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Comment by dolmen | Hacker News Reader

Many important details are not visible anymore:

  - gates on private pathways 
  - shop names

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The choices are tough, also in details: Which shops to show in busy areas at which zoom level?

But mind: openstreetmap.org is ment as a developer site, for developers to see their changes quickly. The official idea is that other people should take the data and do "nice" things elsewhere. But of course reality is that users want to use openstreetmap.org as alternative to Google maps ...

All the more reason to show rather more than less data.

Official? I've never heard this as official doctrine. Can you point me to anything official?

I'd love to see OpenStreetMap.org be more directly useful to more people, rather than only as a "developer site".

Well that's a bit of a balancing act, isn't it? "Why isn't this feature on the site, it would be more useful to me; also, that feature is annoying and useless to me" - says literally everyone.

Thus, we get a built-in editor (less friction, yay/too rudimentary, boo) and popups (OSM events, yay/Popups are now everywhere, boo). And endless discussions on "this should be more/less prominent."

I don't think there's any official edict, but the approach "I don't like this and I'll make my own version" is at the very least workable (as opposed to, say, Google Maps).

"developer" is a slightly weird way of putting it. osm.org is the contributor portal and demo site for OpenStreetMap, and yes it is not and never has been intended as an end user replacement for Google Maps and similar offerings.

The main purpose of the maps on the site is, besides showcasing some topical uses of OSM data, rapid feedback to contributors, which is something that required specific development so that can be provided with vector tiles too.

The 'late to the game' narrative seems to be a bit misplaced in any case given that OSM data has powered essentially all vector tile use outside of Google over more than a decade.

Personally I'm quite happy that these tiles cut down on the clutter in the original OSM tiles. It made it very hard for me to actually use them for navigation because there was just so much stuff everywhere.

For example the old tiles displayed rail tracks extremely prominently, which just aren't relevant 99% of the time even when traveling by train. In the vector tiles they're much more muted and thinner.

Yes but this one only highlights motorways which are used usually just for long distance drives.

The nice thing is, that's just a style, not a property of the tiles. So if you want to alter the rendering, it's "just" a change to the style of that layer/attribute.

> I'm quite happy that these tiles cut down on the clutter in the original OSM tiles. It made it very hard for me to actually use them for navigation

The Openstreetmap.org tiles are a demo and a contributor quality assurance tool - they are not meant for end-user applications, hence the rather over-the-top selection of map objects.

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