Completely agreed. The site:

1) loads instantly

2) is mostly plaintext.

Reddit, for what it's worth, provides about the same features but on an absolutely heavyweight site. Especially the new (redesigned) SPA reddit

SPA is one of the worst things to happen to the web. There are a small number of instances where it makes sense but it just ruins sites like Reddit, especially on a mobile device.

I've had this conversation a lot lately with a friend of mine who is a React developer. And I recall a thread on HN where someone broke it into a dichotomy.

There are those who believe strongly in the web as interactive documents. I fall largely into this camp. I want small pages with a minuscule amount of JS.

On the other hand, there are those now using the web as a distribution platform. My favorite example is Figma. Figma is my favorite vector graphics program of all time. Compare it to something like Illustrator, but with file syncing, collaboration and updates abstracted. I don't have to expose myself to the horror of Adobe bloat.

So I must disagree. SPA and the rise of JS frameworks is not one of the worst things to happen to the web. Look at what Facebook has become. It's an application, not a website of interactive documents. Or see what GitHub is doing. They are soon to integrate a whole IDE into the browser with Codespaces. I'm bullish on WASM as well. I envision a future where all software could be distributed via the browser.

The problem I think is that too many companies have become overly ambitious and bought into a lot of unnecessary tech. Reddit is a great example, and they are also guilty of pushing their native app incessantly.

The problem isn't the technology. It's the misuse of the technology.

To be completely fair, Reddit is an absolutely terrible SPA to begin with. The infinite scrolling is very poorly implemented (if you click a link and hit the back button, you end up at the top of the infinite scroll page and have to wait for it to load everything below again), the memory usage is higher than any other app on my computer, and collapsing comment threads takes forever.

The Apollo app solves every technical problem with Reddit, so I just recommend that people use that instead of dealing with the official web app. Luckily, they haven't gotten rid of old.reddit.com.

When do you think SPA’s are the best fit?

SPAs are the best we can do for... applications. Online spreadsheet? SPA. Document editor? SPA. Image editor? SPA. Visual programming environment? SPA. IDE? SPA. Facebook makes sense as an SPA too - it's basically a rich widget "dashboard" app with some content creation applications inside of it. Building applications for the web is still not the greatest experience because you're fundamentally building an application over hacks built to expand an abstraction built for hypertext content (the DOM). But, honestly modern JavaScript frameworks, TypeScript, and transpiled environments like Elm all do an admirable job working with what they have.

On the flip side, SPAs are terrible for hypertext content, because existing web technology was literally built for that. Why should a blog be an application? The content creation side, sure, maybe, but viewing a blog? That's literally what HTML was made for. A table of contents full of links like the HN or Reddit homepage? That's pretty much hypertext 101.

How does that compare with https://old.reddit.com ?

i.reddit.com is way more basic than old.reddit.com. It's intended for ancient cell phones or the slowest of slow connections. It's actually pretty impressive that it works at all these days.

Fundamentally all reddit is is some comments and upvotes in a database combined with a ranking algorithm of some kind. Other than scale, the actual core functionality is exceedingly basic, so I hope they maintain these old versions (mainly old.reddit) for a long, long time.

i.reddit.com has infinite scrolling, so it's worse.

You can also append .compact to any url for a simple mobile- friendly version of reddit. I refuse to use the app and this works great for me.

Seconding the Compact version - at one point the site upgrade / redesign reached the point where it was unusable in my browser. Compact saved the day, and makes the experience much smoother to a fellow app-refuser.

The thing that keeps me feeling warm and fuzzy is that they dont redirect any links. It's amazing how special I feel when copy/pasting hyperlinks works like it did back in the '90s.

HN is the one thing I can access on my phone when my data plan goes out.

Ha! I also use it to test my network connection. If HN loads slowly I know it’s the network!

I can't stand the new reddit I'm always on the old.reddit

They are brilliant at managing change, which is why people keep saying "it doesn't change." No, they don't do redesigns for the sake of redesigning, but (two examples off the top of my head) they added a "past" section and they added a character count for titles when you are submitting.

Their motto is "move slow and preserve things." They do change, but not stupidly and they do so with a great deal of respect for what is currently working, which is something many, many, many people in the world utterly fail at it. It is the norm to take for granted the things that are going right, then act all surprised when changes result in throwing the baby out with the bath water.

It's enormously hard to make thoughtful tweaks of the sort the happen here, that get researched and thought through over very long periods of time and go largely unnoticed by the collective subconscious of the site. It's the sort of the thing the world needs more of, but also the world needs more commentary on "Well, we did make this, that and the other tweaks, while leaving most stuff intact." because it does tend to go unnoticed and it does tend to get characterized as "never changing."

> They do change, but not stupidly and they do so with a great deal of respect for what is currently working, which is something many, many, many people in the world utterly fail at it.

An excellent design motto. Respect what works!

They added a lang tag recently, too. There’s small changes that go in all the time.

I do wish there were one exception to this: as a way to nicely format quotes of other comments, the way Reddit does when you prefix a line with > (or multiple > for nested quotes). I actually think totally unformatted quotes are fine or even preferable:

> To me HNs biggest feature is the lack of features and the lack of 'innovation', or rather redesigns for the sake of redesigning.

But so many people abuse the code formatting for these

    To me HNs biggest feature is the lack of features and the lack of 'innovation', or rather redesigns for the sake of redesigning.

I probably see it more often than I see actual code, and it's infuriating to read on mobile. People posting this way don't see the problem themselves (presumably they're posting from desktop), so it's just going to carry on persisting regardless of how "wrong" they are.

At the very least, an instant preview or enforced separate preview-before-posting page would help a lot, especially if either it was narrow enough to represent mobile, or had a warning below not to abuse code snippets that way if there's a detected code snippet. (A preview would help anyway because the reply edit box is monospace, which is really hard to read. I often end up posting an initial draft immediately and using the edit page to fix it up.)

I do wish it had some styling changes on mobile though - hitting vote buttons, reply links, etc. is rather difficult because of how small everything is.

And reading code blocks is the worst. Especially if they are in a far down child reply.

Agreed. On mobile to collapse a comment thread I have to zoom in and hit [-]

Maybe greasemonkey style plugin on mobile could fix it up ?

For sure. This helps to keep it part of the old/weird web like the related articles that get much attention here. I appreciate it.

Its funny, because it almost makes the few of them even more enticing. I didn’t realize that you could change the colour of the top bar past a certain karma, but now that I do there is literally nothing I want more than to get there

I can almost instantly load a hn page, but you go somewhere else similar like reddit? 8 10 seconds of rendering.

The greatest sin in building or maintaining anything is fixing something that ain't broken.

There is one feature I would like to see: NNTP. Failing that, a strict chronological mode.

I wish there was a way of fixing posts that accidentally indented their text 2 spaces.

For me, the biggest feature is the lack of ads. Well except for the job postings, which I strongly suspect are unlabeled ads.

They're job ads from YC companies, as mentioned in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

You're joking, right? On tech topics, every third comment is somebody pointing to their company. Sometimes they mention it and sometimes not but it's still advertisement. Not even talking about people spamming their site.

We have ads here, they just have to be carefully crafted infomercials with a high payoff for the advertisee, enough that it could not be an ad ...

Basically, "Mission. Fucking. Accomplished." - https://xkcd.com/810/.

Often there is too much censoring going on but at least they appear to be a bit more transparent about it now. The one feature that I would like to see is to be able to collapse all comments by default (and read only top level comments).

And often, comments critical of HN like this one first get many upvotes and then get sent back to a neutral 1... which is what just happened

It happened because some users upvoted it and others downvoted it. What did you think was happening?

I was even asked to change my nickname once, I think it was by you. The nickname was nothing bad, you just didn't like it.

That doesn't sound like us, though of course it's always possible that we made a mistake. I've made hundreds of thousands of moderation decisions and tens of thousands of posts. No doubt thousands of those, at least, were wrong.

If you're going to make a claim like this, you should provide a link so that readers can make up their own minds. When such complaints show up linklessly, it's usually because there's more to the story that the complaint is omitting (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).

> If you're going to make a claim like this, you should provide a link so that readers can make up their own minds.

fair enough: https://i.imgur.com/Iu7CLxN.png or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16834895

It's rare for people to actually supply a link in response to such a reply, so kudos to you!

The description ("The nickname was nothing bad, you just didn't like it") was false though. 'lovetrump' was a trollish username, and we don't allow those on HN because they effectively troll every thread they post to, which is bad.

This is standard practice: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.... By the way, we can change usernames now, so the problem is easier to solve.

I like Hacker News for the lack of political content. I feel overwhelmed by the amount politics is bleeding into all aspects of my life as of late.

I would like to think that the same type of decision would have been made had your username been from the opposing political party.

> I would like to think that the same type of decision would have been made had your username been from the opposing political party.

I find that hard to believe, but it is possible.

https://i.imgur.com/D73De7f.png

Do you have any reason to believe dang would allow democratic flamebait nicks?

You should state the reason if you have one. Otherwise, you are just slinging a baseless insult.

this was not meant as an insult... this forum is just very democrat, so it would not surprise me if it had a little bias

To be specific: to your knowledge dan has never allowed any troll bait political nicks of any kind.

Additionally: you have a feeling he might allow democratic troll nicks. the strength of that feeling ranges from not surprised if to hard to believe not depending on the day.

Your evidence: claim that the forum is very democratic

I don't believe you would choose a username like that (and to a lesser extent, your current one) for any other purpose than to explicitly provoke heated arguments. There are plenty of places on the web where you can go for those, I am happy that dang et al are making an effort to minimize them.

He did say please