The UI doesn't have anything to do with it. Hacker News is heavily moderated by smart people, that's why it's a nice place to visit. A poorly moderated HN would turn the site into influence-spamming hellscape like Quora.

Amazon.com is the ugliest e-commerce site going, but they aren't worried about losing visitors to Wayfair.com, because they're not competing on looks.

Same thing with HN, they are not in direct competition with any other site. The high quality of discussions (thanks to moderation) helps the site show up in search engines, which is how most people discover it.

There are lots of alternative front-ends to HN, those are personal projects and not done to try to boost HN traffic, just to improve the UX for regular visitors. For example I use a browser extension that adds additional menu items to the HN orange bar, like "shownew".

> The UI doesn't have anything to do with it.

I'm going to disagree somewhat...I think it has _some_ to do with it. I think the UI acts as a sort of pre-filter. I think just having a list of boring looking text (like HN) draws some types of people and repels others.

>I think just having a list of boring looking text (like HN) draws some types of people and repels others.

It is true that HN draws some types of people and repels others, but I think it's because of the culture more than the UI. I mean, old Reddit looked almost exactly like HN and it's as mainstream as a site could be. Craigslist was even more minimalist than HN.

Old reddit was at least a bit more tech and intellectual adjacent than new reddit. The "mainstreamification" of Reddit came largely with the UI change and mobile app. Even with old Reddit it was more mainstream because of UI aspects YC doesn't have (social media sharing, video embedding, custom subreddit CSS)

This. I’ve long thought that you get better users when you filter out the people who both need the site to be pretty and are incapable of tweaking it on their end.

Chans look pretty similar...

I'd wager HN has a larger overlap with /g/ than Reddit does.

I do like some things better about https://hckrnews.com/ as a front page.

The left numbers almost act as a bar graph to tell you how popular something is, and it is otherwise chronological.

High text interfaces are also dense compared to modern mobile touch based interfaces trying to render on a desktop. https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1407-why-the-drudge-report-is...

I also like hckrnews.com because of chronological and the lights of the numbers.

I find that some of them are not highlighted even though the numbers seem high enough.

I'm sure it's an algorithm cut-off thing, but I'd like if the lighting scale was a little more linear.

> HN is heavily moderated by smart people

I don’t think it’s as moderated as you’re saying.

I would say, on the other hand, that the average comment is much more thoughtful, in-depth, as it originates from individuals who possess extensive insights on the topics they comment on.

This deters people from making dumb or useless comments and look like fools in front of smart people that visit HN.

People that is not deterred by that will most likely learn the lesson a couple of minutes later from HN members feedbacks.

The average comment is more in-depth because there's a long history of thoughtful moderation by people like dang. The community has learned what the bar is, and now holds itself to it (more or less). The social standards here didn't come for free, and if you were to take a random selection of the HN audience and get their Reddit profiles, I strongly suspect you'd see a notable difference in the quality of the content they post to the different platforms.

Thank you Dan. If I ever meet you in person, beverage/meal on me.

> The high quality of discussions (thanks to moderation) helps the site show up in search engines, which is how most people discover it.

How do search engines recognize discussions as high quality?

Search engines probably just look at page length and domain authority. Anybody can create a 10,000 word blog post on [topic] but something that gets a lot of discussion on a message board (Hacker News, Reddit, Metafilter) is a reasonably good proxy for relevant content (if not "high quality").

Definitely not perfect. The default "collapse comment" buttons being right-aligned is pure insanity, IMO. They should be left-aligned so they're all in line with each other as you scroll down the page, so you barely have to move your mouse.

Fortunately this extension[1] takes care of that.

[1] https://github.com/insin/hn-comments-owl/

Also, proper hyperlink support in comments would be appreciated.

But then people would complain about it being too close to the vote arrows, no?

Having it on the right is pretty convenient on mobile because it makes it much easier to use just one hand (assuming you are right handed).

Ironically (given how much hate they get), I find reddit new site and official app to have the best collapse ui. On the left on the web (and with a 100% vertical high which means you never have to scroll up to collapse), and tap anywhere on the message on mobile (much bigger and easier target than hn, works for both right and left handed people).

I have a userCSS for that as well:

  .togg { float:left; margin-right:.5em; letter-spacing:5px; } /* Collapse button to the left and larger */

Do you like this extension?

I'm working on this:

https://plzat.me/

Would love to hear your thoughts if you have them.

I'd say it is perfectly functional. Far from perfect in terms of design.

There have been minor improvements over the years, but just like other products with a long history, change becomes ever more expensive.

what would be an example of perfect design?

I browse HN mainly on mobile and it can feel quite cluttered, definitely useable but non idempotent operations like flagging a post have no confirmation. For the most part, I think I've noticed when I've accidentally flagged a post and unflagged it, but I feel I can't agree to call the UI perfect.

I keep logging out while trying to click my username.

Yes, I wish some of the actions were larger and further apart.

Speaking of the perfectness of the HN UI, the text size is very small on mobile. I assume this must be deliberate for some reason - maybe to put people off using it on their phones :)?

It's tiny on Desktop too on a my 27" 1440p main monitor. I have it permanently zoomed in at least ~150%. There's no need for the font size to be that small in today's environment of high res monitors.

Can't reproduce, it's normal for me. Although the desktop version font does seem a bit small.

I think HN’s success is a mix of great people with incredible views and knowledge, good moderation, and the data-dense simple UI. Most social media sites and forums have a vastly lower content-to-noise ratio — all the emoji madness, UI cards for far too many things, wasted space, infinite scrolling, etc. Here you have nice threaded discussions that focus on content above shiny, blinky, noisy UI distractions. Love HN and the excellent people who share here.

Fully agree, HN's basic/simple UI is of paramount importance to me. The "modern" UI proposal is clearly aimed at an audience that I have never felt part of.

I have wondered several times how come has HN not yet abandoned its core principle of simplicity by letting some toxic product designer or typical alike position to step in and "modernize" HN's interface. Everyone does this today and always ends up alienating the audience on which the product is built (coughredditcough).

I admire HN for not doing that, yet, after so many years.

It's fast, does not have ads, doesn't have layout reflows, doesn't have popups, doesn't have marketing overheaad and BS.

Those things alone would make 90% of sites better.

My god man just give us the goods!

I don't know about perfect. The tiny action button/links result in misclicks for me fairly often.

I was hoping for a thread with a UX deep dive on the pros/cons of a simple UI vs other equivalents (Reddit, Reddit Enhancement Suite, social networks, RSS readers).

There's no way to say this is a perfect UI. We don't know if people churn because of the experience, or drop off because it's tedious. Maybe the lack of notifications is a problem? Maybe the archaic search is? Maybe the way the top items are rendered skews towards a certain type of interaction and reduces overall interactions?

It's super arbitrary to say it's perfect, or that it meets the best goals it could achieve.

It took me several goes over several years to become a HN user. The design put me off. It made me think this was a site for CLI nerds.

And of course it is, but it’s far richer than that.

Nevertheless, now I think the design helps keep the riff raff out. :) you have to appreciate the content to appreciate HN.

As a graphic designer myself I tend to be attracted to some products because of its visual design or user interface. Case in point - I couldn't wrap my head about Reddit only until they launched their infamous redesign. It seems many people like interfaces with a huge information density, but for me it was too overwhelming - the redesign has many negative aspects but its readability/scanneability is definitely a positive one.

But that "attraction" doesn't guarantee one would keep using something, so in the end it's just a small ingredient.

One aspect I really don't like is the slot-machine mechanic of mixing yesterday's (or day before's) top stories with today's trending stories. That makes me re-read so many titles, looking for that dopamine hit of something new and interesting. I like many have made a front-end that serves my own purpose and lists stories in reverse chronological order, only showing stories that made the cutoff of 'top' according to the API request.

Something like https://hckrnews.com ?

Very much so. It[0] didn't start out that way. It was first a way of reading the list offline (while underground commuting pre-pandemic), opening a bunch of link tabs at station stops.

The other thing it does is group stories by type and made-up keywords to put uninteresting/noisy stuff at the bottom, leaving the deeper cuts at top.

[0] https://hackerer.news

You should try mailing lists…jokes aside, I wish the up/down votes would be more touch friendly. Too many accidental votes. At the same time I wish they could store my written comments in local storage until I submit it. Sadly scrolling up too far on iOS or closing the wrong tab happens seldom. A simple onchange callback would be enough. I wouldn't mind some minimal KISS improvements…

I hate the Hacker News UI. It is ugly, inaccessible, and confusing. I have some stupid Chrome extension just to make it dark mode.

What's confusing about it?

I mean, a moderator has to turn up and explain how pagination works in every large thread.

Definitely not perfect on mobile. Tap targets are too small, you have to really focus to hit them. You also have to learn what is what, the arrow resembles a collapse / expand icon used in file browsers especially with it’s placement on the left, it really goes against UI conventions, it has a different function with a way too similar look. Font size is a bit too small. Definitely misses a dark mode, I’m using it from an RSS reader and get really annoyed when reading it in bed and going from a nice dark list view into the comments blasting almost full brightness.

I think these can be easily fixed without loosing the simplicity, which is excellent.

I keep seeing people praising the HN UI but just can't see it. The lack of padding makes it hard to differentiate between articles. The many low contrast links below look cluttered. Not to mention how horrible the site is to use on mobile.

Hn loading in poor network conditions is maybe it’s best modern ui feature.

Though dark mode would be really nice. And seemingly pretty trivial to implement?

IMO, support for more rich comment formatting would be very beneficial.

While I would prefer if HN supported Reddit-flavored Markdown, just supporting a quoting syntax would probably provide 50% of the benefit.

The important thing the HN UI gets right is letting people quickscan vast amounts of information to find what is interesting/relevant for them together with an instant sense what the rest of room thinks.

It all goes downhill from there, but hitting that goldilocks zone where people can drink from the firehose without getting whacked is an undeniable accolade.

The UI of "modern social platforms" doen not optimise matching these impendances, thats why their users brains are fried.

The only thing that is lacking from this site is darkmode, using extensions to fix this problem is tedious in my opinion. Otherwise I love everything about it.

I don't like the visited link color, it's grey. It easily blends in with links that haven't been visited and it seems to get worse when any "amber"-like tint is bieng used on the display (nightshift, nightlight, flux etc). I alway use my displays at least some tint. It's the one thing about HN that always bugs me, trying to find a link I visited in the mix of the rest.

Ummm. I think the ideals behind it are perfect. Simplicity, clarity, ease of use, resilient. But I still can barley figure out how the comments and reply functions work. While I agree that the brutality/minimalist UI might perform a filtering function. I definitely think that some basic readability/usability improvements would be great.

Perfect? LOL, it's mleh at best. And the blatant disregard for better typography in such a text heavy place is borderline criminal.

What better typography would you like to see?

Not OP, but: San Francisco font, of course ;)

What really bugs me nowadays is lack of dark mode support on HN. Quite many websites Will autodetect it when I turn dark mode on on my phone, but for some reason HN refuses to do that. It seems like a no-brainer feature to autodetect it.

I mean it's not bad, but I do wish I could tell the indentation of comments, using a screen reader. I just kinda don't even focus on that though, but it does make comments just, mainly, a flat list of comments to me.

Please support reader mode on iOS. Or at least fix the small fonts.

Yes, I agree with this, the UI design is very good. I can uses it using many browsers even lynx when necessary.

Plus as others indicated, there does seem to be any "nastiness" here.

Because HN allows only text format, it's a very simple site by design.

So, perfect is achieved by having nothing else to remove.

Reading an item I agree but viewing the submissions I prefer https://hckrnews.com/

Not perfect, but if it had Markdown with code highlighting it'd be getting there.

less is more strikes again

I'm pretty stupid and the color palette didn't deter me.

Reminds me of PunBB. I loved working with PunBB.

Some buttons/links are too small for touch

> I realize now, that one of the important factors that keep HN's audience selective is its simple UI.

Well... https://xkcd.com/552/

my fat fingers dont agree

> it may start to attract a wider audience which certainly is not the intent of this platform.

Web sites on the front page are regularly collapsing under the load of visitors emanating from this place.

You are not part of a small elite club