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Comment by xkbarkar | Hacker News Reader

What a terrible platform to present an interesting story. What wrong with a good old fashioned article style blog ?

I admit I am so turned off by the format I only made it hlf way throught the thread.

"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."

(I know these things are indeed annoying—but that's why we have this rule.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I gave up when I realized that I have to click on each "tweet" to read more

the horror

Likewise.

There is apparently an extremely unintuitive "Show more for all"[1] button at the top of the initial post.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/5l15SM8.png

navigate the UI disaster to read about the UI disaster...

I don't consider this story a UI disaster. Generating different 4-digit codes across terminals for the same object, and recycling those codes regularly... that's a data handling disaster.

That kinda seems feature-rather-than-bug honestly - I read the entire thing because I'm fascinated by UI/UX stories like this, and clicking to open each tab is nbd, but if it had been a topic I wasn't that interested in, I wouldn't've read it. Which means I'm less likely to fall into an attention-grabbing rabbit hole on social media.

And when you try to scroll down with the keyboard, it moves a full "tweet" down so you can't actually read what you were trying to.

User interface disaster indeed

You made it further than I did, since the UI is absolutely horrendous after the first post.

You can set up a blog on the Internet for free if you want to make longform content.

Here is the thread unrolled:

https://unroller.zachmanson.com/threads/https:/octodon.socia...

As a counterpoint; I really like threaded posts like these. Each post in the thread becomes a kind of sub-heading or meta-paragraph which allows the user to disengage at well defined stops.

At the same time, it’s understandable that people don’t like it. The format has its problems, but I find I will read less of a blog post than a thread all else being equal.

But it does not allow the reader to quickly skim the article. It requires the user to interact with each paragraph in order to enable the user to skim it for interesting words.

Old fashioned non-interactive subheadings would allow the user to "disengage at well defined steps" and also to quickly scan ahead.

I see no benefit to the added interactivity.

tl; dr: They had the wrong contact selected. That's it, that's the whole thing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com