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Comment by zylent | Hacker News Reader

HN is an example of what used to be good about the internet. The page loads quickly without pulling in 100Mb of frontend dev navel-gazing. In my experience simple sites like this are much easier to modify locally for accessibility, via screen readers, or local style sheets to modify things like the small click targets.

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.

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Supposing that all your disabled readers are also all programmers is a terrible approach to developing your website. It was developed a long time ago without any consideration for any of these things and simply hasn't changed to address these things; it's not with intent.

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.

This is a false dichotomy. You can fix the small click targets without adding 100mb of react.

What if I told you that you can have a modern site without the bloat? You can improve accessibility without making it more difficult for the user to tweak things.

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.

Comment threads have been collapsible for a while now, the link looks like [-] or [+].

It's a counterintuitive concept that most of the web doesn't get. Their features have no deep value. I, we know HN is backward, flawed, limited.. it's fugly it's bad, crooked, a shame, laughable, it's whatever. Yet we come back.

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.

> Their features have no deep value. I, we know HN is backward, flawed, limited.. it's fugly it's bad, crooked, a shame, laughable, it's whatever. Yet we come back.

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.

but are they problems ? will that change the reason people come here ?

see it as a kind of filter in a way

Basic usability and accessibility is a pretty awful thing to defend as a “filter.”

ok, i'm stretching it but still, the reality is that people keep on using HN and the convos are good (was better before but alas)

The problems GP listed have nothing to do with the size of JS or any other loaded resources, except for maybe adding a handful of bytes to the 2KB of CSS.

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.

I agree. It's the one site I can browse on a very limited mobile connection, and I'm very glad about it.

It’s a knee jerk reaction by those that don’t want change or’ worried the changes would go too far

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

I literally use it to test if my internet is working!

Amen.

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