I love Hacker News, but I think the design could be a bit better | Hacker News Reader

I love Hacker News, but I think the design could be a bit better

hn-better.vercel.app

5 pointsardakaan22 comments

My personal experience: borders around each article with so much padding makes it harder for me to scan. My eyes have to travel more to consume the same amount of information as the standard view and (at least on mobile) I have to use my finger much more to gather the same amount of info. On current HN, I can read about three or four entries before I have to move my eye. On this redesign I can really only get one in a glance because of all the visual design elements intentionally breaking up my attention. Not to mention centering the score by highlighting it with a giant orange square. I can see how you’ve sought to incorporate modern web design principles, but in doing so you’ve made it less useful for quick readers like me.

super comment thank you. i will make corrections with what i have gathered from your comment and criticism.

I believe the ugliness keeps the muggles uninterested. This is great.

best comment i've ever seen. i am serious.

I genuinely think the ugliness is a key factor in HN’s success. We need it to stay ugly and boring looking. Move along muggles. Nothing to see here.

(I can appreciate this redesign concept though)

There needs to be a special category for HN redesigns. I have lost count.

And they mostly look like this.

And they go offline after a few weeks.

hahaha i really didn't know about the other redesigns, haven't seen them. i'm not someone who knows coding, i made this with cursor. this is kind of an exercise for me. what do you think i could do better?

Many people using HN see the interface as utterly practical. How much can you scan at once, is everything you need to hand and very clear. Maybe allow a local dictionary to highlight key words so people can easily home in or ignore certain stories (just thought of that). That kind of stuff.

How is seeing 7 entries without scrolling better than seeing 20+

And waiting 2-3 seconds on a spinning circle. Success!

i'll try to improve. thanks for comment. cheers

> HNBetter TopNewShowAskJobs Search Top Stories
HN Better - A modern Hacker News client
Made with by Arda Kaan Özcan GitHub TwitterOriginal HN

Note: I love Hacker News, but I think the design could be a bit better. This is my take on it.

That's all the text I see ... nothing else ... is it unpopulated at the moment or is it more a case that if the system is not hanging out with the latest updates, tough luck?

Well it looks like the actual articles and comments are available only to a particular browser or something.

I do have to admit, a blank page like this with nothing useful is consistent with a trend to making websites more disfunctional (as in completely disfunctional) than would have been imaginable by professionals in previous decades.

I never dreamed average people were going to develop an inability to handle simple text, it used to be such a solved problem.

It's been interesting watching web coders move I'd guess unwittingly into closed environments. The fall back of if no JS then text simple page info has evolved, either none at all or if system not open to big gratuitous scrape of PII then default page reasons, not up to date, location, age, or none at all with page elements loading but suddenly forwarding to more or less empty page once the good scrape? script has finished running. Mind the latter might be more just me due to the fact I blocked a couple of bad api sites - as in they had provided a way too intrusive script, one apple bad, the rest can go too. Yes my web experience might be sucky as a result but I can easily live with that.

Eventually once site owners become aware and if they are for instance selling wares or parts, opt to get it fixed for additional accessibility. Within Australia I've noted a few home ware based stores, slowly fix the cheap nasty code to more robust for the fact people here if there's no web site to compare, they most often don't visit the store in person either. Oh I see Rheem Australia have finally got their draw element issue sorted out. Back a few years ago I would point to it as a good obvious example of a closed environment.

thanks for comment anenefan. im not coder actually i just use cursor and have fun. but your comment is deep -i think- cheers

Redesigns are cool exercises and what you’ve done looks good mostly. It only shows top level comments though, and the text colour is unreadable in dark mode.

You say you’re trying to improve the original design, but it’s not clear to me how what you’ve done is an improvement.

Personally, I think that the existing design is much better than this alternative. The alternative has far too much wasted space.

The only thing I dislike about HN’s design is how difficult it is to tap a link. Everything is so smushed together.

I opened it, the content started loading and you lost my interest and attention, tab closed.

i'll try to fix that, thanks

This is like old-reddit vs. reddit. Sorry, but the original is far superior.

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