Ask HN: Is it a strength that HN's UI has not changed over many years?
It also seems with older sites like HN and online bulletin boards, content can be bookmarked, and it's easier to correspond with users on a more regular basis. I think the most frustrating trend on modern sites and apps is that content I want to see simply disappears into a sea of other things I don't want to see, and that searching to find that content is futile, as results are often gamified and spammed into oblivion.
I miss IRC now, I miss bulletin boards despite all the flaws, I miss old school web sites that had the same content in the same place even after hitting refresh.
In my opinion, traditionally highly effective, favorable, and functional user-experience-based design has been thrown out the window lately as a trend; apps now are very often geared towards tracking, sponsored post placement, and profit/revenue optimization goals, rather than towards creating favorable user experiences.
It makes me wonder (despite some issues of course) if HN is still one of the best places to communicate and post serious matters BECAUSE it's UI/UX hasn't changed (In major ways) for many years?
118 comments
[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 202 ms ] threadBut as a whole, and particularly on desktop, the signal-to-noise ratio for this site is so high that it naturally attracts a certain type of technologically-conservative, nonsense-resistant developer, I think.
Yes. The site is fast, using it is fast, the information is clear. It performs the function it sets out to perform very well.
Is it a strength that the feature set (mostly) hasn't changed?
Yes and no. It's mostly a good feature set for me, but I know plenty of people who don't use HN, and who could potentially be in the target market. HN does not need to grow, but the realities of business is that most companies do need to (HN obviously not a company itself), and so it is generally good for new users that features are changing in order to grow as the product is theoretically more applicable to them.
There's another aspect that you touch on with the algorithmic timeline argument. Services we use are becoming smarter, and for the most part people like this. Search is a good example of this, HN's search is basic keyword-based search, and I find it practically unusable because I don't always know the right keywords. A significantly smarter version, of the calibre that FAANG style companies could put out, would be great! Of course it would take more effort than it's worth for this user base to create it because investment like that only makes sense at scale.
Elasticsearch would be a good fit for this, and it's such a delight to use, once you understand how it works. Just tweak some parameters, and you get a fast search engine with immensely useful features like stemming, parameter ranking, and so on. It's one of those things that I love to use on client sites because it makes me look like more of a genius than I really am.
Please let me keep simple word search.
Well… yes… I mean, you could probably make that causing a hit with some stemming if you wanted to, but that seems like reasonable behavior to me.
If you meant to give an example more along the lines of "singer" and "singing" not matching, again, that's a job for stemming. The feature is there; it just needs to be enabled.
A simple String.contains() gets you there, and that is the behaviour of grep, and most tools behaved that way too in the past (and still do, if they don't use ES).
> The feature is there; it just needs to be enabled.
It's not enabled in Discord (afaik uses ES), Slack (afaik uses ES?) nor Kibana (ES). What use is a feature if it's never used?
I'm sure there's plenty good things you can do with elasticsearch, but the things I use daily that use it are absolutely infuriating.
Matching "foocompany.com" from "company.com" can be achieved with a wildcard or fuzzy search. If you specify an exact match then that's what you get.
The accuracy of results (In cases like HN search) is inherently flawed with unstructured data in mission critical settings unless there is an intentionally limited set of resources and contributors... Limiting contributors and resources also often defeats the purpose of maintaining a wide variety of accurate and diverse resources and results.
It looks like redirecting the search to "site:news.ycombinator.com" does leverage their individual search results instead of going to algolia.com, so that's still an option.
Facebook search is abysmal
Amazon search is (now) abysmal (bloated with promoted shit)
Netflix search is... kinda ok? (but rarely use it)
Apple I'm not familiar with.
Google search is the best we've got, and these days is also pretty shit a lot of the time. (https://searchengineland.com/google-search-quality-crisis-27...)
Your opinion on algorithmic timelines and engagement-driven search ("that FAANG style companies could put out") are diametrically opposite than mine. HN search is fine, thanks.
Most users do not know, and algorithmic timelines can optimise out content people don't want. At least in theory, there are obviously bad examples.
[1]: https://hn.algolia.com/
Why miss them? They all still exist. I constantly have my IRC client open and connected to about two dozen channels on Libera (only about five that I actively monitor). Non-Reddit forums for various topics exist too, though, granted, not quite in the quantity that they used to.
I think that's part of what I'm referring to with that as well.
A dating app that starts with some form of topical (text based open group chat) IRC feature (shot text posts) would likely be a wise move in this current day and time... Or even a twitter clone based on dating profiles... hrmmm.... :P
- it is fast! Fast UI is inportant for people nkt bring annkyed.
- it only uses a small set of "dynamic" features, like when upvoting, it does what is needed to show the change but not more
- the interface is not in the way, not overloaded, ...
It isn't great on mobile, but way better than many sites who try to grab your attention all the time
People often _declare_ they care. But rarely support it with money or actions.
Would you join some random forum just for the great UX? I guess not.
Would you leave HN if design became worse? I don’t believe you would.
my first impression of HN was “are you serious?! Back to 90s??” But I got used to it and it’s fine now.
You just have to be super careful when updating to not overwrite your style changes... hah.
However there are some things that could improve.
For example, in text posts (like this one), the font color is a relatively light grey which has rather bad contrast. Also, my mind is trained to ignore grey comments since those are usually quite downvoted so I have a hard time focusing on the text post.
Twitter's UI has been terrible for years, but access to real time content is their only saving grace left in my opinion.
If only YouTube would stop trying to twist up their layout and create an alternate content view with skip/ffwd controls and better recommendation methods (like sticking within consistent music genres properly) I think they'd have something better. They simply have too much content (ad too much low effort content) now to still be using their old/linear play recommendation methods.
A cookie banner is only needed it there are extra cookies for other purposes other than site-functionality, or are collected by third party sites/scripts.
SO many sites threw up the banner by default when the law was initially brought it because it was easier then trying to work out if it was needed or not.
Please stop perpetuating the myth that good actors require cookie banners.
EU/non-EU citizen here. This is a well meaning regulation. However, it is difficult to implement technically. How do you structure a conversation where a critical participant has said they want to be forgotten. Is it enough - practically, ethically/morally, legally - to change the byline on their posts? What if there was additional identifying information? Can you hack the conversation to pieces without destroying the experience for others? What about historical reference?
As a citizen in any society, in general, I believe that people should stand by their behavior and its consequences. That's what being an adult is. It's also positive to have spaces without or with reduced surveillance, but retroactively removing public discussion is quite another thing. If we muffle that, what do we have left? Certainly not a strong basis for public thought, historical inquiry, or truth.
We've also learned that any legal loophole is abused by PR companies for rich people/companies with expensive lawyers. I fear that adding this sort of thing outside the EU would quickly lead to systemic abuse.
It would be handy to have a way to collapse from the top most comment easily from wherever you've scrolled down into the guts of the thread.
It lacks in 'communicate' part
> post serious matters
That depends on whom you talk, not the UX, though yes, there is an overlap
> highly effective, favorable, and functional
The right question is the half of the answer. Half of it is 'and profit/revenue optimization goals'
Still wishing for official support for dark mode, though.
As I age, Dark Mode is the one thing saving my eyes on many of the sites I regularly frequent... Actually, I think reading bright monitors has irreversibly damaged my vision a lot over time.
I shouldn't have to use a browser plug-in to manually tweak CSS on sites like old Reddit FFS, it's really annoying to constantly have to view painfully bright sites online. It's a relatively easy option that all sites (that make money) should implement STAT.
Any surface outside in the sun is orders of magnitude brighter than your monitor and yet it doesn’t hurt to look at.
Monitors are right in front of our eyes. I probably wouldn't hurt looking a tree or hill, or anything that is outside because they are at a distance. And of course you aren't going to stare at them for long periods of time.
Staring at monitors/screens is different.
Personally I live in the jungle in a tropical climate. Dark mode allows me to sit on my balcony with my computer at night. Light mode is like pointing a flashlight towards your face and "millions" of mosquitos arrives.
It gets dark around here at 6:30 pm and it is impossible for me to use a computer with a light theme at night.
Guess there is no size that fits all.
- dark mode - comment reply notification (yes, I know there are third party work around a here)
citation needed.
Other than that, I would love to see a bit better semantic markup, not because I'm some sort of HTML purist who demands everything to be pure, but because it would make it easier to style with CSS (which I did, to add dark mode, bigger font sizes and max widths). Currently, it's nested tables with occasional classes and ids, but not for everything.
Now to try and get it to run on iPadOS
It would be a mistake to do what most link aggregators have done in the past, and burn the whole thing down to do a complete redesign from scratch (cf. Reddit, Digg).
If the tendency is to do the latter, I'd prefer HN did nothing instead.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnVeysllPDI
Is there a reason you can't use a browser that has a built-in dark mode? I use "Samsung Internet Browser Beta" on Android because it has a dark mode, as well as good ad blocking. Might there be a comparable solution that would meet your needs?