Slashdot Launches Re-Design | Hacker News Reader

Slashdot Launches Re-Design

meta.slashdot.org

66 pointsMithrandir54 comments

I was hoping Slashdot was going to reduce the huge amount of padding around each comment, but no luck. For instance, on my screen right now I can fit 13 comments on HN or reddit but no more than 5 on slashdot. This makes it much harder to navigate comment threads, connect replies with comments, etc.

I'm I the only one who thinks this is easily the worst part of Slashdot? It's reminiscent of a bad forum where each 3-word quip comes with an avatar, a custom border, and a 5-line signature.

The original slashdot was actually very readable. Here's a screenshot: http://images.slashdot.org/faq/screen_nested.gif

Not pretty, but readable and very usable.

The padding and useless decoration that you (rightfully) complain about was introduced with the first ajax-redesign a few years ago.

> a 5-line signature

Surely you mean a 200 pixel signature containing an animated image? :-)

I liked slashdot more when it was plain, quick-loading HTML. I liked most sites more when they were plain, quick-loading HTML. Ain't It Cool News is the only other one coming to mind at the moment, though.

Reddit has been pushing it these days, and its performance has been awful for a while now (due mostly to growing pains, I reckon), but their aesthetic is still pretty plain. And of course this site definitely qualifies!

It's not so much the design aesthetic as performance for me. Sometimes browsers just seem to choke or take more time on complicated AJAX for something as simple as making a comment.

Hacker News is great in that respect -- it's all simple and very responsive.

I just visited Ain’t It Cool News for the first time and I don’t really understand what’s plain about it. It’s ugly and was slowly loading for me.

It used to be quicker -- I was saying it was an example of one of those sites that was better before the "Web 2.0 redesign."

Google's Marissa Mayer said it best: The web likes to be square. Rounded corners and other elements slows down a site.

I don't doubt that she said this, but I can't find the quote by Googling, and I would love to see it for myself, in context. Can you provide a link? Thanks!

Huh, why would that be? Drawing a round corner is in fact more complex than drawing a square one, but surely for a few dozen rounded corners the number of additional CPU cycles spent pales in comparison to things like anti-aliased font rendering, calculating CSS box model layouts, decompressing gzipped contents and the myriad of other tasks that a browser has to perform during loading and rendering of a web site nowadays.

For 4 rounded corners you probably need to download 4 images. Thats 4 extra connections to the server to connect to, download, process.

It isn't the processor time that is taking longer its the transfer time.

Not anymore you don't.

Most modern browsers (all but IE I believe) will let you round corners with CSS. An extra line or so of CSS is hardly much of a transfer overhead.

I believe current thinking (on non-enterprise sites anyway) is to let the IE people have their square corners, and those on new browsers get all the curvy goodness.

Yes, that is why I added the probably. The vast majority of rounded corners I see are still done with images however.

The old Slashdot design bothered me so much I proposed a minimalist layout last year: http://nylira.com/p/slashdot

Thoughts on this one:

Slashdot's homepage is much cleaner than before, but the thick green bars denoting each story is visually oppressive. I understand that it's a branding element, but it hampers readability.

The fixed navigation annoys me, but that's a personal preference: I don't think the menus are important enough to be constantly on-screen.

I see they still haven't added a max-width to text columns either. It's difficult reading comments on a 1440px+ screen.

Much prefer your clean design, but I'd move the story icon to the whitespace under the author/submitter info on the left.

Did you design a comment page too?

It's unfortunate that they've jumped on the fixed positioning bandwagon. Non-scrolling headers/footers break the way Page Up and Page Down work, because the visible size is no longer the size of the scrollable area.

Luckily there's a user style in the Slashdot comments that changes the fixed elements to absolute positioning. It isn't a perfect solution, though (e.g. for when you use an alternate browser).

Non-scrolling headers/footers break the way Page Up and Page Down work, because the visible size is no longer the size of the scrollable area.

It also seems to break their "Parent" links -- it ends up with the top bar partially covering the comment's header. I've yet to encounter a web site where floating title bar is a good idea.

I was going to make a snarky comment like Slash..who? But I clicked and it the UI looks much better!

It definitely looks better, but as with everything new I see on Slashdot and SourceForge these days it seems a little to late.

It probably looks better, as I remember Slashdot being really ugly, but the new design is still ugly. The Slashdot header font in particular is an eyesore, but very little on the site actually looks modern or pleasing.

Ugh, all this time, a whole new revamp, and it still suffers from the problem where hitting "Get more comments" moves everything around, and you've got to look through everything to figure out what the hell actually just loaded...

Why would anyone ever think that hitting more should load more comments above the comment you just finished freaking reading? And yes, I realize they're loading low ranked deeply nested comments that are underneath ones that are already visible, but yeesh - just clip the damn comment tree after a certain number of comments are displayed, FFS, no need to try and be clever about it...

I might be alone in this, but I actually preferred the old-fashioned pagination approach to to 'get more articles' buttons. Actually, I might not be alone in this as HN does the same thing :)

I don't really care so much for design as content. Slashdot looks tired, whatever design you slap on top of it. For example they've updated the Bill Gates Borg icon. It looks very dated now, though.

These kinds of designs often work badly with flash, as can be seen by the flash ad on the page: http://i.imgur.com/qycS8.png

(flash in most (all?) browsers appears on top of even html regardless of specific css rules)

There's an option for window mode in the HTML used to embed flash. You can set it to behave nicely, but (surprise!) most advertisers don't.

For the record, Flash will respect z-index if you set the wmode param.

http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=e5141

If I remember correctly, setting the wmode param slows down flash performance significantly. I also remember it having significant trouble in opera. However, it's possible that these issues are now fixed in the newer browsers, but I'm pretty sure that older browsers still experience them.

Def some quirks back in the day (I think FF on Linux still doesn't even listen to the wmode param, iirc) but I think modern browsers deal with wmode better now.

This is probably the first good redesign that /. has done this century!

I actually stopped visiting Slashdot because the previous rounds of "improvement" to the comment system was always a pain in the butt if you had to switch tabs while typing. It will be good to be back.

I hope it will work better than the previous one. It was unbearably slow on my puny work PC and hardly usable on my other machines, and frankly, I don't think that I should upgrade to quad core because of ONE website.

I am glad they kept much of the original design, especially the rounded edges and the green. Yes, it's not pretty, but for me it's like listening to an oldie station. Slashdot was there in the 90s when you felt like participating in a revolution for using Linux (or, if you wanted to be even more avantgarde, one of the BSDs). It helped people get through the time of the Columbine massacre, was the best place to discuss the Halloween documents, offered endless First-Post/Nathalie-Portman trolling opportunities, and with Jon Katz you always had something to talk (or complain) about.

The problem is that the culture did not really evolve. There's nothing that Slashdot stands for anymore. I wonder whether it would be a good idea for Slashdot, now that the readers as well as the authors are older, to cover topics for geeks in their 30s or 40s: homes, families, kids... I believe that there would be a range of interesting topics, and I don't know any news site that covers them.

Now it looks like a framed site from good ol' 1997 again. Fixed header, fixed menu cluttering up your 800x600 pixel smartphone screen, and a small scrollable area (of which most is white space) with the actual content. Wow, that went seriously wrong.

It looks uglier than the old version, in my opinion. On the other hand, it looks like paste now works correctly when entering comments. (It used to often fail on Webkit-based browsers if there was any text already in the box), so that's a huge improvement.

I really thought I'd be saying 'digg-a-what?' before i'd ever say '/?' ever again.

My problem with /. was that the stories were not voted in on by the community but rather by a select few curators who added editorial content in the headlines.

And they're still using the Bill Gates Borg icon?

That could easily be called a feature, looking at how Reddit's focus changed. Hacker News is able to keep it's narrow focus, but it's the exception rather than the rule.

You're right about the editorial content in the headlines and summary though but I like that the stories have a small blurb explaining the story unlike Reddit or Hacker News.

Slashdot? I read HN.

I'm lucky in that I have a somewhat more open relationship with HN; HN allows me to view other sites, and in return I let HN have more users than just me

Slashdot was here before HN.

It is likely Slashdot will still be here when HN is gone.

There's a lesson in that.

http://trends.google.com/websites?q=news.ycombinator.com%2C+...

They're sinking in the last year or so while HN is rising somewhat.

> It is likely Slashdot will still be here when HN is gone.

My gut feeling says no. I used to read Slashdot as much as I now read HN or Reddit. I hardly ever go there any more, and when I do it just doesn't seem interesting.

For me, Slashdot lacks the buzz it used to have.

I scan the RSS feed, ignore the dupes from HN, reject the political stuff, and glance over the remaining tech headlines.

Of the three that might appeal to me, I read the abstracts, and occasionally follow the links to the original articles. I ignore the comments because I never log in anymore. The only ad I might see is in the upper right.

The new design seems to confirm that I'm not alone.

Still no Unicode

Same basic design but like half the number of DOM elements. Well done for doing the right thing :)

I like the redesign. Have they fixed the unusably bad commenting system?

This looks really great. Kudos to the designers and programmers.

The Apple category seems to be gone from the front page.

Looks like CRAP in Opera. Sheesh.

Does the redesign involve removing most of their userbase? There's some kind of aversion to people charging money on that site that just doesn't jive with me. I assume that HN will at some point reach the critical mass that killed slashdot for me. Hopefully that day will be far far in the future.

Looks like a trainwreck w/ K-Meleon, plus it chews major CPU cycles. Ah, the web...

I don't like the feel to it. When scrolling it feels sluggish and the screen seems to flicker.

I noticed the same (i7-920, FF 3.6) - after removing the fixed position bar (using firebug) the site at least seems significantly less sluggish. Weird how a seemingly simple thing can hurt performance so much (or maybe it's just a psychological effect ?)

On a large screen I find it visually more pleasing than the last version but I stoppped using the site completely after they introduced that silly ajax-abuse and the new one wouldn't make me come back if for that reason alone.

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