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HN: The Good Parts (2016)

danluu.com

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Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)

#31

Post by PaulHoule »

sgeisenh wrote: post #20
treebog wrote: post #9

I sometimes wonder how HN’s audience is shaped by the site’s deliberate inaccessibility to visually impaired people. I suspect it is one part of the site’s tilt toward the younger crowd

Maybe this is my inexperience with front-end design keeping a11y in mind: what about HN is inaccessible for visually impaired people? It is mostly plain-text so it is easy to resize. There is some low-contrast text but that can be adjusted in CSS with user styles. I haven't tried a screen reader but I imagine that it would work reasonably well. All not to mention that there are HN RSS feeds, so the content can be con…

Right, any web page with sidebars, popups, cookie warnings, and other distraction is "not accessible" by default.

Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)

#32

Post by PaulHoule »

suprfsat wrote: post #27
creata wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the site’s deliberate inaccessibility to visually impaired people Can you expand? I naively thought that a site with markup as simple as HN's (zooming is flawless and it even works without JavaScript) would be very accessible to visually-impaired people.

Color ratio of a typical comment on this web site: https://contrast-ratio.com/#%23dddddd-on-%23f6f6ef 1.25, which is well below the minimum of 4.5

They ought to have a button to put on a high-contrast stylesheet, in fact I bet some hacker has already done it.

Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)

#33

Post by tyingq »

sgeisenh wrote: post #20
treebog wrote: post #9

I sometimes wonder how HN’s audience is shaped by the site’s deliberate inaccessibility to visually impaired people. I suspect it is one part of the site’s tilt toward the younger crowd

Maybe this is my inexperience with front-end design keeping a11y in mind: what about HN is inaccessible for visually impaired people? It is mostly plain-text so it is easy to resize. There is some low-contrast text but that can be adjusted in CSS with user styles. I haven't tried a screen reader but I imagine that it would work reasonably well. All not to mention that there are HN RSS feeds, so the content can be con…

I'm no expert, but the comment threading and indentation using table cells and spacer gifs doesn't seem like it would be straightforward for a screen reader.

Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)

#34

Post by PaulHoule »

lewisflude wrote: post #19
treebog wrote: post #9

I sometimes wonder how HN’s audience is shaped by the site’s deliberate inaccessibility to visually impaired people. I suspect it is one part of the site’s tilt toward the younger crowd

I mean, the site scales really well with browser size, default font size etc. I'd argue the real inaccessibility is lack of images, and general "boring" vibe that puts off entire demographics who post the type of content that might not be welcome here.

I think a large number of people are unaware that you can scale web pages up with Ctrl -, Ctrl +, particularly older people who complain that "text is too small".

Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)

#36

Post by PaulHoule »

anotha1 wrote: post #13
treebog wrote: post #9

I sometimes wonder how HN’s audience is shaped by the site’s deliberate inaccessibility to visually impaired people. I suspect it is one part of the site’s tilt toward the younger crowd

Interesting thought. I'm wondering how effective non-text would be? Personally, text is my preferred medium for any non-simple communication.

I know teens who do it all on Tik-Tok.

Marshall McLuhan was right to point out that "television" would erode the need for people to read and write.

Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)

#37

Post by the_af »

nickthemagicman wrote: post #6

"HN comments are horrible." Proceeds to list pages of awesome comments. Claims topics he's informed about have mostly wrong comments. Doesn't give any examples. HN comments are a conversation/discussion not a contest of who is right/wrong, and it's great to have differing viewpoints as long as those views don't degrade into logical fallacies like ad hominem, ,anecdotal, or others. There are way less logical fallacies…

I don't think that is a fair reading of danluu's post. It is titled "the good parts", after all. And did you read the closing paragraphs?

> "[...] Having flamebait drop off the front page quickly is significant, but it doesn’t seem sufficient to explain why there are so many more well-informed comments on HN than on other forums with roughly similar traffic."

> "Maybe the answer is that people come to HN for the same reason people come to Silicon Valley -- despite all the downsides, there’s a relatively large concentration of experts there across a wide variety of CS-related disciplines. If that’s true, and it’s a combination of path dependence on network effects, that’s pretty depressing since that’s not replicable."

So he does consider HN successful, he is merely pointing out that the gems are infrequent (though more frequent than on, say, Reddit), and that most comments are uninformed or wrong.

If you read anything from danluu's site, you'll see he is not really an "echo chamber" kind of guy.

PS: I've seen plenty of illogical, flat-out wrong and anecdotical comments on HN to know they are the norm rather than the exception. This doesn't preclude the existence of real gems, like danluu points out.

Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)

#38

Post by anotha1 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #36
anotha1 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting thought. I'm wondering how effective non-text would be? Personally, text is my preferred medium for any non-simple communication.

I know teens who do it all on Tik-Tok. Marshall McLuhan was right to point out that "television" would erode the need for people to read and write.

That reminds me of people who "learn it all on YouTube."

Maybe it's the best option for some people. Not for me, but I do love an audible book.

In conclusion, I think these other mediums simply lack the iterations that we've put into text over the centuries, leaving text as the clear winner in my book.

Re: HN: The Good Parts (2016)

#39

Post by lukastyrychtr »

tyingq wrote: post #33
sgeisenh wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe this is my inexperience with front-end design keeping a11y in mind: what about HN is inaccessible for visually impaired people? It is mostly plain-text so it is easy to resize. There is some low-contrast text but that can be adjusted in CSS with user styles. I haven't tried a screen reader but I imagine that it would work reasonably well. All not to mention that there are HN RSS feeds, so the content can be con…

I'm no expert, but the comment threading and indentation using table cells and spacer gifs doesn't seem like it would be straightforward for a screen reader.

Agreed, making the divs article tags or adding an article role would help, but personally, as a blind user, i don't care as much, the content is interesting enough that it's not a big deal. You can deduce the tree structure anyway, at least most of the time.
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