Rate YC Hacker News Interface

[tojileon]

How much would you give it out of 10? I am not impressed with the user interface or home page of many startups. As a test of how the hacker community thinks, let's rate the hacker news UI. Mine: 9 out of 10.

[Zak]

8/10. Nitpicks:

No top button when viewing a comment - only parent. No way to undo/reverse a vote. Comment reply/edit is on another page instead of inline like reddit. No comment reply notification in the toolbar.

[gersteni]

I don't think undoing a vote would be a valuable feature. One of the nice things about this site is that it is minimalistic.

Undoing a vote, even if it is useful, would add clutter to the UI. Because I always enjoy the sparseness, but would rarely want to undo a vote, I think the site is better off without the feature.

[SwellJoe]

"Undoing a vote, even if it is useful, would add clutter to the UI."

No, it would just leave the arrows in place except highlighted when "voted". You could then click it again to unvote, or click the opposite arrow to reverse vote. Just like Reddit.

I'm not saying I want unvoting, as I don't really care, but I don't think it clutters the interface in any meaningful way. (Though it does make the pair of arrows multi-state, which could be confusing for some users. Doesn't seem to bother redditors though.)

[david]

No undo vote does make me think a bit more carefully when I'm voting on something though. The only time it becomes a problem is if I accidently click on an arrow, which I think has only happened once for me so far.

Adding undo wouldn't add clutter, just see how reddit does it.

[nreece]

"Top button" and "Undo Vote"

I second that. Much needed.

[imsteve]

The people here is, by far, the best feature.

[wammin]

I give it a 6/10 I guess. While I like the simple approach ... I am also missing a few basic bells and whistles. I'd love to see a search feature and/or a way to tag or categorize posts for later reference. Sometimes I think "oh, I remember reading about that on YC" but its nearly impossible to find again.

Also the text (as I'm typing this) in the form field is too lightly colored and the text area is too small for me.

[webwright]

I'd give it a higher rating if it had a search UI. ;-)

[german]

It works fine for me, the only thing that I miss is when submitting an url you can't write the text to be seen in the comments page.

[staunch]

Overall 8/10. It does everything it needs to in a really clean way. It's reliable and consistent.

My biggest nitpick is reading the grayed out font on visited links, submission text, and a few other places. My brain wants to skip over grayed out text so much that it requires an almost conscious effort.

[samwise]

Great and light weight. I would like a clone.