Hacker News Reader

Comment by tag2 | Hacker News Reader

I really like the concept. Great work! The auto refresh is slightly annoying for me personally but I could live with it :)

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I agree. Love the layout and the fact I can get more of an idea what the thread is about, but the constant auto refreshing, as well as the refreshing while scrolling threw me a little bit.

I tend to skim a bunch of articles, and make a mental note of the position of interesting ones to go back to later, but when I scroll up, everything is in a different location, breaking the mental map that I had built.

Other than that, I think it is a great alternative. Good work.

Agree with this, the first version had no autorefresh. But this is quite annoying if you have this open in a tab. You get old news, and that kind of is against the purpose of the app.

I guess there are two types of users - constant checkers might like auto-refresh but if you check less frequently then you want to scroll deep and for us, auto-refresh is a usability nightmare.

Agree with this. If you have a solution please let me know. For now I'm considering adding it as a setting.

I'd suggest something like a toast that says "4 new stories" and you click it to refresh. It means you don't get confused by stale data but the page stays under the users control. It also allows you to flag/highlight/animate the new stories so a user can understand the diff from when they last looked at the page.

This type of feature is sometimes implemented as a huge green banner stickied to the bottom of the view but that I find that too obtrusive and stress inducing - I end up clicking on them to get them out of the way even when I don't want to see the new stories so it actually makes the experience worse. I prefer a more subtle indicator in the top-right similar to how notifications appear in some apps but it shouldn't feel like an error/warning or something that requires immediate attention.

That's a great idea! I'll look into this. I like the idea that you get notified when new items are added. Thank you!

Love the project, thanks for putting it up.

The auto-refresh was making me crazy as well - even a big 'Auto-Refresh: ON' toggle by the menu would be enough.

I'm not a fan of settings in general but it does appear you're getting two distinct groups of users.

If you choose to have it as a setting, have a VERY big switch that stands out at the top, so people can SEE that it can be changed.

Then give the option to hide it, after you've made your selection. :)

It is massively annoying and a huge UX misstep. It just happened to me: I hovered over a story I was interested and could feel the muscles in my hand tensing as I was about to click when suddenly the stories refreshed and I lost the one I was interested in. It made me somewhat irrationally angry, like something was stolen from me.

Do not automatically change content that requires people to read

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