[RubenvanE]

Thanks for your feedback!

I indeed designed HackerDaily explicitly with smaller columns in mind. The reason for this is that it makes reading longer comments a lot easier. There has been quite a bit of research done to figure out what the optimal line length is and most sources come down to about 60-80 characters. With 80-90 characters on HackerDaily its already on the outer edge of the readability spectrum.

[1] https://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability

[nicoburns]

I think there's a bit of a trade-off here. Shorter lines are indeed easier to read. But they are harder to not read (i.e. if you want to skim over content to find interesting ones). The official HN site makes it really easy to skim down to find the next top-level thread for example.

There's the same trade-off with code line length. Shorter lines are easier to read, but they make understanding the overall structure of the file much more difficult.

[someperson]

Exactly. Individual comments often has value, but the comment tree structure itself has even more value.

Being able to read individual comments with more clarity at the expense of the entire tree is definitely major trade off that the line-length research is not measuring.