I really enjoy the content posted on HN. But I frequently find myself skimming through the (often) insightful comments/discussion. Am I the only one who thinks the comments UX makes it difficult to read/participate?
HN is my favorite UI. I guess what makes some people happy makes others unhappy. For me personally "mobile" UI's suck on mobile. HN works great on mobile, for me at least. HN works great on a desktop too.<p>One vote for the UI being great just as it is. Mobile and desktop.
Ugly UI doesn't mean a bad UX. I always point people towards craigslist and ebay.<p>I can get my news and put in my .02, when compelled to do so. Also, the community is authoritative and inviting.<p>What could you want from a new design that would add value to the community?
One small thing that bothers me is the upvote button that looks too much like a button to (un)fold comments, especially when you can't downvote and therefore don't have any downvote button.<p>I just discovered that there is a [-] to (un)fold comments by the way.
I would probably just have swapped the positions and use less confusing icons.<p>Another thing is the occasional blocks of code that are too wide and not wrapped, this requires horizontal scrolling which I find a bit annoying, especially on phones. And the text-reflow Firefox extension does not handle this, otherwise it would be a non-issue for me.<p>At the beginning, the appearance of HN seemed raw to me, but I got used to it and like it.
YAS! I personally use the PWA to view HN as i find it more responsive and more visually pleasing.<p><a href="https://angular2-hn.firebaseapp.com/" rel="nofollow">https://angular2-hn.firebaseapp.com/</a>
Anyone willing to list the rest of the currently maintained alternative web UIs for HN?<p><a href="http://hackernewsgrid.com" rel="nofollow">http://hackernewsgrid.com</a> | <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15078605" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15078605</a> (2017)<p><a href="https://vue-hn.now.sh/" rel="nofollow">https://vue-hn.now.sh/</a> & <a href="https://hnews.xyz" rel="nofollow">https://hnews.xyz</a> | <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?query=hnews.xy" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?query=hnews.xy</a> (2017-ish; 3 discussions)<p><a href="http://tophn.info/" rel="nofollow">http://tophn.info/</a> | <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13782574" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13782574</a> (2017; 1 comment)<p><a href="https://hn.algolia.com" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com</a> | <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8874801" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8874801</a> (2015)<p><a href="http://ihackernews.com" rel="nofollow">http://ihackernews.com</a> | <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1694049" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1694049</a> -ish (2010)<p><a href="https://hckrnews.com" rel="nofollow">https://hckrnews.com</a> | <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14962820" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14962820</a> & <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1722914" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1722914</a> (2010)<p>App recommendations would also be appreciated (if you created or regularly use the app yourself).
I once attended a seminar by Balaji Vishwanathan. He said in that seminar that once he had the opportunity to meet founder of HackerNews, and he asked him why he doesn't do anything about the look and feel of the site? The founder replied,"I want the site to be as ugly as possible". He implied real hackers like things ugly.
There's a lot to be said for the simple UI here.<p>As a developer I'm not looking for anything more here than the "News", "Show", "Ask", "Jobs" features and the insight via the comments.<p>The UX is the content. Anything more would be fluff. That's not to say that's bad, but on this site it's unnecessary.<p>When you look at the source of this it'd be pretty easy to build an app that grabs it and rewraps it and that could be a fun project.
I think the simplicity and lack of bloat make it more refreshing than "modern" UI's, if a little more dated. Also as others have mentioned, there are plenty of wrappers that add more "material design"-esque skins (I have used <a href="http://hckrnews.com" rel="nofollow">http://hckrnews.com</a>)
The commenting experience on mobile left me in pain. That's why I created an open-source HN app using ReactNative: <a href="https://shn.app.link/HN-ask1" rel="nofollow">https://shn.app.link/HN-ask1</a>
I mostly use safari mobile to access HN and I've nothing to complain about. Links on mobile may not satisfy touch interface standards but oddly I get what I want most of the time when I hopelessly click.
HN redesign is a recurring theme but I like it how it is now! (even though 99% of my HN consumption (I'd say an average 12 hours/week) is from Premii's android app)