Tell HN: Thank you for being fast, almost ad-free and text-only

[nojvek]

I’ve been visiting HN for more than a day. Almost daily.

While Reddit, Digg, FB, Twitter etc have jammed in more features and ads looking like posts, HN has remained high signal to noise ratio.

Thank you for that.

As I get older, my brain is unable to deal with ads and too much flashy imagery/videos.

HN is an oasis.

My only ask is to revisit CSS a bit and make it mobile friendly. I.e slightly larger fonts and hit areas for expand/collapse. It’s too easy to hit the wrong button on a phone.

Thank you for keeping HN clean.

[kibwen]

As others will be quick to point out, HN does have ads in the form of job postings for YCombinator startups that are delivered inline with the links on the front page. That said, it's relatively unobtrusive. And of course, the existence of HN is a large part of the marketing for YCombinator itself. Personally, I'll commend dang for doing a high-effort job at moderation, and tolerating all the dunking on Paul Graham that we do.

[tiotempestade]

> As others will be quick to point out, HN does have ads in the form of job postings for YCombinator startups that are delivered inline with the links on the front page.

The way all ads should be? :)

Succinct, relevant and unobtrusive

[amelius]

But ... these job postings are difficult to discern from other posts. At least Google puts "Ad" in front of ads ...

[jedberg]

> and tolerating all the dunking on Paul Graham that we do.

Who wouldn't enjoy some friendly ribbing of their boss's boss? :)

[29athrowaway]

It is done with a lot for respect for the reader, and in a non intrusive way.

There's no profiling or targeting of users. Everyone sees the same ads.

[henning]

True, but those job ads are text-only and unlikely to contain malware. Normal web ads are the opposite in both regards.

[slim]

Not sure jobs are the only form of advertising. Sometimes I feel like some domain names like substack are pumped up

[Rooster61]

Ads that I won't see unless I actually have interest in them? That's not very web 5.0...

[vlunkr]

Those ads are also very likely to be relevant to HN users relative to typical internet ads.

[93po]

I use hckrnews.com and everyone else should too. Not seeing those ads is a nice side effect

[colesantiago]

There should be a way to remove all ads from HN on the account level.

[amelius]

It is kind of ironic that so many professionals come to HN for a breath of fresh air, after which they continue building the UX they were escaping from in the first place.

[Jerrrry]

My only (primary, continuous, and ignored) complaint is that OP's text post's contrast matches the contrast of less-useful comments, making every Self-HN post seem subconsciously and automatically downvoted.

It was "tradition,"? No, it's archaic and ironic for a site with so many A11y/accessibility advocates.

[habibur]

PG did it in the early days, as far as I can recall. The point was to discourage descriptive posts, preventing it from turning into reddit, and rather encourage posts linking to tech materials.

[thefifthsetpin]

I am just now realizing that greyed out text posts weren't downvoted.

[kzrdude]

I agree. The comment section teaches the user to be suspicous of grayed-out comments, but then if we post a text post it's also grayed-out.

[LLyaudet]

I thought the grey color for main post was to discourage us of reading it and to make us: - look only at the shared link when there is some, - or use the reader mode of our web-browser, - or make it harder to read and create a relief when we go back to our source code, ;)

[coldpie]

I emailed them once asking to change that and kind of got a shrug in response. Maybe more emails will convince them?

[CoolGuySteve]

I feel like there's a systemic issue in modern software that HN is immune to. After an initial success, companies will hire tons of project managers and engineers to build new features and continue their growth. The result is a corporate paperclip optimizer.

The problem is that these features won't get used and nobody gets promoted if they're not pushed to the front of UI so you end up with cluttered interfaces loaded with popups and other misfeatures.

Reddit's new interface is a good example of this, but gmail has the same problem. Shit, even QuickTime/Real Player used to fight over Windows file extensions and taskbar icons in the 90s and it was horrible.

Because Y Combinator's business model is different, HN more or less stays the same. It's kind of like open source Unix utilities in that way, nobody's pushing modal ads into the ls command.

[wildrhythms]

Well said, and I see this happening all around me at <big corp>. Every project manager "needs" their feature front and center in the UI, and "needs" to educate the user on the fact that it exists! So you end up with annoying new feature bubbles pointing to the thing. And when it comes to measuring engagement, dismissing the feature bubble counts as a win!

[one-another-dev]

I'll be a counterpoint to Reddit argument. I started out using the new reddit and I find it more usable than old.reddit site.

Also old.reddit has very wide text lengths which makes reading a chore compared to new one where the character limit per line is conservative.

[dewey]

I know what you are saying and I agree and am grateful for it's existance but keep in mind that HN is a marketing tool of a big VC fund.

It has money to pay a moderator and doesn't need to directly make money from it by putting ads or tracking scripts up like other sites.

[dang]

> It has money to pay a moderator and doesn't need to directly make money from it

Yes, that's the sweet spot that HN ended up in, kind of by historical accident, and it seems to be a local optimum.

If we had to make money from HN in any of the standard squeezy ways, it would get worse, which would degrade if not ruin the community. It would also be a miserable slog and who would want to work on that? so the quality would go down that way too. There are a lot of gradients along which the quality would go down.

Because we don't have to do that, we can focus on just trying to keep the community happy, which boils down to trying to keep HN as good as possible. It's incredibly satisfying to just have to make something good. (Not that it is good...but that's a separate question, and this is the internet and we get graded on a curve.)

There are a bunch of old comments here about how we/I think about HN vis-à-vis YC's business interests, if anyone is curious - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....

[dredmorbius]

Appropriately motivated and principled patronage ... is a fairly good media model.

Far superior to naked advertising. On par with public or membership sponsorship.

[mbil]

Yes, and there are often YC company job postings on the front page, which are technically ads.

[mostlysimilar]

Hot take: I think the lack of mobile support is a feature, not a bug. Mobile interfaces are responsible for much of the noise of mainstream social media, they encourage short form content creation because the interface is too simplistic and typing on a tiny touchscreen keyboard is unpleasant and error-prone. By making the only viable interface a desktop interface you put up an additional barrier to that type of noise.

[capableweb]

If you look at the HN stylesheet (https://news.ycombinator.com/news.css) there is actually some minor work being done to make it easier to use on mobile. It used to be much worse than what it is today.

I use HN for both browsing and commenting on my phone plenty, although it could always be easier and there are some warts.

[asdff]

The HN interface is mostly fine but the vote buttons certainly need to increase by 100% for mobile versions. I can't reliably hit them without zooming in quite a lot. It wouldn't dumb down the UI or anything to make the hitbox larger for these arrows if your viewport is so large.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I’m reading this on a phone, right now, and it’s perfectly usable.

[gardenhedge]

Agreed. Anything that has a mobile user base is pretty awful.

See: Twitter, Reddit, TikTok, FB

[kzrdude]

Thank you HN for showing (essentially) the same list of stories on the front page for everyone. A shared display of common topics is a good foundation for a good forum.

[asdff]

OTOH it changes dramatically with time and certain topics seem to end up below the fold, even if its a couple hours old post with a lot of engagement. I wish there was a chronological sort with a threshold vote filter, I guess I can get that from hnrss though.

[amelius]

How do you know this is true?

[dredmorbius]

The text-only / ad-free nature probably explains a fair bit of my own ... enthusiastic ... readership of HN (recent comment on which: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34490839>).

As for CSS tweaks, I've applied some modest changes to the basic style which are linked in my profile:

Dred's HN CSS Madhackery: <https://pastebin.com/gLXiqKyd>

Dred's HN CSS Madhackery -- Dark Mode: <https://pastebin.com/6PF3dCXH>

Both can be applied using a CSS style management extension such as Stylus:

<https://add0n.com/stylus.html>

(For Firefox, Chrome, & Opera.)

[Terretta]

> My only ask is to revisit CSS a bit and make it mobile friendly. I.e slightly larger fonts and hit areas for expand/collapse. It’s too easy to hit the wrong button on a phone.

There is a weird thing with the vote arrows on iPad in particular, if you tap the upvote arrow, the downvote arrow disappears first, then later the upvote arrow disappears.

Always second guessing which arrow I've hit. Can only tell by looking at the text to unvote vs. undown.

[rpgbr]

I use a simple custom CSS to: 1) increase font size; 2) limit line length, and; 3) change OP's font color:

  .comment,
  .toptext {
  max-width: 72ch;
  font-size: 16px;
  line-height: 1.5;
  color: rgb(27, 27, 27)
  }

In Safari, using Userscripts extension: https://github.com/quoid/userscripts#userscripts-safari

[nonrandomstring]

HN looks just perfect using w3m text browser, no js, no css. The clean HTML makes it feel like something running from a local server. Plus there's no "cloudflare" type nonsense blocking my Tor overlay. Excellent straightforward web.

[frosted-flakes]

Clean HTML? It's nested spaghetti tables, which makes it super hard to write user styles for.

[ptx]

Hitting the wrong button on a phone is less of a problem that it might appear at first. An up-vote results in an "unvote" link being shown and a down-vote results in an "undown" link instead, so you can confirm that you hit the right button and undo the vote if it was wrong.

[ipaddr]

Ad free? This is all part of one big ad. Ads are not evil though.. tracking might be.

[jayant_kaushik]

Meanwhile, you can use third party mobile apps for HN that work perfect. Just type “hacker news” on the App Store (iOS) and you’ll see a bunch of apps. Try and see which one fits your usage style. I personally use the app called “HACK for hacker news” and it fulfils all I could ask for. I mostly browse and write on HN using this app. Not promoting this app, just helping fellow users.

[fronterablog]

Totally agree.

I feel the same when I open a good book and read without distraction for hours. It's like mental detox after social media full of short-form videos.

We'll see a wave where what's timeless and simple make a return — like text-only content.

[pcurve]

I visit HN a few dozen times a day. For it, it's like the stumbledupon with ability to comment. Best of both worlds.

[real_jiakai]

At present, I use "modern for hacknews" chrome plugin. via: https://www.modernhn.com/ It redesigns the web interface of hacknews.

In my andriod app, I will use Glider app to read hacknews posts. via: https://github.com/Mosc/Glider.

In most cases, I would choose to use pc's browser to read hacknews. Maybe you can try my recommendations above to improve your reading experience.

[spicysugar]

I use glider daily and i wish it was the defacto/official app for HN

Really appreciate Glider.

[apeace]

> My only ask is to revisit CSS a bit and make it mobile friendly. I.e slightly larger fonts and hit areas for expand/collapse. It’s too easy to hit the wrong button on a phone.

Does anyone know why this hasn't been done? I find things are very small to click even on desktop. Seems there is a lot of low-hanging fruit that could be cleaned up.

I don't like using plugins or custom stylesheets because I fear something breaking one day and giving me a headache (HN withdrawal). I also don't like using alternate HN viewers for fear that they will track me.

[rebolek]

I have HN on 150% in Firefox on desktop (FF remembers individual scaling, not sure about other browsers) and on mobile I scale with two fingers. It's of course not a perfect solution but works.

[webinvest]

Hey OP, there are bookmarketlets that you can save as bookmarks in your mobile phone browser to increase or decrease zoom size on any webpage or website. I don’t use them because I’m not at the age of using glasses or reading glasses for anything but they may be useful to you.

[janitor61]

This might date me but I'd love to see a resurgence of the Gopher protocol - maybe a touch more modernized, but still just plain text files with hyperlinks. Some sort of public-commons version of the overcommercialized web where advertising is very difficult but information is dense and discoverable.