To me HNs biggest feature is the lack of features and the lack of 'innovation', or rather redesigns for the sake of redesigning.
Keep up the fantastic moderation and the wonderful lack of innovation, HN people!
Keep up the fantastic moderation and the wonderful lack of innovation, HN people!
1) loads instantly
2) is mostly plaintext.
Reddit, for what it's worth, provides about the same features but on an absolutely heavyweight site. Especially the new (redesigned) SPA reddit
There are those who believe strongly in the web as interactive documents. I fall largely into this camp. I want small pages with a minuscule amount of JS.
On the other hand, there are those now using the web as a distribution platform. My favorite example is Figma. Figma is my favorite vector graphics program of all time. Compare it to something like Illustrator, but with file syncing, collaboration and updates abstracted. I don't have to expose myself to the horror of Adobe bloat.
So I must disagree. SPA and the rise of JS frameworks is not one of the worst things to happen to the web. Look at what Facebook has become. It's an application, not a website of interactive documents. Or see what GitHub is doing. They are soon to integrate a whole IDE into the browser with Codespaces. I'm bullish on WASM as well. I envision a future where all software could be distributed via the browser.
The problem I think is that too many companies have become overly ambitious and bought into a lot of unnecessary tech. Reddit is a great example, and they are also guilty of pushing their native app incessantly.
The problem isn't the technology. It's the misuse of the technology.
The Apollo app solves every technical problem with Reddit, so I just recommend that people use that instead of dealing with the official web app. Luckily, they haven't gotten rid of old.reddit.com.
On the flip side, SPAs are terrible for hypertext content, because existing web technology was literally built for that. Why should a blog be an application? The content creation side, sure, maybe, but viewing a blog? That's literally what HTML was made for. A table of contents full of links like the HN or Reddit homepage? That's pretty much hypertext 101.
Their motto is "move slow and preserve things." They do change, but not stupidly and they do so with a great deal of respect for what is currently working, which is something many, many, many people in the world utterly fail at it. It is the norm to take for granted the things that are going right, then act all surprised when changes result in throwing the baby out with the bath water.
It's enormously hard to make thoughtful tweaks of the sort the happen here, that get researched and thought through over very long periods of time and go largely unnoticed by the collective subconscious of the site. It's the sort of the thing the world needs more of, but also the world needs more commentary on "Well, we did make this, that and the other tweaks, while leaving most stuff intact." because it does tend to go unnoticed and it does tend to get characterized as "never changing."
An excellent design motto. Respect what works!
> To me HNs biggest feature is the lack of features and the lack of 'innovation', or rather redesigns for the sake of redesigning.
But so many people abuse the code formatting for these
To me HNs biggest feature is the lack of features and the lack of 'innovation', or rather redesigns for the sake of redesigning.
At the very least, an instant preview or enforced separate preview-before-posting page would help a lot, especially if either it was narrow enough to represent mobile, or had a warning below not to abuse code snippets that way if there's a detected code snippet. (A preview would help anyway because the reply edit box is monospace, which is really hard to read. I often end up posting an initial draft immediately and using the edit page to fix it up.)
Maybe greasemonkey style plugin on mobile could fix it up ?
And often, comments critical of HN like this one first get many upvotes and then get sent back to a neutral 1... which is what just happened
If you're going to make a claim like this, you should provide a link so that readers can make up their own minds. When such complaints show up linklessly, it's usually because there's more to the story that the complaint is omitting (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
fair enough: https://i.imgur.com/Iu7CLxN.png or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16834895
I would like to think that the same type of decision would have been made had your username been from the opposing political party.
I find that hard to believe, but it is possible.
You should state the reason if you have one. Otherwise, you are just slinging a baseless insult.
Additionally: you have a feeling he might allow democratic troll nicks. the strength of that feeling ranges from not surprised if to hard to believe not depending on the day.
Your evidence: claim that the forum is very democratic
The description ("The nickname was nothing bad, you just didn't like it") was false though. 'lovetrump' was a trollish username, and we don't allow those on HN because they effectively troll every thread they post to, which is bad.
This is standard practice: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.... By the way, we can change usernames now, so the problem is easier to solve.