Are you using a high dpi monitor but not using > 100% display scaling in your OS or something? It's roughly the same size as most other sites for me.

(And pretty much all browsers have a zoom function for exactly this, it feels like a totally separate frontend would be more hassle to use than just ctrl + scroll wheel once)

I’ve come to enjoy using a high DPI monitor without display scaling as a way to counteract the huge amount of whitespace in modern UIs, coupled with content zooming so words are still actually readable :) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/zoom-page-we/

As a designer, I've been thinking a lot about this "huge amount of whitespace in modern UIs" thing. I personally hate it, I want most things to be always in reach.

Two of my hypotheses are:

(1) some designers are working on huge screens themselves, and don't test enough in usual resolutions

(2) it's easier to achieve good visual composition by doing a lot of whitespace (to the expense of hiding things below fold or in triggerable containers)

It's the only site I have problems with, tbh. Stylesheet says it's supposed to be 10pt (with comment text dropping down to 9pt), which is even smaller than the too-small 12pt font that gets recommended a lot.

On Win10 with default settings, fonts on most sites are totally comfortable to me.

HN is readable - just - but it's definitely on the small side.

The complete lack of some sort of horizontal constraint doesn't help either. 200 character lines are no bueno for reading.

I've found Linux to handle scaling pretty inconsistently; I've got a 4K television I connect my computer to and if I tell it to scale 200% in the monitor configuration most things get scaled nicely, but random stuff (especially proprietary stuff) doesn't know what to do.

It worked much better to just tell it to output 1080p and let my television scale it... less graphics memory too. I still need to scale HN up relative to other sites in order to read it though.

If I compare the text of your comment to the text of an article on npr.org it seems like about the same as the difference between 9pt and 12pt, and they are using a serif font that seems to be a lot easier to read.

It's a style choice I guess? It seems like it would work best on a large 1080p display, so maybe that's just what the person who designed the layout was using.

No I'm not. The font-size for most text on the site is 10pt and 9pt.

Zoom doesn't fix line lengths of 1500 characters and terrible color contrast.

The link to the site guidelines is 7pt with a contrast that fails WCAG 2.0. No wonder no one reads them.

> Zoom doesn't fix line lengths of 1500 characters

That depends on your browsers zoom implementation. Firefox is able to zoom the text/element sizes while keeping the page width the same on HN.

While you are there, can I feature request that bring the upvote icon/button to end of the comment? Right now that triangle is at the beginning of comment, sometimes a comment is long & interesting,I want to upvote it because its relevant, interesting & correct, have to scroll back up.