Hacker News Reader

Comment by ColinWright | Hacker News Reader

Personally, and I'm probably in a minority, I hate these huge, slabby, infinitely scrolling displays of photos/images with precious few items on the screen. It's a lot of work to try to find any sensible number of items of interest.

I seriously prefer an interface like HN - spare, clean, and information rich.

Added in edit: I my POV differs significantly from that of jgrahamc: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4321826

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It's great for pictures. In fact, it's better than great for pictures - you can digest thumbnails dozens at a time, and decide what you really want to look at.

But for textual content, I agree with you. They're rubbish. Let me read the headlines, middle-click links, and leave it at that.

I'd like something in between myself, maybe more like Slashdot but with better summaries. Or shorter ones, even, but more than the title. The problem I have with HN's titles-only index page is that there's far too much emphasis on the title as attention-grabber, which tends to favor either linkbaity things, or else stuff that is just relatively simple to state ("Company A does thing B", "Why you should use C"). In particular it disfavors things that need any context to explain, even 2 sentences of context: it has to be immediately clear from the title why you should click.

High on irrelevant imagery, low on content. It's the same reason that I'm not fond of The Verge's layout (despite their great content).

Lists of titles (old Digg, reddit, HN) is a great way to browse links.

I don't like it either, I personally find it hard to establish any sort of importance or order.

That's what I dislike most. It doesn't have the feeling of flow that you expect from a community-content site.

Agreed. It works with sites like snip.it because no one post is more important than the other, but in Digg's case, you want people landing on the page and knowing right away what they should be looking at.

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