Gratuitous images by each story, slow enough to load that it benefits from a cutesy loading spinner, cookies for tailored marketing, email signup box after the 10th story, fat banner that uses the hamburger menu icon but doesn’t trust it to be communicative enough so also has “Menu” in text on the button...
I agree with your larger point but in a different way — Hacker News is not defined by UI, but community. I’m sure that there is a Hacker News for auto out there already, I’d guess it’s a myBB forum.
HN design and its spartan interface is an overwhelmingly and the primary reason for its success (of course content, people, moderation, etc as well). If it were a phpBB board, or a discourse forum, it just wouldn't be the same. People are addicted to this site for its usability and simplicity.
We've seen mass exodus from Digg and Reddit. The inflection point is always design, 2008 when they messed up the Digg UX with promoted posts, the whole website went down in a dumpster fire. Reddit has been the same but inflection point was carried out through a couple of years as they went to a new design. Still, old.reddit.com is popular. Reddit has too much influx of new users, high churn rate to keep it from burning down.
Design is the reason for IBM. It is why Apple exists, Nike, Stripe, etc. Sure, a company can be successful without good design, but the ones that are built with design as a cornerstone of its foundation, are easy to spot - HN is one of those IMO.
>HN design and its spartan interface is an overwhelmingly and the primary reason for its success
I don't think so, even considering the paranthesis cases. People are addicted to its consistency. It stays the same, the way it worked, and stick to the principles of "don't fix if it aint broke". A forum is primary a forum, where people share ideas.
Trying to force in the industrial design principles of "best design" in to a forum is mixing up the true intention of "best design" thinking.
No such thing as "best design", there's just "different" design. Better design is the excuse producer give consumer to sell something similar yet different, implementing planned obsolecense through deisgn by making the consumer reaching for the "new" design. works for Apple, Nike, Stripe you name it because they constantly want to sell new products, that competes with their old product. To make a profit, the design becomes design for the sake of design. That principle goes against what a forum is supposed to be.
Digg collapsed sure, but where does the Reddit exodus come from? Even IF they had people leave because of the design (which I doubt would be significant numbers) it would not be remotely comparable to Digg.
Digg's userbase collapsed so precipitously because there were alternatives already in competition (reddit itself, largely).
There isn't really somewhere "quite like reddit" enough for reddit users to march off to en-mass in the same way, though I, people I know, and I suspect a large number of others, visit reddit a lot less than we once did and hang around less once we are there. So rather than an exodus there is more an epidemic of "meh".
I certainly don't contribute to "communities" there these days - and I think many others with a similar attitude is why some significant subs have fallen to rabid fighting where at least some insightful discussion once prevailed: the more reasonable voices have shuffled away so the more rabid ones increasingly stand out (and boy do they love it), pushing more "more reasonable" voices into shuffling away leaving the polarised trolls on all sides to fight amongst themselves, and so the spiral descends.
Though I'm not an ad-clicker, gold buyer, or anything else such, so I very much doubt the powers that be over at reddit care that I am not engaged.
People are addicted to this site for its usability and simplicity.
What this website looks like, how fast it loads, and how simple it is are not reasons to post here.
People post to contribute their thoughts to the community. There are people here who we want to discuss things with. There are topics we're interested in that we have opinions about. We each want to be seen to be curious or knowledgeable about tech things.
The design of HN is good because it lowers the barrier to posting. It's simple and obvious how to use it[1]. Those are good things but they're not enough to keep people here. That comes from the links and the comments.
Good design isn't enough to make people here stay on a website. Bad design is enough for people to leave.
[1] Apart from all the stuff new users don't understand like the black bar, the username colors, why comments turn grey, why you can or can't vote etc. Those bits are less good design.
I agree that the main appeal of HN is undoubtedly the community. There's no other place where you can be exposed to so many no-bullshit comments and submissions from so many people so deeply embedded in the industry.
However, I disagree that the design has nothing to do with it. I think the spartan design keeps the appeal of HN low for those who don't fully appreciate the value the community itself brings. Case in point, many people who post here are also probably on Twitter and/or Facebook. But Twitter and FB knowingly pursue such directions in their UI and UX and overall service design that having anything like HN on those platforms is all but impossible.
You’re right and good points, the key point of argument is whether good design attracts the community in the first place (that’s my stance) vs. community is sustained since design is good (your point).
Hmm... these things are hard to tell. I’ll give you my personal motivation to stay here and that’s unquestionably the design. I never got hooked on Slashdot because that site was an eye sore (sorry!).
Usually, good design fades in the background when it’s good. So we give the credit to other things.
As for me, I'd stop lurking if the quality of content and community got bad, but probably much quicker so if the design turned into anything that's normal according to current trends.
What this website looks like, how fast it loads, and how simple it is are not reasons to post here.
With the emphasis on 'here', I think they are very important factors.
Part of HackerNews's community is because you can load the page on a potato. I remember someone mentioning that they frequent HN from the middle of the ocean.
HN certainly does seem like one of the things that you might want to try to use in the middle of an ocean, if you're paying per megabyte of data transferred over an Inmarsta or Iridium based service.
That's an interesting thought though; does the UI of HN help to foster this community in any way? I would argue it absolutely does given the amount of people I see (myself included) that hate designs like the new Reddit, for example. I would then argue that the UI of HN does indeed play an important role in defining it.
I know I wouldn't be here if the site had a design like "New Reddit". Part of the appeal of the community is what it finds important, and one of those things is respecting it's users.
Not true at all. A huge part of HN is - as others mentioned - that is‘s so lightweight and the UI is so clean.
There are a lot of people here that have slower bandwith than a pigeon, and they are very very happy that the HN staff tries to save every bit and byte.
Hi the 1000+ points is the load of users that came from HN yesterday - you click on article, it gets a point. At the moment simple as that. The lack of comments is that I had to disable them temporarily, cause few trolls came around and I had no mechanism in place to stop posting terrible things. Will be fixed and allowed again shortly.
I don't think it's snotty. The criticism is valid and straightforward.
Your comment, on the other hand, brings up the person's post history to make a personal attack. It doesn't address the point being made in any way. This is not the sort of behaviour that's expected on HN.
More interestingly, they picked a top-15 karma account to criticize. I'm guessing the GGP is a bit more well-versed about what is good HN commenting than GP.
Eh you can say as much in a more delicate way – deliver every one of those points. I’m not going to feel bad for thinking we can all be nicer to each other.
I fail to see the connection to the "big corps" here, nor being allergic to the truth. This is about being nicer, as a human being. Becoming more empathetic towards a person who is showing their product for the world to see for the first time.
Of course it may have perceived flaws. Do you choose to beat the person for doing it that way, or do you want to offer gentle advice in order to help them? The motive behind the comment is hidden in its delivery.
You can say your truth, all of it - but you can say it in a nice way or in a shitty way. How you say it will define you.
>The motive behind the comment is hidden in its delivery.
This is exactly why there is blowback to the suggestion that GGP was not being nice enough. It comes across as a desire to obscure the motive of that comment.
really? at big corp people talk behind each other’s backs about how shitty each other are or another team is but never confront people directly until shit has hit the fan and someone is going on a permanent vacation
I get what you're saying, but being deceitful / being nonconfrontational / sugarcoating stuff is a completely different matter. You can be direct, while being nice.
It seems a lot of people think that if you have to confront someone or tell the truth, you can't be nice. That is pretty sad.
You can be nice, and you can tell people what you really think. It is 100% possible.
It is about how you word it. It is about putting in some effort to take care of others' feelings. I.e. being caring and empathetic.
Not a big fan of the use of space compared to hn. On hn on mobile I can clearly see the headlines for 13 stories, on the automotive one, I get 6, meaning i have to scroll a whole page just to see as many stories as I can at a glance on hn. With one quick scroll, i can see an entire hn page, to get to the bottom of autonews I had to scroll 5 times and scroll past an annoying subscribe bar placed in the middle.
I don't really feel like it captures hn's ease of use and simplicity.
We need to own this and say HN design is far superior vast majority of web design out there. It has nothing to do with us getting old and it only gives excuses to people to not be inspired by it.
Thanks, I was actually exactly thinking the same when I was comparing autonews.io vs HN. But I would have to compromise the images if I wanted to make it more concise, and I've decided not to.
I don't think the images are a problem. Like the other commenter said i think it's the use of whitespace. The story feed seems quite narrow compared to hn. There's lots of deadspace to either side. I think you could increase the usage of space while not compromising on the images.
Please too, put the subscribe thing at the bottom of the page, not the middle. That just reminded me of a midpage banner add. It disrupted the reading flow very obviously.
I made this project to help myself stay up to date with automotive industry because I love cars and anything related to them. It gathers the latest automotive news from more than 20 auto portals. Allows users to submit articles, comment, and upvote. I got quite literally inspired by HN and was mindblown why such a thing does not exist for automotive industry.
Also users can subscribe to a newsletter that delivers top 10 articles of the week every Monday morning.
Thank you in advance for any feedback! And happy to reply to any questions.
The pressure to make money out of it will turn your forum into what could be another subreddit. To repeat HN you'd need to remove pictures (they invoke emotions and attract unsophisticated audience) and all the marketing fluff, hire a team of people who deal with autos on day to day basis (mechanics, salesmen, dealship owners, pro racers, stars like the ex Top Gear team) and advertise everywhere that here's the no bs forum about autos. Wait for 10 years and you'll get a critical mass of audience. You'd still have to pay expensive mods. On top of that you'll have to figure a non-ads business model to support the forum.
I've spent much of my career in the auto industry (Tier 1 supplier), and I couldn't agree more. I'm even a "car guy," but I could care less about exotic cars, which most of what appears on autonews.io.
I'm not sure I'd say it's "HN for ..." though. The automated(?) news aggregation and newsletter features seem pretty different from HN's Spartan style and entirely user-submitted content.
Hi, thx! The great aspect of HN, as you say and for me is also the community curation of relevant content. I've automated the inputs of the most popular automotive portals to get in some initial content. However the community - by clicking, sharing, commenting then decides which articles make it to the top. And of course they can submit their own articles - if it gets enough traction - I will consider switching of the popular.
Congratulations on shipping a thing! I have to say though, creating a place to submit links and invite or comment doesn’t mean it’s “a Hacker News for X” - what makes HN what it is is the community. Do you have any thoughts on how you could build a community around this project?
Hi and thanks a lot. I 100% agree with you on the community factor - that was the main motivation behind my project - however to get your hobby project up and running I needed to bring some content in first - therefore the automation. I've reached out to all my peers (i'm ex-automotive engineer) and they've started using it - some of them on daily basis. However once I've reached my network limits - I've started launching to relevant communities - PistonHeads, reddit/r/AutomotiveEngineering, product hunt and now HN. I am hoping to that there will be a cross-section of users that love cars and will stick and start posting content themselves.
If some of them are aggregated, while others are submitted, it is not clear to me to tell them apart, nor where an aggregated story came from. One just says "Submitted by Carol", but I cannot click on the name to learn anything more.
I also notice you hotlink all the images, you might want to contemplate re-hosting the images yourself, or abandon the images altogether.
Hi, thanks for the feedback. In the long term, you will be able to click and see the user behind the submission. However it's still in TODO column atm. But will def add it as this feedback is so valid. Good shout about splitting the automated/submitted content.
I think I like the autosubmissions, sometimes it's silly that a story HN will definitely discuss has to be found and submitted by someone. There are certain sites one could arguably auto-submit to HN, though HN is popular enough to just not need it.
Lots of people here are saying the UI and images detract from the site. I think it is possible that people who are into cars are different than people who are into hackery, and that perhaps this criticism should be discarded.
Great website, you seemed to have worked hard on it.
Some feedback if you don't mind it.
1. How about moving the domain of the article posted beside the post title (like HN)? This maintains the flow of reading. I read the post title and then I can see the source of the article on it's right.
2. You seem to have a separate URL for each post ( EG: https://autonews.io/article/99522953-788c-446f-a706-cd26e2c3...) but I couldn't find any way of accessing an individual post's URL from the front page. Had to dig into the HTML. Maybe clicking on the timestamp copies the post link or takes you to the individual post's URL?
3. Dark mode toggle is very confusing (https://i.imgur.com/V0MrNlA.png). Don't switch the icon after each toggle. Put an icon (indicating dark or light mode) outside the toggle and then let users change based on that (https://i.imgur.com/1wyE6si.png) .
4. Don't automatically open links in a new tab. HN doesn't do that. Let users ctrl+click if they want to open it in new tab if they want to.
The password reset and login form leaks account info in the network response. You should return the same network response regardless of whether the user exists in the DB, instead of relying on the UI to communicate that.
Logging into your site sends back the full account profile object, including the password 'hash', which appears to just be a Base64 encoded string. Fortunately the Firebase API redacts that field so the decoded string is just 'REDACTED', but that's not a good thing to rely on, and I hope the password is actually encrypted behind the scenes..
Both of these are unfortunately common mistakes you see even on more well known sites.
Hi thanks for that. I'm using the Firebase Auth out of the box, basically just methods like - fb.login(), fb.logout(), was not even thinking that Firebase could be insecure tbh.
The initial posts seem mostly be either 1) reviews, 2) "wrapper articles" for auto manufacturers' press releases, or 3) articles about industry-relevant public policy. These are all appropriate for a HN-like community, but I was expecting to see a lot more highly technical articles too. Topics like engine designs, control systems, manufacturing processes, etc., written by engineers.
I guess a lot of the most current and interesting information about those topics stays locked within auto manufacturers.
> I was expecting to see a lot more highly technical articles too. Topics like engine designs, control systems, manufacturing processes, etc., written by engineers.
The youtube channel Engineering Explained is probably as close to that as you'll get. It's mostly about technology already available though, not much content on future tech still in the R&D phase. https://www.youtube.com/user/EngineeringExplained/videos
This might seem facetious, but the cookie warning really threw me off. It doesn't really matter, I canbjust click past it, but instantly in my head:
"This isn't HN for anything. Some marketing something or other I guess..."
I think, for a dedicated/techy crowd, little things like a cookie warning mean a lot. To me it screams crap. I can't think of a single website I use enjoy using regularly that included a cookie warning. I think Reddit added a cookie warning when their UI went to shit.
Hi, I honestly hate the cookie banner myself - that's why I made it as much invisible as possible. But I'm using Google's Firebase for user authentication and therefore it uses cookies. I also store your choice of theme dark/light into a cookie so it's there for you next time. I believe that's why I have to have the banner there. Or am I wrong?
I always thought that for purely functional cookies (like storing theme preferences) the banner is uncalled for. Is there a place I can read more about? I guess this varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction? This (cookie compliance) is a mess...
You probably shouldn't backend on a Google service if you value your users' privacy.
The theme cookie is easier to solve: Use CSS media preferences instead and use people's browser settings to choose it. That being said, cookie warnings may not be necessary if you aren't storing anything personally identifiable.
Per my understanding of GDPR you only need the cookie warning for cookies unrelated to your site's fundamental operation. Admittedly, I'm not a lawyer and I've not really liked too closely at it, but I don't think you need a warning just because you use a cookie.
You might want to consider that autonews.com is the url of Automotive News, a widely-read trade publication from Crain Communications. (I get access to it as I work for a Tier-1 automotive supplier). IANAL, but you probably will get in hot water if you keep using autonews.io, even non-commercially. (trademark infringement, cyber-squatting, and the like) (edit:sp)
If you read that particular thread, you'll see that the only real comment is complaining about the use of a word that starts with the letter after M and before O.
I think that some trolls have gotten to the site already.
There definitely is an overlap, big one. I built it for this reason: I am a automotive engineer. I come to work in the morning, make myself a coffee and open autonews.io, click on 2-3 articles that interest me, read them, done with my coffee, ready to work, I'm up to date with latest news in industry - so maybe the combination of news feed plus community submitted articles is different. Hope it is!
/r/cars focuses primarily on performance ICE vehicles, specifically sports cars and some offroading. It seems like most subjects on OP's site cater towards EV's, hybrids and general non-enthusiast subjects. As a huge performance car enthusiast, there were only a couple links within the past few days that were of interest to me.
Not op, but seems like he's (potentially) creating a focused, niche community, maybe with better moderation. Or maybe he's going for the exact same thing. There's no reason to differentiate from what one subreddit does. Many of us don't like reddit.
This site (cool intent, good luck) highlights what HN does really well, because this site doesn't go deep on a refined textual experience. HN has a very simple user experience, deep content, and yet remarkably little abuse or junk content. There must be a great deal going on behind the scenes for this clean look and feel, free of abuse. How are bots suppressed? How are abusive users and content avoided? Insight into what that looks like would be most appreciated!
That's what I'm trying to figure out at the moment. Want to bring commenting back asap, but need to come up with clever way to block trolls...maybe a time window between registration and allowance of commenting + some sort of minimum karma - like you'd have to click on certain number of articles before you can comment. First thoughts. Will read up a bit on it.
Thanks for the feedback. The main reason why I went for the combination of pictures and text was that many car enthusiast like the visual aspect of cars and therefore I kept the images as well.
For what's its worth - Circular images are a fad created for avatars (pictures of people with their heads fitting inside the circle). You're showing images embedded in the article and IMO should be rectangular.
I think the thumbnails add too much white space between headlines and doesn't actually show enough to be useful. Like if there's a press release of a new model or spy photos, I want to see all the pictures from all angles and not a zoomed in crop of a singular headlight. As of right now I'm only see 3 thumbnails of the top 10 with a picture of a vehicle.
Also (old.)reddit already does the small thumbnail and headline thing. I like the hackernews layout for its information density.
> Some kinds of waste really are disgusting. SUVs, for example, would arguably be gross even if they ran on a fuel which would never run out and generated no pollution. SUVs are gross because they're the solution to a gross problem. (How to make minivans look more masculine.) But not all waste is bad. Now that we have the infrastructure to support it, counting the minutes of your long-distance calls starts to seem niggling. If you have the resources, it's more elegant to think of all phone calls as one kind of thing, no matter where the other person is.
>
> There's good waste, and bad waste. I'm interested in good waste-- the kind where, by spending more, we can get simpler designs. How will we take advantage of the opportunities to waste cycles that we'll get from new, faster hardware?
Weird. When I visit HN I can see all posts from the front page without scrolling and read through the titles. On this page however I could barely see the first eight entries. Also there's a loading spinner for almost two seconds and multiple large image requests (some are really huge!) just to be displayed as a small circle. Ok? 11.7 MB for the front page. "Nice".
I work at an automotive-related tech firm so in principle this looks great and useful. I do think the design could be simpler, more like old reddit or HN, to maximize the amount of information presented to the user. There also appears to be a moderation problem, especially on the current top post, so I can't really share it with colleagues yet ;)
For those viewing this in the future after this has (hopefully) been fixed, it's one user spamming comments with exactly the slur you'd expect a dozen times.
As long as we can give you some honest feedback: your extremely low contrast color choices make this a nightmare to read. Otherwise, I think it's a lot truer to "HN for X" than OP.
Ok, we didn't hear that input before so thank you we will see how to improve that. See in the top right icons there is a 'moon' that turns on a night time mode, might be helpful.
I just ran our site through the Web Accessibility contrast checker at webaim.org to compare the headlines (what we think people want to scan and focus on) to the background. The contrast score is a very high and passing 14.5/1 ratio.
We make the micro text more subdued on purpose to make scanning the headlines easier.
ok thank you we'll check that. I do think our night time styling could be darker, for sure. I use Dark Reader usually for most sites and appreciate sites not being too bright in the eyes at the wrong times.
The reason I use HN is because it is simple. Nothing fancy. Just text. Copy that please. And please add more indepth tech links. Not just company press release links
Does not seem to contain much "industry" news but rather "consumer" news. I am in industry and working on those cars, they are done and off of my desk 2 years before the public even sees them, its all just history for me...Industry news should talk about things like the current µ-chip shortage, sales, regulations, engineering, etc.
What site do you actually use for auto industry? I find that outside of technology and specifically software - everything is just consumer news and detail-less blurbs. It would be fascinating to read the HN equivalent of another topic.
I've been looking for something like this myself for years. I would love to have a HN for electronics and automotive. Problem is both of those industries are quite closed and do not have large groups of their participants online, as with SW. I get industry news internally from our organization, there is unfortunately no online source for it.
Makes me wonder about hacker news having tags/categories. You can ignore them (they're just metadata) but also filter by them if you choose. (show me "automotive" posts)
I like it and, to tell the truth, I may end up reading it rather than subscribing to Motor Trend, the way I no longer feel a need to get science magazines because of r/Science!
Because then it's not proper "Hacker News for X", of course! /jk
(Although it has to be said that HN's rejection of complexity -- the exact opposite of your approach of embracing it with all those javascripty thingies -- does have something going for it.)
I'm still gonna say congratulation!!!
But I think executing a fairly "easy" project such as hacker news for X. And not providing key (UI) features of hackernews seems a bit misleading. Specifically presenting to an audience of software engineers.
People should be able to connect from their car I guess. I'm not sure it would work as is. HN would. It's just the beginning, post the update.
great idea, remove the thumbnails, they serve no purpose. If you want a thumbnail, make it topic related. So like a politics/legislation thumbnail, new product thumbnail, etc that way it is easy to determine what the story relates too. I guess it'd be equivalent to flair on reddit
For the same reasons being a coder isn't necessary to criticize code. Anybody can do it, but chances are your opinions are a lot less informed than you realize.
It depends. If you don't know how to code and you're commenting on language or framework choice (e.g. "it's electron therefore bad") or something like that, then your opinion is probably invalid. On the other hand, if you're comment is something like "This app doesn't work like I want" then it really doesn't matter if you have the slightest idea how to implement what you want.
Likewise, a non-designer offering opinions on design philosophy or alternate styles is probably pretty useless. A non-designer saying the thing is awkward/ugly/confusing/whatever is informative though.
This isn't a great comparison. The only people that need to read (and know how to read) code are coders. A non-coder can't criticize code.
This is not the same for UX (or restaurants, films or cars from my other example) as these are things that everyone interacts with and understands to some extent despite not doing so in a professional capacity.
That is the problem though. As a consumer you’ll never get to know the intricacies of how things are made and why. The biggest problem at least here on HN is that hardly anyone knows how to articulate their (however valid) critiques, and therefore fallback to cliches and easy-to-quote “laws” that are quite irrelevant among design practitioners.
The whole point of UI/UX is to provide a good experience for users. Users know when they are having a good experience and part of the role of a UI/UX practitioner is to collect and synthesise this feedback.
A practitioner who ignores feedback and says "who's the UX professional here?" is not a very good one.
You don't need to know how something was built in order to critique the experience of using it.
A non designer is not going to be good at identifying solutions to problems because that does require knowledge about how the sausage is made, but they should certainly be listened to when identifying problems. Not doing so would be madness.
(Not to mention a lot of the commenters on here that you're decrying as "non designers" probably do have experience with design, considering the userbase of HN)
I may indeed not know the intricacies of web design. But I do know when the "modern" UIs are unable to scroll smoothly. It's full of not moving, then a giant lurch to somewhere else. Worse, random new content will suddenly appear causing my view to randomly move to some other part of the page.
This disease infects an awful lot of "modern" web sites.
That’s...not a Hacker News for X.