I'm not sure, something about the "Recent Stories Summary" section (first view) is hard to read. The spacing is wrong. And the blue font. Someone mentioned Garamond too.
It's creating a "wall of text" effect to me and I'm not able to quickly skim and allow my eye to catch the bits that are interesting to me.
As a comparison, the HN homepage is very accessible to me for skimming and finding things to click into (like this entry).
UI is often quite subjective, understood. But I can't really "scan" the first view fast enough. It's all blending together and causes extra processing on my mind.
I hear you - there's something to be done there. My initial thought was to stay as close to convention as I could (links are blue!), but as the RECENT list gets long, its definitely gets less scannable.
Thank you for the feedback!
I hear you about "links are blue" ... except when you are a link aggregator.
The links are blue design from early HTML was meant to highlight links in the context of a paragraph of prose, not a list of link items. "Blue" means something special about the text in the context of the text around it.
In this case, the blue font is distracting because the links are the content. You don't need the blue to help your links "stand out". Because the links are normal text, using a normal palette would be appropriate.
I don't mind some subtle clues that these are links. Underlines, slight grey text. Or even a subtle hover effect. Two cents.
Put the number of occurrences (I assume that's the # at the end) first to help with signal to noise ratio based on quantity of coverage maybe? I'd also take a look at news minimalist if I were you, and how they used significance scoring as a fill in vs upvotes to provide additional signal: https://www.newsminimalist.com/
It's quite scannable, but obviously you're doing reverse chrono order so up to you how best to solve the UI issue.
How about now? Story titles are still clickable links, but are black. Made the story count a link as well, and kept it blue as a visual cue.
Some additional feedback:
There's no reason for both the story count and the story summary to be clickable. It's confusing because:
(a) It's not clear what the number in parentheses even means (until you click and infer)
(b) Separate links makes you think they lead to different pages
Also, echoing another comment, it's not really clear what "incoming" and "outgoing" stories mean. Maybe "new" vs. "stale"?
Better, to be honest. Keep refining of course. But this is definitely more readable.
I admit that straight black is not quite the right answer either. A slightly toned down dark grey would be nice. And again, subjectively, I like how HN has a row of non-link smaller (lighter shaded) text under each listing, which I think plays nice for the white space between each item.
Personally, I far prefer black over grey. Grey is really hard to read across a variety of lighting conditions and devices. The older you get, the more important contrast becomes.
Fair and good point. Sharp black bothers me, so just adding in a little hue is nice for my eyes. But that's me, of course.
Noting also that this text is #000000 black, per the CSS. Maybe the background color helps soften it a little? Like contrast white/black is hard on the eyes, but HN is not?