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Ask HN: Why does HN require tiny baby fingers to operate on a phone?

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Re: Ask HN: Why does HN require tiny baby fingers to operate on a phone?

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is this a serious answer or trolling? how would web experience on mobile be if i have to manually zoom everything all of the time? fact is NH on mobile web is not optimized for unknown reasons. its not a big challenge to do it either. I have a userscript that makes everything bigger and removes junk out.

there's an interesting discussion to be had here around desktop vs mobile applications/UIs. Despite the promise of the existence of a unifying paradigm I find that often technology providers pick a preference or a preference bleeds through culture (more of our QAs use this device) or by pandering to the majority user (typically phones today). In our case I imagine the culture of traditionally accessing HN through an…

>Despite the promise of the existence of a unifying paradigm I find that often technology providers pick a preference or a preference bleeds through culture

that promise was a myth. The closest we got to it was responsive design and flex boxes, which are less there because there's "one size fits all" and more because it's trying to make it less painful to tweak your page for desktop vs. mobile. Many companies fall towards the latter, so a ood 95% of the time there will be a "base design", with other platforms simply being "ports".

At the end of the day, they are two different problems, so they will have two different solutions (you know, unless we enter some Cyberpunk rennassaince where humans can grow precise stylus-like appendages). The above solutions were made because it wasn't cost effective to run two different websites perfectly optimized for their respective medium.

Re: Ask HN: Why does HN require tiny baby fingers to operate on a phone?

#92
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is this a serious answer or trolling? how would web experience on mobile be if i have to manually zoom everything all of the time? fact is NH on mobile web is not optimized for unknown reasons. its not a big challenge to do it either. I have a userscript that makes everything bigger and removes junk out.

Is there any evidence that discourse here would be improved by encouraging mobile users to slam out mobile-sized comments?

Is there evidence to the contrary?

Re: Ask HN: Why does HN require tiny baby fingers to operate on a phone?

#93
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is this a serious answer or trolling? how would web experience on mobile be if i have to manually zoom everything all of the time? fact is NH on mobile web is not optimized for unknown reasons. its not a big challenge to do it either. I have a userscript that makes everything bigger and removes junk out.

You know you can just go adjust the zoom on most browsers & it'll stick for the site, yes? On Chrome there's a "zoom" option in the drop down. HN is well optimized on mobile. It's great as is. Lot of people just bullying their opinions.

>bullying their opinions

well that's a turn of phrase I have yet to hear until this point.

Re: Ask HN: Why does HN require tiny baby fingers to operate on a phone?

#94
post #28
post #3

January 2007. Steve Jobs introduces the iPhone web browser. “And to zoom in on any page, you just drag with two fingers… like this.” The crowd goes wild. Nobody has ever seen multitouch gestures before. Still works!

That turn of events always struck me as funny too. Ironically (re. the title), I believe he even referred to the preceding standard of mobile browsing as the “baby web”. But now “responsive design” has taken over instead. Still no multitouch.

It's a shame because there very much are parts of the web that would benefit from proper multitouch support. But it's clear at some point that bespoke websites were abandoned (from a marketing and technical standpoint) by large companies in lieu of native mobile apps.

Tangent aside, HN is a site purely focused on text with no dynamic content. It really doesn't benefit from needing to zoom in and out on your phone. It's just unnecessary friction.

Re: Ask HN: Why does HN require tiny baby fingers to operate on a phone?

#95
post #33

I gladly suffer the ux for the information density. I occasionally favorite comments that I meant to flag, or vote the wrong way, but these actions are all undoable. I've never deleted a comment by mistake; there's a confirmation prompt for that.

Why not both? I don't think HN uses its space on mobile that well to begin with. You can make small tweaks to improve readability while simultaneously leaving more space to add in properly sized actions on comments.

Re: Ask HN: Why does HN require tiny baby fingers to operate on a phone?

#96
post #70

HN is not backed by a large organization/company and does not have money to employ a few people to redesign the site and make some long desired and badly needed improvements. /s While you’re complaining about link sizes, did you notice how tiny and close the voting buttons are and how bad the general accessibility of HN is? In a way, I think all this bad design prevents people from using it too much…and that may actu…

I'd rather take speculation than a lack of an answer or the umpteenth "we hear you and we are working on it" answer only to wait years for nothing.

I wish Stylish worked on Firefox mobile. These are issues I can solve myself if the right tools existed (at least, the ones that exist on desktop).

Re: Ask HN: Why does HN require tiny baby fingers to operate on a phone?

#97
post #63
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why not simply inject a tiny bit of client side CSS and fix it yourself? True to the hacker spirit. Because, as the OP states, i'm on a phone.

What a sad state of affairs that this is a successful counter argument. There no technical reason that pocket computers should be incapable of applying user styles. Alas, we allowed the advent of a new technology ratchet tighter the grasp of commercial interests over society.

>There no technical reason that pocket computers should be incapable of applying user styles.

There were in the beginning of Smartphones. We grew past them, but the paradigms and mentalities of smartphones were well cemented by then.

Re: Ask HN: Why does HN require tiny baby fingers to operate on a phone?

#98
post #76

Lol. That post made me laugh. One of the main reasons I never up/down a comment is because the arrows are too easy to misfire.

Mine doesn't have a downvote button. How can I fix this? I kind of like only being able to upvote, but I want to know what is wrong to be missing it

Re: Ask HN: Why does HN require tiny baby fingers to operate on a phone?

#99
post #70

HN is not backed by a large organization/company and does not have money to employ a few people to redesign the site and make some long desired and badly needed improvements. /s While you’re complaining about link sizes, did you notice how tiny and close the voting buttons are and how bad the general accessibility of HN is? In a way, I think all this bad design prevents people from using it too much…and that may actu…

I'd rather take speculation than a lack of an answer or the umpteenth "we hear you and we are working on it" answer only to wait years for nothing. I wish Stylish worked on Firefox mobile. These are issues I can solve myself if the right tools existed (at least, the ones that exist on desktop).

Well, I use Stylus, and it works fine on Android (but you need to use a "custom addon collection" to add it, which is only available on Beta and Nightly). I see no reason why Stylish wouldn't also work.

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...

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