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Comment by shashashasha___ | Hacker News Reader

is this a serious answer or trolling? how would web experience on mobile be if i have to manually zoom everything all of the time?

fact is NH on mobile web is not optimized for unknown reasons. its not a big challenge to do it either. I have a userscript that makes everything bigger and removes junk out.

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HN is not designed well for desktop either. The voting buttons are too small and close to each other. I’m sure every HN user on every platform has clicked wrongly many a times.

And that is (thankfully) solved by the undown/unvote buttons

Is there any evidence that discourse here would be improved by encouraging mobile users to slam out mobile-sized comments?

Not sure but I comment from both my phone and desktop.

While I understand the sentiment, I think people here can discern between an iMessage and an hn comment. I would be curious to know the percentage of people commenting on mobile devices. I’d guess it’s a lot. I prefer the ui the way it is, I don’t mind the old school feel. I’m sure I could go get an App to make it better. But I don’t think mobile vs desktop necessarily correlates well to quality of hn comment. I could be wrong tho.

Sent from my iphone

Did you "slam out" that comment on your phone? I'm only asking because its shorter than most of the comments I post, here; comments I post almost exclusively from my phone because nine times out of ten that's where I'm browsing HN.

Is there evidence to the contrary?

there's an interesting discussion to be had here around desktop vs mobile applications/UIs. Despite the promise of the existence of a unifying paradigm I find that often technology providers pick a preference or a preference bleeds through culture (more of our QAs use this device) or by pandering to the majority user (typically phones today). In our case I imagine the culture of traditionally accessing HN through an IDE-capable device results in the default being optimised for desktop use.

Spotify recently (well over a year ago now) merged its two clients with the mobile UI being the winner. Its interesting how as a desktop user you notice all these imperfections where you are now the loser. The search is top(ish) left instead of top right and various UI elements work now _so_ much better when you are able to swipe right (to easily navigate albums in a scrollable carousel) or swiftly swipe downwards (where on desktop one must find and drag a scrollbar).

I imagine we've all experienced some of the more irksome manifestations that have already transpired due to this schism such as: websites that tell you to download an application, a support call for a broken web function that results in "use the mobile app, it works there" and isn't fixed for weeks or months, or the horrific pop-ups that encourage the use of one or the other application as dev teams hint at their disinclination to continue minority support.

>Despite the promise of the existence of a unifying paradigm I find that often technology providers pick a preference or a preference bleeds through culture

that promise was a myth. The closest we got to it was responsive design and flex boxes, which are less there because there's "one size fits all" and more because it's trying to make it less painful to tweak your page for desktop vs. mobile. Many companies fall towards the latter, so a ood 95% of the time there will be a "base design", with other platforms simply being "ports".

At the end of the day, they are two different problems, so they will have two different solutions (you know, unless we enter some Cyberpunk rennassaince where humans can grow precise stylus-like appendages). The above solutions were made because it wasn't cost effective to run two different websites perfectly optimized for their respective medium.

Out of curiosity, what parts of the UI do you screen out?

lots of small links i don't care about (like flagging things, parent, ...) + dates and such. i focused the experience on reading, so i also make all comments collapsed by default so i can first read the top level ones. also have parts that were in viewport have style of 'visited' so I can ignore it next time.

in other words, lots of changes to make the experience easier (to me)

> fact is NH on mobile web is not optimized for unknown reasons

It’s literally the only site I use zoomed-in on desktop as well, 150%.

You know you can just go adjust the zoom on most browsers & it'll stick for the site, yes? On Chrome there's a "zoom" option in the drop down.

HN is well optimized on mobile. It's great as is. Lot of people just bullying their opinions.

>bullying their opinions

well that's a turn of phrase I have yet to hear until this point.

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