For me HN is nearly unusable on mobile without a client

HN is popular within certain demographics and tends to have somewhat circular discussions as a result. As someone who works in finance in NYC, I know nobody else who reads it. I imagine if I worked in tech in Redwood City, I might think differently.

HN is fine on mobile. It’s just text anyway. It is easy to reflow text.

I’m using it on mobile right now, works great. Has all of the same features as desktop.

What is your complaint about mobile?

I do, and it's fine. Not ideal (things like the vote arrows are hard to hit with fingers, as the most egregious example), but still vastly better than the average "mobile" website.

I'm typing this comment on a third-party app (Hacki) I'm trying out for the first time, so that's another option.

Yes, and it works fine.

I do, using a 3rd party app which has an excellent user-friendly UI.

Due in part to the excellent UI and user-friendly reading experience, both on that mobile app and in a browser on my laptop, HN is the site I visit most often every day for a pleasant break to learn new things.

Reddit on the other hand is something I look at maybe once a month, where I'm reminded each time it's disorienting and hard work to use, so it's not somewhere I go to enjoy a calm read. So for me Reddit is just for finding specific information from a search result then leaving.

The Reddit UI has a lot to do with that. It ties to the "randomness" of the content. HN content also has randomness but because of its UI you can skim a lot in seconds so it's easier to pick out things of interest with low stress and just enjoy them.

Typically I glance through the top 100 to 150 headlines of HN to pick a few of interest, several times a day. It takes about 10-20 seconds to read those headlines, and to know I'm done - which is very different from scrolling-oriented sites which deprive the reader of perspective. I can see how this might be different for people who cannot skim text quickly or who find that difficult, or who are trained to infiniscroll through things showing only a tiny number of large cards on the screen at a time. The latter is how you destroy perspective.

Can you explain what you mean by proper pagination? It breaks up comments into multiple pages so it must be something else.

> No notifications on reply

I'm pretty sure this is intentional in order to avoid shallow discussions and not grab too much attention. I actually like this, but I agree with you that it can make it harder to get answers sometimes and you do miss some replies, on especially older comments.

> No pagination, as mentioned.

Not sure what you mean by this, the lists of posts are very obviously paginated, as (admittedly a bit awkwardly) are larger comments threads. Maybe you mean auto-scrolling pagination?

> No notifications on reply, so it's difficult to get answers to clarifying questions (/threads helps but isn't it).

While not a HN feature, there is a simple solution - http://www.hnreplies.com/

As with others, I'm not sure what you mean by pagination.

The lack of response notification is a feature, though yes, it can be annoying, and I find the degree to which comments or questions go unresponded is ... disappointing. That said, notifications abuse by modern Web / App systems is rampant. I'd like some sort of middle-ground, perhaps a responses / notifications link which would consolidate these. "Threads" is the closest there is to that, though it includes all a person's comments whether (newly) responded to or not.

Mobile experience is pretty poor, agreed, though it's sufficient for reading logged-out (my preferred mode). Composing text on mobile devices is a category error.

Deep threads (and greyed text with downvotes) is a very intentional site design. pg's discussed that in the past, see:

"What I've Learned from Hacker News" (2009) <https://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html>

Discussed at the time: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=495053>

And four years ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19210923>

Some of the site styling can be overridden with CSS. I apply the following on desktop:

Dred's HN CSS Madhackery: https://pastebin.com/gLXiqKyd

There's also a dark mode I've created:

Dred's HN CSS Madhackery -- Dark Mode: https://pastebin.com/6PF3dCXH