Hacker news needs a redesign, the UI is horrible by basic accessibility standards: Very small click targets, horrible mobile experience, too small font size.
I think many in the HN crowd see it as a rejection of the modern bloat and straight up garbage code that many popular sites (particularly news aggregators, looking @ you reddit) tend to become.
I appreciate that hacker news is largely unchanged and I also appreciate a website that is more conservative about making unnecessary changes to it just for the sake of change, but addressing accessibility issues shouldn't be eschewed just for the sake of not changing. You might argue that anyone that is bothered by those changes could also just modify locally for their own personal taste, which seems much more reasonable.
So many people here on HN think it's all or nothing. But that couldn't be further from the truth. You're basically using the worst of the worst sites as an example for how modern sites look and function.
All that is required to build a good modern site, is the will to do so. Even small tweaks to the existing site would improve it a lot. For example, the click targets are extremely small on mobile. Comments get grayed out to the level of them almost being invisible. There is no way to collapse comment threads. And the list goes on and on. All of this can be fixed without rewriting the whole site.
Reddit used to be like that.. search feature was lame, ui was bland .. but the subs and spirit was way so much more important it even made the flaws something you were attached too. It's a very human trait actually.. you know that some stuff gives you so much, you start to like the limitations.
The fact that some people keep coming back despite legitimate problems with the website's design is hardly an argument for not solving legitimate problems.
see it as a kind of filter in a way
The trouble is conflating "what used to be good about the Internet" with deliberately making a website difficult to read and less accessible, when there's absolutely no reason those things need to be correlated.
Personally I agree that accessibility needs huge improvement. Not just for those who have disabilities but even other users on a touch screen will benefit
It doesn't matter if you can zoom into text when downvoted comments have so little contrast with the background (#ddd over #f6f6ef). The "X minutes ago", "hide", "edit" comment header links even fail without zooming.
You can zoom, and the website reacts very well to zooming.
> It doesn't matter if you can zoom into text when downvoted comments have so little contrast with the background (#ddd over #f6f6ef).
That's on purpose. If you don't agree with it it's trivial to overload it with custom CSS.
Your apartment building doesn't have a wheelchair ramp? That's on purpose. If you don't agree with it it's trivial to buy a bag of concrete and build one.
That's a bad metaphor. First it's not possible to build a wheelchair ramp in your apartment building without affecting everyone else. Second, a custom CSS is very easy to make compared to a wheelchair ramp. Third, the comments being hard to read is, again, on purpose. I don't know the precise reason behind it, from what I understand it's part of the numerous tools that HN has to try to be a better place for discussion online than the rest. Some other tools seems to be: dead comments not being visible by default, new accounts having their names highlighted, the "reply" button not being here on "deep" threads in the "regular tree view".
If you don't agree with this decision, that's fine but that doesn't mean everyone is aligned with you.
It's not for my friend, who's a contractor. He finds working with concrete to be easy though. I don't.
Being inaccessible on purpose doesn't change the fact that it's inaccessible.
> Being inaccessible on purpose doesn't change the fact that it's inaccessible.
It explains why it still is though.
No it's not, it's more complicated: https://pastebin.com/aMYiGr05 (and there's no "commtext" class). So it's literally harder than you think, and you're presumably a developer. So how about the average user?
> It explains why it still is though.
Um, ok? And the building only has stairs because the architect didn't consider the needs of people that use assistive devices like wheelchairs. What's your point? "Why?" was not in question.
> Um, ok? And the building only has stairs because the architect didn't consider the needs of people that use assistive devices like wheelchairs.
Using metaphors doesn't help, they don't hold. Unless you assume that there is some people that are considered undesirable and that are also being kept out by having only stairs? And that aren't correlated to people that use assistive devices like wheelchairs?
> What's your point? "Why?" was not in question.
Why is why not in question? HN breaks accessibility guidelines in an easily fixable ways for reasons that are related to the primary purpose of the website. I think at this point it's just a difference of values between us. You seem to think that accessibility guidelines should matter above everything, I think it's fine to break them when it's needed for the "purpose" of the website. One other example of that would be "old internet" website, with flashing text, non-legible text and everything. On these websites, not respecting the guidelines is fine for me.
Again, you don't understand it, but want to tell everyone else how easy it is...
> not respecting the guidelines is fine for me
in contrast I think everyone should be able to use the web, that it should be accessible. This isn't important to you, but sometimes you have to think about other people with a limited set of abilities in a compassionate way. The GP mentions "bad design" and I mentioned an objective measure: text that can't be read by someone without writing code.
Yes, I do.
> Do you understand that the class "commtext" doesn't appear anywhere in the source code for HN?
It actually does, try looking at the source code again.
> The comment colors are controlled by classes like "c00" etc.
Which is unrelated to the fact that you can use commtext to set their color.
> Chrome has a tool called "DevTools" you can use that will show you. Here's the CSS for this site: https://news.ycombinator.com/news.css
Why are you looking at the CSS and not at the HTML? Look at the HTML, and you'll see that every comment is inside an HTML element (usually a span) that has a commtext class.
> Again, you don't understand it, but want to tell everyone else how easy it is...
Again, you haven't checked and just assume you are right.
We can continue the conversation about values once you've learned how to use "show source" or the inspector.
Here's the link for the source of the page of the story: view-source:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28686126. Try looking up "commtext" (by using Ctrl + f).
The reasons this forum has remained under the radar for the majority of people are more likely related to it being hosted on a subdomain of a site almost no one has even heard of, it being called "Hacker News" (which immediately limits its mainstream appeal) and its content not being shared on popular social media sites outside of the population that already knows about it. Plus, this community has kind of a bad reputation in many tech circles, so many potential users avoid it like the plague.
The design isn't keeping anyone away - Craigslist has a similar low-res design and the mainstream has no problem with it. Old Reddit was similar to HN, and 4chan is even more arcane, and both have huge userbases.
The only people who ever complain about Hacker News' layout are its own users.
UI redesigns as a concept are in my opinion horrible.
The approach linked to here is much better. Making incremental changes to the existing and well known UI. No need for a full redesign all at once.
Anyways, when is the victorville film archive grand re-opening?
I have no issue using Hacker News on mobile either. There are apps available if you prefer something mobile-centric.
HN's design is one of the best I've found on the Web, and one of the few places I still feel comfortable at.
It could do with a few minor CSS tweaks to address some of those points you've listed (which I do agree with to a degree).
But we are a long way from horrible by accessibility standards - I mean, it's literally text only for a start!