Setting a max-width on the body text would make this incredibly more readable on narrower viewports. At 636kb and 48 requests, this page probably isn't as "minimal" as you think it is. For example, should there be any reason you can read the disqus comments at a reasonable size but not the body of the post?
I tried it on mobile. It still loaded fast. As with many pages, Firefox Reader Mode improved the experience. Though for me, the bulk of the improvement comes from text formatting, part of the improvement is hiding blog comments, ads, email signups, etc.
Anyway, my experience is that touching Firefox's reader-mode icon in the address bar is usually faster than a boatload of formatting logic; produces more readability than a website's general optimization, and bypasses all the ancillary crap that people concerned enough to optimize for mobile tend to add.
Perhaps someone felt that the page layout was far enough off topic as to be a distraction or otherwise reduce the quality of the discussion.
Personally, I've found treating unexpected downvotes as editorial feedback on the quality of my writing helpful. I just assume that:
1. I didn't make my point clearly
2. My comment was low quality
3. Someone just disagrees with the point
In the first case, I edit or delete it. In the second case I just delete it...except in those cases when I deliberately make a low quality comment knowing it is likely to attract downvotes. The third case reduces to the other two in practice, though not so much in logical theory.
Despite being interested in this topic, I simply could not even read the article. Guess it is a legitimate contribution to a discussion to warn about this issue.
Right, because HN is the customer service department for the site hosting the article that somebody submitted a link to. And because "unreadable on mobile" is such an informative statement that contains so much useful data about why it was hard to read and what it was hard to read on. Surely you weren't downvoted for those reasons. Nah, it's just HN being HN.
They did pass it by, and it was down-voted for its irrelevance to the vast majority of users. Then you went and complained about down-votes (with a dismissive insult, no less), like that was an acceptable response.
If you make a post that most people don't need to see, then don't worry about the down-votes. When you're getting down-voted for writing something most people do need to see, then there's a problem.
