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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

It's not just a Google thing. Recently there was a HN thread on devmag.io -- they have the same problem. I measured it: in the same space HN gives me 18 stories, Devmag.io gives me barely 2.

Unfortunately, I think Google people know and they just don't care. They don't want people who know what RSS is, people who care about information density; they are going after the Pinterest crowd, the sort of people who read Cosmopolitan, watch reality shows, and post drunken pics on Facebook.

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The new reddit mobile page has the same problem. On the old http://i.reddit.com I usually get 1-3 more links per page than on the new http://m.reddit.com

Who actually thinks that all that padding and those stupid navbars are a good idea? On mobile my screen estate is very valuable and I don't want to waste it on unnecessary things.

Designers from San Francisco, that's who. Current design trends favor "negative space", so text has to be spaced widely, with huge margins and hairsbreadth-thin fonts.

Negative space is always useful. Simply spacing shit out to create low information density isn't the same thing. Adding a bunch of unnecessary dividers (cards and shadows) are definitely not the same thing as negative space.

Negative space would be allowing the space between items to create a division instead of the borders and shadows.

You forgot to mention the very low cost, especially for font because we gotta hide that pesky content that we have to show after all.

Images (even small, low-quality ones) are far more costly than text, no?

The saying "Form follows function." is well ingrained among industrial designers, UI designers ought consider it as well.

Although my assumption here is front end designers are often subjected to death by a thousand revisions from 'the suits'.

Yeah but the action of maneuvering through the content is fleeting. Rather than squinting and parsing a whole bunch of stuff - you're just filtering as you move down the page. I do the same exact thing on HN. It's just that I can be lazy with the affordance of a large screen.

Also, reddit is different as a consumption medium, rather than news aggregator. With reddit, you consume. With HN, you peruse.

And yet they already have just what you want, why are they wasting time re-inventing it!

http://reddit.com/.compact

Http://i.reddit.com is the same as adding ".compact" to a link.

I also don't understand the redesign. The old version is way better then the new version, but I guess it just does not look flat and material enough.

As a major point in their favour, at least they kept the old version. They could have just redesigned the webpage and put it on i.reddit.com. Instead I can keep using the same good old layout while those who want can use the new m.reddit.com.

That's more than I can say for many, many other things, where whether I like it or not I'm forced to have the latest design fad (flat, pastel colours, long and inefficient animations and huge, unnecessary padding nowadays) shoved down my throat.

I know nothing about this, but there's a flag on https://m.reddit.com that says "Beta", and on https://i.reddit.com there's a link to "try the beta", so I think it remains to be seen whether the old version is still available when m gets out of beta.

I don't like the new http://m.reddit.com/

Try this my redesign reddit. http://reddit.premii.com/ I hope reddit does something like this, and let user configure layout for each subreddit.

I like the design, but why is there a nav bar? I browse reddit a lot in horizontal view and the navbar just takes very important space away.

I am assuming you are on Android.

iPhone doesn't have a hardware back button, and most people don't know you can navigate back by swiping.

I will add tracking in http://hn.premii.com/ to see how many user uses in landscape mode vs portrait.

Hiding navbar in the landscape mode is an option.

I love i.reddit. When they take that away (and I expect they eventually will), I will probably use reddit a lot less.

Hang on, the problem with Pinterest is the aggressive user hostile "sign in" stuff on the apps and mobile pages. But Pinterest is, for what it is, really freaking good. If you want humanitarian faces or Japanese ceramic or Scandi Furniture or etc you'd be daft to ignore Pinterest.

>> the problem with Pinterest is the aggressive user hostile "sign in" stuff on the apps and mobile pages.

Spot on. Desktop pages are just as bad. It seriously annoys to no end. If it was a paid service, I could understand.

I was with you until you dissed Pinterest.

Pinterest is very information dense. It utilizes every inch of screen space, and it does so without looking cramped at all. It's a huge design success.

It seems very image-oriented though. I wouldn't try to read news on it.

Well, but it's not for news — it's not supposed to be, and that's OK. I don't use pinterest much, except for creative pursuits. For example, browsing for inspiration for calligraphic scripts is a lot of fun on Pinterest:

https://www.pinterest.com/search/pins/?q=textura+quadrata https://www.pinterest.com/search/pins/?q=cadel+flourish https://www.pinterest.com/search/pins/?q=caligrafitti

I treat it as a source of inspiration, not information.

I think the problem is that people see the beauty of the pinterest layout (which works well for pinning images) and then adapt it to show textual content (which works much worse than a plain list of headlines for scanning news).

Right, but that just means they have made a design that suits what is being displayed on their website.

"A picture is worth a thousand words"

Depends on the words, the picture and the audience. I wouldn't attempt to understand your API's system contract via a picture of the computer.

One of the concerns I have is that we may end up moving to a very image-oriented media that finds it difficult to meaningfully communicate certain thoughts - and perhaps encourages an audience largely unable and/or unwilling to meaningfully attempt to understand them.

That's television. The web is a step up from TV in that regard.

And they said the same thing about TV just a decade ago. I'm pretty sure it's still bullshit, just like it was wrt. TV.

Pinterest crowd, the sort of people who read Cosmopolitan, watch reality shows

That crowd is way bigger than the crowd that hangs out at places like HN. So it would make sense for G+ to go after them, no? This is a numbers game.

That crowd is already camping out on Facebook, while G+ was being adopted by more techy people.

Companies running for the same average Joe and forgetting about other groups of people leads to quick deaths of services.

I've always thought Google should buy Github and make that the basis for a new G+. It's too late now but a few years ago who knows.

Sadly yes. Doesn't mean I can't feel sad that is the case, though.

I don't think it's either or. I obviously read hacker news, but I'm also very passionate about ceramics especially Japanese and Korean ceramics and Pinterest is a treasure trove for images of work other people have done as well as new techniques. For contrast: I don't have a Facebook account.

Google have been tremendously coy about what their success metrics for G+ are, though they've played highly disengenuous all-but-utterly-fake numbers games in playing up "engagement" since the very beginning.

I'd argue that the issue isn't numbers, but relevance. G+ is lousy in many ways but has a few small areas of success, notably its Notifications mechanic, a community which, for me, works fairly well, and a search which while pathetically under-featured is comprehensive and fast.

Winning the numbers game for social vs. Facebook in its current incarnation is a fool's errand. Numerous people have pointed this out, including ex-Googlers pointing at the "Interest Graph" (though suggestions for following / pursuing this date to the first few months of G+).

If Google does grab the Cosmo crowd, that's fine, so long as it doesn't also chase off the Nature/PLOS crowd in the process. Unfortunately, Google's proven more than happy to sling absolute snot (as in the G+ "What Snot" feature ... oh, no, that's "What's Hot").

Power users learn how to disable that instantly.

> they are going after the Pinterest crowd, the sort of people who read Cosmopolitan, watch reality shows, and post drunken pics on Facebook.

Inferring a bit much there?

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It's true, but it's such a shame. I still remember the day metacritic switched away from their original design [1] where every movie currently in theaters was in that single column on the left hand side. You visited one page, you looked at it for 15 seconds and you were done. Apparently this was not the best way to make money, but it was so useful.

[1]https://web.archive.org/web/20090117041216/http://metacritic...

That's how for-profit world works. It's not about providing value to customer - it's to provide as little value as you can get away with wile still getting paid. If a company can sabotage their customer's experience and make him pay more at the same time (whether directly or via ads), the company will pick that option.

This is the incentive gradient that's present everywhere, especially on the Internet - that's why I personally won't mind if ad blocking will kill all ad-supported websites. I'll call it good riddance.

Same goes for the Skype Client. These apps seem to want to treat PCs like mobile devices where the app owns the whole screen.

> Unfortunately, I think Google people know and they just don't care.

If this is the case, then it probably means that a majority of people find the less-dense layout easier to read. It would also explain why Reader didn't have enough usage to keep Google interested.

> If this is the case, then it probably means that a majority of people find the less-dense layout easier to read.

Maybe. But the service doesn't exist for the people using it to read, or to post either for that matter. They're not paying for it. If Google knows people would rather a different layout but don't care, it's because the people who are paying for it prefer it this way.

If there is a service that converts your G+ feed into a rss feed, would you use it?

There were a few, but none worked reliably at all. I do use a external service that converts twitter to RSS (something they dropped a while back), but also have to redo those every year or so as the various services break or stop functioning.

The thing about RSS is that it is a good match for providing a feed. By Google not providing that sort of thing, you have to use their user interface. Others can't try experiments, cater to certain usage styles, or introduce new ways of using the service. You'll note that twitter had that vibrant experimentation and growth, until they decided to cut that possibility in 2011 - http://fortune.com/2015/10/21/twitter-jack-dorsey-apology/

A service like this will always be a band aid solution. You are at the mercy of the provider of the source data, and they can easily screw you up (as you have pointed out.)

What's wrong with Pintrest?

You'll like the condensed presentation of https://techbullets.com/ It's tech updates summarized into bite-sized updates which you can easily expand to explore deeper.

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