[krapp]

It isn't necessarily considered great design inside either, judging by how popular Hacker News plugins and readers are.

But a pretty strong argument can be made that, for sites focused primarily on text and reading, simple layouts may sometimes sometimes be better than complex ones.

[TeMPOraL]

HN is kept this way on purpose. That the GenPop doesn't like it is a feature, not a bug.

As for designing sites focused on reading, I wholeheartedly agree with this: http://motherfuckingwebsite.com.

[phaemon]

Almost. I agree more with this: http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/

[leni536]

>A little less contrast

Other than this, I agree. Black on white is fine, and hell no, don't make the background slightly gray. If my display is too bright I turn the brightness down.

[phaemon]

Do you dislike the slightly grey background on HN? I can't say I really notice such things.

[leni536]

Oh, yes I do. And I hate the grayed out downvoted comments. I have a chromium HN plugin that fixes the background.

[2muchcoffeeman]

>"You're a fucking moron if you use default browser styles." >- Eleanor Roosevelt

Why are the default styles so bad?

[dredmorbius]

There are two interpretations of your question, which do you mean?

1. What is wrong with leaving HTML completely unstyled and allowing the browser to apply its defaults?

2. Why is it that the default settings applied by (most) browsers are so awful?

The answer to the first is pretty much, as another HNer noted, the topic of the Better Motherfucking Website page. The defaults suck.

Why the defaults suck is ... probably an accident of history that's difficult to undo. Browsers default to no margins and a whole slew of other stuff, and CSS requires that you either start from known defaults or explicitly style each and every element.

If every browser used its own distinct set of deviations-from-default for various entities, CSS would be even more of a hack than it already is.

Some of the fault also surely lies with standards organisations, including the W3C. If they elected for specific defaults to be applied to all pages, and, by some miracle, browser vendors actually adhered to these, you could conceivably have a world in which most Web pages didn't need much if any styling, and where users could choose to apply default styling to pages.

I do this presently via uBlock and uMatrix on desktop, and via ReaderMode on Mobile. I virtually always prefer the simplified, standardised view to a site's native design.

You've asked a simple question, but a deep one.

[mgraybosch]

The default styles are lousy because there's no reasonable standard on how pristine HTML5 untouched by CSS should look. So browser developers make assumptions because they figure everybody will just use CSS anyway.

Fortunately, we have stuff like normalize.css (https://necolas.github.io/normalize.css/) nowadays.

[TeMPOraL]

The whole site tries to explain that.

[TeMPOraL]

This is great! Together, they form a perfect design philosophy!

[krapp]

> HN is kept this way on purpose. That the GenPop doesn't like it is a feature, not a bug.

The "GenPop" don't even know this site exists and, if they did, would be turned away by the content, not the layout.

That argument is made here often, that somehow liking the plainness of HN's layout is a shibboleth to detect quality users, but i've never really bought into it. Sites like Craigslist, Reddit and 4chan manage to do quite will with relatively simple looks and broader appeal.

[TeMPOraL]

I wasn't really trying to make an argument out of it; I think there's a direct quote from pg floating somewhere that this is one of the reasons HN's design is kept bare-bones. I may be misremembering though.

EDIT: I found one quote:

"So the most important thing a community site can do is attract the kind of people it wants. A site trying to be as big as possible wants to attract everyone. But a site aiming at a particular subset of users has to attract just those—and just as importantly, repel everyone else. I've made a conscious effort to do this on HN. The graphic design is as plain as possible, and the site rules discourage dramatic link titles. The goal is that the only thing to interest someone arriving at HN for the first time should be the ideas expressed there."

http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html

[krapp]

Fair enough, but even if pg said it I still disagree with the premise, albeit respectfully. You can have a site with a simple layout which features the content without having ugliness be a conscious design principle. The problem lies in the assumption that plain design will "repel" one kind of user, but attract another, I don't believe it does.

[TeMPOraL]

> You can have a site with a simple layout which features the content without having ugliness be a conscious design principle.

That I agree 100% with. I too believe that. Hell, I find myself liking simple layouts more than what's the usual startup trend for pretty backgrounds (and background videos; whoever does that deserves to have their Internet access limited to crappy 3G modem with fixed rate of $0.1/MB) and fluff.

Personally, I think HN is actually too simple. Reddit seems uglier, but they have lots of very small features that greatly support discussion on the site. I actually think that the interface for general discussion on-line lies somewhere between HN and Reddit - simple but useful tree-like forum.

[krapp]

One thing i've found odd about HN is that the only really customizable feature for logged in account seems to be the background color of the top bar, after you get enough karma. Just imagine how many complaints people wouldn't be making if they could adjust the default text size, line height or some other colors?