The UI of Hacker News Is Perfect

I'd say it is perfectly functional. Far from perfect in terms of design.

There have been minor improvements over the years, but just like other products with a long history, change becomes ever more expensive.

The UI doesn't have anything to do with it. Hacker News is heavily moderated by smart people, that's why it's a nice place to visit. A poorly moderated HN would turn the site into influence-spamming hellscape like Quora.

Amazon.com is the ugliest e-commerce site going, but they aren't worried about losing visitors to Wayfair.com, because they're not competing on looks.

Same thing with HN, they are not in direct competition with any other site. The high quality of discussions (thanks to moderation) helps the site show up in search engines, which is how most people discover it.

There are lots of alternative front-ends to HN, those are personal projects and not done to try to boost HN traffic, just to improve the UX for regular visitors. For example I use a browser extension that adds additional menu items to the HN orange bar, like "shownew".

The reason a wider audience doesn't come here is that this site is called "Hacker News", it's attached to a subdomain of a Silicon Valley startup incubator most people have never heard of, only a few people ever discuss it outside this forum, and most of those people are complaining about it when they do.

The audience here has definitely grown over the years, but like any niche subreddit the reason the unwashed masses don't flock here is simply because they don't know about this place, and if they did, they wouldn't care, or they would be turned away by its reputation.

And TBH the way people here sometimes fetishize this forum's layout is kind of creepy.

> I realize now, that one of the important factors that keep HN's audience selective is its simple UI.

Well... https://xkcd.com/552/

> it may start to attract a wider audience which certainly is not the intent of this platform.

Web sites on the front page are regularly collapsing under the load of visitors emanating from this place.

You are not part of a small elite club

Speaking of the perfectness of the HN UI, the text size is very small on mobile. I assume this must be deliberate for some reason - maybe to put people off using it on their phones :)?

less is more strikes again

Definitely not perfect. The default "collapse comment" buttons being right-aligned is pure insanity, IMO. They should be left-aligned so they're all in line with each other as you scroll down the page, so you barely have to move your mouse.

Fortunately this extension[1] takes care of that.

[1] https://github.com/insin/hn-comments-owl/

Also, proper hyperlink support in comments would be appreciated.

  .togg { float:left; margin-right:.5em; letter-spacing:5px; } /* Collapse button to the left and larger */

Yes, I agree with this, the UI design is very good. I can uses it using many browsers even lynx when necessary.

Plus as others indicated, there does seem to be any "nastiness" here.

What really bugs me nowadays is lack of dark mode support on HN. Quite many websites Will autodetect it when I turn dark mode on on my phone, but for some reason HN refuses to do that. It seems like a no-brainer feature to autodetect it.

I think HN’s success is a mix of great people with incredible views and knowledge, good moderation, and the data-dense simple UI. Most social media sites and forums have a vastly lower content-to-noise ratio — all the emoji madness, UI cards for far too many things, wasted space, infinite scrolling, etc. Here you have nice threaded discussions that focus on content above shiny, blinky, noisy UI distractions. Love HN and the excellent people who share here.

I keep seeing people praising the HN UI but just can't see it. The lack of padding makes it hard to differentiate between articles. The many low contrast links below look cluttered. Not to mention how horrible the site is to use on mobile.

You should try mailing lists…jokes aside, I wish the up/down votes would be more touch friendly. Too many accidental votes. At the same time I wish they could store my written comments in local storage until I submit it. Sadly scrolling up too far on iOS or closing the wrong tab happens seldom. A simple onchange callback would be enough. I wouldn't mind some minimal KISS improvements…

One aspect I really don't like is the slot-machine mechanic of mixing yesterday's (or day before's) top stories with today's trending stories. That makes me re-read so many titles, looking for that dopamine hit of something new and interesting. I like many have made a front-end that serves my own purpose and lists stories in reverse chronological order, only showing stories that made the cutoff of 'top' according to the API request.

I was hoping for a thread with a UX deep dive on the pros/cons of a simple UI vs other equivalents (Reddit, Reddit Enhancement Suite, social networks, RSS readers).

There's no way to say this is a perfect UI. We don't know if people churn because of the experience, or drop off because it's tedious. Maybe the lack of notifications is a problem? Maybe the archaic search is? Maybe the way the top items are rendered skews towards a certain type of interaction and reduces overall interactions?

It's super arbitrary to say it's perfect, or that it meets the best goals it could achieve.

As a graphic designer myself I tend to be attracted to some products because of its visual design or user interface. Case in point - I couldn't wrap my head about Reddit only until they launched their infamous redesign. It seems many people like interfaces with a huge information density, but for me it was too overwhelming - the redesign has many negative aspects but its readability/scanneability is definitely a positive one.

But that "attraction" doesn't guarantee one would keep using something, so in the end it's just a small ingredient.

Please support reader mode on iOS. Or at least fix the small fonts.

I hate the Hacker News UI. It is ugly, inaccessible, and confusing. I have some stupid Chrome extension just to make it dark mode.

I browse HN mainly on mobile and it can feel quite cluttered, definitely useable but non idempotent operations like flagging a post have no confirmation. For the most part, I think I've noticed when I've accidentally flagged a post and unflagged it, but I feel I can't agree to call the UI perfect.

It's fast, does not have ads, doesn't have layout reflows, doesn't have popups, doesn't have marketing overheaad and BS.

Those things alone would make 90% of sites better.

My god man just give us the goods!

Some buttons/links are too small for touch

Hn loading in poor network conditions is maybe it’s best modern ui feature.

I don't know about perfect. The tiny action button/links result in misclicks for me fairly often.

IMO, support for more rich comment formatting would be very beneficial.

While I would prefer if HN supported Reddit-flavored Markdown, just supporting a quoting syntax would probably provide 50% of the benefit.

The important thing the HN UI gets right is letting people quickscan vast amounts of information to find what is interesting/relevant for them together with an instant sense what the rest of room thinks.

It all goes downhill from there, but hitting that goldilocks zone where people can drink from the firehose without getting whacked is an undeniable accolade.

The UI of "modern social platforms" doen not optimise matching these impendances, thats why their users brains are fried.