

Alternate Hacker News Interface - screeley
http://hackernewsfeed.com/

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hkuo
When I first visited Hacker News, I was a little offput by the design, but
quickly embraced it after discovering the quality of content. I now see this
as an advantage, as it can turn away undesirable users that would not add
quality to our conversations. I can't guess really whether this effect is
true, but anything that could keep this from turning into reddit or digg would
be great.

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pg
I don't know for sure if it works, but is definitely deliberate.

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craigbellot
It looks worse than the current one.

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brandonkm
I don't think the current one looks bad. I would even say the design is great.
Maybe not aesthetically, but its very functional and is consistent with the
purpose of the site.

The proposed redesign has too much transitional volatility associated with it.
Although functional, subtracting from the current width makes the site look
weird. Theres also too much text on the front page which is a departure from
the way forums typically work with just the thread title (submission) and
other essential info (comments, etc.).

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chaosmachine
I'd rather see a preview of the top comments than the first paragraph of
content.

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FahnRobier
a HN "zen garden" type of redesign would be a fun challenge, limiting yourself
to modifying the css only.

<http://www.csszengarden.com/>

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geuis
Sadly, the underlying table structure and layout of the site isn't condusive
to this. I spent a few days earlier this year trying to write an iPhone
interface for HN by just modifying existing styles and it didn't work out so
well.

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erikwiffin
Aside from functionality issues mentioned elsewhere, you have some problematic
UI issues to work through.

For one, it took me 3 tries to click "expand" in the little preview box. I
kept overshooting with my mouse, and then the box would close. More padding
around the expand link or a 1 second delay on closing the popup would probably
help a lot.

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jacktasia
Can you put the code for this on GitHub or something? Might get some
interesting results if anyone could fork it and make changes to either the
style and/or functionality and push it back...Just an idea.

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Calamitous
HN's interface is not so bad... the only thing I'd like are larger/padded "#
comments" links, since that's typically the first thing I look at anyway.

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geuis
I don't like it. Usually the first paragraph of text is meaningless. Just look
at the current entries for .hn from Wikipedia. Unless someone hand curates
that kind of thing it's impossible to get right. It looks like you're trying
to add in a link/subject/description model for submissions like Digg and all
other social news sites. Sorry, but that isn't HN. Personally I prefer
scanning the headlines. This blobby text insertion just makes that impossible.
If you were going to put anything as a short description, it should be the
highest rated comment currently on the thread. I'm also not sure why you
replaced the upmod icon. That darn little thing has always been too small, but
at least it indicates what it's for. If anything, make the icon bigger but
don't change it's shape for no reason.

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screeley
I agree adding the comments would be great, but without html scraping Hacker
News it's not possible. I didn't want to reproduce HN only show that adding
more context around a link will change a user's behavior around that link.

I would disagree that the first paragraph is meaningless. The title alone is
generally not enough to make an accurate guess on whether a link is useful.

~~~
geuis
I disagree about the first paragraph bit. In every case where showing
something like that works, it's setup so the poster can add such a
description. Examples would be Slashdot, which is often a long form summary,
and Digg, which is short form. Here on HN there is no summary. This encourages
short, accurate, descriptive subjects. The base argument I'm trying to express
is that either model works well, as long as it's human edited. However,
automatically grabbing a semi-random chunk of text and displaying that as the
descriptive paragraph isn't useful and makes reading the headlines difficult.

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nirmal
Why keep the gray on lighter gray color scheme for super tiny text? If there
is one thing that I could change about HN...

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timf
Got my hopes up for a second, I thought this was the real, remote API that is
sure to materialize at some point.

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chanux
If there's one thing I love, it's the + mark :)

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edw519
One (possibly unintentional) shortcut for me: your "content" button enables me
to see what's blocked by the web filter at work. I'll bookmark this for the
next time that happens. Thanks.

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sree_nair
Sorry to Say this, but bad. It looks so clutterd, it could drive people away
froom the site.

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manish
Exactly, its cluttered and I could not stay more than 5 mins. I appreciate the
effort and if we keep trying may be we will get better interface. As of now I
would stick to HN.

