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Comment by fairpx | Hacker News Reader

Interesting experiment. My observation: With the thumbnails, the title of each post becomes a less-important-caption. In the case of HN, I think the text-only approach is far better. Product Hunt used to be text only, and frankly, it was a better experience. The moment you introduce images to these types of communities, people will start using that real estate to create flashy-attention-grabbing visuals. Over time, it'll be more about how good a thumbnail looks, rather than the curiosity of a title that lures you into the content.

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On the other hand, one of the sites' thumbnails is one of those email capture modals, so at least I know to avoid that one.

Actually fuck sites that have a modal popup on window mouseout. Great way to get me to not return.

I don't know, I would want to see titles put above the thumbnail before I conclude that the title becomes less important. Right now I think that this effect may be exaggerated because the thumbnail is the first thing you see.

In general I am inclined to agree, but I would want to see titles be first before I write it off completely.

Edit: And perhaps boldface as well...

I totally agree.

Perhaps visuals would work for a community of graphics designers. But outside of that, it's just not useful. Especially if half of the thumbnail is filled by ads or logos.

I found myself evaluating links I would have otherwise skipped.

Same. "Disconnect. Offline only." was completely uninteresting to me on the HN homepage, but the thumbnail made me curious:

http://i.imgur.com/0k4fbc5.png

I think people here are just romanticizing text titles like they're some objective description of the material.

(Not actually) shower thought: maybe if google showed thumbnails beside results, that'd drive websites to avoid using them popups that appear on page load?

> "Over time, it'll be more about how good a thumbnail looks, rather than the curiosity of a title that lures you into the content."

This makes it sound like clickbait is a better option than flashy thumbnails, but it's essentially the same bullshit.

But at least most of us here have by now trained ourselves to be mostly immune to click bait. Don't want to go through the same process again but with misleading thumbnails this time.

Clickbait text loads a lot faster and is easier for me to mentally sift through than thumbnails. Agree they're both BS though!

Well, it moves the "click-bait titles" to "click-bait images"...

Click-bait titles can be moderated and edited more easily.

Especially algorithmically, we're a way off being able to do the same with images.

Except when the aggregators guidelines specify that titles must remain verbatim.

People sometimes think that about HN but of course it's not true.

Good point. I wonder if this might be measurably worse. A click-bait image might have the power to grab your attention from your peripheral vision in a way that pure text, however click-baity, can't.

I agree. There are two (mildly related) parts to this: grid layout and using an image.

Image instead of text does not work for me. I prefer to read things. Grid layout makes curated content less clearly ranked: does your eye wander horizontally first, vertically, or some random pattern? does screen size affect this?

What could be interesting is to supply 3-5 main points from the article. Doing this automatically is, I suspect, very hard, but if done would give me significantly more information on whether to click the link, go to comments or ignore. Just my 2c.

I discovered the "Disconnect. Offline only." article through the thumbnail :)

Second this. ProductHunt is unusable for me becasue of the thumbnails. They are distracting and add nothing but noise to the page.

That's the first thought that came to me, when I saw this.

Couldn't he/she just write the text over the image?

On a similar note, I consider the moment reddit abandoned text only their first large mistake. (Many more since then)

What was stopping people from taking the same click-bait approach to the text titles? Titles on reddit are still pretty damn nondescript, and rarely have actual relevant information in them.

Honestly it was a difference in the userbase and how they interacted. There's some unknown threshold of users where once a platform becomes too popular it begins to degrade. I'd say pre-2010 reddit is a vastly different beast than today.

Reddit appears to only show images to posts about the image, not to a website. Most of reddit content are just posts to images and the discussion about the image, so IMHO that improves reddit's usability for their target audience.

HN is more about interesting content/discussion instead of posting memes and it is much harder to scan and determine interesting content from images than it is from titles. As a note: when HN has the same target audience as reddit is when i stop using HN.

Well you can easily disable them (I always do).

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