
Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News - ramphastidae
I’m currently in a country with low speed internet and the entire ‘modern’ web is basically unusable except HN, which still loads instantly. Reddit, Twitter, news and banking sites are all painfully slow or simply time out altogether.<p>To PG, the mods and whoever else is responsible: thank you for not trying to ‘fix’ what isn’t broken.
======
buybackoff
Right now I'm traveling in a train somewhere in Smolensk region in Russia and
HN is the only site I could use normally with sporadic Edge/3G. Had exactly
the same thought as in the title. Thanks HN!

+1 for a dark theme though, reading from a bright screen in midnight darkness
hurts eyes.

Another frequent thought I have during such trips is why so few sites have any
basic offline support? E.g. while writing this I moved to offline zone and if
I press 'add comment' now then most likely I will lose it. So I have to copy
it and save temporarily in a GMail draft. But it would be nice if all drafts
are stored in LocalStorage/IndexedDB as I type until posting is acknowledged.

Actually it is much easier to lose written text on mobile. I've just opened 5
apps that took all Android memory, which kicked Chrome from RAM and forced
page reload when I returned to Chrome. The page reloaded from cache instantly,
but the comment draft was lost (continuing this from GMail draft, waiting for
a stable 4G at the next train station near a mid-size town).

GitHub issues comment form keeps the content if I accidentally click on a link
(e.g. Pull Requests) and then return to the issue page (not just by going
back, but jumping over several GH pages, e.g. Home->Repo->Issues->#issue) and
such behavior is much better than an alert on tab close about unsaved content.
Probably in GH case this is an accidental side effect from SPA state storage,
but at least once it saved me from losing a large complex comment with links
and markdown, that is how I noticed the behavior. GH still loses content on
page close, but keeps it after page reload.

~~~
AlexDragusin
I turn HN into dark mode instantly by applying the negative color filter built
in on Android (I assume iOS has something similar as well). On Android the
option can be found under accessibility and can also be assigned to a
combination of hardware keys for quick switching.

~~~
yahnu
Just looked into setting in my phone and doesn't have Dark Mode but I tried
the Color Inversion. It's enough!

------
turrini
There should be an extension that automatically redirects common websites to
their lite versions.

reddit.com -> old.reddit.com

facebook.com -> mbasic.facebook.com

cnn.com -> lite.cnn.com

npr.org -> text.npr.org

twitter.com -> twitter.com (with JS disabled)

gmail.com -> gmail.com (HTML version)

~~~
boring_twenties
Twitter is barely usable with JS disabled. Any time you follow a link to it
you'll get a worthless interstitial "would you like to proceed to legacy
twitter??" with only one button: "Yes." As of recently, if you have cookies
disabled for their domain as well you'll end up in a redirect loop and never
be able to see the 140 characters of text.

*As for reddit though, if you log in with an account you can set it to always use old reddit in preferences.

~~~
dredmorbius
No, you can set "Use new Reddit as my default experience ". At the bottom of
the page, "beta options".

[https://old.reddit.com/prefs/](https://old.reddit.com/prefs/)

There is no "always use old reddit"

~~~
boring_twenties
Hmm, it always shows me old reddit when I log in. I just tried logging out,
got new reddit, then old reddit again as soon as I logged back in.

Are you saying you have that checkbox you pointed out unchecked, and still get
new reddit by default?

~~~
dredmorbius
I navigate directly to old Reddit. However if links within Reddit (in
comments, sidebars, wikis) specify the full domain, I end up at new reddit.

I basically never ever want to be there. I've specifically _not_ enabled JS
for 'www.reddit.com' so that the site won't load, but I still have to fix URLs
manually when directed there.

What I'd like is for any 'www.reddit.com' I encounter on the site to be
rewritten to 'old.reddit.com'.

~~~
ttctciyf
I log in to www.reddit.com, and have the "use new reddit" box unchecked.
Anytime I click a link to reddit (including np.reddit links) it honours my
preference of avoiding new reddit (checked just now by a quick reddit search
on site:reddit.com)

So maybe this is a misfeature on old.reddit.com, or you don't have the box
unchecked?

~~~
dredmorbius
As an example: visiting the Ask Historian's wiki in Old, all the links
redirect to New.

[https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/index](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/index)

~~~
ttctciyf
Ok, well if I visit that url and click links to reddit posts, like [1] under
April Fools, they go to www.reddit.com but my preference setting of not seeing
new reddit is honoured there. (i.e. looks the same as if I did s/www/old/ on
the url.)

Not sure if you're saying that setting's not working for you or you're just
annoyed that it doesn't explicitly link to
[https://old.reddit.com../blah/.](https://old.reddit.com../blah/.).

1:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b7rums/why_d...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b7rums/why_did_so_many_nazis_at_the_nuremberg_have/)

------
dmarlow
I love hearing stories about people choosing to forego large frontend
frameworks, or even not using JS altogether.

Is there a community or name for this? If not, I'm going to call it
#neverscript. I find the web works far better, more often, for me when SPAs
and JS aren't used. There's something about minimalistic sites that's very
appealing to me. I know it doesn't work for all sites, but a lot of the web
could be improved by reducing the frontend bloat.

~~~
JaRail
When you're not using frameworks/libraries, it's typically referred to as
_vanilla js_. Probably the name stuck thanks to this amazing satire of a js
library. [http://vanilla-js.com/](http://vanilla-js.com/). This was basically
around the time browsers got good enough that jQuery was no longer needed. It
essentially emphasized that all the showcase features of popular 'must-have'
js libraries were now a standard part of modern browsers.

~~~
simias
>Probably the name stuck thanks to this amazing satire of a js library.
[http://vanilla-js.com/](http://vanilla-js.com/)

Using "vanilla" to describe a standard, unmodified and un-customized version
of something is a very common idiom. This satirical website followed the
convention, it didn't coin the expression. I don't think it's even jargon,
it's just based on the meaning of the adjective "vanilla":

 _Lacking adornments or special features; basic or ordinary: "a delicious
twist to a vanilla plot" (Ian O'Connor)._

~~~
JaRail
Of course. But within the JavaScript community, it has taken on specific
meaning: no 3rd party libraries at runtime.

For "vanilla js," I can still have compilers, type checking, advanced
ECMAScript 2019 features, local storage, webgl, etc. Without that
understanding, you could qualify something as "vanilla js" in lots of
different ways.

If someone said "vanilla c++," they might mean c++ without the recent language
features, or they could mean the latest language spec but no standard library.
Maybe it's still okay to link OpenGL but not okay to use a desktop GUI
framework? Maybe OS frameworks are okay but nothing more? There's no communal
understanding there that I'm aware of.

------
overcast
I wish they would update the line-height to something more reasonable. ~1.5x
font size would be go a long way in paragraph readability. Other than that,
it's fast and stable. About all I require from a forum.

Edit: All my lovely responders, I appreciate the feedback, but I don't want to
install addons/mods/hacks to fix line-height.

~~~
krilly
Another awesome thing about simple sites like this is you can hack the CSS
really easily with something like Stylus.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/styl-
us/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/styl-us/)

~~~
zzo38computer
Yes, it is good. (I tend to only use it for sites that already use CSS; for
those that don't, the default is almost always good enough.) Even on Hacker
News, I use that to do two things: to make all comment text black, and to
display dotted lines for the comment indentation to make it more easily to be
seen the indentation level (it is implemented as simply a tiling background
picture). (For more complicated web pages, I often need to add a lot more
stuff to make it work reasonably.)

------
lousken
I had to use 64kbps internet on vacation for last couple of years, it's rough
but it's possible. RSS everything and then use Inoreader mobile and read it
there. Unfortunately more and more websites use javascript for content and
that breaks the mobile version loader (it can parse text from mobile version
and show it to you). But stupid webdevs make even even blogs and galleries via
javascript so it often says that it cannot render mobile version. I hope
google will eventaully return to non-js content and pagerank of those sites
will fall down significantly.

------
divbzero
Besides the excellent minimal UI changes [1] [2], the HN leads have focused on
the difficult core challenge of moderating the forum [3] [4]. Thank you.

[1]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10489499](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10489499)
"mobile markup"

[2]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073675](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073675)
"collapse comments"

[3]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang)

[4]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=sctb](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=sctb)

------
emersonrsantos
Amen. It’s the most pleasant site I use every day. Even Google search is
beginning to slow down to a crawl in some hours (and Google used to be blazing
fast).

------
level09
You can redesign the website using modern technology and still make it
insanely fast, probably even faster than its current state.

~~~
diminoten
This, and you can get a much better mobile experience to boot, not to mention
fixing dozens of errors that crop up with prolonged use of this site.

Literally to post this comment, I got a, "We cannot serve requests that
quickly please try again in a moment" message. Completely unnecessary in 2019,
given how simple this site (as a concept) is.

"I hate change" <\- basically the summary of this submission, and kind of sad.

~~~
Aeolun
Have you ever seen a SPA redesign that actually improved the usability of the
site for you?

~~~
adtac
No one said anything about SPAs. You can keep the site modern whilst still
serving content in separate pages with a little JavaScript here and there.
Being ideologically against any and every form of JavaScript is being
pretentious and holier-than-thou.

As for concrete examples of the above, see lobste.rs for an excellent
interface that's still minimal and responsive. Typing this comment on HN took
me to a separate HTML page for absolutely no reason; Lobsters doesn't do that
and allows you to write inline, preserving the context above.

Old Reddit (the only acceptable way to use Reddit) is another example of good
JavaScript. Fuck the new redesign, but there are countless subtle and useful
features in the old design that are only possible because of a tasteful use of
JavaScript.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _No one said anything about SPAs. You can keep the site modern whilst still
> serving content in separate pages with a little JavaScript here and there._

But that's not modern web development, that's jQuery-style coding. Modern web
development is about heavyweight SPA frameworks like React or Angular.

~~~
Can_Not
Heavy weight SPA frameworks might be popular, but there are also tiny SPA
frameworks like choo, svelte, hyper.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I like Svelte, but it's not exactly tiny. And it still has the cost of
generating _everything_ with JS.

------
exabrial
I loathe the modern web. Speed is a secondary to "hey look what we're doing
with our frameworks".

~~~
dmix
Modern front-end toolsets are finally starting to address this by using
automated critical css, SSR + "hydrating" on load for interactive elements,
webpack treeshaking + chunking of assets into tiny js/css files and only
loading code based on what the page/routes asks for, PurgeCSS to get rid of
unused css, cssnano/uglify/htmlmin/imagemin, etc. Webpack and these various
popular tools has done a lot to make the web better and are default in many
starter kits. But we're just beginning to see it go mainstream.

The basic shift back to pre-rendering + delivering only what's needed on the
actual page is a big deal which hasn't got enough attention yet IMO. We went
completely in the other direction for over a decade because we thought
networks and browsers could handle it, but it was too easy to abuse and mobile
took over.

There's no reason even very advanced websites can't load quickly, without
having to fully compromise back to the 90s non-interactive websites.

News sites and marketing teams still ruin it regardless with all the crap they
add on top. But it's far far better than loading a giant blob of 20 jquery
libraries plus a big old angular.js or backbonejs app (sometimes both at the
same time) encompassing a whole site in one file, even though you just wanted
to visit the contact page.

I also blame Themeforest type developers because they're still stuck in the
"let's add a hundred JS files so I can parallax and animate two divs" mindset.

~~~
jasonhansel
Yeah, but those fixes and workarounds are only _almost_ enough to _sometimes_
compensate for the code bloat that the frameworks themselves have caused.

~~~
dmix
People seem to be confusing web 2.0/bootstrap style design (see: Reddit's bad
redesign) with the frameworks here but the component based approach combined
with webpack/compilation steps, which are very much mainstreaming, are
fundamentally different than top heavy JS frameworks I spent most of the last
decade using.

I dont think people have really seen what server-side rendering (ala
Next.js/Nuxt.js), decoupled components, modern treeshaking, minification, and
chunking can do for performance. We've yet to have a full web framework
designed entirely to encompass this from day one but they're coming and
getting better at it.

Outside of the endless 3rd party crap the 'business' guys add, if anything,
it's no longer the JS framework size and library cruft I'm worried about it's
how many object watchers I've got at runtime via Vue.js and reactive style
programming (which automatically adds Object.observe style watchers to all
data) + component initializers (which can add overhead to simple HTML
templates). Fortunately with the new Vue 3 function API there is a clear
distinction between observed values vs static/immutable/config data. The
amount of observers per page dropped dramatically. Otherwise looking at a Vue
project in the performance tab shows it's highly async and efficient.

The new Vue functional API (allegedly) is also going to be far easier to
treeshake so you really only ever get the library features you're using. Even
for something like Lodash or Ramda where you might use only 10% of the
functions it's a big deal.

I'm sure React is making similar progress in this direction and it was already
smaller than Vue.

CSS Frameworks have some ways to go and PurgeCSS isn't perfect but using a
functional CSS framework like Tailwind or Tachyons also helps in this regard,
so all of the stuff isn't intertwined and can be stripped out.

This type of tooling really does massively improve the state of things
automatically, even with poor coding practices or large applications spanning
multiple pages. SSR, treeshaking, chunking, stripping unused CSS, etc is a
'zero cost' type optimization that I've seen turn 700-1000kb dev assets into
loading 100kb base + a few 5-10kb js/CSS files dependent on the page.

~~~
csande17
I think you and the parent commenter are coming at this from fundamentally
different perspectives.

The parent commenter remembers a time when websites were server-rendered by
default. The server would send down HTML, along with a small amount of CSS and
JavaScript to style it and add interactivity. You didn't need an elaborate
chain of compilers and bundlers and frameworks and chunkers to make sure you
didn't ship several megs of dead code to the client; you just _didn 't ship
several megs of dead code to the client_. That's their baseline for web
performance.

Your comment, on the other hand, seems to use the current giant-JavaScript-
framework sites as the baseline for performance. And yeah, you can get a lot
of cheap wins if you start from there. (For starters, you can break up your
JavaScript execution into tiny slices so that, even if you're using 80% of a
CPU core and draining the user's battery for no real reason, you're at least
not blocking the browser UI thread.)

~~~
dmix
This is more than just wrapping stuff in cards and making the font 2x, it's
about the abilities of what websites can achieve. The design is a part of that
but it's also influenced by what you can do differently than a pure HTML + a
bit of jquery site.

I basically rebuild past era bootstrap style Rails HTML views with some jquery
into modern Vue components for a living on a B2B app.

I'm very familiar with the old way and how much better a proper modern replace
could be. I can pack a ton of information into smaller flexible places and
integrate action-relevant help boxes and only showing the parts of forms as
needed.

Page render times to first action are about 10x faster on average (no joke)
and our users use 1000's of objects on a single HTML form. I'd love to see
someone try rendering that pure SSR framework with partials in a performant
way and usable way.

This type of interaction extends well outside of my business/B3B domain as
well. I'm quite excited for the future of web development after a decade of
fearing more JS everywhere (which I was contributing too).

Another great HN style site is Basketball Reference, I personally love these
information dense designs but it's not very scalable with tons of information,
elements, and what it could really achieve if it was a desktop application or
fully flexibly UI wise.

[https://www.basketball-
reference.com/teams/TOR/2019.html](https://www.basketball-
reference.com/teams/TOR/2019.html)

This site could massively improve with real time filtering, multi-select
forms, interactive data exports tools, multi-team/page comparisons,
information highlights on hover, inline math tools, etc. On the site currently
it looks great on the surface but once you engage with any JS-y stuff or
imagine what's possible if it was a desktop app, and the previous tools would
be extremely limited in scope.

You can do this very powerful stuff now without clogging up performance and
load times. That's a big deal. We've been dealing with slow clunky JS
components forever now and it can be way better.

~~~
csande17
> The design is a part of that but it's also influenced by what you can do
> differently than a pure HTML + a bit of jquery site.

> I can pack a ton of information into smaller flexible places and integrate
> action-relevant help boxes and only showing the parts of forms as needed.

> This site could massively improve with real time filtering, multi-select
> forms, interactive data exports tools, multi-team/page comparisons,
> information highlights on hover, inline math tools, etc.

I guarantee that it is possible to write any of these features in traditional
HTML, CSS, and JavaScript without relying on today's frameworks or build
infrastructure. I know this because even the most advanced build pipeline in
the world must eventually compile down to traditional HTML, CSS, and
JavaScript; that's all browsers run, no matter how many layers you add to try
to abstract yourself away from it. I also know this because websites existed
that had these features prior to React becoming popular.

> We've been dealing with slow clunky JS components forever now

That's the thing -- there was a time before slow, clunky JS components. (They
used to be slow, clunky Flash components :P)

------
psteinweber
I generally agree, but what a few lines of CSS would make it much more
pleasant to read IMO:

\- limit container width so lines don't get too long

\- larger text and more line height

And not really CSS but:

\- Making it easier to collapse comments on mobile

I know some of those changes would potentially destroy the look & feel that
some seem to enjoy around here. However on mobile currently it's only possible
to enjoy HN via a third party app though.

~~~
cherrypepsi
I actually put together a userCSS to fix the two first points. I made it last
year, haven't updated it recently but it's still up in my repo:
[https://github.com/gonzalocesar/sightsafe-
hn](https://github.com/gonzalocesar/sightsafe-hn)

------
kgraves
It is this that I cringe hard whenever a developer mentions 'the modern web'
or 'the free and open web'.

I wish websites were as simple as HN.

\+ Lightweight.

\+ No ads.

\+ Works without (or little to no) JS.

\+ Does not make me download MB's of data.

It seems 98% of the websites I visit cannot pass the first two.

------
rossdavidh
I'm currently living in a country and city with high speed internet, and I
would also like to thank all who are responsible, for not trying to 'fix' what
isn't broken.

------
mooreds
I like

[https://text.npr.org/](https://text.npr.org/)

for this as well.

~~~
dredmorbius
[https://duckduckgo.com/tty/](https://duckduckgo.com/tty/)

Well, OK, that's actually _NOT_ lightweight.

But this is:

[https://duckduckgo.com/lite](https://duckduckgo.com/lite)

~~~
isodude
Sweet, now I can visit duckduckgo lite in firefox lite. Thanks!

------
wffurr
I love how fast and simple HN is. I wish the touch targets were bigger on
mobile. Shouldn't be too hard with just a little CSS

------
meowface
100% agreed. A dark mode option would be cool, but it's very easy to get one
with user themes and alternative UIs.

I bet HN will look almost identical 10 years from now, too. I wonder how many
popular websites can boast such a consistent design from their beginning?

~~~
1_player
I hacked a quick dark mode userscript for HN that respects your OS choice of
dark/light colour scheme (using the prefers-color-scheme media query)

[https://gist.github.com/1player/85d146a4aa0c2afc78bab63582f5...](https://gist.github.com/1player/85d146a4aa0c2afc78bab63582f518aa)

Some things like the login page are not styled correctly, but works good
enough to browse and post comments.

------
rahidz
On the other hand voting is a pain on mobile, even with a large screen I often
misclick.

~~~
psteinweber
Leave alone collapsing comment threads. I end up on the commenters profile 50%
of the time.

------
Deimorz
HN is lightweight in some ways, but also quite bad in others. For example,
every single time you vote on anything, the site sends back a 302 redirect and
then a copy of the entire page's HTML in response. This means that every vote
results in a response that's usually around 10KB gzipped.

As of right now, for me, voting on any comment in this thread currently causes
a 14KB response and takes about 1.3 seconds to finish.

~~~
FreeHugs

        This means that every vote results in a
        response that's usually around 10KB gzipped
    

I have Facebook open in another window and opened the network inspector to
compare it:

Just moving the mouse towards the like button created 824KB of data transfer.
Not sure if it is because of tracking the mouse movement or if it preloads
stuff it thinks my mouse is moving towards. Or maybe it loads stuff that it
would display if I held the mouse over something longer. No idea. But it
loaded 824KB without me interacting with anything. Just because I moved the
mouse.

The actual click on the like button added 30KB on top of that.

~~~
Deimorz
Sure, of course it can be much worse, and almost all other sites are. I'm just
saying that HN could do it better, because there's no need for it to send a
redirect or that full-page response unless the user has JS disabled.

With JS, they could send a completely empty HTTP 200 response and it would
work exactly the same (it does nothing with the response anyway). Right now HN
is probably sending multiple gigabytes worth of responses to voting every day
that are all just thrown away.

~~~
noobermin
>almost all other sites are.

That's their point. You're not wrong, you can always be better, but HN is
barebones compared to _almost all_ (using the mathematical
definition...alright, facetiously using it) other sites.

~~~
drusepth
Comparing to Facebook is probably the worst possible comparison, though, and
doesn't seem representative of most other sites.

~~~
GoblinSlayer
Only a very few sites are not bloated Facebook clone abominations.

------
Jorsiem
Whenever I use up too much data on mobile and get throttled hacker news
becomes the only site I can still use since every other website takes 5+
minutes to load a single page.

Please never do a redesign. Don't ruin a good thing.

------
logotype
+1

I’d also like to express my sincerest THANKS for keeping it simple. Visiting
HN every day is pure joy, and reminds me of the old days of the web with less
distractions.

------
momokoko
I personally believe this is one of the couple reason why HN's demographic is
significantly on the older side, in Tech terms.

I personally wish HN attracted a bit of a fresher, younger crowd as the
conversation here has become more stale over the last few years.

~~~
wolco
I wish there were more preteens and teens on the site. By the time someone
reaches 20 their ideas are a little stale shaped by the harsh realities of
life.

~~~
inetknght
On the other hand, such demographic often comes with a _lot_ of drama

~~~
capitalsigma
I think that comment was sarcasm.

~~~
thekyle
Think so? I didn't get that feel, but it can be tough to tell sometimes.

------
perilunar
HN is pretty snappy and lightweight, but there's still quite a bit of HTML
bloat that could be removed. e.g. all the nested tables, divs, classnames and
padding gifs are completely unnecessary, and could be replaced by a single
nested list.

~~~
tripzilch
If I'm interpreting this whole discussion properly, it seems that the fact
that "modern web development" is bloated as hell, means that the messy table-
based layout on HN is a-okay, because you really can't expect people to learn
from history more than a single step back, or something.

Yes indeed, the shit that web developers were trying to get rid of around
2005-ish, is actually better than we have today on many pages.

Who are all these programmers that like bloat so much??

------
Tade0
A while ago I managed to open HN on a Nokia 3310 classic.

It crashed eventually (not surprising given the minuscule amount of RAM this
device has), but the front page was visible long enough for me to read some of
the titles.

~~~
saagarjha
Fun fact: you can use Hacker News on an Apple Watch, and it’s not even that
horrible.

\- Sent from my Apple Watch

------
Deimorz
This is a good post about how bad the modern web is getting for people with
slow/unreliable connections: [https://danluu.com/web-
bloat/](https://danluu.com/web-bloat/)

That was written two and a half years ago now, and things have only continued
to get worse since then.

------
daveheq
Website bloat is why my laptop now runs slow when the browser is open. It's
why I had to upgrade last time. Modern websites will just continue to get more
bloated for every magpie developer who wants to thrust their version of
"better" on everybody.

------
viach
Agree with everything, but there is a small UI thing that could be improved -
it is very easy to occasionally press "flag" instead of "hide" on mobile.

This improvement could be very beneficial for users with fat fingers. Well, HN
is inclusive platform, right?

------
B_Throwaway
For twitter you can disable JS and it will fallback to a ""degraded"" (a.k.a.
Much faster & usable) experience.

~~~
boring_twenties
Yes, but you have to click past an annoying prompt[1] every time. Does that
not happen for you?

[1]: [https://i.postimg.cc/jjBSVmCX/Screenshot-
at-2019-09-01-15-23...](https://i.postimg.cc/jjBSVmCX/Screenshot-
at-2019-09-01-15-23-37.png)

~~~
dredmorbius
Once the cookie's set, I tend to go straight through.

That annoyance is considerably less than all the others a full-JS Twitter
imposes. Including the motherlovin' account-creation nag that shows up all the
motherlovin' time.

One click through at entry rather than random annoyance in the midst of
reading? A net win. And an incredibly sad commentary on the state of the Web.

------
retpirato
One thing I found recently That would help with data usage, as well as
preventing tracking (like facebook) is
uMatrix:[https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix](https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix).
It allows you to selectively block ads, cookies, frames, scripts, xhr etc;
from each individual source sending data on a particular site. You can even
block individual sources across the board & they will be prevented from
sending data on any site, as long as uMatrix is enabled. The link is the
official github & contains links to the chrome, firefox, & opera versions.

------
CalChris
I'd really like to disagree but I have to agree. I can think of so many ways
that HN could be improved but then to what purpose.

------
k__
While I like the light-weight design, I would prefer some bigger hit-boxes for
the links on mobile. Also, the vote-buttons are very tiny.

And I would prefer if "hiding" would be near the voting buttons.

~~~
jon889
You can zoom in to hit them. Personally I much prefer being able to see a
tonne more content on the screen, then zooming in to interact with it. Then
having a mobile site in which you see like 1 post per screen and the buttons
are large.

~~~
k__
I like the middle way.

See a few posts less but don't have to fiddle around with buttons.

------
KajMagnus
What about this forum software I'm developing? I'm trying to keep down the
amount of Javascript — 150 kb currently.

[https://www.talkyard.io/forum/latest](https://www.talkyard.io/forum/latest)

Long term, I'd like to make this work on slow connections, Offline-First, in
e.g. rural villages in Africa :- ) on a Raspberry Pi, local wifi, unaffected
by a "global Internet outage".

Can I ask, which part of the world are you in? (which country?)

------
cameronbrown
old.reddit.com is still usable if it helps!

~~~
mrweasel
I still can't use the redesigned Reddit, I not even sure that I would, if I
could. It's still way to slow to be something I'd use on a regular basis. If
they kill of the old.reddit.com, I don't think I'd continue to visit Reddit.

Imgur for instance isn't a site that I visit daily or even weekly any more. I
really enjoyed the site, but after a redesign it just stopped being enjoyable.
It's way to slow, to much Javascript. It's the only thing that will reliably
force my MacBook to ramp up it's fans. How is it possible for a website to
make a laptop heat up more than doing development work?

~~~
cameronbrown
Other than poor performance, the thing I'm most upset about is how each
subreddit has lost its personality, and the fact they've closed the source.
Being open is what made Reddit special, considering who founded it, it should
never have gone closed source.

~~~
crusader1099
> Other than poor performance, the thing I'm most upset about is how each
> subreddit has lost its personality

What makes you say this?

~~~
cameronbrown
They axed custom subreddit CSS stylesheets. It was very much like unstyled
Reddit was a base to build upon.

------
colmvp
Is PG even involved with HN anymore? He hasn't posted on his account in four
years.

~~~
noident
I've seen posts by PG in some recent threads out in the wild, they don't show
up in his post history. I would imagine this is intentional to prevent old
comments being dredged up and used against him, much like Zuckerberg's old FB
messages were automatically deleted from the recipients inbox.

Fine by me, but I wish HN would offer the same privilege to its users and
allow us to delete our old posts

~~~
jddj
I believe Dang has said once or twice that this is something that can be
achieved if you email them.

------
pncnmnp
I recently created a Text-Only news site:
[https://textnews.pythonanywhere.com/english](https://textnews.pythonanywhere.com/english)
for Indian readers. The goal was to provide multilingual news in places with
slow-internet connectivity. I would appreciate any feedback.

------
mrjasongorman
Progressive enhancement all the way, HN is a great example of this, focuses on
its core functionality and slightly enhances things with JS. There's the
argument for modern web not having to reload a page, but we were reloading
pages on 56kb dial up.

------
garysahota93
I've thought about making my own extension to make HN more "modern" but when I
sat down to make it better, turns out I was really happy with how it is. Agree
with what you're saying!

------
cryptozeus
Too many negative views against new web. Imo these apps are built for both
faster and slower connection with lite version. Sites can support slower
network areas but why should that go against new web stack. I absolutely love
the experience of spa, progressive webs and heavy client aide apps which do
not post entire html every time you click on something.

I do agree with op that HN is built for sharing news and links and it is great
that they have not tried to update it with new style and heavy experience.

------
Carnageous
If you want to keep that performance but still want HN to be a bit more
"appealing", try a browser extension. This way it looks nicer but the styles
are stored locally.

------
scarface74
Just for grins and giggles, I bought a 30 pin iPod chord to charge my first
gen iPod Touch from 2007. HN and Daring Fireball are two of the only sites
that actually still render.

------
teej
I noticed that a CSS fix I gave to pg for Hacker News over 10 years ago is
still in place today.

I’m proud to have a single brick in the foundation of a site that has lasted
this long.

~~~
dang
What was it?

~~~
teej
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=592515](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=592515)

------
ganonm
One issue I find on mobile with HN is accidentaly hiding or flagging articles.
It's very easy to do considering how close together flag, hide and comments
are.

------
chamini2
Mobile could really use some work. Otherwise, HN is awesome.

------
aloer
The number one request I would have is that they support previews in
messengers.

When I share an hn link on iMessage or telegram it should at least show the hn
title text

------
eternalny1
I use Stylus with "Hacker News Readable Dark" and it works fantastic.

It doesn't constantly break, because the site is simple and unchanging.

Thanks to HN for that.

------
ProZsolt
You can use [https://old.reddit.com/](https://old.reddit.com/) till it lasts.

------
dwt204
HN is great just the way it is. I have access to reasonably fast internet
service, but the speed and reliability trumps whatever "advantages" that are
proposed to be found in modernizing the site. Like Stallman's site, HN is a
paradoxically enjoyable destination, that I look forward to browsing and
learning from every day. THANK YOU.

------
aasasd
I want to add particular thanks for:

\- Keeping the ‘[-]’ comment collapse button minuscule on the mobile site, so
that hitting it is a game of chance.

\- Abstaining from adding semantic CSS class names to page elements—such that
CSS selectors amount to “a table cell on the third level under this table
cell.”

These two features steadily keep me from spending even more time on the site
than I already do.

~~~
Aeolun
I don’t understand. The collapse comment button is plenty big enough to
consistently hit it every time I try.

Even if I only touch in it’s general direction my phone compensates for my fat
fingers and collapses anyway.

Does this not work on other devices?

------
montychain
AMEN! Please keep Hacker News as it is forever!

------
joeevans1000
Yes. I agree. HN speed and simplicity is probably a big reason it's one of the
sites I go to first when procrastinating.

------
vermontdevil
For FB

[https://mbasic.facebook.com/home.php](https://mbasic.facebook.com/home.php)

~~~
llacb47
It still loads tracking (of course), but it is a vast improvement over their
mobile site, and doesn't need JS.

~~~
vermontdevil
And you can use messenger without having to use the app or go to desktop

------
nojvek
I use hn.algolia.com and it’s fantastic.

With HN as is, I think plenty can be done to make it light weight and make it
even more performant.

E.g HN isn’t a progressive web app. So you’re loading the same things over and
over again. With a service worker HN could teach even more people around the
world with a spotty connection.

May be I should prototype and build it.

~~~
csande17
> E.g HN isn’t a progressive web app. So you’re loading the same things over
> and over again. With a service worker HN could teach even more people around
> the world with a spotty connection.

Hacker News uses standard HTTP headers to cache all its CSS, JavaScript, and
images. The only thing that gets re-downloaded when you click a link is the
actual text content on the page -- usually about ten kilobytes. And isn't that
almost always what you want, to make sure you see the latest posts, comments,
and vote counts?

Because it's standard HTML, Hacker News also works with existing features like
Chrome for Android's "download page when back online" button.

------
ddingus
Thanks. This is nice. Useful.

Could be a bit more flexible on some regions of discussion, but take that as a
quibble, and recognition to many personas here. (You are good people, I do not
imply otherwise)

Those personas combine in what I find to be lucid, and high value.

And the full thanks go to those who recognize that and work to nurture it all
along.

------
a_imho
Hearing the internet is not feasible without ads can't help but wonder what is
the economics of running HN?

~~~
captain_murdock
I had never heard of Y Combinator until Hacker News. As far as brand building
goes, most investment companies could only dream of Hacker News.

------
guelo
My only request would be better comment formatting options, the code block
thing is used wrong all the time.

~~~
gomox
Came in to find the obligatory blockquote markup request.

------
Havoc
Agreed. Though a Reddit style red envelope would make me respond to people
faster that interact with me

~~~
saagarjha
Some may call that a feature. For the rest,
[https://www.hnreplies.com/](https://www.hnreplies.com/) is quite useful.

~~~
Havoc
Thanks!

------
jjakque
I'm curious, in practical term (not throttle emulator via browser's developer
tool), does single page app 'works' in location of low speed internet?

By 'works', I mean not just content been served, but overall usages not making
you wanting to abandon this site.

------
Semiapies
But this site _has been_ redesigned. It used to be unusable on mobile and is
now just poor.

~~~
noisem4ker
It used to be _better_ with mobile browsers that knew how to properly reflow
text (Opera Mobile), so that comments didn't get progressively narrower down
the reply chain. Dumber browsers have since taken over as the whole
"responsive" thing became a responsibility of the website itself, instead of
being taken care of by the user agent, with inconsistent and ultimately worse
results.

------
zzo38computer
Yes, it is good that you did not "fix" Hacker News wrong. Still, I think it
should be "fixed" by adding a NNTP interface to it (so that offline mode and
so on is possible; and all sort of usability features you get "for free").

------
tobr
Sure, but the mobile layout could do with some concrete improvements.
Specifically, the up/down arrows are too small to hit, and the comment text
area should fit a few more lines of text. I feel like Bambi on ice when I
scroll around in it on my phone.

------
meerita
You still can improve HN performance a lot and get better results on low
connections.

------
jdnenej
Trust me, it's not just developing countries having an issue. Even on a super
fast internet connection these modern web crApps will make your phone chug
while they load 100 different ad and analytics libraries.

------
_emacsomancer_
Thank you also for not changing the back-end.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_\(programming_language\))

------
markus_zhang
I wish HN had a "search" button but it's OK to search through Google. I hope
they will never change the design forever. It reminds me of the BBS which I
still logs on through Cterm these days.

~~~
dredmorbius
Footer.

Also DDG !hn <terms>

If DDG is your default browser, you can run that in the navbar. Which I do
_all the damned time._

~~~
AlexDragusin
Using that takes me to "This page will only work with JavaScript enabled"

[https://hn.algolia.com/?q=thinkpad](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=thinkpad)

So not nice!

~~~
dredmorbius
True, though if you enable JS, you'll have a good HN search tool.

I'm a fan of basic functionality w/o JS in most cases myself. I make
exceptions for useful and non-annoying sites. Algolia meets both criteria.

~~~
AlexDragusin
Gave it a spin, I see what you mean, that's pretty good actually, thanks.

------
boring_twenties
For reddit, try old.reddit.com, or you can set your account to always use old
in preferences.

It's not as clean as hn, but way better than "new" reddit. (I use it even on
my fast connection.)

~~~
dredmorbius
[https://i.reddit.com](https://i.reddit.com) is also simple and AFAIU more
lightweight.

Tends to work better than either www or old for console browsers (lynx, w3m,
etc.)

Some features, notably search, are broken, however.

~~~
boring_twenties
reddit search is broken no matter how you look at it, it's been an ongoing
meme since the beginning. One always uses google to search reddit.

~~~
dredmorbius
Reddit search is _limited_ in several ways, most especially in that _comments_
aren't indexed.

I actually find it useful though. It's among the features that kept me using
Reddit as a blogging engine for as long as I did, though accumulating
annoyances have since driven me from that.

------
OMGWTF
In terms of new websites/services,
[https://sourcehut.org/](https://sourcehut.org/) is a nice exception to
current trends.

------
arbuge
We have an ecommerce website in straight php we haven't redesigned since 2011.
Works fine, very fast, and capable of handling very large traffic spikes
without missing a beat.

------
pure-awesome
I quite like the blog [https://qntm.org/](https://qntm.org/) which has a
minimalist design in this sense.

------
redis_mlc
I'd also like to thank HN.

It still works on my Blackberry 8700 under Opera Mini, and is the only site
that I commonly use that I can say that about.

So HN performs fine using GPRS/EDGE!

------
baby
Seriously? The website could be lighter, more responsive, and better designed
(minify comments on the left?) while being as or even faster to load...

------
ulisesrmzroche
HN really needs a dark mode. Anyone mentioned it yet?

Also: yall ever hear about that syndrome that originated in Stockholm? This
site obviously needs a lot of work

~~~
Plancke
Dark mode would be pretty nice, negative colors on my phone works I guess but
it'd be nice to have real support.

------
m-p-3
The only thing I'd like to see is a native dark mode, but everything else is
perfect. It even works well on my Kobo eReader.

------
kamaal
One of the biggest edge emacs and vi have held over other editors over the
years. Consistent user interface.

Learn once, use for a lifetime.

------
test1235
it is possible to redesign something without adding tons of useless guff -
stuff does need updating eventually, even if it isn't technically broken e.g.
inline styles and spacer gifs.

I'd argue that having simpler markup and some sane, well-designed css would
enhance performance further.

------
LarryDarrell
There is lite.cnn.io as well.

I wish there were more.

------
stakhanov
In that case, if you're looking for a great search engine, try
duckduckgo.com/lite

------
systematical
Yes please do not every redesign this. I am still on old.reddit.com, new
reddit sucks.

------
Razengan
If there's one change they should make, it's a dark mode.

------
buboard
i love how tables are now more responsive than responsive. HN skipped an
entire generation of jumpy websites and is now comfortably readable in every
screen

------
Foober223
ditto. Hacker news also works _great_ on mobile devices. While every other so-
called mobile app/website is a pain in the butt.

------
HNLurker2
Laughs in Romanian 5g mobile data unlimited plan

------
penmanglewood
I agree with this, though less for its usability and more for its aesthetic.

I wouldn’t complain, though, if dark mode and a mobile-friendly font size were
introduced.

------
augstein
It’s lightweight and feels snappy.

Fonts and upvote buttons could be a bit larger on mobile though imho (my hands
are of average size).

------
soheil
You can always use a terminal based browser like lynx, it’s also a way for me
to often bypass some stupidly implemented paywalls. The elegance and speed of
those browsers cannot be overstated in the world of unwanted garbage (embedded
videos, 9 billion auto-refreshed ads, etc) on sites like CNN or most news
sites.

------
3xblah
What is the country?

------
xtat
this x 1 mil

------
lugg
The only thing that needs fixing is the link font size on mobile. Bumping it
by 20% would fix things.

