HN is perhaps the most user friendly site I go to with regularity.
The idea that a website needs to be “rich” to be usable is one of the dumbest things the industry has convinced itself of in the last 20 years (following only ‘yaml is a smart way to encode infrastructure’).
To be fair, it's not as much user-friendly as it is simple, and simple tends to be easier to understand.
For example, if it was more user-friendly, it could have links to jump between root comments, because right now very popular top comments tend to accumulate most interactions, and scrolling down several pages to find the next root thread requires effort.
The people who push the other direction also bring few or no metrics. I.e. there is often no reason to add <bag of features>, except a customer (who didn't buy the product yet) mentioned them as nice to have during initial sales talks.
IMO the solution to YAML-as-config is a strict subset of YAML.
JSON is one strict subset, but one that makes smart trade-offs for strictness and machines like error detection and syntax-typed types.
We decided on a different subset of YAML for our users that were modifying config by hand (even more strict than StrictYAML). Some of the biggest features of YAML are that there is no syntax typing, and collection syntax is simple (e.g. also true for JSON, false for TOML).
For example, a string and a number look the same. This seems bad to us developers at first, but the user doesn't have to waste 20 min chasing down an unmatched quote when modifying config in a <textarea>. Beyond that, it's the same amount of work as making sure the JSON is `"age": 20` instead of `"age": "20"`, one just has noisier syntax.
>Stack Exchange which is way more rich and runs on small (relative) infra.
Yes, I've heard that SO runs on relatively simple and modest infra. And agree that would be a good example.
>HN is not user friendly
How so? I find the HN UX a refreshingly simple and effective experience. It might not have all the bells and whistles of newer discussions fora, but it doesn't obviously need them. I'd say it's a good example of form/function well suited to need. Not perfect perhaps, but very effective.
Try loading it on a 2G (2 bars = 128kbits per second — those are bits not bytes) connection. It loads almost instantly with no fuss. Now try loading virtually any site on the same, if it ever loads at all without timing out, you’ll be waiting over 10 minutes.
There was a YT preso from several years back where the StackExchange founder explained how it ran off just ~10 servers, and could run on half that many if needed. He stressed the simplicity of their arch, and that their problem space was massively cachable, so the servers just had a few hundred GB of ram, and only had to do work to rerender pages, but could store them in cache most of the time. It was a C#.Net app.
So, I think there is a lot more in common than you think between HN and SO.
My pet peeves: No dark mode, sorely lacking for me for reading in the dark, then there is no indication at all that you've got replies (at least a tiny number next to threads perhaps?) and the up/downvote buttons are too small to reliably tap on mobile. Oh, and enumeration support would be fantastic, the workarounds tend to be hard to read.
Other than that, I think it's delightfully ugly and lightweight.
I can't seem to find Harmonic in the iOS App Store, is it Android-only?
Also, HN apps tend to make it harder to send interesting things to Roam or the laptop or Safari's reading list, the website makes that really convenient.
I wouldn’t say it’s not user friendly but I understand where you are coming from. I also missed some more modern features/looks and decided to build my own open source client [0]. Feel free to give it a go to see if it’s more your taste!
The idea that a website needs to be “rich” to be usable is one of the dumbest things the industry has convinced itself of in the last 20 years (following only ‘yaml is a smart way to encode infrastructure’).