poor coding practices or large applications spanning multiple pages. SSR, treeshaking, chunking, stripping unused CSS, etc is a 'zero cost' type optimization that I've seen turn 700-1000kb dev assets into loading 100kb base + a few 5-10kb js/CSS files dependent on the page.

csande17
I think you and the parent commenter are coming at this from fundamentally different perspectives.

The parent commenter remembers a time when websites were server-rendered by default. The server would send down HTML, along with a small amount of CSS and JavaScript to style it and add interactivity. You didn't need an elaborate chain of compilers and bundlers and frameworks and chunkers to make sure you didn't ship several megs of dead code to the client; you just didn't ship several megs of dead code to the client. That's their baseline for web performance.

Your comment, on the other hand, seems to use the current giant-JavaScript-framework sites as the baseline for performance. And yeah, you can get a lot of cheap wins if you start from there. (For starters, you can break up your JavaScript execution into tiny slices so that, even if you're using 80% of a CPU core and draining the user's battery for no real reason, you're at least not blocking the browser UI thread.)

dmix
This is more than just wrapping stuff in cards and making the font 2x, it's about the abilities of what websites can achieve. The design is a part of that but it's also influenced by what you can do differently than a pure HTML + a bit of jquery site.

I basically rebuild past era bootstrap style Rails HTML views with some jquery into modern Vue components for a living on a B2B app.

I'm very familiar with the old way and how much better a proper modern replace could be. I can pack a ton of information into smaller flexible places and integrate action-relevant help boxes and only showing the parts of forms as needed.

Page render times to first action are about 10x faster on average (no joke) and our users use 1000's of objects on a single HTML form. I'd love to see someone try rendering that pure SSR framework with partials in a performant way and usable way.

This type of interaction extends well outside of my business/B3B domain as well. I'm quite excited for the future of web development after a decade of fearing more JS everywhere (which I was contributing too).

Another great HN style site is Basketball Reference, I personally love these information dense designs but it's not very scalable with tons of information, elements, and what it could really achieve if it was a desktop application or fully flexibly UI wise.

https://www.basketball-reference.com/teams/TOR/2019.html

This site could massively improve with real time filtering, multi-select forms, interactive data exports tools, multi-team/page comparisons, information highlights on hover, inline math tools, etc. On the site currently it looks great on the surface but once you engage with any JS-y stuff or imagine what's possible if it was a desktop app, and the previous tools would be extremely limited in scope.

You can do this very powerful stuff now without clogging up performance and load times. That's a big deal. We've been dealing with slow clunky JS components forever now and it can be way better.

csande17
> The design is a part of that but it's also influenced by what you can do differently than a pure HTML + a bit of jquery site.

> I can pack a ton of information into smaller flexible places and integrate action-relevant help boxes and only showing the parts of forms as needed.

> This site could massively improve with real time filtering, multi-select forms, interactive data exports tools, multi-team/page comparisons, information highlights on hover, inline math tools, etc.

I guarantee that it is possible to write any of these features in traditional HTML, CSS, and JavaScript without relying on today's frameworks or build infrastructure. I know this because even the most advanced build pipeline in the world must eventually compile down to traditional HTML, CSS, and JavaScript; that's all browsers run, no matter how many layers you add to try to abstract yourself away from it. I also know this because websites existed that had these features prior to React becoming popular.

> We've been dealing with slow clunky JS components forever now

That's the thing -- there was a time before slow, clunky JS components. (They used to be slow, clunky Flash components :P)

userbinator
Seeing the parent post you're replying to reminds me a lot about how mainstream compiler optimisation works: create a lot of crap "unoptimised" output, then add many additional layers of complexity in an attempt to get rid of the unnecessary crap, instead of the quaint idea of simply not creating so much crap in the first place.

"All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection, except for the problem of too many layers of indirection."

benologist
Iterating without a destination in mind. Assigning people to work on something vs finish it. This is in stark contrast to games which get released, get stabilized, and stop development. This model would suit a lot of software aside from security or dependencies necessitating updates but if we want we can just iterate forever.
j79
I’m always amused when the frameworks being used advertise things like “We make coding fun!”

I tend to think “but what about making the web enjoyable for the end user?”

Aeolun
The end user is paid to deal with whatever we provide them.

But more importantly, the fact that the page loads 2 seconds longer is a drop in the bucket compared to the insane processes our business people dream up.

tmh88j
>I’m always amused when the frameworks being used advertise things like “We make coding fun!”

I understand where they're coming from having dealt with a few legacy frameworkless spaghetti code bases that have no documentation. Give me bad code to maintain in a known framework over bad code without a framework anyday. Adding features and debugging in those conditions are no fun at all.

ummonk
I love the power of modern web apps built using modern frameworks. I hate that ordinary content websites decide they need to be built using such frameworks.
boring_twenties
Secondary? If only. It's more like not even considered at all.
mistersys
I understand where this is coming from, however whenever I interact with a app that re-loads the whole window on every major interaction, I start getting frustrated because of the jarring, slow transitions, most modern web apps are faster after the initial page load, albiet on my 15" 2018 MacBook Pro.

Stop blaming the modern web. There are plenty of slow PHP and rails sites and plenty of slow React based sites. Of course speed is second priority, I'd much rather have users using my app with a mediocre experience than nobody using my app. However, as the web supports more tooling and frameworks continue to evolve towards web assembly, I believe will start to have web apps approaching native speed.

The reality is that requiring a server to render every page limits what you can do with your app. Even if modern tooling is overused, developers will always move towards what allows you to do more.

I'd much rather focus on making modern tooling faster than complaining about the modern web.

zanny
You can have a very tiny website with custom onclicks to load / change elements via callbacks. The bloat of JS frameworks to do everything including generate the actual HTML client side is totally separate from having dynamic page content.

I always strive to keep the client side stupid. I should be sending as much of the final document as possible from the server and any interactivity needed should also produce as little work for the client as possible.

muzani
Honestly, with modern things like Webpack, minify/uglify, CDNs, web speed should be much better on low bandwidth sites compared to the past.
Aeolun
My parcel with a fairly simple app spits out a 10MB release build. We still have some way to go.
jdnenej
How many libraries did you add? Last I checked the major ones were about 1mb
Aeolun
I think the AWS library is pretty insane.
dwheeler
It depends on how you use it. Size matters. On a site I manage, we send about 64KB of JavaScript and we are working to make that smaller... and the main site functionality works when JavaScript is disabled.

In contrast, many sites seem to think that 1MB of JavaScript, or even 5MB, are acceptable, and they can't even show simple static content when client-side JavaScript is disabled. On a slow link, 1MB of JavaScript means that the user has probably given up. And it's not just the size. 200KB of HTML is far far faster than 200KB of JavaScript; web browsers are highly optimized for handling HTML, while processing JavaScript is necessarily much slower. JavaScript is great for some things, but like a sledgehammer it's not always the best solution. Too many people aren't considering the real end-user experience. "Pretty graphics, but it takes 5 minutes to download" is usually not a worthwhile tradeoff.

To paraphrase Goldblum:

Your web designers were so preoccupied with whether or not they could use JavaScript, they didn’t stop to think if they should.

andrepd
To a certain extent, it's developers serving themselves, not the user. Your job is not to show off the latest frameworkify.js and get internet points when you blog about it. It's also not to make your life easier (like by including a 1MB js library that saves an afternoon of your time). It's to make the user's life better. Just do your damn job! \end{rant}
userbinator
Unfortunately I suspect a lot of the decisions are driven by resume-padding, which is itself a phenomenon started by management who has no idea of the implications of using $latest_web_tech beyond the fact that it's "new and modern" asking for use of the dozen latest frameworks for everything they do.

If the companies hiring web devs changed their mindset and listing a dozen different frameworks on your resume was perceived as the negative trendchasing architecture-astronauts that such developers often turn out to be (at least in my experience), and valued simple JS skills and experience instead, I suspect websites would end up being a lot different than they are today.

scarface74
If HR departments wouldn’t set hard limits on percentage raises that are allowed and then hire new developers at market rates causing salary compression and inversion, developers wouldn’t have to be constantly on the look out for their next job and always stay focused on Resume Driven Development.
jdnenej
Saving an afternoon of your time means spending an afternoon working on more things the user wants. With that logic we should be writing web apps in pure assembly to shave off as much loading time as possible despite the fact that in the time you could have built the whole application, you are still working on the login page.
[dead] dymk
DAE javascript is bad???
meowface
100% agreed. A dark mode option would be cool, but it's very easy to get one with user themes and alternative UIs.

I bet HN will look almost identical 10 years from now, too. I wonder how many popular websites can boast such a consistent design from their beginning?

turrini
There should be an extension that automatically redirects common websites to their lite versions.

reddit.com -> old.reddit.com

facebook.com -> mbasic.facebook.com

cnn.com -> lite.cnn.com

npr.org -> text.npr.org

twitter.com -> twitter.com (with JS disabled)

gmail.com -> gmail.com (HTML version)

wasdfff
There’s a couple for reddit at least. For some of the others you can get by with a bookmark, so typing facebook would take you to your mobile site bookmark.
NullPrefix
>gmail.com -> gmail.com (HTML version)

gmail used to have an option to set HTML as default, but it seems like it's gone.

Only way to get HTML is to click on a link that's available during loading, nothing in the settings to make it permanent.

Wowfunhappy
You can definitely make it permanent, it's permanent on my account. Can't remember what I did now...
NullPrefix
Generate enough outcry on social media?
forsakenharmony
After you've clicked on it, there's a bar at the top with an option to "Set basic HTML as default view"
NullPrefix
s/there's/there was/

It's gone. That's why I'm posting about it.

sus_007
It still displays "Load basic HTML (for slow connections)" at the right bottom section of the loading page. :/
NullPrefix
Yes it does. Like I said in my first comment, I have to click it every time I load gmail, because "Set basic HTML as default view" is gone.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
waterhouse
Just use this as your bookmark: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/
longtom
For anyone interested, I just put together a userscript with some rudimentary key assignments for the Basic HTML version of Gmail:

https://pastebin.com/raw/kHyZXcTY

    gi    Go to inbox
    gk    Go to first label inbox
    t     Toggle checkbox of current mail
    mr    Mark checked mails as read
    mu    Mark checked mails as unread
    k     Navigate up in mail list (shift twice as fast)
    j     Navigate down in mail list
    h     Go to older mail(s)
    l     Go to newer mail(s)
    Enter Open mail
    r     Reload
    b     Back
    n     New mail
sundarurfriend
Thanks a lot! This was the only thing I missed from the JS version, but it wasn't worth the slowdown/heaviness that that version brought with it. Now this gives me the best of both worlds.
boring_twenties
Twitter is barely usable with JS disabled. Any time you follow a link to it you'll get a worthless interstitial "would you like to proceed to legacy twitter??" with only one button: "Yes." As of recently, if you have cookies disabled for their domain as well you'll end up in a redirect loop and never be able to see the 140 characters of text.

*As for reddit though, if you log in with an account you can set it to always use old reddit in preferences.

dredmorbius
No, you can set "Use new Reddit as my default experience ". At the bottom of the page, "beta options".

https://old.reddit.com/prefs/

There is no "always use old reddit"

boring_twenties
Hmm, it always shows me old reddit when I log in. I just tried logging out, got new reddit, then old reddit again as soon as I logged back in.

Are you saying you have that checkbox you pointed out unchecked, and still get new reddit by default?

dredmorbius
I navigate directly to old Reddit. However if links within Reddit (in comments, sidebars, wikis) specify the full domain, I end up at new reddit.

I basically never ever want to be there. I've specifically not enabled JS for 'www.reddit.com' so that the site won't load, but I still have to fix URLs manually when directed there.

What I'd like is for any 'www.reddit.com' I encounter on the site to be rewritten to 'old.reddit.com'.

ttctciyf
I log in to www.reddit.com, and have the "use new reddit" box unchecked. Anytime I click a link to reddit (including np.reddit links) it honours my preference of avoiding new reddit (checked just now by a quick reddit search on site:reddit.com)

So maybe this is a misfeature on old.reddit.com, or you don't have the box unchecked?

dredmorbius
As an example: visiting the Ask Historian's wiki in Old, all the links redirect to New.

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/index

mminer237
If you uncheck that box though, you will always be taken to old Reddit unless you specifically go to new.reddit.com
noirscape
It's _meant_ to do that, but from personal experience (and one that from what I've seen others share), keeping old Reddit enabled is extremely finnicky (apparently it's an issue with the way their server handles the old/new check) and it'll randomly switch to new Reddit.

I personally wound up using an extension[1] to keep old Reddit active, which so far has taken care of the weird behavior.

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/nl/firefox/addon/old-reddit-redir...

userbinator
twitter.com -> m.twitter.com appears to be the mobile, non-JS version. (I don't use it to tweet, but I get linked to it to read some things sometimes, and that functionality works fine.)
boring_twenties
Hm, so maybe all I need is an extension to rewrite twitter links to the mobile version. Will look into, thanks!
Springtime
The current workaround to those issues for Twitter (while it still lasts) is to set the user agent to Opera 12. To handle that for Vivaldi/Chromium I use a nice little user agent extension [1] that allows auto UA switching based on domain.

[1] https://github.com/eminentspoon/chrome-extension-useragent

iforgotpassword
Might work with internet explorer too. On ie11 mobile I always instantly get the static twitter page. Loads way faster than the modern Js version on my note 7 which has four times the ram and twice as many CPU cores. It's both hilarious and sad.
peruvian
Funny thing is that I'm pretty sure CNN Lite is a server-rendered React app, or was at some point.
wtallis
On Firefox I use Redirector: http://einaregilsson.com/redirector/

I have it set up to handle Reddit and Wikipedia. News sites and Twitter don't get to run JS thanks to NoScript, so I usually don't have to do anything extra to get a lightweight experience there.

waterhouse
+1 for Redirector. I eventually got sufficiently sick of www.reddit.com that I searched for solutions and ultimately chose Redirector to replace it with old.reddit.com. It lets you use either a "wildcard" or a "regex"-type match; I chose the former, and this is what I've been running:

  Redirect:
  *//www.reddit.com/*
  to:
  $1//old.reddit.com/$2
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
siruncledrew
Switcheroo Redirector for Chrome has worked for me to redirect amazon.com links to smile.amazon.com
Nition
reddit.com -> old.reddit.com -> i.reddit.com
ttctciyf
Well volunteered! You can add:

* amp link -> non-amp version of same link

while you're at it, please!

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
momokoko
I personally believe this is one of the couple reason why HN's demographic is significantly on the older side, in Tech terms.

I personally wish HN attracted a bit of a fresher, younger crowd as the conversation here has become more stale over the last few years.

wolco
I wish there were more preteens and teens on the site. By the time someone reaches 20 their ideas are a little stale shaped by the harsh realities of life.
inetknght
On the other hand, such demographic often comes with a lot of drama
capitalsigma
I think that comment was sarcasm.
thekyle
Think so? I didn't get that feel, but it can be tough to tell sometimes.
saagarjha
I have found that many people online are not necessarily forthcoming with their age. Hacker News might have more people of that demographic than you think it does.
test1235
it is possible to redesign something without adding tons of useless guff - stuff does need updating eventually, even if it isn't technically broken e.g. inline styles and spacer gifs.

I'd argue that having simpler markup and some sane, well-designed css would enhance performance further.

Deimorz
This is a good post about how bad the modern web is getting for people with slow/unreliable connections: https://danluu.com/web-bloat/

That was written two and a half years ago now, and things have only continued to get worse since then.

ganonm
One issue I find on mobile with HN is accidentaly hiding or flagging articles. It's very easy to do considering how close together flag, hide and comments are.
guelo
My only request would be better comment formatting options, the code block thing is used wrong all the time.
gomox
Came in to find the obligatory blockquote markup request.
rahidz
On the other hand voting is a pain on mobile, even with a large screen I often misclick.
psteinweber
Leave alone collapsing comment threads. I end up on the commenters profile 50% of the time.
rossdavidh
I'm currently living in a country and city with high speed internet, and I would also like to thank all who are responsible, for not trying to 'fix' what isn't broken.
buboard
i love how tables are now more responsive than responsive. HN skipped an entire generation of jumpy websites and is now comfortably readable in every screen
wffurr
I love how fast and simple HN is. I wish the touch targets were bigger on mobile. Shouldn't be too hard with just a little CSS
lousken
I had to use 64kbps internet on vacation for last couple of years, it's rough but it's possible. RSS everything and then use Inoreader mobile and read it there. Unfortunately more and more websites use javascript for content and that breaks the mobile version loader (it can parse text from mobile version and show it to you). But stupid webdevs make even even blogs and galleries via javascript so it often says that it cannot render mobile version. I hope google will eventaully return to non-js content and pagerank of those sites will fall down significantly.
meerita
You still can improve HN performance a lot and get better results on low connections.
garysahota93
I've thought about making my own extension to make HN more "modern" but when I sat down to make it better, turns out I was really happy with how it is. Agree with what you're saying!