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Comment by kolev | Hacker News Reader

Why nobody bothers to fix the ugly (i.e. misaligned with modern day design guidelines) out-of-the-box Telescope theme? I see a bunch of sites popping up with empty hopes to build new communities with a domain and little effort?

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Why not use Lobsters (https://github.com/jcs/lobsters), instead, which is kinda active at https://lobste.rs/ and has been around for a couple of years if not more?

I wanted to try MeteorJS, personal preference

I'm sure. By the way, this is the second time I'm bringing this on Hacker News - it's Meteor, not MeteorJS. Please, honor the branding that the authors have chosen (after a careful consideration).

Got it, Meteor.

Why not? in the mean time I just did it as an experiment that came out as a comment on freenode ##frontend, if it goes well in a month or so, I will take some time from my current paid work to create a custom theme for this site.

Empty hopes? do you have data to confirm that?

little effort? we are not that experts as you

Also I will just drop this just here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_product

Thanks for your comment :)

I think you misunderstand MVP. It's not using somebody else's code and slapping a new domain on it without doing a little effort to customize. Even MVP landing pages look different. And, I think you misunderstand MVP. Instead of getting offensive at critical people - you should rather treasure feedback, especially negative - the guys with the positive feedback (possibly) already bought in. Again, when I see a website looking and behaving like a thousand other ones, I won't revisit, honestly, and I'm not alone. And why would I when you show no attention to detail and no energy to create and keep alive something trying to be different among the million other websites out there?

The creator of Bootstrappers.io managed to get 700 emails by launching "a website looking and behaving like a thousand other ones":

http://blog.bootstrappers.io/how-i-bootstrapped-bootstrapper...

I appreciate that you're trying to give feedback, but in this case I think you're extrapolating a bit too much from your own (perfectly valid) opinion. Just because you don't see the value doesn't mean plenty of other people won't :)

Telescope designer here. Curious to know how many people think the default theme is ugly? Just upvote this comment if you agree with kolev so I can find out.

Why not upvote kolev?

Because he will not be able to see how many upvotes that comment got then

Because most people can't see comment scores other than their own.

Don't get offended! I abused the word "ugly", I apologize, but Telescope is unlike the minimalistic looks of Hacker News, Lobsters, Monocle (http://monocle.io/), Reddit, and Product Hunt. The looks of up/down arrows are inconsistent between homepage and comments. The buttons on the homepage on the right are too big and not modern-looking. Background of a comment and page should not differ (unless you have a fix width design - then what's beyond the fixed width is acceptable to in high contrast.

I'm not offended, thanks for the extra feedback :)

Although I do want to point out that Telescope also comes with a minimally styled base theme that was specifically made to let people customize it however they want: http://telescope-base.meteor.com/

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