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Notes -
I apologize if any of the following suggestions have been brought up downthread, but I've been engaging with the new site significantly less than I did when we were still on Reddit, and this pretty much comes down to readability issues. I should note that I mostly browse The Motte on a desktop computer and have only checked out the mobile site once, so these comments concern issues with the desktop site only.
The biggest issue that I've seen users here complain about so far is that it's difficult to follow threads and their various subthreads. The line you introduced separating parents in yesterday's prototype helps, but it's really a band-aid solution to a much bigger problem. If you look at old Reddit, the parent comments were all justified hard-left, at the edge of the screen, without any kind of margin. This acted as a sort of straight-edge; the top-level comments were always aligned with the edge, so it was easy to quickly tell where they were. New Reddit moves them farther toward the middle, but this is countered by not one but two visually distinct margins—a dark grey margin covers most of the sides on a widescreen monitor, and a margin color unique to the individual sub covers the area immediately to the left of the thread. Again, this provides a distinct demarcation between margin and content. Here, though, there is a margin but it is the same color as the body text background. Post's positions within the hierarchy are determined by how far they are indented from the edge, and when the edge is well to the left of the highest level everything is just sort of floating in space. Coloring the margins in or running the body hard-left would greatly improve readability.
The second big issue involves line length. Most professionally typeset materials aim for a line length of between 45 and 90 characters. Old Reddit had a max line length of about 110 characters, which is on the high side but still reasonable. New Reddit reduced this to about a hundred, again, a little long, but at least within Microsoft Word's default settings. Here the lines are a whopping 185 characters long. To put this in perspective, in Microsoft Word, in 12-point Arial with default (1") margins this is going into the third line, and could be well into the third line depending on where the breaks are. The effect of this is that once a reader gets to the end of a line his eyes have to move quite a ways back to get to the start of the next one, and by then it's hard to tell where he left off. It's not like he's always consciously losing his place, but after a while the small, frequent adjustments get fatiguing.
Finally, there are a couple minor things that could be tweaked. I don't have numbers, but the font size on Reddit seems slightly larger, and that can increase readability without sacrificing too much space, provided the adjustments are made judiciously. Second, I've never been a fan of Helvetica and it's various clones for body text. Helvetica was designed for things like signs and advertisements, where large amounts of text weren't going to be read in one go. The old rule-of-thumb was that sans-serif fonts were better for viewing on a computer, but this is obsolete advice from the days when everyone was using 72 dpi CRTs. With the ubiquity of high-res monitors, either serif or sans-serif fonts can be used comfortably. But either way, Helvetica was never a good choice for body text; the shapes are too similar and legibility is affected. Reddit uses Verdana, which was commissioned by Microsoft specifically to be used as body text on old monitors, and, while not my personal favorite, it works fine and is a much better choice than Helvetica. Open Sans and Fruitger also work well.
That's all I can think of for now. I had a couple big posts in me and one continuing series that I had been meaning to contribute once we made the move, but I'm having such a tough time staying engaged that I don't know if it's worth the effort at this point. I appreciate all the hard work you've been doing to make this place possible, but I can't argue with my eyes and fight through the tedium for a pursuit that is really just entertainment for me. Thanks and I hope to see at least some of this addressed.
About the child comments format I suggest to make the line besides the comment a different color according to its depth level. I've seen this in the mobile app for reddit "Slide" and it's a good feature in my opinion, don't know if it's necessary (or good) for the desktop version, but for mobile seems a good feature.
The only drawback is when it has too many comments at many levels it didn't work as a reference because the colors started repeating. Nonetheless, here's a screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/i2vxAoQ
I'll add another good feature on this one is the button at the bottom (middle), you can configure to which depth level do you want to move (with the up and down arrows at the side). So on the culture war threads I'd switch to child comments and I could comfortably browse first child's comments.
Huh, that's kinda nice. I'll try that out (although . . . I'm not sure how to do it yet. But I'll figure something out.)
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Font updated, incidentally.
It’s wild how less “pinched” it feels.
Yeah it's absolutely ridiculous how impactful small changes can be. It's annoying, too, because it can be a nightmare trying to figure out what the problem is, even if you know there's a problem.
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Thanks! Already a 100% improvement. This actually made a much bigger impact than I thought it would have.
Yeah, it's a good change :D I think I need to reduce the bold weight on a few elements, but that's not a big problem.
Thanks for pointing it out, I don't know how long it would have taken me to recognize it.
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That's a good idea, yeah. I'll see what I can manage on that.
I completely agree. I actually wanted to put a fix in for that, but I got sick right after doing the initial changes (which are now live) and decided to just push these instead of delaying the entire thing a few days while my brain came back. I'll be working on this soon.
Hah, I just figured out what's going on here; I've been doing my dev on Linux, and for whatever reason, both this site and Reddit end up resolving to the same font on Linux. So I didn't realize there was a difference.
Yeah, I'll change it over to Verdana. The font size is actually the same on both sites, I suspect the difference in font size is entirely due to the fonts themselves.
Keep feeding me this info! Most people are not giving me much feedback on legibility issues, and this kind of thing is really valuable. We'll get there.
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