Hacker News Reader

Agreed, the quality of their web site tells a lot, especially when their product is for developers

- Trendy font that reminds me of Comic sans - 1 MB of images and JS - Mission statement and values read as generic lifestyle brand copy. - A 1.4 mb PNG header image on their beta sign up page - Tiny unreadable video (with huge black borders) or full screen only.

It's pretty smart from a marketing point of view. It gets everyone on HN riled up and so lots of comments and upvotes whenever they post.

It's a perfect language to implement dark patterns, in fact they could trademark that term /s

I agree, but how did it get so many upvotes? there's a huge disconnect between most top level commenters not liking it and the aprox. 350 karma.

I'm a new user so this is very confusing to me.

HN has a much broader population than individual comment threads might indicate.