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Comment by Illniyar | Hacker News Reader

I see a lot of comments here about how not having js on the page is a great thing and lets get back to the old days.

Lets be frank here, HN's UI is not good. At the very least it needs collapsible comments and responsiveness to mobile.

The fact that HN is a success is despite its bad UI, or maybe because of the many HN readers out there that fix all the broken stuff on the page.

While js on sites have surely overgrown, and there is a place for minimalism, I really don't want to go back to the old days where every click reloaded the page and interactivity was really only done in flash.

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Honestly, HN is great, and this:

> At the very least it needs collapsible comments and responsiveness to mobile.

I don't even want that. On root comments, simply add a link (let's call the text "next") that jumps to the next root level comment. That would solve my only complaint about the HN UI.

I'd like to see answers to my comments or postings in real time, not having to reload the page. HN doesn't allow me to do that.

There's a bookmarklet: https://hnlivecomments.pex2.jp/

How is this usable on mobiles? And... Why do I have to rely on a piece of third-party software in order to get features present in any really modern website?

I think HN tries to avoid being too modern...

>responsiveness to mobile.

Please no. I like being able to zoom in or out, and too often "responsive" means no zoom and either huge or miniscule text.

Opera lets you override that!

This. Their text size and reflow are all that I miss from Opera Mobile.

"Responsive" doesn't mean those things. Just because some sites fail to design a decent mobile experience, doesn't mean HN (or you or anyone else) can't.

I remember some of the early HTC Android phones had text reflow enabled by default. That was almost always good enough and it would be "responsive", but for some reason mobile browsers don't seem to offer it anymore.

To get collapsible comments, you can use "Reddit-Style Comments for Hacker News" chrome extension/GreaseMonkey script: https://github.com/andrewheins/HN-Comment-Hider

HN's UI is clear, accessible, and uncluttered. If you want something different, they expose an API which everyone and their mother has written a client with, including native apps for mobile. The only JS on the site is in place to reduce the page reloads you were worried about.

What is the problem here?

It's certainly not "uncluttered" on mobile, where the text and vote buttons are so tiny and crowded together that it's super easy to tap the wrong thing.

The only think I'd like for mobile is better up and down arrows. That's literally the only thing. Otherwise, don't change the UI in any way. To do otherwise would make this site so much less great!

HN's design is fantastic - it is totally perfect for its function. Collapsible comments are a pig to use. HN looks and works great on mobile now (it didn't used to but they did a redesign in the last few months).

Downvoters do you care to explain why you disagree?

I didn't down-vote you, but "collapsible comments are a pig to use" isn't really a statement I can get behind, nor a statement with any real value (what does "a pig to use" mean, practically?)

I use a (slightly modified) Chrome plugin to clean up HN's styling to make it more readable. Most importantly it adds collapsable comments, without which I would enjoy HN much less.

Collapsable comments makes it easy to tell what you have and haven't read, and to easily skip large threads which bore you without having to mentally watch the invisible vertical line and scroll until it comes back it.

Yeah "a pig to use" might come across as inflammatory and I guess that this expressing my personal preference (which is just as valid as yours but clearly neither are objectively correct).

Disclosure I use no script and am very happy that HN works without any javascript.

Practically I find collapsible comments highly annoying in every case I've seen them used. This is probably because they seem to either (1) require javascript, or (2) require page reloads, or (3) both.

In the case of HN, dang et al do a good job of detaching irrelevant comments.

I guess that collapsible comments should be one of those optional features that could be available with javascript but gracefully degrade to showing the full tree without.

I didn't use it directly on mobile for so long, I didn't even know they made it work on mobile.

Collapsible comments are still, I think, the minimum needed to make HN usable, in long threads it just becomes impossible to find or follow comments.

> HN looks and works great on mobile now (it didn't used to but they did a redesign in the last few months).

For the record, after the redesign the comments looks worse on Windows Phone. I know, no one gives a damn about WP, but a "proper" mobile redesign would work on every browser.

Is that the fault of HN or Windows Phone?

HN.

Makes me thinkg of that great rant my Linus about breaking userspace by "fixing" a "bug"

If you break something for a significant portion of your users, even if it's caused by someone/something else doing something dumb, it's still your fault

In the case of the web we have standards which describe correct behaviour. Is HN not following them?

> for a significant portion of your users

Windows Phone users are a significant portion of HN users?

Shameless plug, check out my HN app for WP8.1 called Hacky News. It's very fast and has collapsible comments.

Link: https://www.microsoft.com/en-US/store/Apps/Hacky-News/9NBLGG...

Collapsible comments are driving me mad. It's wrong on all levels on a forum-like page where I go for the comments and the comments only.

HN is a success despite its UI because it was written in a Lisp and because it has the cachet of Y-Combinator behind it. If this exact site were written in PHP, and posted as a Show HN in an alternate universe, no one would consider it anything but a toy, and no one would be defending the layout with the same cargo cult mentality that HN seems to inspire.

Why compare the margins of nonsense (lisp and php)? If a site like this were written in Node.js and with mobile users in mind, it would be in all means superior to what we see right now.

And right now I see yellow outline around this textarea, which is WebKit's default and they didn't even bother to remove it to make this textarea look the same in all browsers, let alone adapt it for mobiles.

I'm implying that language elitism and faux-intellectual posturing are among the reasons this community seems to correlate the simplicity of the layout with its own intellectual purity. That same elitism would cause the same community to dismiss the same site out of hand, were it written in a language it was popular to hate.

But yes, it could be written in any language and still have a more progressive layout, and people would hate that the site appears mainstream or, heavens forbid, looks and acts more like Reddit.

Now I get the picture and totally agree. For me, even this yellow outline is a sign of totally ignoring real-world user needs.

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