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Comment by yamrzou

3 years ago

People nowadays can't handle information-dense websites anymore. I showed HN to a couple friends once and they were like “How can you read on this website?”. I'm glad HN kept the same design since 2007.

7 comments

yamrzou

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dmitshur  3 years ago

> I'm glad HN kept the same design since 2007.

As someone who enjoys and prefers high-density of information, I generally agree.

I do, however, wish HN would add support for @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark). By now it's one of the few sites that are still unpleasantly bright to look at when in a dark environment. (When I don't forget, I visit https://darkhn.herokuapp.com/ instead, which helps but can't be used to upvote/comment.)

  • xvello  3 years ago

    Agreed. In the meantime, I use the following uBlockOrigin rules:

        news.ycombinator.com##html:style(filter:invert(100%) hue-rotate(180deg))
    news.ycombinator.com##body:style(background: white)
    news.ycombinator.com##div.toptext:style(color: black)
    news.ycombinator.com###hnmain td[bgcolor="#000000"]

  • mlindner  3 years ago

    I'm not sure on your browser, but I've used this for quite a long time, since long before dark mode was available on most websites: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/darkreader/

    It turns most websites into a dark mode equivalent (mostly) correctly. Some websites it just doesn't work for and you need to disable it, but it's otherwise great. It also auto-detects (most of the time) when a site supports dark mode and shuts itself off for that site.

RajT88  3 years ago

I love information-dense websites.

As long as you strip out the distractions: Pictures and videos which add nothing, ads, other visual cruft.

Clean design is nice, but I like being able to consume the relevant bits without having to scroll. I can move my eyes around.

Which brings me around to my point - not everyone has the same preferences with regard to presentation and parsing of information. The latest trends in web design aren't necessarily better - they are Western (and English) centric, and as well highly informed by an industry which likes to foist things on their users and hope they become trained to accept it as normal.

I don't see Japanese web design as backward, ancient, dated, just different. Possibly, in some ways, better.

I'd love to see an analysis of loadtimes, page size, tracking javascript, etc. When I have low signal on my phone (and thus not much bandwidth), these beautiful clean, minimal websites somehow take an age to load - because of all the largely invisible baggage they come along with.

It's part of why I love this site for news, as well as lite.cnn.io. (If anyone knows of more sites stripped of everything but text for news, I'm always looking for some)

Markoff  3 years ago

I use compact layout in Reddit, mailbox and pretty much everywhere but still can't stand HN layout, I read it through Serializer.io much cleaner design and anyway I don't want curated home page but also don't wanna go through all New.