Hacker News Reader

Not nitpicky at all. It's a pointless, obfuscating blob of unhelpful colors violating basic principles of data visualization:

- Sequential income brackets are not adjacent. The wage of each blob can only be understood by reading every number

- Irregular shapes make it impossible to gauge size by eye

- White text on green and pink backgrounds does not score well on WCAG. At least they had the decency to make the text bold.

View on HN

I even think it's intentionally obfuscated. The obfuscation misleadingly suggests the arbitrarily chosen thresholds 30k and 50k are somehow meaningful. This encourages group-association-based / class-divide-based outrage-sharing, reinforcing the infighting between lower middle class and upper middle class.

Lumping together $50k-$50M as though that's a meaningful interval is especially misleading.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com