Hacker News Reader

why is the UI so completely neglected?

Because when I spend time on HN my top priority is features that will make the content better. I believe that matches the priorities of the users-- that users would rather use a site with good stories and comments and a primitive UI than one with a slick UI and worse stories and comments. And time is a zero-sum game. Spending more time on UI = spending less on quality.

The focus on content quality above all is the reason you find yourself saying later "If there were any other community like this..."

You're simply wrong about the moderation. Nearly every story that gets killed is either autokilled, or a dup, or flagged to death by users. I would guess moderators manually kill less than 10 non-dup stories a day. You're also wrong that YC cos get special privileges.

1) I could accept I'm wrong about stories being killed by humans, but I know the titles get edited by humans. I remember one story I posted about some really ancient, accurate maps, and I made the title something like "Accurate maps from the 1500s unearthed." And then some moderator made it the story headline instead "Named building in DC hosts map show" or something equally uninformative.

2) I'm positive YC companies get at least one special privilege - the ability to post jobs.

3) I've been told YC accounts are excluded from anti-spam measures, but I can't prove it.

EDIT: Also, regarding the zero-sum-game argument. All of us developers know we have limited time to spend on things. But a HUGE change to a non-priority that takes almost no time (for example improving the CSS on mobile) should be squeezed in between these experiments that may or may not make the content better, and take hours.

I assume you're talking about this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1390895

I don't know what title you used when submitting it, but the current title wasn't written by a moderator. It's the original article title.

It's true that YC founders' accounts have a field set saying so, but the only code that looks at this field is the code for posting jobs. None of the anti-abuse code does. And the jobs page has been around for years.

Yes, as I said in the parent comment, the moderator changed it back to the original story headline.

I had changed it because I knew nobody cares about the Library of Congress, and no one knows what Portolan means. I read the story, determined a meaningful title, and the moderator decided that was no good. Since I have edited many, many newspapers, and written countless headlines, I felt particularly annoyed.

I find mods retitling links to be a strongly positive feature of HN. It is one of those things thats very touchy though, but it'd be a shame if people's territoriality meant we had to accept wrong and misleading titles.

For what its worth, whatever was wrong with the original title I feel like yours was pretty misleading after going and reading the article (great article by the way, thanks for sharing it). The article was very explicitly about the library congress meeting to talk about the origins of the map, rather than a general piece about the map. If thats all you found interesting, perhaps you should have linked to a wikipedia page or a more general article.

It's worth distinguishing between (1) "The moderators retitled such-and-such an article, and it wasn't an improvement" and (2) "The moderators retitle articles, and that's bad". #1 might be true in this case (I see greendestiny doesn't think so; I'm on the fence) but it's very weak evidence for #2. For what it's worth (and I know this is also weak evidence) when I've looked at an article and thought "Wow, HN should have used a different title for this" it's much much much more often been because of editorializing by the submitter than because the original article title was used but wasn't very good.

We need moderators aggressively retitling articles submitted with stupid or biased titles. (Not only because that fixes those titles, but also because it reduces the incentive for submitters to submit with bad titles.) And if we have that, then inevitably there will be occasional misjudged retitlings. The question is whether the benefit outweighs the cost, and in my mind there's very little doubt that it does.

Ironically, time spent arguing that "it's better to focus on the content rather than the UI" could have been spent to improve the UI.

Or the content.

Time spent arguing helps define which should get the free-time, though. Otherwise, ultimately, it would be "best" if every developer ignored every bit of feedback their applications caused, because their time is best spent making changes, not debating over what to change.

It was more of a joke than a comment to take seriously.

Furthermore, from a selfish point of view, I like better when PG works on HN concept as he indirectly work on Arc.

I like the UI. I know it's hard for some to believe, but it's stark and functional and fast and mostly stays out of the way; it works. The comment scores need to be hidden for comments you didn't write; other than that, what's to improve? Taking back votes? How about, just forget about the vote.

If HN has a problem with titles, it's with not enough stores having their titles rewritten to the article original.

I agree. I love the spartan UI. That said, reading HN sucks on mobile and this would only take a few minutes to fix without compromising the simplicity of the main UX.

ihackernews.com is most helpful for me on the mobile platform

How it looks is fine, I suppose. But it could surely use in-line replies.

The comment scores need to be hidden for comments you didn't write

People keep saying this, but it would severely limit the utility of the site. When I chance upon a post with more than ~50 comments, I only want to read the 6-7 or so that the community has agreed are best. I perceive a positive correlation between comment scores and quality. That is, the odds that a post with 50 points contains good content do empirically seem to be higher than for posts with 2 points.

In short: I need a comment filter that is more strict than than simply "appears on Hacker News". I don't want to read every single one.

Comments are sorted based in part on votes. That's fine. The system we have now isn't picking out the best comments; it's picking out my comments.

There's a difference?

I like using votes to determine whether or not it's worth devling into a deep thread. If there's a conversation that goes 5 levels deep, you can just scan the bottom layers - if they're getting votes, then it's likely to be a worthwhile conversation.

Similarly, if there's a bunch of responses with a score of 1 with replies forking off all over the place, having a visible score lets you catch that at-a-glance and avoid bothering with a conversation that is clearly digressing.

>The comment scores need to be hidden for comments you didn't write

That was in the REPL for a while and I thought it was just annoying and confusing.

At least some types of UI changes would affect content quality. For example changing the size and color of the up and down arrows could have a big impact on voting frequency. Making the submit link more or less prominent could have a big impact on submission frequency, as well as providing tools like submission bookmarklets. And if at some point the majority of HN usage is mobile, it'll really change the sort of stories that people upvote.

It's not clear which direction you would want those metrics to move to improve quality, but it at least seems like UI vs quality is not a zero-sum tradeoff.

But would increasing voting frequency make the content better? It seems to me equally likely that it would make it worse. Ditto for having a more prominent submit link.

There is a submission bookmarklet. There's a link to it at the bottom of the page.

Yes, it seems equally likely that it would make things worse. But it seems unlikely that it would have no effect. It is unlikely that these are the optimal shapes of the up and down buttons.

For what it's worth, I think the Google way to solve this would be to figure out which metrics you can associate with quality and A/B test the impact of the UI changes. Setting up an A/B framework might be more work than you want to put in. But there might be a UI that encourages higher quality that you could discover empirically.

Good idea. You should download the Arc source for Hacker News and patch it to allow such UI testing for the site.

"Spending more time on UI = spending less on quality."

I disagree.

The inability to reverse incorrect votes reduces the quality of the site by assigning incorrect scores to comments. In fact, many comments are apologies for accidental down-votes.

Also, not being able to comment inline means thread context is lost when comments are being composed. It is very likely this results in lower quality comments, which reduces the quality of the site.

A good UI can and does lead to a higher quality sites. Keep things as simple as possible, but not so simple that quality suffers.

Just my opinion.

A quick UI fix would make HN readible on mobile devices. The fixed width of the page is caused by the navigation menu. If the navigation menu was made wrappable (white-space:auto) then the page would more easily fit right on almost any size screen. On mobile devices you can also eliminate unnecessary borders and padding. Very simple fixes like this would go a long way.

On Android, turn on "auto-fit pages" in settings. This isn't ideal, as there's still some left-to-right scrolling to focus on individual comments as comments become nested, and fixed width text doesn't wrap at all (which is thankfully relatively rare), but it's a vast improvement, as each comment fits horizontally.

This is a great idea. Why don't you patch the source for the site and make those changes available for use by the site.

(Let alone the fact that I'm busy enough with my own projects) There's no link anywhere on the site to the source code, or information about how to contribute.

I would even argue that having a bad UI is a feature of HN in the sense that it is a deterrent to trolls and other such Internet creatures.

Trolls need an audience to survive. Does HN superficially look like a popular website? No. It lives on a subdomain and the official way to get here is by clicking a tiny footer link on YC's website. And let's face it, the design is pretty ugly too by many standards.

To realize there's a vibrant community here, you have to get passed those "deterrents". This selects for individuals who are truly concerned about great content and intelligent discussion rather than great design or sensationalism which leaves the trolls at the door.

If only you had some connections with web designers.

It seems to me that the almost plain UI is a choice that goes beyond the interesting "zero-sum game" that you mention. If I were you I will be defending the HN UI as a choice and not as a necessity because of your limited time. Would you shoot for a richer UI if you had all the time of the world?

Looking at the HTML, the misclicking of up/down arrows on small screens could be fixed just by adding a couple more <br> tags between them.

The misclicking is mostly due to the fact that the targets are square images with extra padding, combined with sloppy nested tables and piles of inline elements that freak out further in mobile webkit.

If you're going to use tables for layout, use them consistently all the way down — don't just decide to party like it's 1994 and throw in some line breaks. Clean up the padding to rationalize the hit targets (could even use characters like ∆ and ∇ to make them non-square).

What's wrong with line breaks? What's sloppy about nested tables?

It's the easiest solution because pg can't be bothered messing about with "proper" layouts and I can understand why.

I like the "Spartan" UI here. Also, I believe it serves to keep the signal to noise ratio high, in a way, by filtering out a set of potential readers/voters that would not add value in the aggregate.

That said, I wish there were 2 enhancements — [1] a search bar|function that would list matches in date order and [2] a little markup to make mobile/tablet viewing easier on the eyes — a chore that could be as simple as adding a meta viewport line in the HTML (would accommodate iOS devices).

Hi, could you please delete my account (plus comments if possible)? I saw elsewhere you were the person to ask. It would be much appreciated.

> It's impossible to use HN on mobile iPhone and Android handhelds.

I actually find it quite the opposite. I've downloaded multiple Android apps that try to improve the HN reading interface, and I still find myself using browser instead. The closest thing that I would describe as being "bad" on my phone is that the arrows are small enough that I sometimes misvote on comments. Otherwise, I think it works really well:

* Each comment is the width of the screen, so there's not much vertical scrolling needed

* Comments are still well-indented so that I can easily follow a thread by scrolling right or left.

* I greatly enjoy being able to long-press comment links from the main page to open them in a new window, and then long-press the OP link to open that in a second window, and be able to use the back button to return to comments when I'm done reading, or even switch back and forth like I can in Chrome at home.

The fact that the text is essentially in a 4pt font doesn't bother you? Or is that an iPhone-only misfeature? Because on my iPhone 3GS, the page is wide enough that I either have to have unreadably small text or I have to zoom in and repeatedly pan from left to right in order to read a comment.

That sounds like an iPhone-only misfeature. On Android, you can turn on "auto-fit pages" and your chosen font size is locked and the width of elements is horizontally limited with no panning left-to-right to read a single comment (unless they contain unwrappable pre-text, which I find the hacker news text formatter to be kind of bogus on (indenting always makes preformatted text))

I've fixed a few of these in the iPhone app I built. It's a native Cocoa app that lets you browse, vote, and comment on HN. Here's what the home screen looks like: http://michaelgrinich.com/hackernews/media/screenshot-1.png

I separated the voting arrows and reply button, which helps with accidental taps. Here's a comments page: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4595/hn-vote.png

There's also a few nice features, like an in-app browser with Readability and send to Instapaper/Twitter/etc. You can see a demo of the app here: http://michaelgrinich.com/hackernews/

The app doesn't sell enough to be a full-time project, so I push updates when I have time. Currently I'm working on an update with full iPad support.

(All of this works via HTML scraping since there's no API.)

I used this before I switched to an Android phone, highly recommend it.

The simplicity of the design is one of the main things I like about this site. It's like the things I make for myself: a handy tool.

>Fix the mobile interface. It's impossible to use HN on mobile iPhone and Android handhelds.

That's funny; the default HN interface is very much like the mobile interface of other sites, i.e. everything extraneous has been removed.

Otherwise, +1 for the ability to change a vote. I can't for the life of me understand the reasoning behind the current setup.

A GlimmerBlocker filter which improves the layout for mobile: http://glimmerblocker.org/site/filters/mobile-optimized.xml

Pastebin version. css: http://pastebin.com/AE1UzYvU js transform of html source: http://pastebin.com/9069JULs

Most of the improvements could be made by a seperate mobile stylesheet if more classNames were added to the generated html.

I can't see it having been mentioned anywhere else, but HNdroid on Android is fantastic. It'd be nice if the site itself had a decent mobile stylesheet, but in the absence of one, HNdroid does a great job.

Someone posted this awhile back and it works great on the iPhone: http://ihackernews.com/

It should be pointed out here that 1) the code base for the site is available for download and 2) you can not only inspect it but set up your own 'competing website' with a better UI.

I propose a contest to redesign HN, no code just visuals.

The winner gets, umm, well, instant recognition as the 'best designer of the wolf pack', or BDWP in short.

One more feature request: upvote comments saves comments.