Ask HN: Why is this site so stubbornly against readability and accessibility? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why is this site so stubbornly against readability and accessibility?

21 pointsRazengan19 comments

I don't get it. This place has been around for more than 15 years, with supposedly some of the smartest people in the industry hanging out here, yet why is almost every thing about it still so HOSTILE towards basic UX practices?

Tiny font, minuscule tap/click targets, GRAY text on a BEIGE background???

Yes, yes, if I hate it so much I could just use custom CSS, or make a better platform, or a reader app.. I just want to know why, besides "they don't have enough time/resources." Literally all they'd need to do to make this place more readable is remove their current CSS.

View on HN

Huh?

How about some site for sore eyes like

https://www.reddit.com/

I use ctrl + and ctrl - to adjust this site for viewing conditions. I will grant that I hit the flag button by accident sometimes with my tablet but i am scrupulous about fixing my mistakes.

It's a breath of fresh area for an industry that wants to devote 80% of a 640x480 screen by superfluous whitespace and huge letters where I have to drag, drag, drag, drag, drag to read anything...

I agree about the colors but the text-centric nature of the site otherwise makes it better than most places I visit.

Resizeable text would also be good on mobile, where zoom is not always available, and is often of the wrong type to be useful¹.

Dark Reader handles the colors well enough to be usable imo, although it makes the OP on text posts kinda ugly and low-contrast by default.

> HOSTILE towards basic UX practices?

As someone who is mildly to moderately visually impaired (and whose vision continues to degrade rapidly compared to that of healthy people), I don't actually trust UX professionals with accessibility, especially on the web. This is unfortunate because that's also the only group that ever has any expertise with it. But generally speaking, extremely simple, text-centric websites are way easier to work with than professionally designed ones.

1: Magnification is an 'intuitive' form of zooming but it's god awful if you need to be zoomed in all the time. Old school resize-and-reflow zoom is way more usable because then you still only have to scroll/pan in one direction.

>Old school resize-and-reflow zoom is way more usable because then you still only have to scroll/pan in one direction.

Yes, but that isn't how HN Works on mobile.

That's exactly why I said that building it (i.e., text size increase/decrease buttons) into the website would be good.

A simple dark mode would be nice, and so would not clicking flag all the time by accident.

>This place has been around for more than 15 years, with supposedly some of the smartest people in the industry hanging out here

Your question answers itself partially. If it's lasted 15 years with the smartest people, then it's doing something right regardless of how wrong the errors that it commits are.

In http://paulgraham.com/hackernews.html pg wrote the following (the entire essay is worth a read):

> So the most important thing a community site can do is attract the kind of people it wants. A site trying to be as big as possible wants to attract everyone. But a site aiming at a particular subset of users has to attract just those—and just as importantly, repel everyone else. I've made a conscious effort to do this on HN. The graphic design is as plain as possible, and the site rules discourage dramatic link titles. The goal is that the only thing to interest someone arriving at HN for the first time should be the ideas expressed there.

Voting on a comment on my phone is always a gamble. "Have I upvoted or downvoted?" "Who knows!"

  1. Zoom all the way in on the buttons
  2. Observe the animation while your fat finger hits the arrow
  3. Weren’t sure? Unvote and revote

60% of the time, it works every time!

> "Have I upvoted or downvoted?" "Who knows!"

It's easy to see which way you voted. If you upvoted, an "unvote" link will appear on the line. If you downvoted, an "undown" link will appear. These allow you to change your vote (for a certain period of time).

It is a gate.

Exactly. Come for the content, despite the looks.

I use a plugin called Zoompage to make the type larger, and Stylus to put everything in dark mode.

I kind of like the minimal interface. People can always customized browser settings if they want to, and the site is refreshingly straightforward and no-nonsense.

There are plenty of hacker news apps with different interfaces

How many work in any web browser??

Most

Thanks. By "app" did you mean stylesheet/skin?

Do yourself a favor and get Dark Reader[1]

- [1]: https://darkreader.org

It's called egotism. So just accept it and make your own stylesheet or site.

Because it's perfect the way it is.

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