Show HN: A UI That Lets Readers Control How Much Information They See

> My initial impression is that the ROI does not justify the effort.

> It depends on how strongly users respond to the feature, because it'll create a noticeable amount of work for writers.

The author is probably correct about the ROI not justifying the effort, but I think UI design should also be considered as an input for whether users would respond to the feature. The UI as it stands is technically functional and easy to understand, but not exactly effortless or convenient to use. In particular, there's quite a jarring difference between the modes during switch, making comparison impossible.

An inline UI next to/within the content, with some logic to ensure the nearest content to the control stays at the same scroll-position during change would help a lot with this.

e.g. Expounder (linked in a sibling comment) looks to be a much nicer UI implementation from my quick glance at it.

Regarding the significant effort for writers I have been exploring a few options as that felt like the biggest drawback for this to catch on. I think we will soon figure out ways to make it less painful which will make it totally worth it

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I would like to see some suggestions on the semantics of different levels of content detail. Because different authors could organize their articles in different ways such that it would be hard to navigate the information since there's no standard for what to expect.

Which leads to another issue which is that it doesn't really remove the hidden detail from the user's focus. There's no way to know which level of detail is correct for them. If you read and article and think "this doesn't make sense, there should be some more information" then you'd have to scroll through multiple levels (plus or minus one level) to make sure that it's the level of detail you're on and not the article that omitted that information.

And moving in between levels isn't easy either. It's not just certain sections, individual paragraphs seem to change from level to level. Which means that if you read a tldr view and you want more information, there's no way to gracefully add the new detail. You essentially have an entirely new article.

Perhaps the biggest issue is that I am not sure such a feature even if it was ironed out would be useful. I think readership detail is usually binary. Either someone wants a coarse overview, or they want the full story. I know that there are obviously exceptions like where there's a lot of fluff to a story and you wish they'd cut it out but that's typically the purpose of those articles. They're meant to be read that way. We already have things like table of contents and certain standards in writing that make navigating the details of an article pretty fast already without adding some kind of complicated ui into the mix.

I am not even sure that an author would want to put in all this effort and write an article in such a way. Writing is usually very purposeful and thinking about how to write something that makes sense at multiple levels of detail seems like it would be really troublesome.

As a side note, the background color option on their test example should not be a continuous range. The halfway value makes everything grey.