Comment by ducktective | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ducktective | Hacker News Reader

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Discourse is dynamic and fun but:

1- There is excessive white-space everywhere (like every other modern web-app). I feel like it was designed as a mobile-first solution.

2- There could have been smarter features regarding gamification and karma. Currently you can only hit like button (the total like count of a user is not even visible)

3- If a post has many replies, it only shows them up until a certain point and you have to scroll down to view more. These javascript shenanigans should not exist in a forum app IMO.

I have never used a nimforum-based forum but a quick browse in https://forum.nim-lang.org/ shows that their UI is more dense (less white-space) which addresses point 1 above.

> the total like count of a user is not even visible

That’s wonderful. Definitely a fantastic decision to help prevent toxic conversations. So glad that “feature” doesn’t exist on Hacker News or in Discourse.

But it does exist on HN. I can see you karma and after a while, the upvote count is visible.

When I ask a technical question on a forum, I'd like to know if a user who is deemed helpful in the community (by like count or `solved` count) is replying to me.

> 1- There is excessive white-space everywhere (like every other modern web-app). I feel like it was designed as a mobile-first solution.

So many programmers have this obsession with interfaces having every available piece of information displayed all at once. I just don't understand the appeal. I find these sorts of interfaces confusing and overwhelming, I literally can't think straight when I look at them. I immediately forget what I was doing due to all the distractions.

It highly depends on the use case. When people interact with a piece of software all day every day, they tend to appreciate having more information/actions available at a glance. Simple interfaces are better for casual users, but they generally mean more clicking around and tend to be slower to use for experts.

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