Comment by djray | Hacker News Reader

Comment by djray | Hacker News Reader

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I agree with removing the obvious dopamine-related signals, but removing timestamps is a mistake, as they are vital for technical and news-based posts. They're a valuable relevance signal in many cases, not 'noise'. At least make them available on-hover or as a user option. Yes, you could try with a 'limit to historical posts' option, but that's going to be difficult as some topics move a lot faster than others, e.g. current affairs versus web standards.

This sort of unilateral action-before-asking is imo not a great signal to send out if you're trying to grow a platform. If you're going to run experiments, let people know first.

Could I also suggest making the comment text size larger (it's smaller than CSS 'small'), changing the typeface to be proportional, and most importantly making sure the contrast between foreground and background elements is WCAG-compliant? Most of the text is less than 3:1. Currently the site may be quite challenging to access for a visitor with visual impairments, and I think many such users would enjoy a site such as this if it were more accessible. Thanks.

Re: timestamps, feel free to vote[0] on the matter!

Re: design, a lot of people seem to like it the defaults. If you make an account you can customize theme, color scheme, font face/size, and more. If we’re missing a more contrasty theme it should be easy to add.

[0]: https://textlog.cc/post/2326

Your default should be WCAG-compliant. That's the whole point! A visually-impaired user shouldn't have to customise your site for it to be readable. Your site will be failing some accessibility metrics until you do that, and that will affect your search ranking etc. Plus it's generally a good audience-friendly thing to do.

I was aware of the poll, but putting that up after the fact and it being only about the timestamp is a bad signal, too. It says that you're willing to pull the rug on whole sets of features at a whim and just because _you_ think it's the right thing to do. If you're trying to foster a community, I'd argue that this is not the best approach. These sorts of things could be reversible experiments - such as a banner at the top of the page saying "We're trying out removing timestamps and counters like likes! Click here to give us feedback or to switch back to the old UI." And then you keep track of everyone who switched back or re-enabled the feature you're fiddling with. Or you let people switch for a while and give their opinion after the test period.

It’s early stage and we’re still figuring things out and how its final form should look like. Thanks for the feedback, it’s very valuable.

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