Please don’t. HN has just the right information density with its small default font size. In most browsers it is adjustable. And you can pinch-zoom if you’re having trouble hitting the right link.
None of the ”content needs white space and large fonts to breathe“ stuff or having to click to see a reply like on other sites. That just complicates interactions.
And I am posting this on an iPhone SE while my sight has started to degrade from age.
Yeah, I'm really asking for tons of whitespace and everything to breathe sooooo much by asking for the default font size to be a browser default (16px) and updated to match most modern display resolutions in 2025, not 2006 when it was created.
HN is the only site I have to increase the zoom level, and others below are doing the same thing as me. But it must be us with the issues. Obviously PG knew best in 2006 for decades to come.
On the flipside, HN is the only site I don't have to zoom out of to keep it comfortable. Most sit at 90% with a rare few at 80%.
16px is just massive.
Sounds like your display scaling is a little out of whack?
Yeah, this is like keeping a sound system equalized for one album and asserting that modern mastering is always badly equalized. Tune the system to the standard, and adjust for the oddball until it's remastered.
Except we all know what happened to the "standard" with the Loudness War.
I'm not a fan of extreme compression and limiting, but doing so in a multiband fashion (as occurs due the loudness war) actually does result in more consistent EQ from album to album, label to label, genre to genre, etc. which virtually eliminates the need to adjust EQ at playback time between each post-war selection.
You're obviously being sarcastic, but I don't think that it's a given that "those are old font-size defaults" means "those are bad font-size defaults." I like the default HN size. There's no reason that my preference should override yours, but neither is there any reason that yours should override mine, and I think "that's how the other sites are" intentionally doesn't describe the HN culture, so it need not describe the HN HTML.
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on mobile at least, i find thati can frequently zoom in, but can almost never zoom out, so smaller text allows for more accessibility than bigger text
Browser (and OS) zoom settings are for accessibility; use that to zoom out if you've got the eyes for it. Pinching is more about exploring something not expected to be readily seen (and undersized touch targets).
Don't do this.
I agree, don't set the default font size to ~12px equiv in 2025.
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Do you think that "Don't do this" as a reply comment is following the spirit of the guidelines? It doesn't seem very thoughtful or substantive to me.
Content does need white space.
HN has a good amount of white space. Much more would be too much, much less would be not enough.