alt Hacker NewsInformation density and ease of identification is the antithesis of "engagement" which often has some time on site metric they're hunting.
If you can find what you want and read it you might not spend 5 extra seconds lost on their page and thus they can pad their stats for advertisers. Bonus points if the stupid page loads in such a way you accidentally click on something and give them a "conversion".
Sadly financial incentive is almost always towards tricking people into doing something they don't want to do instead of just actually giving them what they fucking want.
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The one and only thing I'd do is make the font bigger and increase padding. There's overwhelming consensus that you should have (for English) about 50–70 characters per line of text for the best, fastest, most accurate readability. That's why newspapers pair a small font with multiple columns: to limit number of characters per line of text.
HN might have over 100 chars per line of text. It could be better. I know I could do it myself, and I do. But "I fixed it for me" doesn't fix it for anyone else.
> Sadly financial incentive is almost always towards tricking people into doing something they don't want to do instead of just actually giving them what they fucking want.
Northstar should be user satisfaction. For some products that might be engagement (eg entertainment service) while for others it is accomplishing a task as quickly as possible and exiting the app.