No. I think the UI here is good.
Ask HN: Is it me or HackerNews needs a better UI?
31–40 of 42 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is it me or HackerNews needs a better UI?
#32I actually really enjoy the layout. I think changing the color scheme to make it a bit easier on the eyes would certainly be an improvement.
I like the 'Stylish' chrome extension. User created (or custom) styles for any website you use regularly. I use dark themes for practically everything.
My Hacker News style is a user stylesheet "Hacker News Dark" and 1 line of additional CSS I added to reduce the lane width of the text:
.comment-tree { max-width: 600px; }
Of course you can go to town and add comic sans, etc.
Re: Ask HN: Is it me or HackerNews needs a better UI?
#33I once attended a seminar by Balaji Vishwanathan. He said in that seminar that once he had the opportunity to meet founder of HackerNews, and he asked him why he doesn't do anything about the look and feel of the site? The founder replied,"I want the site to be as ugly as possible". He implied real hackers like things ugly.
>He implied real hackers like things ugly. Maybe be likes things ugly, and believes real hackers should be like him. Either way, I think he's incorrect. Or else the people who have been complaining about the design and layout here for years aren't "real hackers."
It might be implying that "real hackers" end up doing things their own way if they want to e.g. style overrides / pwas / 3 million different hacker news feeds, etc
Re: Ask HN: Is it me or HackerNews needs a better UI?
#34HN redesign is a recurring theme but I like it how it is now! (even though 99% of my HN consumption (I'd say an average 12 hours/week) is from Premii's android app)
Re: Ask HN: Is it me or HackerNews needs a better UI?
#35HN is my favorite UI. I guess what makes some people happy makes others unhappy. For me personally "mobile" UI's suck on mobile. HN works great on mobile, for me at least. HN works great on a desktop too. One vote for the UI being great just as it is. Mobile and desktop.
The voting and hide/comment age buttons are terrible on mobile - they're far too small and close together so it's easy to accidentally press the wrong button. Nested comments are bad on mobile too, since they end up being in a column two words wide.
Re: Ask HN: Is it me or HackerNews needs a better UI?
#36I mostly use safari mobile to access HN and I've nothing to complain about. Links on mobile may not satisfy touch interface standards but oddly I get what I want most of the time when I hopelessly click.
Re: Ask HN: Is it me or HackerNews needs a better UI?
#37There's a lot to be said for the simple UI here.
As a developer I'm not looking for anything more here than the "News", "Show", "Ask", "Jobs" features and the insight via the comments.
The UX is the content. Anything more would be fluff. That's not to say that's bad, but on this site it's unnecessary.
When you look at the source of this it'd be pretty easy to build an app that grabs it and rewraps it and that could be a fun project.
Re: Ask HN: Is it me or HackerNews needs a better UI?
#38The commenting experience on mobile left me in pain. That's why I created an open-source HN app using ReactNative: https://shn.app.link/HN-ask1
Re: Ask HN: Is it me or HackerNews needs a better UI?
#39HN is my favorite UI. I guess what makes some people happy makes others unhappy. For me personally "mobile" UI's suck on mobile. HN works great on mobile, for me at least. HN works great on a desktop too. One vote for the UI being great just as it is. Mobile and desktop.
The voting and hide/comment age buttons are terrible on mobile - they're far too small and close together so it's easy to accidentally press the wrong button. Nested comments are bad on mobile too, since they end up being in a column two words wide.
The nesting of comments really bothers me too, the deeper you go into a thread, the narrower the columns.
If you're looking for an app that has solved the nested comments issue, check this out: https://shn.app.link/HN-ask2
Disclaimer: I made it, it's open source, and contributions are welcome! (Built in react native)
Re: Ask HN: Is it me or HackerNews needs a better UI?
#40One small thing that bothers me is the upvote button that looks too much like a button to (un)fold comments, especially when you can't downvote and therefore don't have any downvote button.
I just discovered that there is a [-] to (un)fold comments by the way. I would probably just have swapped the positions and use less confusing icons.
Another thing is the occasional blocks of code that are too wide and not wrapped, this requires horizontal scrolling which I find a bit annoying, especially on phones. And the text-reflow Firefox extension does not handle this, otherwise it would be a non-issue for me.
At the beginning, the appearance of HN seemed raw to me, but I got used to it and like it.