Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomelders | Hacker News Reader

If I may take a moment to whinge and whine a tad; Websites like this infuriate me because for all their "design", sites like Reddit and HN (which are basically just lists) are delivering news in a much more consumable fashion, better suited to the eating habits of the common or garden user.

Who's to blame? The designers with their need to make their own mark? The suits with their demands that the business needs be met regardless of the way the world actually works? Probably both.

Also, I think Digg deserves more credit for finding a successful mid point between lists and designed layouts.

That's not to say there's no room for design, but this new NYT layout is anything but design. It's the same wall of information with sporadic and indecipherable levels of emphasis made to look mildly palatable for another couple of years. If the NYT has anything interesting to say, I'll wait for it to appear on HN, Digg or Reddit.

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It's not "bosses v. designers", it's a newspaper failing to grasp that when you put a newspaper online it doesn't have the same visual constraints a printed newspaper have. Either that, or it's the newspaper totally getting that they do need to look like that to not confuse the heck out of the large constituency of readers that are slightly older and less tech-savvy than the Reddit crowd.

But yeah, I'm with you, I'm pretty far down the procrastination list before I open a newspaper web-front-page.

I wonder how much of thinking in the past affects more of of a newspaper's thought process on online?

For instance, NY Times insists on using the delivery model for charging for online access. Additionally, the local newspaper here tries to use every new shiny toy they can. At the moment, it's auto play videos. lol

I'm a fan of print newspaper layouts so the closer the digital product can be to that, the better.

This layout (as opposed to a list format)makes browsing and discovering articles outside of my normal focus areas much easier as the headlines don't all blend together.

I'm not sure what the best layout would be, but for a newspaper, the NYTimes current style is better than a Hackernews style list.

Try their today's paper view. Very effective.

That's really nice and much more readable - thanks!

My dad finds sites like Reddit/Digg/HN totally overwhelming, and I doubt he's alone. It's generational. Sites like NYT use standard design techniques to direct your attention (font size, etc) that work really well for people that are more-accustomed to traditional media. And, frankly, seeing a huge-headline is a much more-immediate way to indicate the importance of a topic than scanning down a list and looking for stories with lots of upvotes or comments.

Digg overwhelming? Maybe old digg. Not new digg.

Funnily, I find digg/reddit/hn easy to skim, while NYT's front page layout is overwhelming to me (well, not easy to quickly skim for interesting content).

So I guess it depends on what you're used to. As usual.

The Drudge Report skews heavily for an older (50+) male demographic (going by Quantcast.) The design is text heavy, small fonts. A more static version of HN/Reddit, from one or two contributors rather than a community.

Design has not changed since 1997: https://web.archive.org/web/19971210093544/http://www.drudge...

19 million+ US uniques makes it a very important news site (NYTimes has about the same amount.)

I don't understand your complaint. NYT is a news source. HN/Reddit/Digg are content aggregators. The two things serve different purposes. It's like complaining that your faucet hasn't kept up with watering things like your water hose has.

You like getting news from aggregators like HN/digg/reddit? Great! Do you think that news is well-presented when you find it (via the above aggregators)? That's a completely separate question.

Isn't a news source like the NYT also just a content aggregator? They're aggregating all sorts of content (business, technology, sports, weather, etc.) and displaying it to you to consume.

In both scenarios (reading HN/reddit or reading the NYT/Chicago Tribune), you're consuming content from some sort of layout. I think it's fair to compare those two to each other.

News aggregators are not hosting the actual content, which is very key to the design. For news articles, usually you want to post a small blurb or a picture, where as a news aggregator is nothing but the title.

News websites also need to maintain visual continuity between the navigation and the articles themselves, while aggregators only need to design navigation.

I don't see your point. News sites want to post a blurb and a picture, but reddits traffic tells me that users don't really care.

And a news site can still have a simple headline page AND consistent when you click through to the articles.

Also, I'm not saying there's no room to add emphasis and prominence to some articles, but I am saying that the way they do it now makes no sense to me, and I'm a designer by trade.

Reddit, like HN, actually deals with a huge range of sources where all the content is written very differently.

News sites are written consistently. All news stories follow the same format, with the first paragraphs summarising the story. The news site knows if a picture in the story is relevant.

Reddit & HN actually tell us nothing about the best format for news because they quite literally can't serve their links up in a format like this. Each source is too different.

Though I also think it's too busy. But I do not agree at all that HN or Reddit can tell us anything about news sites.

Agreed. There's reddit and on the other end there's pinterest. Both of those work in their context, but this nytimes redesign is skeuomorphism and all that's missing is the fake paper background image. As someone else points out it's probably because of all the older, stagnant people who expect newspapers to look like this. If these types of people listened to music online you'd probably see spotify's UI look like a record or tape player. I qualify older with stagnant because as I'm getting older I'm aware that it's not so much about age than a common laziness and reluctance to deal with an ever increasing pace of innovation. And that reluctance affects us all because it comes with scams, toolbars, shitty ads and botnets.

this nytimes redesign is skeuomorphism

Really? I don't see that at all. This redesign looks nothing like a newspaper to me. The closest I can see to any newspaper metaphor is the left/right navigation to switch between stories, which really is nothing like how I switch stories in a physical newspaper.

The front page seems much the same, content-wise, but the article view is dramatically improved from a usability standpoint. The switch to single-page is a fantastic change in and of itself.

I'm interested to see if the new top nav and right/left experience does a better job of providing me with a curated news experience, which is one of the things that I really miss in most online news sources. The Economist's iPhone app pulls this off pretty well; I hope this helps highlight the editor's role for nytimes.com.

laziness, reluctance & stagnation are ways of looking at it. I think it's a misconception.

The idea persists that computers and the internet are peripheral to people's lives. Once upon a time, computers were devices purchased to expedite or enhance analog activities. This is no longer true.

As long as you're employed in a 'developed' country, your existence is mediated by computers. You depend on networks and there is no avoiding them or living without them. The difficulty in recognizing this is that the change happened gradually - there was no one moment when suddenly the whole world went digital. We still have analog brains that live in a world built while computers were enormous calculators. At the core, though, is pride. The idea that something is lost when you use a computer, that you took the easy route instead of buckling down and doing something "yourself". It's a problem of perspective.

I agree however that until you've shaken the misconception, you can become a target for people who have. That's the digital divide.

I don't always want my news ranked in a list by upvotes and an algorithm, thank you very much. I find sites that rely on user input to rank stories are prone to spreading rumors and emotional, link-bait news. I trust the New York Times to present to me a variety of stories in what they think is the best way. What is it with this obsession with the idea that the view of the mob must be the best way?

I wasn't arguing for that, that road leads to gizmodo and TMZ. I'm talking purely about how the content is presented, and within that there is still room for hierarchy and emphasis, but what the NYT has produced is a muddy incoherent mess.

What road are you talking about that leads to Gizmodo and TMZ? The one I described (ranking by upvotes) is used by HN and Reddit.

And if not the ranking, what part of HN, Reddit, etc. are you praising over NYT?

Do you like just the listing, without the ranking? I think the latter follows from the former. I don't like listing, because it orders articles and artificially gives the higher up ones more importance. NYT headlines instead assign things to levels and categories, based on page location and headline size. Also, in many of the sub-sections, news is organized roughly as its added (newest-oldest), and its assumed that it's important enough to read if it's in the NYT.

Or do you just like the plain text presentation? Fair enough, but I like having more context on the home page.

It may seem messy at first, but as a long-time reader, I love the NYT site for its rich and informational presentation (and content).

Are you honestly comparing reddit and hn to the New York Times? You can't just lump those sites in together as "news sites," they are completely different in content and purpose...

I sympathise to some extent. But this is not an entirely scientific perspective. The NYT will undoubtedly have performed significant user testing and also looked at the metrics (articles read, time spent, etc.) before making this switch.

> the common or garden user

Reddit and HN traffic is not common. It's a small share of the general population, and further, probably overlaps little with the target NYT audience whom they want to upsell to a paid subscription. I read HN; my extended family has never heard of it.

This reminds me of people who are unaware of how small the combined market share is for rdio and spotify, or why networks don't abandon cable tv revenue for cord cutters, despite how seemingly convenient and inexpensive they are. Most people listen to the radio (in the car). Most people subscribe to cable.

Reddit gets over 100 million uniques a month. The NYT gets about 12 million.

I know that the two organisations work very differently behind the scenes but as some one else here mentioned, they're both content aggregators at their core. And let's be honest, if a story is on one news website, it's on all of them so it's not like the NYT is a special place that has all the news no one else has.

There's a lot of reasons why reddit gets much more traffic, but I genuinely believe the way they present their content is more accessible to more people, and that's why they can so successfully grow and retain their user base, and I think that's why simple list presentations consistently win out over complicated presentations. Flip book might be a more sensible comparison, that's an aggregator and it's a bore to use after a while.

I suspect it’s more that image macros and memes appeal to a wider audience than does the kind of carefully curated news, analysis, and longform content that the NYT produces. I guess I’m not really sure where to begin comparing audience metrics between reddit and NYT as if their offerings were similar at all? Is this a real comparison that real people are making?

Another thing Digg deserves tons of credit for is emphasizing visual journalism along with text. There is no excuse not to include at least an eye-grabbing photo with most stories.

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