There's a rule against excessive negativity but respectful, constructive criticism is an important role that HN plays here. Here's a feature that wades into what is arguably browser vendor territory, rethinking the way that hyperlinks work.[1] Is it a good pattern we should adopt throughout the web?
Does its on-by-defaut nature disrupt the reading experience? Does summarizing linked content have problems? What about mobile (now approx. half of traffic and growing)?
I see a few comments using the word "hate" but for the most part the negative ones are just critical, with supporting points. I think a fundamental design pattern like this is worth some scrutiny alongside the support.
[1] Case in point: Safari implemented a feature similar to this a few years ago. It works generally across all sites, uses reserved gestures (3D Touch on mobile, 3-finger-tap on desktop) to gives users full control, and sidesteps the whole summarization problem by using more screen real estate to just show a bigger preview.
Oh, I absolutely agree. I am in no way saying that constructive criticism (or hell, even warranted, non-constructive criticism sometimes) is fine and should be encouraged! The comments I was referring to (many have either been deleted or removed) were quite a bit less focused on constructive criticism than they were on just a barrage of insults towards the team responsible as if this decision was made intentionally just to spite them.
I think your criticism is a really good one though, especially if these link previews can be harmful towards accessibility/make basic interactions more difficult. Like I mentioned, I enabled a similar beta feature a while back that was a bit difficult to get used to, but I have grown to find indispensable. I think in the same argument, however, you can argue against any sort of hover effects on the web (drop down menus, hover animations, etc.) and to be fair, it would be hard for me to disagree with that point on many instances of that as well.
My criticism is actually about lack of mobile support. I think it's not a good practice to invest years of effort solving a problem in a way that's fundamentally incompatible with mobile. Already nearly most traffic to wikipedia is mobile, and the share is growing.[1]
Browser vendors seem better positioned to solve this problem. Indeed, my reaction to this was I've been doing this with Safari for years already (3 finger tap on macOS, light or long press on iOS). On wikipedia and all over the web. But I can see why Chrome/Firefox users would love this feature, if this is their first encounter with it.
Mobile keeps growing indeed, but around 45% of our pageviews are still on desktop. Here's an overview on how this has changed in the last half decade: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Audiences#/media/Fi...
(I'm the data analyst who has been working on this software feature, and also keeps track of Wikimedia's reader traffic in general.)
,_2013-.png){kind=link}
Does its on-by-defaut nature disrupt the reading experience? Does summarizing linked content have problems? What about mobile (now approx. half of traffic and growing)?
I see a few comments using the word "hate" but for the most part the negative ones are just critical, with supporting points. I think a fundamental design pattern like this is worth some scrutiny alongside the support.
[1] Case in point: Safari implemented a feature similar to this a few years ago. It works generally across all sites, uses reserved gestures (3D Touch on mobile, 3-finger-tap on desktop) to gives users full control, and sidesteps the whole summarization problem by using more screen real estate to just show a bigger preview.