[piva00]

So how you go by applying this reasoning to this very website where you are commenting?

Hacker News would never be, for me personally, on the top of the list of websites that inspire confidence by its looks, it's only when you delve into it and realise the content is actually great that you can appreciate it.

Such a shallow evaluation is quite strange coming from technical people who are used to mailing lists and all sorts of badly designed (or at least aesthetically unpleasing/neutral) pages...

[1123581321]

I don’t know how Google evaluates link aggregators. My comment was based on how Google evaluates content sites right now. I’m not saying it’s fair to Examine.com’s researchers and writers, as most of the replies to my comment appear to assume. I should have made that more clear.

[AhmedF]

They actually have published guidelines, and we meet them 100%.

[1123581321]

Indeed. I sincerely hope they improve the situation. A favorite site of mine, Metafilter, went through something similar a few years ago. Google cracked down on user-generated content too broadly, similar to here, and they have had a tough time recovering despite their care to follow the guidelines. It’s frustrating to see it happen again.

[AhmedF]

Yup! We even mentioned MF in our blog post.

[bob457]

I think HN follows the aesthetic, to a good extent, of a sparse text based doc page. Those kinds of sites rank high in my personal trustworthiness rubric.

The more something has been “designed”, the more the sight falls into the untrustworthy category, barring substantial evidence to the contrary.

[inetknght]

> Hacker News would never be, for me personally, on the top of the list of websites that inspire confidence by its looks, it's only when you delve into it and realise the content is actually great that you can appreciate it.

Other than the whole unchangeable orange theme, I think it's fairly easy to intuit.

[rfrey]

>unchangeable orange theme

“Topcolor” setting on your profile page

[inetknght]

Ahhhh that's what that does lol