[martin-t]

I find it exactly the right size on both PC and phone.

There's a trend to make fonts bigger but I never understood why. Do people really have trouble reading it?

I prefer seeing more information at the same time, when I used Discord (on PC), I even switched to IRC mode and made the font smaller so that more text would fit.

[askonomm]

I'm assuming you have a rather small resolution display? On a 27" 4k display, scaled to 150%, the font is quite tiny, to the point where the textarea I currently type this in (which uses the browsers default font size) is about 3 times the perceivable size in comparison to the HN comments themselves.

[rob]

Agreed. I'm on an Apple Thunderbolt Display (2560x1440) and I'm also scaled up to 150%.

I'm not asking for some major, crazy redesign. 16px is the browser default and most websites aren't using tiny, small font sizes like 12px any longer.

The only reason HN is using it is because `pg` made it that in 2006, at a time when it was normal and made sense.

[askonomm]

Yup, and these days we have relative units in CSS such that we no longer need to hardcode pixels, so everyone wins (em, rem). That way people can get usability according to the browsers defaults, which make the whole thing user configurable.

[martin-t]

1920x1080 and 24 inches

Maybe the issue is not scaling according to DPI?

OTOH, people with 30+ inch screens probably sit a bit further away to be able to see everything without moving their head so it makes sense that even sites which take DPI into account use larger fonts because it's not really about how large something is physically on the screen but about the angular size relative to the eye.

[Izkata]

Yeah, one of the other cousin comments mentions 36 inches away. I don't think they realize just how far outliers they are. Of course you have to make everything huge when your screen is so much further away than normal.

[jermaustin1]

I have HN zoomed to 150% on my screens that are between 32 and 36 inches from my eyeballs when sitting upright at my desk.

I don't really have to do the same elsewhere, so I think the 12px font might be just a bit too small for modern 4k devices.

[zachrip]

I'm low vision and I have to zoom to 175% on HN to read comfortably, this is basically the only site I do to this extreme.

[trenchpilgrim]

I have mild vision issues and have to blow up the default font size quite a bit to read comfortably. Everyone has different eyes, and vision can change a lot with age.

[pletnes]

Even better: it scales nicely with the browser’s zoom setting.