It's very frustrating whenever this topic comes up that people see no middle ground between "the website as it is right now" and "some bloated JavaScript monstrosity". There is lots of room for improvement that would not turn it into "a bloated JavaScript monstrosity". How about bigger touch targets? Half the time when I go to vote on a comment on mobile I vote in the wrong direction and have to undo it. Same goes for using the search feature: I constantly fat-finger the drop-down search options on mobile.

Even though I usually prefer mobile websites to apps, most of the time for HN I browse using Octal instead of the website because the website is such a pain. And it wouldn't take very much to make it better, which makes it so annoying that people have knee-jerk anger to the prospect every time the subject comes up.

> How about bigger touch targets?

And lose even more precious space for reading? No thanks. Zoom in before you vote if it's a problem for you. You might say "how about drag up/down?" but then you can't scroll reliably on the page.

There's all this blank space to the left of the comment. Some of that could be used for bigger arrows.

Or some of the buttons on a comment could be hidden until you tap the comment. (And you can do it in CSS if div toggle is an offensive amount of javascript.)

There are some low-hanging fruit that would make the experience better. It's fine but it's not great.

The Octal app has better touch targets on mobile and manages to show more text at the same time. Here’s a pair of screenshots from my iPhone of the top of the “Is Rust Faster than C” comments. [0] is mobile Safari, [1] is Octal. The app shows more text.

This is exactly what makes me nuts about this whole debate: the complete lack of empiricism or nuance. People would rather just have their knee-jerk outrage about JavaScript or web design fads, instead of actually checking whether the things they’re saying are true.

[0]: https://imgur.com/a/aOvLFcM

[1]: https://imgur.com/a/7R14m4d

The font is bigger in your first example, the text uses twice the space (or your screenshots are different resolutions?). I greatly prefer it because it's easier to read. You could zoom out if you want, I guess.

But you could move the arrows to be to the right of the [-] and space them out a bit, sure, so they're easier to touch.

Anything that would introduce any amount of unneeded Javascript would make HN worse. It's the cancer of the modern Web. The current design shows that it isn't needed at all.

You do not need JS to make some things (vote arrows, for example) bigger on mobile, just CSS.