One of the most frustrating things about HN for me these days is going into the comments to read more about the content of an article, and instead being bombarded by people nitpicking the design of it.
I dislike it when people complain about people disliking the design and presentation of a site, because it devalues the reality that these are important for effective communication.
Comments on presentation are quick and easy to make. They show up soonest on a submission, and since they're at the top, collect upvotes. Comments on content take longer to write, end up below comments on presentation, and receive fewer upvotes.
HN should have randomised ordering of presentation of top posts, with a sort of simulated annealing technique that fades over time, so leaves are sorted to the top based on the branch total vote count after some hours.
I have no idea how a company so large can have such poor design. The new management web interface looks like a hastily made bootstrap theme. My only explanation is that Bezos himself chooses the designs and nobody can object.
Jeff Barr has used the torn paper effect on screenshots for the AWS blog for many years. It's not a one-off for this article. You can see it on basically every blog post he has made for a decade.
It's a blog post, not a PR piece. The only issue I take with it is in the first screenshot, where it says to 'click the CloudShell icon' and then presents you a screenshot that doesn't actually highlight what and where the icon is. You just have to already know that '>_' is some sort of hacker parlance for a shell.
I might argue that it’s their recipe to success. Their UIs, from Amazon.com to AWS are pretty intuitive and content-oriented. It’s their style and it works for them.
