Ask HN: Why is hacker news still stuck with an ugly UI?

2 points by jaseemabid ↗ HN
A lot of smart people use this everyday. There are a lot of alternate CSS versions also. Why not something that looks good? And the layout still uses tables!

6 comments

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Other than the orange whats wrong with it? Funny how the good stuff on a site is always done when the site is simple and plain looking. I think it should be made uglier, maybe the pinheads will go away then.
Could have a fluid layout covering the full screen. Better typography, The gray background for the complete page and not for a patch on the screen. No orange and a lot more simple changes like that can make it look beautiful
What are you talking about? The UI on this site is wonderful.
Primarily (i believe) because those of us perusing hacker news care about the content with as little fluff or ui distractions. Many of us (grey-beards particularly) are still preferential to old style ansi colour typesets on a plain (non pure-white/non pure-black) background.

The layout makes quick work of scanning for interesting articles, seeing which have a slew of comments and what not. It is and always has been about the content and never about the flashy appearance (lack thereof). It is functional in its simplicity. This is why I still end up using freshnews.org (and have for over 12 years) as a news aggregator site. Simple, Clean, very muted use of colours and shapes. I find what I want quickly because I value my time, even when slacking.

The use of tables has no impact that I can see on the appearance of the site, unless you view the site over, say, telnet.

And I for one do not find the site ugly. I find most other sites ugly. :-)

I personally use the "HackerNew" extension on Google Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/lgoghlndihpmbbgmbp...

it makes the layout/styles a lot nicer and adds some useful features such as:

- Improved readability design

- Super fast inline replies

- Quick profiles with social network info when hovering over usernames

- Filtering of stories based on terms and phrases / domain or user

- Endless scrolling

- Collapsible comment threads

- Social sharing for Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Buffer