HN's pedestrian design makes for a much better experience.
- no flair for usernames - means people concentrate on the message not the messenger
- no visible karma for anyone but the top few - means people don't spend (as much) time karma whoring
- limited formatting, no images or video - increases the value and import of the written word
- no sharing, or @user referencing - means posts live and die more by their merit rather than brigading or other shenanigans
At first I thought I wouldn't like it, because I tend to post on subjects I'm knowledgeable and want to do my best there. But now I'm so glad to not get the anxiety and rush of the back and forth in heated discussions.
Peace and quiet.
In HN the username is simply plain text. You can't even see it's a link without hovering.
It’s hate of the new Reddit, plain and simple. Well deserved might I add, it embodied the new priorities of the site: number go up.
I quit Reddit cold turkey when they took Apollo away.
It took one click to see that user abraae has 6671, as of this writing. Or did I miss the point in dramatic fashion?
E.g. A reply/comment is at the top of the chain, but you don't know if there is a difference of 1 karma or 100 karma between it and the next comment.
I won't link it; per the hacker ethos, I encourage you to find it yourself.
most of the readers here don't mind reading text and face a wall of text daily, so it works out here.
Even for us, we do mind reading HN as a single wall of text. I've got my userContent.css file set up for HN so that:
1. There are maximum sizes to the paragraphs (I can't read a wall of text stretching across 1080 pixels!)
2. Vertical spacing between comments and lines are larger.
3. Each comment in a thread has a larger indent using padding so that, visually, it's easier to track the parent of any given comment.
The case of the filenames may or may not be important, depending on whether on Windows or not.
https://gist.github.com/lelanthran/873983febef21450b0afcb99d...