[beachy]

Downvoted but true.

HN's pedestrian design makes for a much better experience.

- no flair for usernames - means people concentrate on the message not the messenger

- no visible karma for anyone but the top few - means people don't spend (as much) time karma whoring

- limited formatting, no images or video - increases the value and import of the written word

- no sharing, or @user referencing - means posts live and die more by their merit rather than brigading or other shenanigans

[lnauta]

On top of that no sharing/@ing: no notifications for responses (there's probably an addon for that if you want it).

At first I thought I wouldn't like it, because I tend to post on subjects I'm knowledgeable and want to do my best there. But now I'm so glad to not get the anxiety and rush of the back and forth in heated discussions.

Peace and quiet.

[RGamma]

Would be nice to have the option. I've missed more than one belated response for sure...

[ho4]

I would say this site user design wise is about the same as reddit, so I don't agree with any of your points. What makes it higher quality is that it has a niche theme (hackery) and it makes it less popular. As in general online, the less popular a resource is, the higher quality communication it has. You can find the same quality of conversation in low population subreddits too, despite the aforementioned design.

[beachy]

Go and look at Reddit again. Every post has a little avatar of the poster right next to it. Some of them are quite funky and some are offensive. The text of the username is bold - bolder than the post content itself.

In HN the username is simply plain text. You can't even see it's a link without hovering.

[ho4]

It's true. But it's not what contributes to the quality of the conversation. Find a niche (non-meme) subreddit that has at best 10 posts a day and check the conversations on there. They all have flashy avatars, a modern design for their posts, etc. But the conversation is high quality at the end of the day.

[mcmoor]

That's new reddit for you. Old reddit is bland af, and some people love it for that.

[baq]

It isn’t love of old Reddit, it sucked, you needed RES to make it usable.

It’s hate of the new Reddit, plain and simple. Well deserved might I add, it embodied the new priorities of the site: number go up.

I quit Reddit cold turkey when they took Apollo away.

[vik0]

There are user flairs on old reddit too. You can see the persons karma if you hover over their username. But even if that wasn't the case, Reddit (99.98% of the time) sucks, regardless of what UI you use.

[mikestew]

no visible karma for anyone but the top few

It took one click to see that user abraae has 6671, as of this writing. Or did I miss the point in dramatic fashion?

[echelon_musk]

I interpreted this point to mean that there is no visible karma for any of a user's posts.

E.g. A reply/comment is at the top of the chain, but you don't know if there is a difference of 1 karma or 100 karma between it and the next comment.

[beachy]

Oops. I was really meaning no badges, karma etc. showing next to people's posts but forgot you can see it by clicking in.

[foolswisdom]

I wonder the same, I can definitely see the karma of users who have only double digit (and I think I have seen single digit) karma.

[justech]

I think it's a lot less obvious here than on Reddit you could hover over a username and see it.

[radley]

You did. His score has little to do with anything on the site. That's the point.

[throwanem]

There's no meaningful leaderboard.

[kibwen]

There is, but the fact that almost nobody knows that it exists might be a feature.

I won't link it; per the hacker ethos, I encourage you to find it yourself.

[throwanem]

My qualifier is empirical, and not at all pejorative.

[rldjbpin]

with the experimental spirit of the site, the barebones look is enough for the "mvp". but for most of the web users today, it is not quite as engaging to use.

most of the readers here don't mind reading text and face a wall of text daily, so it works out here.

[lelanthran]

> most of the readers here don't mind reading text and face a wall of text daily, so it works out here.

Even for us, we do mind reading HN as a single wall of text. I've got my userContent.css file set up for HN so that:

1. There are maximum sizes to the paragraphs (I can't read a wall of text stretching across 1080 pixels!)

2. Vertical spacing between comments and lines are larger.

3. Each comment in a thread has a larger indent using padding so that, visually, it's easier to track the parent of any given comment.

[rldjbpin]

would like to check it out and see how to set it up for my browser!

[lelanthran]

Place this into your `userContent.css` file in `$FIREFOX_PROFILE/chrome`.

The case of the filenames may or may not be important, depending on whether on Windows or not.

https://gist.github.com/lelanthran/873983febef21450b0afcb99d...

[toomuchtodo]

Optimized for thoughtful discussion over engagement.