Yes, but unfortunately that would be a quick, effective solution. In no way does it entail startups being accelerated into making mobile apps that disrupt some trivial aspect of daily life.
As "Ricardo Montalban" used to say on SNL, it is better to look good than to feel good. Likewise it is better to reinvent the wheel than to fix it.
Not only will they not make the website better they are incentivised to not make it better. With the current look/feel/behavior be it good or bad they have grown because of it. Any change they make is likely to make the number of users go down. And as much as the users care about quality the owners metric is always number of users so why change it if it is "working". I am on the watch for a new social tech news site that is optimized first for mobile to replace HN which I am 100% sure will be made and I will switch to at some point in the future.
HN isn't really a commercial venture. It has some pretty significant benefits for YC, but pg's mostly opposed to trying to grow the site. In fact, he seems to more or less resent the growth that has happened due to the concomitant decline in overall quality.
Even if you were consider only the benefits YC gets from HN (exposure for YC companies, recruiting, and cachet), the benefits to the first from larger crowds are, I'd bet, offset by the slow dispersion of high-value members that has accompanied the drop in quality we've seen over the last couple years.
I'd be willing to bet that HN would probably serve YC's purposes better with 5,000 - 10,000 users than with 50,000 - 100,000.
I agree with you but I think doing things like eliminating table layout and having some sort of improved experience on mobile would not affect usership at all. You could keep the look and feel the same. There are profound technical issues with the site that affect everyone that could literally be addressed in an afternoon if anyone cared.
That's strange for hn because it's known that in a vast and rich sea such as the IT world, stability leads to a slow/fast failure or disappearing. They'll have to innovate, for their business and for the users.
And yet the reverse is true too. Over-innovating which I see as almost universally putting form ahead of function kills web enterprises dead too.
I think craigslist is a great example of success going with the most minimal "innovation" - in the last ten years I can think of two changes there, and one wasn't even voluntary. First, the map-view for housing listings and second the giving up of sex services to other sites like backpage under threat from a bunch of point-scoring district attorneys.
Just because you have grown in the past with a certain tactic does not make that tactic the most effective choice. And, certainly, if the industry changes so much that mobile does indeed take over the personal device market, having a subpar experience on mobile phones could then have an effect that previously wasn't apparent.
"We make the best candles in all of the world!" didn't allow the candle company to compete with the lightbulb maker. (Albeit a less than accurate comparison, it illustrates my point I think.)
Rather than just saying you're wrong, I will let Luke Wroblewski explain why changing a working website to put mobile first is rarely ever wrong no matter how successful your site has been in the past.
Personally, I believe that this layout deters those who might not be as serious about the content HN brings to the table. The type of person who would judge this website based on its simplistic layout is probably the same type of person who wouldn't read half of the articles posted, or contribute to the conversations at all.
This is not about design or layout, it's about antiquated and unacceptable code. You could fix all the problems I'm complaining about and not change the look or feel one pixel. I'm actually surprised that any programmer worth a nickel including PG can stomach keeping such poor code in production.
I like how you can change the text size for a small phone. And it's light-weight for mobile connections - caches all the front page articles so makes it worthwhile for commuters.
Actually, this was build for HTML5 browser to see if i can build native like experience. This works great on desktop and Mobile IE10/11. I was also told that this works on latest blackberry and Firefox OS.
Wow! Huge improvement on my iPhone. No more vertical scrolling of comments. If only I could vote and it had a narrower title bar. Current current title bar takes up 20% of my screen. Any perminant feaure should use the minimum space possible to maximize content view.
Actually, changing the CSS is not necessary. All that is needed are a couple of meta tags (viewport) in the head and switching textareas to css-based relative width instead of using cols...
I think it looks fine. Everytime someone wants to make a mobile experience better, I want to kill a kitten.
More often than not it makes vastly worse. Why can't people just keep it to themselves.
Steve Jobs and Co. gave me a real browser so I didn't have to use a sub-par web. Now everyone is forcing it on me anyway. Stop. Please stop. Half of the websites I use have been ruined by responsive, and or enhancing, the mobile experience (GitHub and StackOverflow are worthless with their mobile defaults, text cannot be read because it overflows and zoom is disabled, formatting looks like shit).
Why, dear world, must people insist on fixing things that are not broken?
Are you against bad mobile implementations or just mobile implementations altogether? This seems like a weird position to take. It's not easy to read through comments and stories on most mobile browsers. It requires you to either squint to read the headlines or scroll horizontally just to read across the lines. That is a broken user experience.
I've actually found pinching and zooming to be more than adequate... And even a bit of squinting I find acceptable because it lets me easily skim a page for content. When I have to scroll forever just to find the content I'm looking for its frustrating and a waste of my time.
Or news websites that start hiding the actual content on mobile, so you're forced to "tap" the headline to even read the summary.
Or in the case of github or stack overflow, the formatting is so illegible, I can't believe they released 'em. They've made it harder to read.
Mobile is about fast access. Letting me get my information on the go... When mobile is a different experience it craps on that goal because I cannot access information as fast. I must now learn this new thing; which, is a the opposite of why I have a smartphone (fast information).
For my use cases is vastly worse. The desktop versions of most sites have more features and allow for faster access of information. Maybe I have to zoom in, that's okay! It's a better experience in the end.
I hate any mobile implementation on tablets, my iPad 4 has a high resolution, almost 10" display and can easily handle a full screen implementation yet some websites force mobile upon it.
And cue the comments where it says HN is just fine and nothing about it never ever needs to be changed and every change you could possibly make to it would just make it worse and you just don't know how to use your phone and so on...
All of my news and info gathering, from about 20 sources, comes in to one place (RSSDemon) on my Android Phone and tablet, and then if I click on a subject to read more or see the comments thread my (boat) browser takes over - simple!
For me is cooler this way, because it offers visibility on app list and when I have a few free moments, I look at my phone apps and I say "Great, let's see what's new on HN" :D .
I fail to see how it could be anything else. You previously stated:
> it offers visibility on app list and when I have a few free moments, I look at my phone apps and I say "Great, let's see what's new on HN"
I do not know about you — hence the interrogative — but I can (and do) put bookmarks on my home screens, right next to applications and thus with the exact same visibility.
There is a app called "MiniHack" that is actually extremely nice. It has commenting, replying, login, voting, readability, etc. And it looks beautiful.
I would say it's more a matter of habit, if you've used the original for such a long time you feel so familiar with it that any other way of using HN just seems "unnatural". I too have tried many alternatives, yet still coming back to the original ;)
Then you must not be using HN on a mobile device, because it is pretty much unusable.. that is, unless you like panning left and right incessantly as you read titles.
I think this "ugly design" as you say is resistant because it is a good design. It's functionnal and as such, I don't see any reason why it should change.
A good design is a design we can read easily and use easily. For instance, I find Designer News far less easy to read than HN. HN's design might be ugly but it's convenient and it's all what matters.
I agree that HN could have a better mobile experience. But the current design works particularly well on desktop.
I agree, I was talking about the desktop version.
I just wanted to say that the so-called "ugliness" of HN's design has nothing to do with the fact it's not convenient on mobile.
I much prefer the current HN smartphone experience to some stupid thing that displays one comment at a time in a huge font and is missing half the options.
It does suck on non-smartphones phones, but nobody cares about that anyway.
Although I'm running on the Nokia 822. I actually just run the RSS through NextGen reader and the layout is super clean and has easy navigation for the comments.
working just fine on Windows Phone 7[1] Internet Explorer. Even better i think. It automatically make the text bigger, thus easier to read within the small screen size.
I love using HN on my iPhone. It loads quickly even when the signal is weak and scrolls super nicely because of the simplicity. On mobile, I'm much more likely to read the comments before the articles because I know the comments will load super fast and the article will load super slow and be difficult to stretch into the screen.
EDIT: Go ahead and set up a site that implements your "slightly nicer CSS and HTML" that will make such a huge improvement. Publish the traffic stats so that we can all see when you get it right.
