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Comment by ninepoints | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure this is an unpopular opinion here, but I hate this website's UX. Replying to a comment loads a new page, losing the entire context of the thread. There is no UI to indicate if there's a reply to an earlier comment made. The typograph is ugly as sin, and hard to read (too small on desktop, looks bad on mobile, poor contrast). With new pages needed for basic reply/editing capabilities, the site doesn't even accurately track the navigation stack. Sure it loads quickly, but we can load a hello world in a p tag pretty quickly too. HN as a site is a perfect example of how bad a SSR experience can be.

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None of this changes simply by moving rendering to the client, and none of these changes would require a client-rendered site.

Please indicate where I suggested as such.

This reply comes off as needlessly rude, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that it's just intent not coming across well via text.

In the context of the comment to which you're replying[0] I'm not sure how else to take your comment. OK, you don't like HN's UX, that's either a comment on SSR and on topic for the thread, or completely unrelated.

> HN as a site is a perfect example of how bad a SSR experience can be.

This is a great ending line if the things you list before it would automatically be better under CSR, or are only capable of being fixed by moving HN to CSR. So, it seems pretty natural to me to assume that you're saying those things (reply notifications, typography, losing position on a reply) would be better under CSR, which is not necessarily the case.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37237320

My point is that this site is not a good example to use for showing SSR in a good light. Logically, this doesn't mean the converse of the statement is implied (that if this site didn't use SSR, it would be good).

From a pure UX perspective, I agree. User experience is outside of any technology. Apple Magic Mouse is a technological marvel, but UX sucked.

Don't know who built this site or how old it is, but the UX is definitely sub-par compared to many other server-rendered sites. Submitting a form and losing the scroll position doesn't happen in every site, even if the page gets reloaded. And the font thing is more of a CSS problem than a SSR/client-rendering problem.

Maybe it's time to implement this site Ux with htmx

A lot of it could be improved with some CSS changes (scaling etc) as a sprinking of javascript which could handle commenting without reloads. My opinion is that it's perfect for what it is, a discussion board and nothing more. It's not a social media site.

Not that this should be the answer, but there are a lot of HN browser plugins. Most have at least some level of theming and inline commenting. I'm currently a fan of Refined Hacker News (no affiliation) - https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news - but I'm sure there are others just as good out there.

Thank you for the suggestion, it looks great!

For what it's worth, my iOS and Android hacker news app called HACK includes push notifications for replies to posts and comments.

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