I realize now, that one of the important factors that keep HN's audience selective is its simple UI.
IMO if we put the design and UI/UX elements of modern social platforms, it may start to attract a wider audience which certainly is not the intent of this platform.
Amazon.com is the ugliest e-commerce site going, but they aren't worried about losing visitors to Wayfair.com, because they're not competing on looks.
Same thing with HN, they are not in direct competition with any other site. The high quality of discussions (thanks to moderation) helps the site show up in search engines, which is how most people discover it.
There are lots of alternative front-ends to HN, those are personal projects and not done to try to boost HN traffic, just to improve the UX for regular visitors. For example I use a browser extension that adds additional menu items to the HN orange bar, like "shownew".
I'm going to disagree somewhat...I think it has _some_ to do with it. I think the UI acts as a sort of pre-filter. I think just having a list of boring looking text (like HN) draws some types of people and repels others.
It is true that HN draws some types of people and repels others, but I think it's because of the culture more than the UI. I mean, old Reddit looked almost exactly like HN and it's as mainstream as a site could be. Craigslist was even more minimalist than HN.
The left numbers almost act as a bar graph to tell you how popular something is, and it is otherwise chronological.
High text interfaces are also dense compared to modern mobile touch based interfaces trying to render on a desktop. https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1407-why-the-drudge-report-is...
I find that some of them are not highlighted even though the numbers seem high enough.
I'm sure it's an algorithm cut-off thing, but I'd like if the lighting scale was a little more linear.
I don’t think it’s as moderated as you’re saying.
I would say, on the other hand, that the average comment is much more thoughtful, in-depth, as it originates from individuals who possess extensive insights on the topics they comment on.
This deters people from making dumb or useless comments and look like fools in front of smart people that visit HN.
People that is not deterred by that will most likely learn the lesson a couple of minutes later from HN members feedbacks.
How do search engines recognize discussions as high quality?
Fortunately this extension[1] takes care of that.
[1] https://github.com/insin/hn-comments-owl/
Also, proper hyperlink support in comments would be appreciated.
I'm working on this:
Would love to hear your thoughts if you have them.
.togg { float:left; margin-right:.5em; letter-spacing:5px; } /* Collapse button to the left and larger */Ironically (given how much hate they get), I find reddit new site and official app to have the best collapse ui. On the left on the web (and with a 100% vertical high which means you never have to scroll up to collapse), and tap anywhere on the message on mobile (much bigger and easier target than hn, works for both right and left handed people).
There have been minor improvements over the years, but just like other products with a long history, change becomes ever more expensive.
I have wondered several times how come has HN not yet abandoned its core principle of simplicity by letting some toxic product designer or typical alike position to step in and "modernize" HN's interface. Everyone does this today and always ends up alienating the audience on which the product is built (coughredditcough).
I admire HN for not doing that, yet, after so many years.
Those things alone would make 90% of sites better.
My god man just give us the goods!
There's no way to say this is a perfect UI. We don't know if people churn because of the experience, or drop off because it's tedious. Maybe the lack of notifications is a problem? Maybe the archaic search is? Maybe the way the top items are rendered skews towards a certain type of interaction and reduces overall interactions?
It's super arbitrary to say it's perfect, or that it meets the best goals it could achieve.
And of course it is, but it’s far richer than that.
Nevertheless, now I think the design helps keep the riff raff out. :) you have to appreciate the content to appreciate HN.
But that "attraction" doesn't guarantee one would keep using something, so in the end it's just a small ingredient.
The other thing it does is group stories by type and made-up keywords to put uninteresting/noisy stuff at the bottom, leaving the deeper cuts at top.
I think these can be easily fixed without loosing the simplicity, which is excellent.
While I would prefer if HN supported Reddit-flavored Markdown, just supporting a quoting syntax would probably provide 50% of the benefit.
It all goes downhill from there, but hitting that goldilocks zone where people can drink from the firehose without getting whacked is an undeniable accolade.
The UI of "modern social platforms" doen not optimise matching these impendances, thats why their users brains are fried.
Plus as others indicated, there does seem to be any "nastiness" here.
So, perfect is achieved by having nothing else to remove.
Well... https://xkcd.com/552/
Web sites on the front page are regularly collapsing under the load of visitors emanating from this place.
You are not part of a small elite club
The audience here has definitely grown over the years, but like any niche subreddit the reason the unwashed masses don't flock here is simply because they don't know about this place, and if they did, they wouldn't care, or they would be turned away by its reputation.
And TBH the way people here sometimes fetishize this forum's layout is kind of creepy.