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Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News

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Re: Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News

#181

Post by nothrabannosir »

ezequiel-garzon wrote: post #74
_ps6d wrote: post #57

HN is lightweight in some ways, but also quite bad in others. For example, every single time you vote on anything, the site sends back a 302 redirect and then a copy of the entire page's HTML in response. This means that every vote results in a response that's usually around 10KB gzipped. As of right now, for me, voting on any comment in this thread currently causes a 14KB response and takes about 1.3 seconds to fini…

I assume you have JavaScript disabled, right? If so, can you give an example of a similar webpage that doesn’t reload the whole page to reflect your vote?

No this is about JS enabled. It's the same endpoint. Open dev console and have a look.

Re: Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News

#183

Post by _ps6d »

18pfsmt wrote: post #133
DC-3 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since he's probably too modest to mention it himself, the user you're replying to is the founder of the news aggregator and forum site Tildes [1] which is pretty much the gold standard of modern forum site design imho. If anyone has the right to make this comment it's him. [1] https://tildes.net

>which is pretty much the gold standard of modern forum site design Wait, what? >open-source link aggregator with no ads or tracking (currently in invite-only alpha) HN is over 12 years old and much larger. Suggesting an alpha-level service is the "gold standard" is pure hyperbole. I'm not familiar with the founder, so I am not making any judgement; and, I support the basic premise of their project.

I think they were just talking about the design. HN is certainly a lot more active and successful overall, but it's extremely minimal for both design and functionality (which is part of its appeal).

Tildes's design has a lot more to it, including better responsiveness for mobile use, a built-in theme system with multiple themes (including dark ones), full markdown (CommonMark/"GitHub Flavored Markdown") support, syntax highlighting for code, etc. There are lots of aspects of it that would be nice to have on HN.

Re: Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News

#184

Post by superkuh »

boring_twenties wrote: post #94

For reddit, try old.reddit.com, or you can set your account to always use old in preferences. It's not as clean as hn, but way better than "new" reddit. (I use it even on my fast connection.)

It's not worth it given the censorship but if you encounter some answer on reddit via a search and want to access it the best way is through http://ceddit.com/r/whateverurlpath . It's even more javascript but it's the only interface left that both looks and acts like the original.

Re: Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News

#187

Post by Aeolun »

j79 wrote: post #40
exabrial wrote: post #17

I loathe the modern web. Speed is a secondary to "hey look what we're doing with our frameworks".

I’m always amused when the frameworks being used advertise things like “We make coding fun!” I tend to think “but what about making the web enjoyable for the end user?”

The end user is paid to deal with whatever we provide them.

But more importantly, the fact that the page loads 2 seconds longer is a drop in the bucket compared to the insane processes our business people dream up.

Re: Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News

#188

Post by Aeolun »

muzani wrote: post #153
exabrial wrote: post #17

I loathe the modern web. Speed is a secondary to "hey look what we're doing with our frameworks".

Honestly, with modern things like Webpack, minify/uglify, CDNs, web speed should be much better on low bandwidth sites compared to the past.

My parcel with a fairly simple app spits out a 10MB release build. We still have some way to go.

Re: Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News

#189

Post by ollerac »

dmarlow wrote: post #101

I love hearing stories about people choosing to forego large frontend frameworks, or even not using JS altogether. Is there a community or name for this? If not, I'm going to call it #neverscript. I find the web works far better, more often, for me when SPAs and JS aren't used. There's something about minimalistic sites that's very appealing to me. I know it doesn't work for all sites, but a lot of the web could be i…

> The web is a bloated, over-engineered mess. The Lean Web is a set of principles for a simpler, faster world-wide web.

https://leanweb.dev/

Re: Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News

#190

Post by manigandham »

zeta0134 wrote: post #145
_ps6d wrote: post #57

HN is lightweight in some ways, but also quite bad in others. For example, every single time you vote on anything, the site sends back a 302 redirect and then a copy of the entire page's HTML in response. This means that every vote results in a response that's usually around 10KB gzipped. As of right now, for me, voting on any comment in this thread currently causes a 14KB response and takes about 1.3 seconds to fini…

Okay quick thought exercise. HN doesn't use a react framework and is quite lightweight on clientside JavaScript. How many upvotes does it take using this system before the total data size transmitted (original page + modifications) is, in sum total, larger than a fresh load of, say, Twitter? The reality is that for the bulk of users, votes are an uncommon interaction; most of us are here to read the articles and view…

It's nothing more than an extra header or query param to denote an AJAX request. Then the server can respond with an empty 200/204 status code instead of the entire HTML page. It's an hour of work and would actually save resources. None of this requires a front-end framework.
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