Why is text of sumissions in low-contrast grey on HN? | Hacker News Reader

Why is text of sumissions in low-contrast grey on HN?

227 pointsfodkodrasz123 comments

Is this some accidental artifact, or intentional?

It strains the eye, it is pain to read asks for example.

While we're at it, why is the 'hide' button so close to the submission link, with no confirmation?

I often accidentally click hide, have to navigate to my profile, click 'hidden', click 'un-hide' then have to go back to the front page and find the post again.

It could simply be replaced with an 'sure? yes / no' right before hiding and this problem would disappear.

Same goes for 'flag'. In fact, sometimes I'm not even sure if I've hidden or flagged the link and I have to check both.

Perhaps proving https://xkcd.com/1172/, that would be pretty disruptive to the way I use the hide button, as it's a good way to leave your cursor in the same spot and "dismiss" posts that I don't plan on reading one by one. Adding a confirmation, and therein forcing me to continuously move the mouse there and back, would completely break that.

I agree with it shouldn't be so near to the link though (and with the broader topic that it seems HN prides itself somehow on having bad UX instead of just simplicity -- albeit perhaps because we couldn't all agree what to change and how!).

I don't know why I'm even surprised, but this is very funny! Of course my "simple" solution has problems as well :)

Maybe something you could opt into though?

I wonder if someone wrote a blog post about the cost of adding options vs not for maintenance of some software in the long term.

Can keep the confirmation link in the same place as the hide link (e.g. make Sure clickable). Then it's just double click.

What hide and submit links are near each other? Submit at top of site... Hide in the individual post headers... Huh?

...oh do you mean the individual post's link in the timestamp? Right. But why are you clicking that? To copy link maybe?

It's only a few pixels (vertically) between the title of the link and the "hide" button.

Misclick when browsing on phone.

I have a "flag" link between the submission link and the hide link.

  77 points by fodkodrasz 1 hour ago | flag | hide | past | favorite | 42 comments

I guess thats a function of having enough karma to enable flagging. Doesn't solve your immediate issue though.

I think they mean the link above it, the actual outgoing link. So in your case it just adds another misclick vector.

I still don't understand the issue. Does OP have an extremely imprecise or very very low DPI mouse? I don't think I'd be able to accidentally misclick the link if I washed down three percocets with a fifth of vodka.

Maybe OP uses a smartphone and a mobile browser

Very easy to misclick on a mobile device, even an iPad.

I think, it is weird that I have never ever clicked on any of items there;

   unvote | flag | hide | past | favorite

I frequently am unsure whether my fat finger tapped upvote or downvote on comments, and since they both disappear...well, I usually just tap "unvote" and do it again, but I'm still never really sure if I tapped the correct one since my finger is so much bigger than the buttons.

You can tell which one happened because the button will say "unvote" if you upvoted and "undown" if you downvoted.

Thank you for this tip! TIL. I almost never downvote, and apparently I've seldom actually misclicked, so I had no idea there was in fact a UI difference.

Please no confirmation prompts. Those are annoying when I am sure that I want to perform an action. I'd rather have an undo button after clicking.

I agree, no confirm, but the current undo procedure for hide is definitely painful and it's really easy to accidentally click.

On the other hand, maybe it's a feature. Lately I've taken the approach that if I hid it accidentally, it probably wasn't worth reading anyway. I'm learning to let it go.

There's a simple fix (from a UX perspective): when you click "hide", swap the button with "unhide" but don't actually hide the article until you refresh.

Would require updating the page with JS

Edit: HN does in fact have things that change without reload like voting, so I take that back, good idea

And the logout button right under my name so I accidentally push it on mobile 50% of the time. Still I don’t think it’ll ever change much which is kind of cool in a way

When I read it on my phone, I have to zoom in for any interaction with HN.

But I really wouldn't like it to become less dense. Or to have prompts.

Yeah I've flagged way more posts by accident than I have on purpose. It's a pain to go find and un-flag them.

This was done by Paul Graham himself in this forum's early days.

At that time reddit was rising. PG didn't want to turn this forum one into another Reddit. To discourage posts with body he grayed out the body text. And then within the next few weeks he grayed out the texts gradually even more. Until it reached the point that you see now.

Encouragement was to post interesting links and blogs. But not turn this one into a general discussion forum.

That was may be in the late 2000s. As far as I can recall.

In that same logic, ask and show HN in PG's mind is to be discouraged because they always contain body text.

But the opposite should be true, ask and show (and others) should just be plain text and not greyed out.

Most regulars post with no body and then add a comment with more info.

I'm reminded of the cognitive ease part of Thinking, Fast and Slow.

The theory is supposedly we pay more attention to what we are reading if it's a bit hard to read. Was there any such idea behind lowering the contrast for these?

Great memory.

It seems that HN has a lot of anti-user features for the sake of it. Perhaps the rationale for graying out self posts is to make them not stand out (so that the post from OP doesn't get any undue advantage over the comments), but it's just an accessibility nightmare. It's as if people with poor eyesight were not welcome here.

I use Refined Hacker News https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news which alleviates some pain points, but unfortunately it doesn't fix this issue.

Maybe you can add some user CSS to change the text color for "toptext"?

In some cases I agree, but in this case it might be that making the top text darker would contrast too grossly with the bright white background of the textbox below, making it painful. I actually think it's rather balanced.

It could also be observing the necessary humility of offering a submission to be judged and engaged with by the larger community. In this community "light slate gray", or thereabouts, is the "Hessian sack of humility".

That fact that my mid-20s eyes still require having HN at 110% zoom should be a clear sign that design is not a top priority for the site. It's fine, you can always do custom CSS, right /s

Or you could hit ctrl-+ once and go on with your day?

That's what I said? ctrl-+ increase the "zoom" of the page.

You said

> It's fine, you can always do custom CSS, right /s

Which seems rather excessive when it's a single keystroke to fix

That is referring to design/accessibility not being a concern for the site.

I do that too. Only needed to once I went from a (1080p) 27" monitor to a 24" one. Not required, but the size at 110% looks better to me. Recently discovered that firefox saves this value if you do it outside of a private browsing window, prior to which I did it on each browser restart.

I use HN at 133% zoom and it's perfect. (unfortunately refined hacker news also don't fix the zoom)

Did the whole site's font change recently? Because I hate it.

Do you have tracking protection set too high in firefox? That prevents sites from rendering text in "non-system" fonts.

It's DejaVu Sans on my screen. I haven't noticed it change, if it did.

> It's as if people with poor eyesight were not welcome here.

Or even good eyesight.

Every single part of HN’s inaccessibility is intentional, with a very strong and unshakable foundation beneath it. This is empirically proven by the fact that YCombinator hasn’t spent any effort on changing it for over a decade and a half. And it’s not for the lack of money or the lack of competence.

Of all the things one could complain about HN, like the tiny fonts and the tiny buttons next to each other and the disregard for making it easier for those who use screen readers, the color of a text submission would be the very last thing that would get fixed.

(This comment is partly sarcastic)

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

"Additionally, founders of YC companies see each other's usernames show up in orange, which — although not an explicit benefit — does allow fellow YC founders to immediately identify one another in discussions."

The real features are hidden from us plebes.

Is a list backing this available anywhere? Would be neat if someone ported that into a userscript or something.

Maybe I'm the odd one out, but I really like this design for getting a massive amount of comments on screen at once with minimal distractions (no avatars, less ability to add memes), compared to most any other forum or social media. The grey text OP mentioned is a bit of an oddity, especially when I consider someone who has vision issues but not to the extent they need a screen reader. If other forums I frequent decided to swap to a more HN inspired design, I think I would overall feel better using it.

That said, I haven't tried using a screen reader on here so I can't speak to how well it works from that level of accessibility.

I would think HN is actually pretty good for screen readers or other assisted browsing. I say that having not tried it myself, but it even works reasonably well in text-only browsers. Certainly a much simpler front-end than most modern websites.

I just tried using Firefox Mobile's reader mode and it seems to work really well. All the comments get included, although oddly the usernames do not. But maybe that is not a bad thing ;)

Agreed 100 percent. Luckily third party apps and websites exist, because the one that YCombinator has made is worthy of all the ridicule it gets. Reddit gets a lot of hate around here but at least it's readable on a device made in the last decade.

It's a shame because the community here is so great otherwise.

I use the following in ublock origin to change the look of HN. You can definitely restyle the site to your liking!

    news.ycombinator.com##html:style(filter:invert(95%) hue-rotate(200deg); background: white)

Edited to add: screenshots here: https://gist.github.com/aclarknexient/c39c83f2f97c3c6b1c307c...

Thank you. Never thought of doing quick'n'dirty CSS changes through uBlock.

I second that. Didn't even realize I could do that, just copied

news.ycombinator.com##html:style(filter:invert(95%) hue-rotate(200deg); background: white)

into My Filters section, refreshed the page and it worked. It's so simple.

I didn't realize CSS had such sophisticated transformations nowadays. How long until filter:llm("pontificate")?

Stories that are text, rather than links to articles or posts offsite, are disfavored. I think for awhile they had a ranking penalty, too? Like this one, they tend to be meta, and HN has a fairly low tolerance for meta on the front page.

I had the same question and made a browser extension that addresses many of the complaints in this thread (poorly-positioned elements, sizing, dark mode): https://github.com/dan-lovelace/hacker-news-pro. It lets you completely rebuild the layout however you'd like and has some pre-made themes that do a decent job without writing one from scratch.

It is intentional and meant to dissuade users from treating HN as a content publication platform. HN seeks to be an aggregator of quality links (on specific subjects) + topical discussions on the linked subjects. They don't want to degenerate into a Linked-In (or similar) type network which encourages users to create original posts on their platform.

It's a really shitty, user-hostile way to run a website and is a beacon of the tech-bro "screw you, I'm fine" attitude that I utterly detest around tech.

Fix your styles, make it accessible. Don't be an a-hole.

And I've resorted to a custom user style to make it readable. https://github.com/mgladdish/website-customisations/tree/mai...

I guess it's a good place to start sharing userstyles for HN.

https://userstyles.org/styles/92693/dark-hacker-news-solariz...

All I see are enormous album arrows filling the screen on iOS

Just letting you know, both stylish extension and with it userstyles.org have been largely left behind by the community due to past transgressions like tracking site visits. While that's mostly in he past afaik, they've been superseded by the stylus extension and userstyles.world

Yes, I'm actually using Stylish - thank you for leaving some context for everyone reading this.

I think it would be good to change. IMO I have learned that downvoted comments are gray, so unconsciously I associate gray comments with suspicion.

Exactly. So the submissions themselves are met with subliminal suspicion because of our training.

I read grey comments and I upvote them if they are not offensive or extremely wrong (or huge walls of text).

I downvote very seldom (like once per week). But I don't downvote grey comments, they are already downvoted. (The exemptions are extremely offensive comments or astronomical wrong comments (but I don't remember someone that was so wrong to deserve piled downvotes).)

I mentioned this before. This kills show/launch-HNs that has long text that needed all the attention it needs. For these long posts, it is just unreadable in mobile, so I have to skip reading it until I get back to desktop, which often, its ranking dropped and/or I had forgotten about it. So HN is really preventing these show/launch-HNs from getting its needed attention.

A better question is why websites in general feel the need to use custom colors and fonts for text. Users should set their own preferences in the browsers and that should be that. OTOH if I continue with that argument I should shun the pale background color which I actually kind of like. OTOH part of why I like it is because it sets the "page" apart from the unused portions of the browser window, which I'm not going to get into, as it really opens a huge can of worms that are mostly opinion ;-) (hint from me: why do we run everything maximized?)

Take your point to its extreme conclusion and you will reinvent Gemini.

That’s why I like Gemini so much (and developed my own command line browsers which display the content of a web page in the terminal without caring about CSS/colors/etc)

I agree. User preferences should always override a site’s color, typeface, text size choices. The browser is the user agent after all, not the web developer’s agent.

If I want a high contrast color scheme, or large fonts because of my vision, I should simply be able to set it in my browser’s settings and be done, not have to futz with extensions and injecting CSS into each site.

There are a whole lot of front-end UIs for Hackernews but I never wanted to litter my primary browser with extras unless in dire need. I usually browse Hackernews in my Primary Browser on a rather large monitor.

So, the first problem is that Hackernews is too spread out for comfort and I have a custom styles that forces the max-width within 960px (I know, OldSkool habit).

If this is something you are comfortable with, I just set the text to be a little darker than the default light gray.

FYI, `table#hnmain` where everything happens in HN. And one of the best articles to help you with this is at https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2021/custom-style-sheet-in-safa...

To set the text to a darker color;

   :root {
     /* besides the other variables  */
     --color-700: #374151;
   }
   table.fatitem .toptext {
     color: var(--color-700) !important;
   }

The font size is also incredibly small on large monitors; my default zoom on here is like 150% in my browser.

The browser has per-website zoom controls, so it's probably wise to use those, and not bikeshed font sizes on websites.

Man, the bar for bikeshedding is on the ground these days!

Yep. Totally my fault for wanting the website to use at least the browser's default font size (16px), and not sizes designed for a 1024x768 monitor in 2007. :)

I agree with you about the effect on the eyes.

That's the default color of the page, set with

  body  { font-family:Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size:10pt;
          color:#828282; }

in https://news.ycombinator.com/news.css

It's also the color of the name and data of the people that write comments.

Comments text has its own color, set with

  .c00, .c00 a:link { color:#000000; }

I've been wondering this myself, also, since comments that are downvoted heavily get lighter and lighter, for the longest time I've assumed that the text submissions I was reading also were that controversial.

I've always assumed it was to disincentivise posting text rather than links.

There are so many accessibility issues on Hacker News!

Ways to avoid the same mistakes?

Easy...

1 - Make sure everyone involved from designers to developers to content creators to testers to... whatever your village has in it... has knowledge of WCAG. (New standards out a few weeks ago!) WCAG is the de facto law of the land now, and businesses are liable from damages if they don't make efforts to ensure all users receive "equal enjoyment" of their web properties.

https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG22/

2 - Incorporate Accessibility Testing into your design, build processes, and content creation processes. WAVE works great! Aim for 0 Errors and 0 Contrast Errors. (You will likely have to re-design anything where you're putting text directly on top of images.)

https://wave.webaim.org/report#/https://news.ycombinator.com...

3 - Incorporate Lighthouse into your design and build process. Aim for > 90s in all categories.

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/overview/

4 - Ensure your content stays your own by setting up your security headers. This step just ensures that you know where all the content is coming from and you've had a chance to validate it.

https://observatory.mozilla.org/analyze/news.ycombinator.com

https://securityheaders.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinato...

And here are some browsers extensions that make it easy to build a CSP for your existing sites.

Chrome - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/content-security-p...

Firefox - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/laboratory-by...

I, for one, miss the old plain HTML look, with blue unvisited links and purple visited ones and a font of my choosing through my browser settings.

Let's return to Berners-Lee Chic.

Well, that’s basically what we do on Gemini ;-)

https://geminiprotocol.net/

HN is a bad site when it comes to UX in general. Riddled with known anti-patterns. Its the content that brings me back, despite bad UI/visual design, fundamentally unfair and unpredictable voting patterns, and nasty community behavior being far too common down in comment threads.

Thats how good the content is on HN.

I use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hnes/ which has a bunch of nice features

I'd also like to bring up why downvoted comments are increasingly dimmed? It is very difficult to read them. If the idea is to discourage users from reading them, why not just remove them after a few downvotes.

They are removed after a few downvotes, unless you turn on showdead in your profile

There's a difference between downvoted posts and dead posts, I believe:

> What does [dead] mean?

> The post was killed by software, user flags, or moderators.

> Dead posts aren't displayed by default, but you can see them all by turning on 'showdead' in your profile.

But many downvotes is one of the main ways that they get picked to kill by "software, user flags, or moderators".

Is this true? I thought dead was the result of flagging, not mere downvotes.

This is one of HN's best features, IMO. Bad comments literally become less visible, in proportion to how bad they are, but without actually stopping anyone from reading them or leaving a context hole if someone makes a good reply.

"Bad" as in HN disagrees with, not "Bad" against the rules or incorrect.

Gotta keep groupthinking right HN ?

It's censorship by hivemind. (popular in much social media. A kind of crowdsourced moderation)

The hivemind censors any opinion in discord with its own.

Which is one path to harmony and peace. But at what price?

Removing the post entirely would be censorship. That's not what's happening.

But HN also removes comments that are flagged too many times, unless you turn on showdead. So yeah, censorship by hivemind is the proper description (by your definition).

You're already grey friend.

Also called online group bullying, old time religions called it shunning, old UK unions called it 'sending to Coventry', ostracise, ghost = a way to harm people by collective and deniable group action.

Mammalian tribe-forming automation?

By the literal definition of censorship, you are correct. HN, and most social media, make decisions about what gets shown and what doesn't. Any filtering, moderation, or removal of any content where the goal is to make things better (and so implies the removed item was in the way of good) is technically censorship. Even the likes of spam filtering is censorship. It is removal of objectionable content after all.

But there's connotations to the term censorship that make it carry a stronger implied moral, or indeed political, judgement than terms like "filter" in contexts like this one.

Maybe that's exactly what you wanted to communicate. However, as phrased, it's more likely to get a knee-jerk downvote rather than a reasoned response.

Which is exactly why I chose to respond, I'd rather see a discussion on the topic rather than either your comment being ignored or removed. After all, that's why I come to HN, it censors in favor of discourse, and though it's imperfect, it does far better in practice than any other site I know of.

Apparently 97% of the population can be relied upon to conform (according to a statistic I saw once). That casts the method into doubt I think.

Yes, it's a massive labor saver. No, it is not intelligent.

Conform to what? What labor is saved? I'm not following

Conform to the popular view.

The labor of moderators.

I don't think this take is necessarily wrong, but HN isn't a forum for free and open ideas in the way you're getting at.

The purpose of this site is to surface content and discussion that is likely to be considered insightful, engaging, interesting, etc. to the specific demographic that reads this site.

Consensus moderation is on point for this. You let the demographic that is on the site determine the value of the content on the site.

Content that appeals to a minority of the demographic here is unlikely to get traction. That's kind of the point, I think.

That doesn't mean minority viewpoints are unlikely to get traction, I do see engaging takes on minority viewpoints get traction on HN, I assume because they are both interesting and fun to engage with for the demographic that hangs out here.

Discourage is different from preventing; there have been a few times when I've noticed controversial comments bouncing between grey and black, including some when they've been mine and I can therefore see the net karma directly.

Purely subjectively, I think low contrast also makes it harder to get annoyed when noticing Someone Is Wrong On The Internet, without also feeling (so strongly) disengaged when I think a low contrast comment has good point.

This is one of those things I wish surfaced in the UI: polarized votes vs. consensus votes.

I actually really like the dimmed blocks of text for highly downvoted content.

But I've made a few comments that were _extremely_ controversial and oscillated wildly a few points up or down over the course of an hour. Once I noticed what was happening, I started refreshing out of curiosity to see how wild the oscillations were.

It seemed like the comment was getting hundreds of votes, but staying around a total point count of 10.

A comment with a point count of 10 and a total of 10 votes signals something very different than a comment with a point count of 10 and a total of 500 votes.

If you click the timestamp (permalink) of the post to open it in its own page, you'll see it in full contrast. This is the workaround for when you literally can't read it any more.

If I ever want to read dimmed text on HN, I just highlight it with my mouse. Then it shows up quite well.

Dark Reader is your friend on this site. It also helps reading downvoted comments (which are often dumb, but not always, and I want to read and decide for myself).

I'm on my phone so I can't check, but does HN still have the accessibility issue with having a hidden image that does the indentation?

Yes, layout is done with tables and indent looks like:

  <td class="ind" indent="1">
    <img src="s.gif" width="40" height="1">
  </td>

Argh, my life was so much better before I knew that :-(

Posts with the body, like yours, are discouraged for a reason.

Ask HN:

Because this isn't reddit and blogposts should go, as the name suggests, on a blog.

Explaining the submission title you've chosen with corresponding submission text is not blogging. Anyone who might attempt to use it as such would likely not see enough upvotes on the post for it to ever become an attractive blog system.

The guidelines ask to use the original title, so people are no supposed to choose the submission title. (There are some exemptions and special cases, more details in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html )

Computer people generally design terrible computer interfaces because they are not only willing to cope with something bad, they're pleased to. - Alan Kay, Personal Computing Historic Beginnings

(I use hckrnews.com)

Why is there still no Dark Mode?

Sorry, it had to be said. :P

The idiocy of HN's anti-feature features is laid bare when you realize a lot of them are easily fixed with a little bit of custom CSS, and it is a forum for hacker after all. I wager these sorts of tricks don't really do much but make dang and co. feel smart.

If the goal of the feature is to affect user behaviour en masse, then it doesn't matter what can be done to disable them, as long as the majority of people don't disable them.

Hacker news is a site for "hackers", which is to say people who like to tinker and explore.

Making the css awful is part of the experience. It encourages you to learn how to tinker with your way of consuming the web to be able to override that css and make it readable.

I'm pretty sure the majority of iphone jailbreaks have been to allow customizing hacker news's css in ios safari.

What an insane justification for making a site have accessibility issues. Hacking should be for the joy of it, not to undo someone else's poor judgement.

LOL, HN is owned by a major VC-funder, its not some grassroots hacker website.

Unrelated: Any 'grassroots hacker website' that doesnt echo the same thing over and over :/?

May I suggest joining the fediverse and following the right set of people.

You could try lobsters, but it's basically the same as this site, with maybe 30% fewer transphobic techbros.

It's also literally the MVP for pg's toy lisp implementation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com