If I recall, HN intentionally avoids appealing to modern aesthetics and user conveniences to reduce popularity among a non-technical audience that could harm the average quality of participants. Whether that approach is effective, I don't know. Web design started off more technical on average, then later became more artistic. In that sense maybe the more artistic sensibility infused into a site design the more up to date and relevant people perceive it to be especially with the visual appeal marketing pushed by the big tech companies through hardware or software.

It is very easy to ruin a good thing by following every impulse with disregard or ignorance for what factors contribute fundamentally to its goodness. It happens regularly to companies, products and services around the world all the time.

That said, I also don't particularly care for the Emergent Mind main list page design. The importance of optimizing for the consumption of the information on the page seems to have taken a back seat to keeping up appearances. The scaling on a PC monitor feels oriented more towards children, like oversized at least to me. I don't understand what the icons are trying to communicate in relation to the posted link either, despite having a sense for what each of the icons are. The spacing feels like a table or grid was given a margin and let the elements land as they may instead of trying to place the elements on the page with intent to maximize the communication of their relationships, context and readability.

Hey there, I didn’t know that about HN.

I have a similar view about design honesty and products being overly focused on modern aesthetics compared to basics, elegance, simplicity, and care.

Here is how I would tweak HN: line length of fewer than 90 characters to make it more legible; line-height around 1.45% of the font size so you can read blocks of text more smoothly; optimized font sizes; use better-made typefaces so you can have better “between-the-lines” experience and overall character; make elements better click/touch targets; less busy interface, etc. I don’t want people to notice the design much. What I want is to make the product more useful and understandable; and users to feel relaxed and joyful :)

I’ll share this observation I found in physiology: the better the function, the better the structure, and aesthetics on top of it. However, there are many kinds of “aesthetics” in the human world.

The icons are there so that one can, at a glance, recognize a post type – video, link to an article, tweet, code project, or tool.

As I mentioned previously: in the past, there were many two-line post names (prompt examples were more common), so we increased the row height. As I can see it now, there are very few two-line posts, and I’ll review the row height amount next.

You could also appreciate that nature has examples of animals that are ugly or masquerade as something worse than they are, intentionally to fend off other animals that are evolutionarily disadvantageous to survival.

Digital products are largely detached from the burdens of physical effort excepting execution efficiency beyond a threshold, so unsound structures survive all the time and have to be tested in other ways. Whatever horrors exist underneath, so long as the intended audience doesn't care it may survive.

I was a dotcom boom designer, so design isn't alien to me and it's clear that many improvements could be made to HN. It's just that HN isn't a canvas. Many people try, by making their own self-hosted front-ends to HN. They pop up all the time as people inevitably see improvements that could be made and have to express it in their own way, because making things look better can be an addiction especially when the gap between what is and what could be is large. It's just not the point here. :)

Ah sorry, for my tastes the excessive spacing between lines looks like it should be accompanied with children's book pictures. Is the CSS broken on Firefox?

In the past, there were many two-line post names (prompt examples were more common), so we increased the row height. As I can see it now, there are very few two-line posts, and I’ll review the row height amount next.

Testing it on Firefox – Twitter embeds don’t show on my computer (we’ll investigate); everything else looks fine.