The real real problem is that so many sites overcomplicate their design.
HN works beautifully on any window / screen size.
HN works beautifully on any window / screen size.
And on mobile I find it impossible to hit the upvote arrow.
Because HN is designed so simply, you can trivially get the layout you want (half width lines) and I can also get the layout I want.
If HN instead tried to artificially limit the viewport in code (which is something lots of web developers do), they would break all sorts of other use cases for no reason. That's what I mean when I say websites tend to overcomplicate their design.
Except you're ignoring mobile devices.
Or random blog sites that become a narrow column of text and a *huge* amount of whitespace on either side.
Somehow we've gotten to this world where the web designer expects almost-pixel-perfect control over the layout of every little thing on the page, user's preference be damned. You're not laying out a magazine page in a desktop publishing application!
There is no way to format your text, even stuff that's available since MS Word 1.0, such as bold or italic. Even science papers have formatting so I don't buy the "overuse of styles" BS.
There is no way to have avatars or some other ways to distinguish users (or mods!) to make this place feel more like a community in real life. I've gotten used to it but it still sucks.
The contrast is super low.
HN is an MVP for a super minimalist forum that wouldn't fly for any other kind of community except for the intersection between hackers and wannabe entrepreneurs.
Are you entirely sure about that?
Spoiler: You mean mathematical sans-serif bold small l, mathematical sans-serif bold small i, mathematical sans-serif bold small k, mathematical sans-serif bold small e, mathematical sans-serif bold small t, mathematical sans-serif bold small h, mathematical sans-serif bold small i, mathematical sans-serif bold small s?
HN doesn't have a "quotes" feature. Some users here have the unfortunate habit of abusing the code formatting feature for quotes.
>There is no way to have avatars or some other ways to distinguish users
Thank god. There's a lot I miss about forums, but avatars and huge signature blocks are better left in the trashbin of history.
So an accessible site that follows modern design fads is probably the best thing to have (if that sells rugs).
That isn't an acceptable compromise, you end up doing a lot of horizontal scaling to read block quotes and zooming to touch UI elements.
It's not the worst, but it is trivial to do better.
what block quotes?
Reddit is barely more than HN with pictures and a LOT of bloat inbetween. It could be as minimal as 4chan-style imageboards if you add voting and a slightly different comment view.
Youtube is just a tiled list of thumbnails or an embedded video player followed by a list of thumbnails. It could work 100% without JS outside of the video controls. Instead it's a huge, slow mess. It's also inconsistent; in my case it scales the list of videos from subscriptions to about 50% of the browser window's width, leaving a chunk of empty space on the sides. The startpage with basically the same layout always uses the full width.
99% of websites are (could be) just static text and images. Facebook, Reddit, CNN etc could look like HN. Amazon could look like craigs list. The amount of sites that actually need and are enhanced by JS bloat is very low.
Its actually one of those cases where the old news print model of multiple columns would work well, but that is much harder than it should be with CSS, so pretty much no one does newsprint style scrolling where you read all the columns and then scroll to the next set.
I think many people, my parents included, would have trouble navigating HN on a phone. Especially upvote/downvote.