If you go to the front page without logging in, you’ll quickly notice the target demographic is teens/young adults. The redesign makes a lot more sense with that context
Do you imply that teens/young adults don't care about usability? Or that they don't have the attention span to read comments and just want to endlessly scroll through crap?
We are biased , as HN users, to prefer text-based, minimal, UIs that lead to (mostly) insightful conversations. Reddit on the other hand caters to a hivemind type mentality that loves things like emojis, karma, dramatic posts, etc. The current UI definitely favours that, and I think generally teens/young adults prefer that as well
HN is not free of hive mind effects, and I imagine most users here are also the type that seek “high engagement” material at least time to time. I’m guilty of it myself as recently as early this year. But reddit is intolerable to the point I don’t visit it aside from it being the default for search results.
I think teens and young adults merely tolerate it because it's what they've been given. Any seemingly positive embrace of such drivel is actually an adaptation of it into something more culturally meaningful and better coded to elude boomer advertisers' prying eyes.
Teens/young adults, or really anyone "new" to the web/internet, haven't learned yet the importance of information transmission speed, or which use patterns will make them lose more time than get them something worthwhile in return. They're also discovering a lot of "basic" stuff in all types of content, so are more tolerant of what more seasoned users would call repetitive crap. That includes ads, which they are more likely to perceive as novel and entertaining, even be happy to see some of them.
It enables making ads indistinguishable from real content, to get more clicks through deception.
That's another interpretation. You'd think ad buyers would have a problem with this, but I guess not.
I've begun dragging a small "ultraportable" laptop with me, because it makes a lot of things bearable again: youtube, reddit, stackoverflow ... I'm not sure why people treat mobile users so horribly bad, but here we are.
> I'm not sure why people treat mobile users so horribly bad, but here we are.
Maybe because those people "don't care" about usability, or better said, never got to know what this even means. The young generation was socialized on mobile. They just don't know better so you can treat them like that without consequences.
If you’re on android you can use Firefox with ublock. It’s my biggest loss switching to iPhone, to the point that HN comments are literally the only web page I will visit on my phone. Anything else I wait for laptop access.
Supposedly supposed to get side loading later this year which hope to god means Firefox with extensions on iOS
Also ad buyers don’t mind, and often prefer, deceptive or discrete advertising. Product placement and “native advertising” has been around for decades or maybe even a century.
It also puts more focus on visual content on the main page instead of buried under the links. Personally I hate this. I prefer about a 90-95% text to visual ratio.
As I understand it teens/young adults generally have more free time and less responsibilities (housework, kids, family, etc.). I'd be surprised if that didn't drive a different type of engagement model.
I generally praised Reddit, as the opposite of endless service. I can check updates from couple niche subreddits that interest me and I'm done, there's nothing more to get until later.
