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Comment by callumlocke | Hacker News Reader

This page is a good example of what's wrong with HN.

Someone publishes their open source experiment in minimal browser UI design, and everyone shits on it for not being a built-from-scratch web browser with low memory usage.

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Being experimental and open source resonates with most users here, but it doesn't make the project immune from technical criticism.

Aesthetically, it's an interesting proposal for minimalism, but technically, it's literally the opposite.

I posted this elsewhere, but since a lot of people seem genuinely confused about why someone would want a project like this, I'll say it again.

I use `chromium --kiosk-mode` as my daily browser. Chromium has features I value highly (e.g. great devtools, doesn't constantly crash like webkit), but I'd rather have a more minimalistic user interface (less space devoted to chrome I don't want to waste screen real estate on).

Note that this preference is completely orthogonal to the desire to have a lighter weight, more minimalistic browser in terms of codebase, memory usage, etc.

I cannot agree with you more

This is a good example of what is right with HN. Technical people expressing their technical demands w/r/t a technical project. If you want people to ooh and ahh over a project and keep quiet about its faults, show it your relatives.

There's nothing helpful about derailing a thread. Just because we're technical doesn't automatically make doing so not inherently be a hindrance.

You don't get it.

Someone built an experiment in minimalistic UI design. "Technical people" started a massive pile-on, declaring "this is stupid, this doesn't have a minimalistic codebase at all."

That's not a technical demand, and it's not identifying a product's faults. That's a demand that this project have an entirely different purpose.

Personally, I use `chromium --kiosk-mode` as my everyday browser, and this project looks like something I'd be interested in if I were on a compatible OS. Not a small codebase, not a lightweight browser, but that's not what I care about. I want something that has Chrome's features (great devtools, doesn't crash every hour like the webkit browsers I've tried) but with less UI devoted to, uh, chrome that I don't use or want or need.

The warranted response is obviously a mix of technical and product-based critique. But you would be foolish to expect every comment to convey this mix.

When a experiment has a domain and a splash page, it's left behind the status of "an experiment" and gone into the realm of "a product".

IMHO, free or not, it's a product, and should be judged appropriately.

It's easy to register a domain and throw some designing on the wall.

> Someone built an experiment in minimalistic UI design. "Technical people" started a massive pile-on, declaring "this is stupid, this doesn't have a minimalistic codebase at all."

Yeah, we're criticizing the fourth word of the very first sentence of their webpage, explaining what this is:

"Ōryōki is a small web browser with a thin interface."

There's nothing small about Chromium, and adding layers onto something doesn't make it smaller. Unless they're talking about how small you can make the browser window, it's a false claim that should have been excluded from the description.

Why should this be wrong? People can be who they want to be. If something is cool it's appreciated, if it's not, it's been shit on. That's life, deal with it. Not everyone is made of porcelain. Some are able to deal with critisism even if it's not delivered like it's taught in management classes.

This is a common objection that does carry some weight, but turns out not to hold in HN's context. In a large, semi-anonymous, weakly cohesive internet forum, the behavior referred to in this thread as "shitting" propagates into a force that's destructive of the community. The best people begin to leave, the shit piles up, and soon we're in a death spiral.

That's the #1 risk to HN, so we worry about it. Like many here, we've seen it happen before, and HN was literally founded on the idea of not letting it happen again—or at least trying to stave it off.

That doesn't mean we don't get the value of hard-hitting technical critique done in a right context; it means that HN is not a right context for the shitting variety. Nor do we ask users to be namby-pamby milquetoasts; we ask them to understand enough about the fragility of the community to preserve it for the future. We don't want a scorched-earth outcome.

So go ahead and make clear technical criticisms, but make them without the extra jabs that people often feel compelled to stick in. That latter behavior isn't hard technical critique anyhow, just chest-beating.

Unfortunately that's how the real world is when you ask people to spend their time to look at what you've done. They are going to look at it for exactly 10 seconds and tell you it sucks or that they have no use for it.

If HN (or any other website) turns into a "Its OK, you're among friends here" type of auto-fawning community, it would delude people into thinking they're actually doing something worth showing to people as opposed to hacking on a hobby project for their own enjoyment. (This isn't specific to the linked project)

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