Hacker News Reader

Comment by orschiro | Hacker News Reader

Related: how do you consume hacker news? Using a dedicated Android or iOS app or directly opening the website in your mobile browser?

View on HN

I use Firefox for HN (and all my other web content consumption) on both mobile and desktop. In that way I still get the benefit of all my synced browser features (e.g. add-ons) and avoid the edge cases where a page isn't textual and resorts to the browser anyway. The weakness of the experience - and where apps/add-ons have a niche - is reply notifications, comment tracking, etc. I would be more interested in a web-app type HN wrapper than anything native. That's not to disparage any native app designers, though! I appreciate that many people prefer that experience.

I use materialistic but have a bookmark to my comments page to regularly check if I receive replies, since there's no notification system and the profile view in materialistic is shit.

Haven't you found materialistic to have a big problem with comment collapsing and doubled comments?

Many times when I collapse a thread it will do so weirdly and a few comments will still be left visible. Many times I'll also have a single comment duplicated two or three times.

Yeah I've run into the same issues but they're not annoying enough to leave honestly. Imo the reading experience on materialistic is so much better that I just put up with the weird duplicates/closing error.

Same here. But with a wider audience this lack of functional app would be unthinkable.

I use it in my mobile browser, mainly to try to force myself to visit other places, too. HN seems to have virtually no protection against large-scale astroturfing, and is big enough to be a target of it, so while I am skeptical of most things I read on here, I try to also just not expose myself too much to it.

And that also just because being skeptical of every piece of unsourced information isn't too great when having personal conversations. You don't have to believe every single rumor, but making people prove everything they tell you, that's just not very sociable.

Have you noticed instances on HN that seem to you to be astroturfing ?

I mean, it's impossible to say for sure that something is astroturfing, maybe it's just me having a particularly bad opinion of these companies, but for example Google and Microsoft often feel that way.

When you look at controversial topics with these two companies in them, you often see a whole load of negative comments and then one or two chains of comments that defend them, declare people being negative about it as being unreasonable and you generally have multiple accounts responding to each other, agreeing that this really isn't too bad. And of course, these comment chains have been voted to the top.

The last part doesn't have to be a result of astroturfing, HN's voting system encourages controversial comments, as more people are able to upvote than downvote comments, but yeah, that doesn't exactly make the platform as a whole a better place.

Safari mobile. Works pretty well. I’d just wish they would support safari reader mode. But maybe that’s impossible with the comment structure

I've tried a number of apps, but I always end up coming back to the site itself.

It’s also so nice how quickly the site loads — that and the simplicity of HN’s mobile site makes for a very pleasant experience.

Same for me I’ve tried a few apps but always run into a few quirks that steered me back to the site itself. It’s essentially a pinned tab in Safari on my iPhone at this point.

Web browser.

None of the apps I've seen so far allow me to be logged in (and some I wouldn't trust), so what's the point?

minihack on iOS.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com