Ask HN: Why so hard to read HN on mobile | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why so hard to read HN on mobile

5 pointsjzombie9 comments

The really tiny font and not great contrast ratio make Hacker News a bummer to read on mobile.

I have a slight suspicion it will never improve and these words are going into the void, but the site has not improved for years and neither has my vision.

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Aside from heavily downvoted and dead comments, where is the contrast ratio poor?

Everywhere. The text is black on grey. Of all the sites I visit regularly, HN has the worst reading contrast.

And that's not even mentioning the ridiculously small font size of 10pt, and the hardcoded font families (Verdana, Geneva) that can cause poor text rendering (should be "system-ui" instead for best display quality on all platforms).

Comment headings. I feel the text in the orange header could be included just because of how ridiculously tiny it is.

When HN was born, it was for browsing on a laptop while your compiler runs in a different window.

Little known fact: There's no embedded audio or video because nobody could hear it over the howl of the cooling fans.

I agree. This is why I use Opera's mobile browser which defaults to zoom with dynamic text wrapping to fit the screen width.

Never had an issue with HN on my phone, wish more sites had its nice simple layout which is the same on desktop and mobile.

Reading from my phone right now can confirm

Probably it was made for web 1 and maybe we are at like web 4 or 5 by now. Also the one who made it paul graham was last seen on twitter flexing on elon musk and showing human mortality actuary curves so idk if he's thinking to upgrade his news site. Maybe bringing any attention to the website's implementation wouldn't be a good look because I think it was supposed to be the flagship or demo for arc his boutique programming language which is having a ... slow takeoff or at least not a fast takeoff.

I bet the code is nearly unmaintainable too.

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