| HN Mirror

  1. ... It shows several stories at once, not just the google brainteasers stories.

It shows one article initially. It will load the next one as you scroll down and approach the end. This is not counted as a Page View unless you actually continue down into it - you'll notice the URL change at that point)

  2. In general, people would rather read the real article
  instead of a summary of the article.

I would argue that this is a "real article". The NYT piece were 8 questions and answers. This article is based on just one of those questions - and expands on it. I'm not an editor/write so I'll avoid going deeper but thats my take-away.

  3. For long form articles, nothing beats reading the print-preview page...

Tru dat.

  Even aside from that, the New York Times has some of the best 
  information architecture in the business. These are the guys 
  who did NYTProf. Their web team is awesome.

I used to work there :)

  4. Some visual issues I had with quartz:
  4.1: No left/right whitespace around images.

The Featured Image (between Headlines and Text) is meant to be full-width to a max. Inline images should have left/right whitespace

  4.2: I see a vertical scroll bar in the middle of my screen on Firefox.

Can you email me a screenshot (email in profile)? There are a few Firefox specific bugs we're working on this week. This may be one of them.

  4.3 The black header bar which is fixed and stays on the screen 
  all the time even though it conveys no useful information to me.

True. Intentional. It can be expanded which reveals the large site map. There are big pros and cons to hiding it. Its an on-going conversation.

However we used to have it disappear altogether and people complained about that too....

  4.4: A bunch of text blurbs on the left side of the screen 
  that convey no useful information to me.

Its a list of Headlines - thats all that is meant to be conveyed.

  You say you're trying to be as distraction free as possible, 
  but that's not actually true because it isn't possible to 
  have your business model and be as distraction free as possible.
  The print preview page is as distraction free as possible.

I'm confused. That doesn't make much sense to me. Yes, I am saying that we intend to be "distraction free as possible" - I'm not sure that I have to add a big asterisk * that covers "within the confines of an ad based business model" any more than I should also add "within the confines of a browser running a web site thats not a book" - I'm not trying to be snarky, just hard know what to make of what you said exactly..

Also - take a look at the ads... do we have them all over the place? Nope - we have them at the end of an Article - not in-between, not embedded, not inline. Thats important.

We are not perfect, but we aspire to continuously improve. Focus is on the user and the reading experience but with recognition that we have to pay the bills for 20 or so editors and journalists across five (maybe more?) countries. (I'm not counting devs, sales, hr etc in that)