Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

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hn_throwaway_99

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.

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