Ask HN: Why HN is so ugly?

2. Agreed, so we leave the numbers along, but some spacing won't harm.

3. Right, not always, but in this case i think it will, things will get more readable.

4. Well, i think the current colors doesn't make the site specially readable, not that it makes it unreadable, just that it doesn't specially help with readability.

7. In my experience if you put a lot of content on top of each other with almost no spacing people will just get lost, luckily HN's audience is not the common folk, but does that justifies this?

8. I don't think adding a character counter or just a message letting you know will overflow the cognitive load, and the user hitting submit to find it out is just wrong IMHO.

9. Hmm, tables are the tables of HTML, <ul> and <ol> are lists of HTML.

>Bigger does not equal better.

It doesn't equal bloat either. But where typography is concerned, particularly on mobile, it can definitely equal "more legible." Readability should certainly be a concern on a forum. I would argue it should be one of the top concerns.

For instance, to me, the leading between lines here is way too small. That's an easy thing to fix.

>Not displaying unnecessary things reduces cognitive load. Anything that takes 2000 characters to express is something that could be reduced in length anyway.

It would not tax anyone's mind to the breaking point to tell them what the character limit is, even assuming your latter statement tends to be correct. The ultimate expression of that philosophy is twitter anyway - longer comments are not necessarily worse, and a word limit doesn't necessarily guarantee quality.

>Tables are the lists of html. The ambiguity they introduce is not always an error

Actually, lists are already the lists of html. Tables are meant for rows and columns. Using them to show comment trees seems unnecessarily redundant because there's already an element for that.

Although, granted, that is the least important of the issues at hand.

Your questions have been asked many times, both about the look'n'feel, and the formatting. The answers you seek are already here, if only you'd take the time to look.

I think there is an argument to be made that a site like this can be both minimalist and accessible, and that the dichotomy between a feature-rich HN and a HN with quality comments is possibly false, borne out of a lingering fear of a slippery slope leading to Reddit. Elitism may play a part in that - a better looking, more accessible site might by definition attract more people, and more people would dilute the quality of the discussion pool. I've seen 'features' like the awkward structure of nested comments, the broken pagination, etc. described (granted, by people who probably wouldn't actually know) as ways of keeping the riff-raff at bay.

OR maybe it's essentially a hobby site written to justify an obscure and difficult to wrangle Lisp dialect that only a couple of people ever work on, and it's literally not worth the time for at least one of them to tweak.

I think dang has mentioned they're working on adding some stuff anyway so... who knows?