Why Use Hacker News Vue?
Hacker News Vue makes the social news site easier to use. With an adjusted layout that reduces cognitive load and assists visual parsing, the extension also improves page navigation without eroding the minimalist brand.
Moderated by “two wildly polite old friends,” Daniel Gackle & Scott Bell, Hacker News is very information dense. The text is tight, like a list of processes in a terminal window which, as it turns out, was by design. This hasn’t hindered the site’s popularity over the years, but neither has it made the content any easier to consume.
Our approach to Hacker News creator Paul Graham’s original layout was to bring the site from this:
to this:
without diminishing the perceived value of the information. Taking it further, comments are now highlighted and auto-linked so you can pursue any thread from top to bottom just by clicking the text.
Special hat tip to Dane Lyons’ Hacker News UX Review, which sparked my interest creating the browser extension.
And remember, never “read Hacker News comments about anything you write.”