Hacker News Reader

Comment by someperson | Hacker News Reader

Very useful, nice work.

I find your HackerDaily comment section much more difficult to read compared to standard HN. I think it's because Hacker News indentation is larger (with upvote/downvote arrows), and standard HN uses almost the entire width of my 4K display (which makes almost every comment only 1 or 2 lines long), compared to your website which has a narrow column so wraps each comment into many paragraphs (which makes it harder to view the comment tree in a compact way).

I'm sure other users prefer the narrow column view, so take my feedback with a grain of salt.

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I was thinking of mentioning the same thing. For me I think it is that the internal paragraphs are about the same size as the breaks between comments. Also I like the way that the Original Hacker News uses grey for the user name and dark for the comment, that provides more differentiation between comments. Also, using bold for user names attracts my attention to the least important part.

To give a positive comment, long comments are easier to read on this version.

Thanks for the great feedback!

I just deployed a version with reduced margins between paragraphs in a comment and I'm gonna look into how to improve the comment metadata in a less obtrusive way.

Your new version already looks much better: the collapsible -/+ buttons provide better delineation.

Thanks for your feedback!

I indeed designed HackerDaily explicitly with smaller columns in mind. The reason for this is that it makes reading longer comments a lot easier. There has been quite a bit of research done to figure out what the optimal line length is and most sources come down to about 60-80 characters. With 80-90 characters on HackerDaily its already on the outer edge of the readability spectrum.

[1] https://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability

I think there's a bit of a trade-off here. Shorter lines are indeed easier to read. But they are harder to not read (i.e. if you want to skim over content to find interesting ones). The official HN site makes it really easy to skim down to find the next top-level thread for example.

There's the same trade-off with code line length. Shorter lines are easier to read, but they make understanding the overall structure of the file much more difficult.

Exactly. Individual comments often has value, but the comment tree structure itself has even more value.

Being able to read individual comments with more clarity at the expense of the entire tree is definitely major trade off that the line-length research is not measuring.

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