[justanotherhn]

One of the reasons why HN has stayed relatively under the radar for the majority of people is in part because of its perceived "bad design". I, for one, love the fact that it's not attracting a wider audience. You have reddit for that.

[greggturkington]

There's "bad design" (subjective) then there's "fails to meet accessibility standards" (objective). HN would not pass WCAG 2.0 AA for a large number of reasons. Tap targets and illegible text being big ones.

It doesn't matter if you can zoom into text when downvoted comments have so little contrast with the background (#ddd over #f6f6ef). The "X minutes ago", "hide", "edit" comment header links even fail without zooming.

[Zababa]

> Tap targets and illegible text being big ones.

You can zoom, and the website reacts very well to zooming.

> It doesn't matter if you can zoom into text when downvoted comments have so little contrast with the background (#ddd over #f6f6ef).

That's on purpose. If you don't agree with it it's trivial to overload it with custom CSS.

[greggturkington]

Agreed, it's not accessible; if you write your own accessible theme, it will have an accessible theme.

Your apartment building doesn't have a wheelchair ramp? That's on purpose. If you don't agree with it it's trivial to buy a bag of concrete and build one.

[Zababa]

> Your apartment building doesn't have a wheelchair ramp? That's on purpose. If you don't agree with it it's trivial to buy a bag of concrete and build one.

That's a bad metaphor. First it's not possible to build a wheelchair ramp in your apartment building without affecting everyone else. Second, a custom CSS is very easy to make compared to a wheelchair ramp. Third, the comments being hard to read is, again, on purpose. I don't know the precise reason behind it, from what I understand it's part of the numerous tools that HN has to try to be a better place for discussion online than the rest. Some other tools seems to be: dead comments not being visible by default, new accounts having their names highlighted, the "reply" button not being here on "deep" threads in the "regular tree view".

If you don't agree with this decision, that's fine but that doesn't mean everyone is aligned with you.

[greggturkington]

Yes, a custom CSS theme is easy to make, for web developers. https://pastebin.com/aMYiGr05

It's not for my friend, who's a contractor. He finds working with concrete to be easy though. I don't.

Being inaccessible on purpose doesn't change the fact that it's inaccessible.

[Zababa]

I don't think it's that hard for non web developers. The rule is commtext { color: black; }. I think that adding an option (like showdead) would be better, as it doesn't require people to take the time to find out by themselves. Again, your comparaison doesn't really hold.

> Being inaccessible on purpose doesn't change the fact that it's inaccessible.

It explains why it still is though.

[krapp]

This is an often repeated claim, but I've never found it plausible.

The reasons this forum has remained under the radar for the majority of people are more likely related to it being hosted on a subdomain of a site almost no one has even heard of, it being called "Hacker News" (which immediately limits its mainstream appeal) and its content not being shared on popular social media sites outside of the population that already knows about it. Plus, this community has kind of a bad reputation in many tech circles, so many potential users avoid it like the plague.

The design isn't keeping anyone away - Craigslist has a similar low-res design and the mainstream has no problem with it. Old Reddit was similar to HN, and 4chan is even more arcane, and both have huge userbases.

The only people who ever complain about Hacker News' layout are its own users.