Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News

Modern front-end toolsets are finally starting to address this by using automated critical css, SSR + "hydrating" on load for interactive elements, webpack treeshaking + chunking of assets into tiny js/css files and only loading code based on what the page/routes asks for, PurgeCSS to get rid of unused css, cssnano/uglify/htmlmin/imagemin, etc. Webpack and these various popular tools has done a lot to make the web better and are default in many starter kits. But we're just beginning to see it go mainstream.

The basic shift back to pre-rendering + delivering only what's needed on the actual page is a big deal which hasn't got enough attention yet IMO. We went completely in the other direction for over a decade because we thought networks and browsers could handle it, but it was too easy to abuse and mobile took over.

There's no reason even very advanced websites can't load quickly, without having to fully compromise back to the 90s non-interactive websites.

News sites and marketing teams still ruin it regardless with all the crap they add on top. But it's far far better than loading a giant blob of 20 jquery libraries plus a big old angular.js or backbonejs app (sometimes both at the same time) encompassing a whole site in one file, even though you just wanted to visit the contact page.

I also blame Themeforest type developers because they're still stuck in the "let's add a hundred JS files so I can parallax and animate two divs" mindset.

There should be an extension that automatically redirects common websites to their lite versions.

reddit.com -> old.reddit.com

facebook.com -> mbasic.facebook.com

cnn.com -> lite.cnn.com

npr.org -> text.npr.org

twitter.com -> twitter.com (with JS disabled)

gmail.com -> gmail.com (HTML version)

I've seen posts by PG in some recent threads out in the wild, they don't show up in his post history. I would imagine this is intentional to prevent old comments being dredged up and used against him, much like Zuckerberg's old FB messages were automatically deleted from the recipients inbox.

Fine by me, but I wish HN would offer the same privilege to its users and allow us to delete our old posts

it is possible to redesign something without adding tons of useless guff - stuff does need updating eventually, even if it isn't technically broken e.g. inline styles and spacer gifs.

I'd argue that having simpler markup and some sane, well-designed css would enhance performance further.