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Comment by lukasm | Hacker News Reader

That awkward moment when website you made 20 years ago is better to read articles.

>"That awkward moment when website you made 20 years ago is better to read articles."

Am I the only one who thinks that the whitespace heavy and well designed NYT modern site is better? Good line height, good type choice, very good readability.

As opposed to times new roman at 1.0 line height, is that really the pinnacle of readability? Eight grade book report format?

I hit Reader Mode instantly for all articles. Too many distractions.

I agree. With ad block on, I think the current NYT site is very nice to read.

It's a bit of a joke, but yes NY Times does a good job :)

I use a low brightness setting on my laptop because I am uncomfortable looking at bright screens for extended periods of time. I prefer the body text to be #000 on something close to #FFF (this website uses #828282, which is fine for me.) The Times uses #333 for their body text which is probably enough contrast for bright screens, but it is noticeably poorer on the dimmer screen that I use. I don't see a reason to make the text more difficult for the people with poor vision, especially elderly, who on the whole have poorer vision, to read. I can use extensions and overwrite their CSS to change this, but I shouldn't have to.

The fixed headers are very annoying on small laptops, where vertical screen space is already limited. It makes no sense to stuff the main navigation menu into a hamburger bar on the FRONT PAGE of a newspaper web site so that a tiny amount of white space may be added to the sides.

A navigation bar shouldn't scroll down the screen with me and steal screen space when I'm reading an article. I would rather hit the back button, change tabs, or scroll to the top and click on a different section when I'm done reading an article. And the layout is just ugly when Javascript is turned off because there is no spacing between the full size images and the body text.

Seriously. No big list of social media icons. No big sidebar of "most emailed" and "recommended for you." Actual structure to the front page.

I once saw a scene in a movie from the 1990's where the character used the NYT website to look up an article. My reaction: jealousy.

Pro-tip: click the print link for clutter free reading. Works on a lot of news sites.

I wonder which big company will say, "Enough is enough. We are just irritating our readers/customers with all the lag time, and utter confusion."

Right now, if I see a website winding up; I hit that X with the speed of a mouse hitting the stimulant lever. I don't think I'm alone.

None because the majority of users don't care and click those social links.

Not necessarily the majority of users, but the users who draw in more traffic. Sites court some users more than others.

Similarly, sites that sell products don't care how many users they have, they care how many users buy. And they optimize accordingly.

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