Hacker News Reader

Comment by subbu | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why some users are saying the design is not good. I found it to be pretty neat and clutter less. It doesn't come in the way.

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I don't find it terrible, but I think the question text on the main page could be larger than the Votes/Answers information. I mean, isn't the question more important the number of votes or answers? I'm not scanning the home page for the question with the most votes or answers.

Or, from another angle:

What kind of effect will making the number of votes, answers, and views more prominent than the question have on the site? Will it encourage gaming the system / posting for points rather than to be helpful?

Compare Hacker News - http://i493.photobucket.com/albums/rr292/stackoverflow1/Pict...

With Stack Overflow - http://i493.photobucket.com/albums/rr292/stackoverflow1/Pict...

In Tufte-speak, Stack Overflow clearly has a much lower data/ink ratio and way too much chart junk.

Interesting classification. But I wouldn't put the answer/view count in crap. Otherwise there is no way of judging/weighing the answers and its usefulness.

Those numbers tell you nothing about the actual usefulness of the answer since that's entirely subjective. They only tell you a little about the community there, which is only useful if that matters to you (i.e if you're there to play the game).

However from the point of view of someone who admittedly wastes too much time on distractions like YC, I'm glad their design sucks since if they copied YC outright they would be 4x as likely to suck me in. In the same screen space YC manages to show me 20 articles whereas Stack Overflow only manages to fit in 5.

In my opinion, the colors don't look good together, and the main page is way too busy. Tags have too much emphasis. (Reddit does the same thing, and it's ugly there too.)

Anyway, I am not the target demographic, so my opinion really doesn't matter.

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