Hacker News Reader

Comment by guzik | Hacker News Reader

Here's the concept of HN: https://interface.fh-potsdam.de/future-retro/HN/ if someone missed it

What the fuck is that? It certainly looks cool, but I have no idea what it is, what it's for, or how to use it.

Being usable and looking really cool often don't go together very well. I suppose the few cases where they do, are the mark of a truly great designer.

Not to sound mean, but I'd prefer all websites looking generic (as uninventive as it might be), if this is supposed to represent the alternative.

I am not the author, but I do agree.

This is completely unusable -is it supposed to be a parody?

I see this more as an example of what can be done. It's a bit like concept cars - they aren't supposed to be driven so designers take the opporuntiy to push the limits of what can be done. Perhaps that website, once the usability is improved, could be the beginning of a good idea, or perhaps it should be dropped altogether but it doesn't hurt to try new things.

It's the 4th example in the article.

Superimposing the text of one comment over another may look cool, but doing so means you gave no thought to the experience of the user.

Which itself is a perfect showcase for why most sites look the same. That redesign is virtually unusable, and goes so far into being 'art' that it just doesn't work as a discussion forum.

Still, maybe it's more the article writer's concepts of a unique website that don't work more than all sites being the same being a bad thing. Their redesign for Medium.com is nearly as unusable too:

https://retro-medium.netlify.com/borism

I get the creativity in letting people adjust the length of words/negativity of words/number of most common words in an article, but like the Hacker News redesign, it just creates an unreadable mess.

You can make something different without making it unusable, and most of these redesigns fail miserably at that.

This looks awesome, but it's completely unusable.

I think HK has one of the best (if not the best) design of any news aggregator sites out there. It’s perfect and I hope it doesn’t ever change. I can’t think of many websites that scale so well from a mobile phone to a desktop computer.

I'm surprised he even categorized HN as looking the same. This place is very streamlined compared to other news aggregator type sites, even pre-redesign Reddit.

HN is basically a vBulletin forum from 15 years ago with less functionality. Metafilter and Slashdot are similar and their looks haven't changed much since they started.

The HN Redesign probably happened because the API was easy to use by students and they wanted to experiment with "cyberpunk" style interface, for which a text heavy site like HN was perfeect. It isn't at all the type of site

This is very impressive from a technical perspective, but for actual using it, it's truly horrible.

I can certainly imagine all websites looking like this in the near future however. Website designers all seem to love jumping on idiotic bandwagons that favor looking cool over usability.

Nice, but too cool

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