The most frustrating thing to me about imgur is they way over-compress images on the mobile site. I always have to request the desktop site to get the original quality image. It&#x27;s bad to the point that text on an image is often unreadable on the mobile site.

Other than poor performance, the thing I&#x27;m most upset about is how each subreddit has lost its personality, and the fact they&#x27;ve closed the source. Being open is what made Reddit special, considering who founded it, it should never have gone closed source.

I still can&#x27;t use the redesigned Reddit, I not even sure that I would, if I could. It&#x27;s still way to slow to be something I&#x27;d use on a regular basis. If they kill of the old.reddit.com, I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;d continue to visit Reddit.Imgur for instance isn&#x27;t a site that I visit daily or even weekly any more. I really enjoyed the site, but after a redesign it just stopped being enjoyable. It&#x27;s way to slow, to much Javascript. It&#x27;s the only thing that will reliably force my MacBook to ramp up it&#x27;s fans. How is it possible for a website to make a laptop heat up more than doing development work?

old.reddit.com is still usable if it helps!

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lite.cnn.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lite.cnn.com&#x2F;</a> as well - 107 KB

Sweet, now I can visit duckduckgo lite in firefox lite. Thanks!

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;duckduckgo.com&#x2F;tty&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;duckduckgo.com&#x2F;tty&#x2F;</a>Well, OK, that&#x27;s actually NOT lightweight.But this is:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;duckduckgo.com&#x2F;lite" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;duckduckgo.com&#x2F;lite</a>

I think Gopher could be good for some text-only versions stuff like that.

I like<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;text.npr.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;text.npr.org&#x2F;</a>for this as well.

I&#x27;d suppose he&#x27;d use a throwaway if he&#x27;d want to post anything. Otherwise it&#x27;d draw too much attention and get too many upvotes and replies, essentially killing the small amount of neutrality we get here.

I believe Dang has said once or twice that this is something that can be achieved if you email them.

I&#x27;ve seen posts by PG in some recent threads out in the wild, they don&#x27;t show up in his post history. I would imagine this is intentional to prevent old comments being dredged up and used against him, much like Zuckerberg&#x27;s old FB messages were automatically deleted from the recipients inbox.Fine by me, but I wish HN would offer the same privilege to its users and allow us to delete our old posts

&gt;At the end of March 2014, Graham stepped away from his leadership role at Y Combinator, leaving Hacker News administration in the hands of other staff membersThough he&#x27;s still a major shareholder of YC which owns it. He tweets quite a lot these days.

Is PG even involved with HN anymore? He hasn&#x27;t posted on his account in four years.

It seems to fall back to the old mobile website for me? This is after clicking the fallback prompt.

Once the cookie&#x27;s set, I tend to go straight through.That annoyance is considerably less than all the others a full-JS Twitter imposes. Including the motherlovin&#x27; account-creation nag that shows up all the motherlovin&#x27; time.One click through at entry rather than random annoyance in the midst of reading? A net win. And an incredibly sad commentary on the state of the Web.

Yes, but you have to click past an annoying prompt[1] every time. Does that not happen for you?[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.postimg.cc&#x2F;jjBSVmCX&#x2F;Screenshot-at-2019-09-01-15-23-37.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.postimg.cc&#x2F;jjBSVmCX&#x2F;Screenshot-at-2019-09-01-15-23...</a>

For twitter you can disable JS and it will fallback to a &quot;&quot;degraded&quot;&quot; (a.k.a. Much faster &amp; usable) experience.

Amen. It’s the most pleasant site I use every day. Even Google search is beginning to slow down to a crawl in some hours (and Google used to be blazing fast).

There is lite.cnn.io as well.I wish there were more.

That&#x27;s not increasing line-height. I don&#x27;t have a problem with my eyesight, I have a problem with poor typography.

In Safari: View → Zoom InIt&#x27;s smart enough to remember the zoom level the next time you open HN too.

Isn&#x27;t that something that can be fixed with user-side CSS rules? EG, this for Firefox: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ffeathers.wordpress.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;03&#x2F;10&#x2F;how-to-override-css-stylesheets-in-firefox&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ffeathers.wordpress.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;03&#x2F;10&#x2F;how-to-override-c...</a>

HN is trivially editable with userstyles. I personally use one for a dark theme; I think you can install a userstyle of your choosing on all browsers from which you access HN.

You can literally do something like what parent comment wanted to do in three (3) minutes, including installing the addon. Stylus is great.

Yes, it is good. (I tend to only use it for sites that already use CSS; for those that don&#x27;t, the default is almost always good enough.) Even on Hacker News, I use that to do two things: to make all comment text black, and to display dotted lines for the comment indentation to make it more easily to be seen the indentation level (it is implemented as simply a tiling background picture). (For more complicated web pages, I often need to add a lot more stuff to make it work reasonably.)

Another awesome thing about simple sites like this is you can hack the CSS really easily with something like Stylus.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-GB&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;styl-us&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-GB&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;styl-us&#x2F;</a>

Does your JS do something differently than HN&#x27;s native comment-collapsing? You can just click the &quot;[-]&quot; at the end of each comment&#x27;s &quot;header&quot;.

What sites does zoom break? I&#x27;ve been on a 2x DPI screen for years and never noticed anything. The web is pretty good about this, even &quot;pixels&quot; are actually just length units not physical pixels.

my default zoom is 150%. this breaks a lot of websites. but maybe they don&#x27;t care about accessibility anyway. like OP said, i have not had any issue with HN for years.i recently started keeping dev tools&#x27;s console open when i am using chrome. i have some JS to collapse comments here on HN.i have seen some interesting things in the console, i just keep it opened now:- some sites have st tons of JS errors and yet function as normal- some companies put job ads in there for JS people (medium is doing it right now)- some libraries show off their awesome ASCII logos in the console- debug statements are left there unintentionally (i wonder if there is no tool that could strip these out)

For PC Chromium based browsers - use the extension &quot;Zoom Text only.&quot; Allows you to - well, the name is self explanatory.For Firefox - no extension needed. Press alt to show the main menu. Go to View -&gt; Zoom - then select Zoom Text only.Now, zoom will only increase font size, instead of the whole page.

All my lovely responders, I appreciate the feedback, but I don&#x27;t want to install addons&#x2F;mods&#x2F;hacks to fix line-heightI have, but it&#x27;s a mark of frustration for me. It definitely falls under the heading of, &quot;The user shouldn&#x27;t have to do this.&quot;

Edit: All my lovely responders, I appreciate the feedback, but I don&#x27;t want to install addons&#x2F;mods&#x2F;hacks to fix line-height.The line-height looks perfectly fine to me. AFAIK the HN CSS doesn&#x27;t force any specific height but uses the defaults. In fact I&#x27;m sick of the &quot;modern&quot; absurdly-low-density design trend that just makes me need to scroll more to see less.My browser has a zoom function, and so should yours. I don&#x27;t understand the resistance against customising a site --- it is a user agent working for you, and the CSS spec even mandates a user-stylesheet (which I know some browser(s) blatantly disregard). Different users will obviously have different preferences.

I wish they would update the line-height to something more reasonable. ~1.5x font size would be go a long way in paragraph readability. Other than that, it&#x27;s fast and stable. About all I require from a forum.Edit: All my lovely responders, I appreciate the feedback, but I don&#x27;t want to install addons&#x2F;mods&#x2F;hacks to fix line-height.

And you can use messenger without having to use the app or go to desktop

It still loads tracking (of course), but it is a vast improvement over their mobile site, and doesn&#x27;t need JS.

For FB<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mbasic.facebook.com&#x2F;home.php" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mbasic.facebook.com&#x2F;home.php</a>

We have an ecommerce website in straight php we haven&#x27;t redesigned since 2011. Works fine, very fast, and capable of handling very large traffic spikes without missing a beat.

A modern css framework would increase the font size change the font type make the reply link a fat button. It would put a card around each parent reply thread.Getting rid of unused css helps but the additional markup would make the page 4 or 5 times larger.

&gt; news sitesIt&#x27;s really a sad state of affairs when an industry with such a strong historical connection with publishing is now reasonably cited as an industry worse at publishing than most others.

Yeah, but those fixes and workarounds are only almost enough to sometimes compensate for the code bloat that the frameworks themselves have caused.

Modern front-end toolsets are finally starting to address this by using automated critical css, SSR + &quot;hydrating&quot; on load for interactive elements, webpack treeshaking + chunking of assets into tiny js&#x2F;css files and only loading code based on what the page&#x2F;routes asks for, PurgeCSS to get rid of unused css, cssnano&#x2F;uglify&#x2F;htmlmin&#x2F;imagemin, etc. Webpack and these various popular tools has done a lot to make the web better and are default in many starter kits. But we&#x27;re just beginning to see it go mainstream.The basic shift back to pre-rendering + delivering only what&#x27;s needed on the actual page is a big deal which hasn&#x27;t got enough attention yet IMO. We went completely in the other direction for over a decade because we thought networks and browsers could handle it, but it was too easy to abuse and mobile took over.There&#x27;s no reason even very advanced websites can&#x27;t load quickly, without having to fully compromise back to the 90s non-interactive websites.News sites and marketing teams still ruin it regardless with all the crap they add on top. But it&#x27;s far far better than loading a giant blob of 20 jquery libraries plus a big old angular.js or backbonejs app (sometimes both at the same time) encompassing a whole site in one file, even though you just wanted to visit the contact page.I also blame Themeforest type developers because they&#x27;re still stuck in the &quot;let&#x27;s add a hundred JS files so I can parallax and animate two divs&quot; mindset.

Iterating without a destination in mind. Assigning people to work on something vs finish it. This is in stark contrast to games which get released, get stabilized, and stop development. This model would suit a lot of software aside from security or dependencies necessitating updates but if we want we can just iterate forever.

The end user is paid to deal with whatever we provide them.But more importantly, the fact that the page loads 2 seconds longer is a drop in the bucket compared to the insane processes our business people dream up.

&gt;I’m always amused when the frameworks being used advertise things like “We make coding fun!”I understand where they&#x27;re coming from having dealt with a few legacy frameworkless spaghetti code bases that have no documentation. Give me bad code to maintain in a known framework over bad code without a framework anyday. Adding features and debugging in those conditions are no fun at all.

End users don&#x27;t care. When they see a slow website they think &quot;Awesome, now I have a reason to buy that new iPhone Jessica has because this one is getting slow&quot;

I’m always amused when the frameworks being used advertise things like “We make coding fun!”I tend to think “but what about making the web enjoyable for the end user?”

I love the power of modern web apps built using modern frameworks. I hate that ordinary content websites decide they need to be built using such frameworks.

Secondary? If only. It&#x27;s more like not even considered at all.

You can have a very tiny website with custom onclicks to load &#x2F; change elements via callbacks. The bloat of JS frameworks to do everything including generate the actual HTML client side is totally separate from having dynamic page content.I always strive to keep the client side stupid. I should be sending as much of the final document as possible from the server and any interactivity needed should also produce as little work for the client as possible.

I understand where this is coming from, however whenever I interact with a app that re-loads the whole window on every major interaction, I start getting frustrated because of the jarring, slow transitions, most modern web apps are faster after the initial page load, albiet on my 15&quot; 2018 MacBook Pro.Stop blaming the modern web. There are plenty of slow PHP and rails sites and plenty of slow React based sites. Of course speed is second priority, I&#x27;d much rather have users using my app with a mediocre experience than nobody using my app. However, as the web supports more tooling and frameworks continue to evolve towards web assembly, I believe will start to have web apps approaching native speed.The reality is that requiring a server to render every page limits what you can do with your app. Even if modern tooling is overused, developers will always move towards what allows you to do more.I&#x27;d much rather focus on making modern tooling faster than complaining about the modern web.

My parcel with a fairly simple app spits out a 10MB release build. We still have some way to go.

It depends on how you use it. Size matters. On a site I manage, we send about 64KB of JavaScript and we are working to make that smaller... and the main site functionality works when JavaScript is disabled.In contrast, many sites seem to think that 1MB of JavaScript, or even 5MB, are acceptable, and they can&#x27;t even show simple static content when client-side JavaScript is disabled. On a slow link, 1MB of JavaScript means that the user has probably given up. And it&#x27;s not just the size. 200KB of HTML is far far faster than 200KB of JavaScript; web browsers are highly optimized for handling HTML, while processing JavaScript is necessarily much slower. JavaScript is great for some things, but like a sledgehammer it&#x27;s not always the best solution. Too many people aren&#x27;t considering the real end-user experience. &quot;Pretty graphics, but it takes 5 minutes to download&quot; is usually not a worthwhile tradeoff.To paraphrase Goldblum:Your web designers were so preoccupied with whether or not they could use JavaScript, they didn’t stop to think if they should.

Honestly, with modern things like Webpack, minify&#x2F;uglify, CDNs, web speed should be much better on low bandwidth sites compared to the past.

Unfortunately I suspect a lot of the decisions are driven by resume-padding, which is itself a phenomenon started by management who has no idea of the implications of using $latest_web_tech beyond the fact that it&#x27;s &quot;new and modern&quot; asking for use of the dozen latest frameworks for everything they do.If the companies hiring web devs changed their mindset and listing a dozen different frameworks on your resume was perceived as the negative trendchasing architecture-astronauts that such developers often turn out to be (at least in my experience), and valued simple JS skills and experience instead, I suspect websites would end up being a lot different than they are today.

Saving an afternoon of your time means spending an afternoon working on more things the user wants. With that logic we should be writing web apps in pure assembly to shave off as much loading time as possible despite the fact that in the time you could have built the whole application, you are still working on the login page.

To a certain extent, it&#x27;s developers serving themselves, not the user. Your job is not to show off the latest frameworkify.js and get internet points when you blog about it. It&#x27;s also not to make your life easier (like by including a 1MB js library that saves an afternoon of your time). It&#x27;s to make the user&#x27;s life better. Just do your damn job! \end{rant}

I loathe the modern web. Speed is a secondary to &quot;hey look what we&#x27;re doing with our frameworks&quot;.

Here you go! =)
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;vishaldpatel&#x2F;HNDarkMode" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;vishaldpatel&#x2F;HNDarkMode</a>

I hacked a quick dark mode userscript for HN that respects your OS choice of dark&#x2F;light colour scheme (using the prefers-color-scheme media query)<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;1player&#x2F;85d146a4aa0c2afc78bab63582f518aa" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;1player&#x2F;85d146a4aa0c2afc78bab63582f5...</a>Some things like the login page are not styled correctly, but works good enough to browse and post comments.

100% agreed. A dark mode option would be cool, but it&#x27;s very easy to get one with user themes and alternative UIs.I bet HN will look almost identical 10 years from now, too. I wonder how many popular websites can boast such a consistent design from their beginning?

There’s a couple for reddit at least. For some of the others you can get by with a bookmark, so typing facebook would take you to your mobile site bookmark.

You can definitely make it permanent, it&#x27;s permanent on my account. Can&#x27;t remember what I did now...

After you&#x27;ve clicked on it, there&#x27;s a bar at the top with an option to &quot;Set basic HTML as default view&quot;

Just use this as your bookmark: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mail.google.com&#x2F;mail&#x2F;u&#x2F;0&#x2F;h&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mail.google.com&#x2F;mail&#x2F;u&#x2F;0&#x2F;h&#x2F;</a>

&gt;gmail.com -&gt; gmail.com (HTML version)gmail used to have an option to set HTML as default, but it seems like it&#x27;s gone.Only way to get HTML is to click on a link that&#x27;s available during loading, nothing in the settings to make it permanent.

No, you can set &quot;Use new Reddit as my default experience &quot;. At the bottom of the page, &quot;beta options&quot;.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;prefs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;prefs&#x2F;</a>There is no &quot;always use old reddit&quot;

twitter.com -&gt; m.twitter.com appears to be the mobile, non-JS version. (I don&#x27;t use it to tweet, but I get linked to it to read some things sometimes, and that functionality works fine.)

The current workaround to those issues for Twitter (while it still lasts) is to set the user agent to Opera 12. To handle that for Vivaldi&#x2F;Chromium I use a nice little user agent extension [1] that allows auto UA switching based on domain.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;eminentspoon&#x2F;chrome-extension-useragent" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;eminentspoon&#x2F;chrome-extension-useragent</a>

Twitter is barely usable with JS disabled. Any time you follow a link to it you&#x27;ll get a worthless interstitial &quot;would you like to proceed to legacy twitter??&quot; with only one button: &quot;Yes.&quot; As of recently, if you have cookies disabled for their domain as well you&#x27;ll end up in a redirect loop and never be able to see the 140 characters of text.*As for reddit though, if you log in with an account you can set it to always use old reddit in preferences.

Funny thing is that I&#x27;m pretty sure CNN Lite is a server-rendered React app, or was at some point.

+1 for Redirector. I eventually got sufficiently sick of www.reddit.com that I searched for solutions and ultimately chose Redirector to replace it with old.reddit.com. It lets you use either a &quot;wildcard&quot; or a &quot;regex&quot;-type match; I chose the former, and this is what I&#x27;ve been running:<pre><code> Redirect:
 *&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;*
 to:
 $1&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;$2</code></pre>

On Firefox I use Redirector: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;einaregilsson.com&#x2F;redirector&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;einaregilsson.com&#x2F;redirector&#x2F;</a>I have it set up to handle Reddit and Wikipedia. News sites and Twitter don&#x27;t get to run JS thanks to NoScript, so I usually don&#x27;t have to do anything extra to get a lightweight experience there.

Switcheroo Redirector for Chrome has worked for me to redirect amazon.com links to smile.amazon.com

reddit.com -&gt; old.reddit.com -&gt; i.reddit.com

Well volunteered! You can add:* amp link -&gt; non-amp version of same linkwhile you&#x27;re at it, please!

There should be an extension that automatically redirects common websites to their lite versions.reddit.com -&gt; old.reddit.comfacebook.com -&gt; mbasic.facebook.comcnn.com -&gt; lite.cnn.comnpr.org -&gt; text.npr.orgtwitter.com -&gt; twitter.com (with JS disabled)gmail.com -&gt; gmail.com (HTML version)

On the other hand, such demographic often comes with a lot of drama

I have found that many people online are not necessarily forthcoming with their age. Hacker News might have more people of that demographic than you think it does.

I wish there were more preteens and teens on the site.  By the time someone reaches 20 their ideas are a little stale shaped by the harsh realities of life.

I personally believe this is one of the couple reason why HN&#x27;s demographic is significantly on the older side, in Tech terms.I personally wish HN attracted a bit of a fresher, younger crowd as the conversation here has become more stale over the last few years.

it is possible to redesign something without adding tons of useless guff - stuff does need updating eventually, even if it isn&#x27;t technically broken e.g. inline styles and spacer gifs.I&#x27;d argue that having simpler markup and some sane, well-designed css would enhance performance further.

This is a good post about how bad the modern web is getting for people with slow&#x2F;unreliable connections: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;danluu.com&#x2F;web-bloat&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;danluu.com&#x2F;web-bloat&#x2F;</a>That was written two and a half years ago now, and things have only continued to get worse since then.

One issue I find on mobile with HN is accidentaly hiding or flagging articles. It&#x27;s very easy to do considering how close together flag, hide and comments are.

Came in to find the obligatory blockquote markup request.

My only request would be better comment formatting options, the code block thing is used wrong all the time.

Leave alone collapsing comment threads. I end up on the commenters profile 50% of the time.

On the other hand voting is a pain on mobile, even with a large screen I often misclick.

I&#x27;m currently living in a country and city with high speed internet, and I would also like to thank all who are responsible, for not trying to &#x27;fix&#x27; what isn&#x27;t broken.

i love how tables  are now more responsive than responsive. HN skipped an entire generation of jumpy websites and is now comfortably readable in every screen

I love how fast and simple HN is.  I wish the touch targets were bigger on mobile.  Shouldn&#x27;t be too hard with just a little CSS

I had to use 64kbps internet on vacation for last couple of years, it&#x27;s rough but it&#x27;s possible. RSS everything and then use Inoreader mobile and read it there. Unfortunately more and more websites use javascript for content and that breaks the mobile version loader (it can parse text from mobile version and show it to you). But stupid webdevs make even even blogs and galleries via javascript so it often says that it cannot render mobile version. I hope google will eventaully return to non-js content and pagerank of those sites will fall down significantly.

You still can improve HN performance a lot and get better results on low connections.

I&#x27;ve thought about making my own extension to make HN more &quot;modern&quot; but when I sat down to make it better, turns out I was really happy with how it is. Agree with what you&#x27;re saying!

What do you mean? Haven&#x27;t had that issue. Am on desktop version, unsure if mobile exists

Hehe, I had never thought of this, but you&#x27;re right. It&#x27;s not just an iPad, either - it&#x27;s the same on my Microsoft surface.I got so used to pinch-to-zooming, for so many years, I guess I didn&#x27;t even consider that usability flaw.

I always need to zoom to vote or collapse threads on mobile

On mobile, I use MiniHack (there are tons of other HN apps). On desktop, HN&#x27;s interface works well enough that I don&#x27;t try to mess with it.I really wish I could do one feature on the desktop&#x2F;web that mobile MiniHack.app does on mobile - to enforce all links opened launch in reader mode in Safari webview. 99% of the time that&#x27;s exactly what I want when I click through.

I had the same issue on mobile. Annoyed me so much, I made a browser extension that increases the padding around those and the collapse buttons. Not useful for you, but for anyone using Firefox for Android, see here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-GB&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;sihn&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-GB&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;sihn&#x2F;</a>(It could use some tweaks to keep everything aligned, but the small usability tweak was most important to me.)

This. Please spend a little more time on the css. And a somewhat bigger up&#x2F;downvote arrow would be great. I don’t have fat fingers but still accidentally click the wrong one every now and then.

When reading on an iPad, tapping on links is nearly impossible.A better responsive CSS file wouldn&#x27;t make the site any slower or degrade the experience for laptop users.

No, voting doesn&#x27;t work at all with JS disabled.

You can do this without javascript, you just create a form that sends an XHR PUT&#x2F;POST request and returns back a 200 response.You can&#x27;t do much with the response without JS but a single upvote doesn&#x27;t change anything on the page so there&#x27;s no need for the reload.

No this is about JS enabled. It&#x27;s the same endpoint. Open dev console and have a look.

You&#x27;re correct that when JS is disabled, any interaction requires a HTTP request from a link or form, and that does a full page reload.However when JS and AJAX is used, it&#x27;s expected that it also avoids an entire full-page HTML response that goes unused. It can easily be a 204 instead.

I assume you have JavaScript disabled, right? If so, can you give an example of a similar webpage that doesn’t reload the whole page to reflect your vote?

They might be tracking your browsing habits. For instance if you hover over the like button and rest the cursor there for a moment but you subsequently don&#x27;t like the post, it could mean that you thought of liking that post but you did not do it for whatever reason.
Or they are just prefetching pages.

Sure, of course it can be much worse, and almost all other sites are. I&#x27;m just saying that HN could do it better, because there&#x27;s no need for it to send a redirect or that full-page response unless the user has JS disabled.With JS, they could send a completely empty HTTP 200 response and it would work exactly the same (it does nothing with the response anyway). Right now HN is probably sending multiple gigabytes worth of responses to voting every day that are all just thrown away.

I have a gigabit Internet connection with top of the line laptops and Facebook still makes me wait for a second or two simply to show me 5 notifications.

You don&#x27;t have to use the actual words &quot;what about&quot; in your whataboutism post.

In lower internet speeds Facebook loads a lite version which is super fast (loads better than HN for me) and has most of the basic functionalities.

The actual like is pretty small, about half a KB. Just a light graphql query that responds with updated counts for different reactions (happy&#x2F;sad&#x2F;etc). They definitely batch it with some other stuff though. Batching is really important for browser performance.

Does this explain why my votes on mobile often don&#x27;t go through on the first click?

This is a diversion to the point being made.Facebook is a very different site, and could be lazy loading anything, and do you know the mouse move was causal? was there a window.setTimeout initiating it?. Facebook is not a site i&#x27;d expect to use on a low bandwidth connection, or if I did I&#x27;d use a low bandwidth version if possible (like Gmail has a HTML only version).

<pre><code> This means that every vote results in a
 response that&#x27;s usually around 10KB gzipped
</code></pre>
I have Facebook open in another window and opened the network inspector to compare it:Just moving the mouse towards the like button created 824KB of data transfer. Not sure if it is because of tracking the mouse movement or if it preloads stuff it thinks my mouse is moving towards. Or maybe it loads stuff that it would display if I held the mouse over something longer. No idea. But it loaded 824KB without me interacting with anything. Just because I moved the mouse.The actual click on the like button added 30KB on top of that.

I&#x27;m going to agree and say there are minor usability&#x2F;functionality quirks like theseFor example, adding a story to favourites shouldn&#x27;t redirect it back to the main pageAt the same time there were a couple of minor improvements &quot;recently&quot;, like the undo feature for votes which were a bit of high-impact low hanging fruit.Apart from that I&#x27;m just happy I can customize the level of orangeness on the top bar to a lighter shade

&gt;&gt; Also, worth mentioning the insufficient formatting features. Quoting is not supported, and is quite important for forum discussions&#x27; UXExactly

For me, the only formatting issue is the code blocks that people use for quoting from linked articles - it doesn&#x27;t wrap properly on mobile.Other than that I like the minimalism. I even think the lack of automatically quoting the parent comment is a good thing, as it forces the user to think about the part of the parent they want to quote instead of wholesale quoting it all as the lazy option. If auto-quoting existed the comments would be 40% quotes of each other, and much harder to read.

Also, worth mentioning the insufficient formatting features. Quoting is not supported, and is quite important for forum discussions&#x27; UX.

But they&#x27;re already using javascript, and the issue is the backend response, so this would only be a backend optimization then and doesn&#x27;t require any fancy frameworks?

It&#x27;s nothing more than an extra header or query param to denote an AJAX request. Then the server can respond with an empty 200&#x2F;204 status code instead of the entire HTML page. It&#x27;s an hour of work and would actually save resources. None of this requires a front-end framework.

Okay quick thought exercise. HN doesn&#x27;t use a react framework and is quite lightweight on clientside JavaScript. How many upvotes does it take using this system before the total data size transmitted (original page + modifications) is, in sum total, larger than a fresh load of, say, Twitter?The reality is that for the bulk of users, votes are an uncommon interaction; most of us are here to read the articles and view the comments. The additional complexity needed to make votes small has an upfront cost, and in this case, I feel the simplicity of the base interface is the better thing to optimize for, and HN&#x27;s designers appear to agree. 10 kB for what is effectively a server-side page reload (which probably gracefully degrades for folks running NoScript) seems fine.

This isn&#x27;t about reloading the page on voting with JS disabled; it&#x27;s about the XHR call when you have JS enabled. It goes to the same endpoint as a non-JS call, ultimately loading the new page, but completely discards it (as it is an XHR call not an actual pageload).

Reloading the page is way easier then rebuilding the entire comment section, should something be renewed ( eg. a new comment).It also (partially) removes the requirement for live-pages on an active post here.

Sending the same reply regardless of whether the user is using Js or not is not a feature. It&#x27;s lazy. You wouldn&#x27;t even need to change a single thing about the front end to fix this on the back end, since the js request via Ajax already has an additional header field (x-sent-via: Xmlhttprequest or something along the lines). This might be as simple as wrapping output generation in a single if-statement.

This is probably the reason upvotes still work with javascript dissabled. It’s a feature.

&gt;We might not know the reason, but the developer who did that had one and at the time it was probably a good and valid reason (and might still be).People seem to assume every aspect of this forum has some brilliant, purposefully elegant rationale behind it, but the truth is PG designed the language (and the forum) to be experimented with and iterated upon, and likely didn&#x27;t intend the forum to be considered &quot;finished.&quot; This software isn&#x27;t a masters&#x27; thesis, it&#x27;s a proof of concept for a web application in Arc lisp.Unfortunately, a cargo cult mentality has kind of grown up around this forum and every aspect of it is treated as sacred and not to be touched because &quot;there must be a reason for it.&quot; The reason is probably that PG didn&#x27;t care enough to iterate on the first working solution he came up with.

From my experience when something like that happens, i.e., HackerNews sends back 10K after an upvote, there is a reason for that. We might not know the reason, but the developer who did that had one and at the time it was probably a good and valid reason (and might still be).

HN is lightweight in some ways, but also quite bad in others. For example, every single time you vote on anything, the site sends back a 302 redirect and then a copy of the entire page&#x27;s HTML in response. This means that every vote results in a response that&#x27;s usually around 10KB gzipped.As of right now, for me, voting on any comment in this thread currently causes a 14KB response and takes about 1.3 seconds to finish.

I use Stylus with &quot;Hacker News Readable Dark&quot; and it works fantastic.It doesn&#x27;t constantly break, because the site is simple and unchanging.Thanks to HN for that.

Sure, but the mobile layout could do with some concrete improvements. Specifically, the up&#x2F;down arrows are too small to hit, and the comment text area should fit a few more lines of text. I feel like Bambi on ice when I scroll around in it on my phone.

It is this that I cringe hard whenever a developer mentions &#x27;the modern web&#x27; or &#x27;the free and open web&#x27;.I wish websites were as simple as HN.+ Lightweight.+ No ads.+ Works without (or little to no) JS.+ Does not make me download MB&#x27;s of data.It seems 98% of the websites I visit cannot pass the first two.

It’s lightweight and feels snappy.Fonts and upvote buttons could be a bit larger on mobile though imho (my hands are of average size).

In terms of new websites&#x2F;services, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sourcehut.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sourcehut.org&#x2F;</a> is a nice exception to current trends.

It used to be better with mobile browsers that knew how to properly reflow text (Opera Mobile), so that comments didn&#x27;t get progressively narrower down the reply chain. Dumber browsers have since taken over as the whole &quot;responsive&quot; thing became a responsibility of the website itself, instead of being taken care of by the user agent, with inconsistent and ultimately worse results.

But this site has been redesigned. It used to be unusable on mobile and is now just poor.

I like the middle way.See a few posts less but don&#x27;t have to fiddle around with buttons.

You can zoom in to hit them. Personally I much prefer being able to see a tonne more content on the screen, then zooming in to interact with it. Then having a mobile site in which you see like 1 post per screen and the buttons are large.

While I like the light-weight design, I would prefer some bigger hit-boxes for the links on mobile. Also, the vote-buttons are very tiny.And I would prefer if &quot;hiding&quot; would be near the voting buttons.

Ah thanks man, didn&#x27;t know about this...

Down in the footer, there&#x27;s an Algolia search box that works pretty well.

Thanks man, I&#x27;m using Chrome but will try DDG. It&#x27;s gaining popularity these days.

Using that takes me to &quot;This page will only work with JavaScript enabled&quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?q=thinkpad" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?q=thinkpad</a>So not nice!

Footer.Also DDG !hn &lt;terms&gt;If DDG is your default browser, you can run that in the navbar. Which I do all the damned time.

I wish HN had a &quot;search&quot; button but it&#x27;s OK to search through Google. I hope they will never change the design forever. It reminds me of the BBS which I still logs on through Cterm these days.

Too many negative views against new web. Imo these apps are built for both faster and slower connection with lite version. Sites can support slower network areas but why should that go against new web stack. I absolutely love the experience of spa, progressive webs and heavy client aide apps which do not post entire html every time you click on something.I do agree with op that HN is built for sharing news and links and it is great that they have not tried to update it with new style and heavy experience.

I&#x27;d really like to disagree but I have to agree. I can think of so many ways that HN could be improved but then to what purpose.

reddit search is broken no matter how you look at it, it&#x27;s been an ongoing meme since the beginning. One always uses google to search reddit.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.reddit.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.reddit.com</a> is also simple and AFAIU more lightweight.Tends to work better than either www or old for console browsers (lynx, w3m, etc.)Some features, notably search, are broken, however.

It&#x27;s not worth it given the censorship but if you encounter some answer on reddit via a search and want to access it the best way is through <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ceddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;whateverurlpath" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ceddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;whateverurlpath</a> . It&#x27;s even more javascript but it&#x27;s the only interface left that both looks and acts like the original.

For reddit, try old.reddit.com, or you can set your account to always use old in preferences.It&#x27;s not as clean as hn, but way better than &quot;new&quot; reddit. (I use it even on my fast connection.)

I use barba.js to make my site load faster, but at the initial expense of a JavaScript payload to enable the XHR page delivery. It would be cool if browsers offered an experimental flag, allowing the page to be fetched with XHR by default when possible. Then static sites could be even faster, no Javascript download required, because of a little browser magic

&gt; The web is a bloated, over-engineered mess. The Lean Web is a set of principles for a simpler, faster world-wide web.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;leanweb.dev&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;leanweb.dev&#x2F;</a>

doesn&#x27;t have a way to interact with the server (e.g. chat&#x2F;feeds etc.) - which most sites need to have

I have a hobby webcomic, and it made me realize how little code you need for any website. Works great on any device and it is 2mb. That 2mb is the actual comic page. It has every navigation and contact button you could want. And I believe it is about 80 lines of html total.Boggles my mind how bloated and down right creepy the modern web is today.A webcomic is a far cry from some main stream site, but it served as a good window into how others abuse their viewers with bloat and surveillance.

&gt;Probably the name stuck thanks to this amazing satire of a js library. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;vanilla-js.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;vanilla-js.com&#x2F;</a>Using &quot;vanilla&quot; to describe a standard, unmodified and un-customized version of something is a very common idiom. This satirical website followed the convention, it didn&#x27;t coin the expression. I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s even jargon, it&#x27;s just based on the meaning of the adjective &quot;vanilla&quot;:Lacking adornments or special features; basic or ordinary: &quot;a delicious twist to a vanilla plot&quot; (Ian O&#x27;Connor).

What if you don&#x27;t want to use JS at all? I want to cater to people who want to turn off JS altogether.

When you&#x27;re not using frameworks&#x2F;libraries, it&#x27;s typically referred to as vanilla js. Probably the name stuck thanks to this amazing satire of a js library. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;vanilla-js.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;vanilla-js.com&#x2F;</a>. This was basically around the time browsers got good enough that jQuery was no longer needed. It essentially emphasized that all the showcase features of popular &#x27;must-have&#x27; js libraries were now a standard part of modern browsers.

I browse (and can browse) HN without javascript.Only useful feature to me that javascript enables is comment hiding.

I love hearing stories about people choosing to forego large frontend frameworks, or even not using JS altogether.Is there a community or name for this? If not, I&#x27;m going to call it #neverscript. I find the web works far better, more often, for me when SPAs and JS aren&#x27;t used. There&#x27;s something about minimalistic sites that&#x27;s very appealing to me. I know it doesn&#x27;t work for all sites, but a lot of the web could be improved by reducing the frontend bloat.

Have you ever seen a SPA redesign that actually improved the usability of the site for you?

Literally to post this comment, I got a, &quot;We cannot serve requests that quickly please try again in a moment&quot; message. Completely unnecessary in 2019, given how simple this site (as a concept) is.That&#x27;s a ratelimiting function to stop spammers and such. No one is questioning the ability of the servers to handle much higher request rates.&quot;I hate change&quot; &lt;- basically the summary of this submission, and kind of sad.It&#x27;s &quot;I hate useless change&quot;. What&#x27;s sad about that?

This, and you can get a much better mobile experience to boot, not to mention fixing dozens of errors that crop up with prolonged use of this site.Literally to post this comment, I got a, &quot;We cannot serve requests that quickly please try again in a moment&quot; message. Completely unnecessary in 2019, given how simple this site (as a concept) is.&quot;I hate change&quot; &lt;- basically the summary of this submission, and kind of sad.

The key is to start without JavaScript and then progressively enhance. There&#x27;s very few reasons you need gigabytes of JS downloaded just to read a website.

Theoretically.You can but no one manages to do that!

here are some ideas, hope you could find some of them useful:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;2019.jsconf.eu&#x2F;news&#x2F;how-we-built-the-fastest-conference-website-in-the-world&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;2019.jsconf.eu&#x2F;news&#x2F;how-we-built-the-fastest-confere...</a>

You can redesign the website using modern technology and still make it insanely fast, probably even faster than its current state.

Progressive enhancement all the way, HN is a great example of this, focuses on its core functionality and slightly enhances things with JS. There&#x27;s the argument for modern web not having to reload a page, but we were reloading pages on 56kb dial up.

Just for grins and giggles, I bought a 30 pin iPod chord to charge my first gen iPod Touch from 2007. HN and Daring Fireball are two of the only sites that actually still render.

I don’t understand. The collapse comment button is plenty big enough to consistently hit it every time I try.Even if I only touch in it’s general direction my phone compensates for my fat fingers and collapses anyway.Does this not work on other devices?

I want to add particular thanks for:- Keeping the ‘[-]’ comment collapse button minuscule on the mobile site, so that hitting it is a game of chance.- Abstaining from adding semantic CSS class names to page elements—such that CSS selectors amount to “a table cell on the third level under this table cell.”These two features steadily keep me from spending even more time on the site than I already do.

Just looked into setting in my phone and doesn&#x27;t have Dark Mode but I tried the Color Inversion. It&#x27;s enough!

I turn HN into dark mode instantly by applying the negative color filter built in on Android (I assume iOS has something similar as well). On Android the option can be found under accessibility and can also be assigned to a combination of hardware keys for quick switching.

Right now I&#x27;m traveling in a train somewhere in Smolensk region in Russia and HN is the only site I could use normally with sporadic Edge&#x2F;3G. Had exactly the same thought as in the title. Thanks HN!+1 for a dark theme though, reading from a bright screen in midnight darkness hurts eyes.Another frequent thought I have during such trips is why so few sites have any basic offline support? E.g. while writing this I moved to offline zone and if I press &#x27;add comment&#x27; now then most likely I will lose it. So I have to copy it and save temporarily in a GMail draft. But it would be nice if all drafts are stored in LocalStorage&#x2F;IndexedDB as I type until posting is acknowledged.Actually it is much easier to lose written text on mobile. I&#x27;ve just opened 5 apps that took all Android memory, which kicked Chrome from RAM and forced page reload when I returned to Chrome. The page reloaded from cache instantly, but the comment draft was lost (continuing this from GMail draft, waiting for a stable 4G at the next train station near a mid-size town).GitHub issues comment form keeps the content if I accidentally click on a link (e.g. Pull Requests) and then return to the issue page (not just by going back, but jumping over several GH pages, e.g. Home-&gt;Repo-&gt;Issues-&gt;#issue) and such behavior is much better than an alert on tab close about unsaved content. Probably in GH case this is an accidental side effect from SPA state storage, but at least once it saved me from losing a large complex comment with links and markdown, that is how I noticed the behavior. GH still loses content on page close, but keeps it after page reload.

Besides the excellent minimal
UI changes [1] [2], the HN leads have focused on the difficult core challenge of moderating the forum [3] [4]. Thank you.[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10489499" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10489499</a> &quot;mobile markup&quot;[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12073675" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12073675</a> &quot;collapse comments&quot;[3]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;threads?id=dang" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;threads?id=dang</a>[4]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;threads?id=sctb" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;threads?id=sctb</a>

One thing I found recently That would help with data usage, as well as preventing tracking (like facebook) is uMatrix:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gorhill&#x2F;uMatrix" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gorhill&#x2F;uMatrix</a>. It allows you to selectively block ads, cookies, frames, scripts, xhr etc; from each individual source sending data on a particular site. You can even block individual sources across the board &amp; they will be prevented from sending data on any site, as long as uMatrix is enabled. The link is the official github &amp; contains links to the chrome, firefox, &amp; opera versions.

Fun fact: you can use Hacker News on an Apple Watch, and it’s not even that horrible.- Sent from my Apple Watch

A while ago I managed to open HN on a Nokia 3310 classic.It crashed eventually (not surprising given the minuscule amount of RAM this device has), but the front page was visible long enough for me to read some of the titles.

Website bloat is why my laptop now runs slow when the browser is open. It&#x27;s why I had to upgrade last time. Modern websites will just continue to get more bloated for every magpie developer who wants to thrust their version of &quot;better&quot; on everybody.

Whenever I use up too much data on mobile and get throttled hacker news becomes the only site I can still use since every other website takes 5+ minutes to load a single page.Please never do a redesign. Don&#x27;t ruin a good thing.

I recently created a Text-Only news site: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;textnews.pythonanywhere.com&#x2F;english" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;textnews.pythonanywhere.com&#x2F;english</a> for Indian readers. The goal was to provide multilingual news in places with slow-internet connectivity. I would appreciate any feedback.

HN is great just the way it is. I have access to reasonably fast internet service, but the speed and reliability trumps whatever &quot;advantages&quot; that are proposed to be found in modernizing the site. Like Stallman&#x27;s site, HN is a paradoxically enjoyable destination, that I look forward to browsing and learning from every day. THANK YOU.

Mobile could really use some work. Otherwise, HN is awesome.

The only thing I&#x27;d like to see is a native dark mode, but everything else is perfect. It even works well on my Kobo eReader.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=592515" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=592515</a>

I noticed that a CSS fix I gave to pg for Hacker News over 10 years ago is still in place today.I’m proud to have a single brick in the foundation of a site that has lasted this long.

I&#x27;m curious, in practical term (not throttle emulator via browser&#x27;s developer tool), does single page app &#x27;works&#x27; in location of low speed internet?By &#x27;works&#x27;, I mean not just content been served, but overall usages not making you wanting to abandon this site.

Some may call that a feature. For the rest, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hnreplies.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hnreplies.com&#x2F;</a> is quite useful.

Agreed. Though a Reddit style red envelope would make me respond to people faster that interact with me

ditto. Hacker news also works great on mobile devices. While every other so-called mobile app&#x2F;website is a pain in the butt.

The only thing that needs fixing is the link font size on mobile. Bumping it by 20% would fix things.

+1I’d also like to express my sincerest THANKS for keeping it simple. Visiting HN every day is pure joy, and reminds me of the old days of the web with less distractions.

You can always use a terminal based browser like lynx, it’s also a way for me to often bypass some stupidly implemented paywalls. The elegance and speed of those browsers cannot be overstated in the world of unwanted garbage (embedded videos, 9 billion auto-refreshed ads, etc) on sites like CNN or most news sites.

Trust me, it&#x27;s not just developing countries having an issue. Even on a super fast internet connection these modern web crApps will make your phone chug while they load 100 different ad and analytics libraries.

Yes. I agree. HN speed and simplicity is probably a big reason it&#x27;s one of the sites I go to first when procrastinating.

I agree with this, though less for its usability and more for its aesthetic.I wouldn’t complain, though, if dark mode and a mobile-friendly font size were introduced.

Yes please do not every redesign this. I am still on old.reddit.com, new reddit sucks.

Thank you also for not changing the back-end.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Arc_(programming_language)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Arc_(programming_language)</a>

Seriously? The website could be lighter, more responsive, and better designed (minify comments on the left?) while being as or even faster to load...

&gt; E.g HN isn’t a progressive web app. So you’re loading the same things over and over again. With a service worker HN could teach even more people around the world with a spotty connection.Hacker News uses standard HTTP headers to cache all its CSS, JavaScript, and images. The only thing that gets re-downloaded when you click a link is the actual text content on the page -- usually about ten kilobytes. And isn&#x27;t that almost always what you want, to make sure you see the latest posts, comments, and vote counts?Because it&#x27;s standard HTML, Hacker News also works with existing features like Chrome for Android&#x27;s &quot;download page when back online&quot; button.

I use hn.algolia.com and it’s fantastic.With HN as is, I think plenty can be done to make it light weight and make it even more performant.E.g HN isn’t a progressive web app. So you’re loading the same things over and over again. With a service worker HN could teach even more people around the world with a spotty connection.May be I should prototype and build it.

I’m currently in a country with low speed internet and the entire ‘modern’ web is basically unusable except HN, which still loads instantly. Reddit, Twitter, news and banking sites are all painfully slow or simply time out altogether.To PG, the mods and whoever else is responsible: thank you for not trying to ‘fix’ what isn’t broken.

Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News