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Comment by lopkeny12ko | Hacker News Reader

This feels very much like a solution in search of a problem.

The web design trend toward less and less information density is a troubling one.

I like high information density, but HN does have troubling click target density. On a phone I often misclick links if I don't zoom in first to make the target bigger than my finger. A design change that made UI links (not UGC links) more like buttons, without adding padding elsewhere for that trendy sparse look, would be quite nice. I think it could even be applied when a feature detection script sees a touch screen, so as not to inconvenience mouse users.

This actually reminded me of one of the design changes Slashdot made about two decades ago that made me stop using it. It was clear that designers came in and in an attempt to "prettify" the site (added tons of unnecessary whitespace, perhaps a better font and color scheme) clearly had no idea how users, especially frequent users, used the site. It became impossible for me to find highly rated comments so I just stopped using Slashdot.

So many of these design trends you see are due to the "tyranny of the marginal user" (there was a fantastic post on HN about this a while ago). That is, once you get your core users, design changes get made to try to appeal to people who apparently "only have one working thumb" and all they're capable of doing is scrolling.

I get that HN might not be the most "user-friendly" site for brand new users, but so what? It takes a couple mins to read the site guidelines and figure out what's going on. There is no need to make the site less appealing to frequent users in an attempt to lower the already pretty low bar for new users.

My personal conceptualization (for which I have no real evidence) of the general design goals of large social media platforms is that they seek to emulate the experience of cable television. One local minima of this design is the experience of channel-surfing but with ML driving the "next" button (see: TikTok). I suspect that presenting the user with only one or two posts at a time is useful not only for determining which post to attribute the next user action to but also for triggering addiction through intermittent reinforcement.

To pursue this design pattern further I would suggest that OP continue to reduce the post density by incorporating meta tag images and videos. Additionally, adding "friendly" animations for upvotes would be useful. Slot machines are a great example of the type of slow-ish, satisfying animations designers at Facebook appear to be emulating.

However, I think the main issue is that most users of HN don’t come here to "veg out and channel surf". There’s a reason the McMaster Carr catalog and the Sears catalog ended up looking extremely different.

I would suspect that the average HN user is here to feel connected to the technology startup community and understand the latest technical trends and opinions. I further assume that they are someone who values their time and enjoys learning new things. Using these assumptions I would suggest robust keyboard navigation and "url threading" (a quick way to see other posts which contain the same url) as UI improvements which may be more appreciated. Github’s interface may be a good place to draw inspiration.

It's what happens when we seek the most common denominator to design. I doubt large companies that do comparison testing do this without the numbers to back it up.

The posted site has the same amount of information as Hacker News' own pages. Information doesn't become less "dense" just because the kerning and whitespace increases.

Information is what is being conveyed by the text, that is a property of the language used, not the text layout itself. Smaller letters packed into a smaller space doesn't mean more information, it just means things are harder to read.

> More, smaller letters packed into a smaller space doesn't mean more information

What smaller space are you talking about? The browser window dimensions don't change. On vanilla HN at the default zoom level, I can see ~22 submissions. Whereas with the posted site, I can only see ~9. How is that not less information density?

Again, and for the last time because I know it's going to be pointless, because people here have some weird hostility towards proper typography and design - information is a property of language and information density is a separate property from the density of the text itself.

That you see fewer items per line and fewer lines in your monitor does not mean there is less information on the page. It's same information, it's just spread out more. If you switched to a larger monitor, the information density would not magically increase. If you switched to a smaller monitor, it would not decrease. The information density remains the same regardless of the layout, because it's coming from HN's API and the same data sources that populate HN's own page.

> It's same information, it's just spread out more.

Maybe I'm being dense, but isn't density mass per volume, or more specifically here: headline per screen area? So spreading out information would make it less dense.

> weird hostility towards proper typography and design...It's same information, it's just spread out more.

This sounds like some kind of delusion web designers tell themselves to justify pushing out UI changes that users don't want.

"It's the same information but just more spread out" is quite literally the definition of reduced information density.

You're trying to make pointless semantic distinctions, so I'll put it bluntly: I think a screen where I can see a lot less info all on the screen at once, and where I need to scroll and scroll to see more info, is less efficient and useful to me than one where I can see more on-screen at once.

You can make all the arguments you want about what "semantic density" really means, but I don't care. The other site is objectively worse for me, and many others, so we don't need to be lectured to about what "proper design" is. If you like it better, congrats, knock yourself out.

The "weird hostility" probably has more to do with your opinions being presented as "proper typography and design" followed by frankly incoherent arguments wherein you try to tell people their preferences are incorrectly stated.

I studied design. I know what an en-dash is, and an em-dash, and I know when to use them. I know about reading gravity, and page furniture and leading and kerning and ligatures and all that stuff. I love that stuff.

But in the end "Proper typography" is just a set of general guidelines. They are not unbreakable rules; nor are they applicable to every audience in every situation. In fact, one design rule that I remember is to "understand your audience".

I think the audience for Hacker News generally prizes economy, efficiency, time and information density; wants to see more LOC on screen not less, and probably a reasonable percentage spend their day looking at screens like this:

https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/0*cZ0wb7K2E6qtZtt...

(This is an exaggeration, but exaggerations are useful for understanding sometimes).

It's less a wierd hostility to proper typography, and more an understandable hostility to affecting what is comfortable and efficient; lastly don't underestimate the power of an idiosyncratic design: it has character, it is recognisable, and it stands out.

On that 'modern page' I see 6 items without scrolling, on the traditional page 22 items.

TBH that new page looks like part of the CSS is missing because of all that wasted screen space ;)

Doubt the HN audience has any wish to scroll through 300 screens of one phrase per screen, even if their solo founder SaaS sites are done like that :)

I define density as information per unit of screen space. (Not information per word, which is a different measure. Useful, but different.)

I'm on Firefox on Ubuntu right now, 1920x1080. Classic HN shows me 19 headlines in one screen, along with point counts. So let's say, 38 pieces of information per screen. The submitter's app shows me 5 headlines and point counts, so 10 pieces of information. Classic gives me nearly four times the info per screen.

Don't get me wrong, the uncluttered view is pleasant to look at, but HN is the kind of site where density pays off.

On that basis, the classic view is

Go over to Reddit, sounds like you'll love their new design...

Often excessive whitespace and 'spreading out' the content is a dark pattern, used to make you scroll more (or load more pages) and view more ads along the way.

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