SN new editor testing playground \ stacker news ~meta

970 sats \ 35 comments \ @k00b 5 Jan 2023 meta

We are working on an editor that's a little easier to use. Colloquially this kind of editor is called a WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get).

If you go to https://stacker.news/lexical you can demo it and let us know what you think. It supports markdown shortcuts so you can start writing markdown and it'll style accordingly.

These kinds of editor are notoriously buggy, so please report any problems you find. If it's too buggy, we might end up launching it as an opt-in beta from the settings panel.

There's a little preview pane below the editor. This represents what the corresponding post/comment will look like after it's been converted to markdown (for storage) and rendered back. It's not exactly 1-to-1 with how it is displayed in the editor currently, but we'll iterate on that.

It also only supports a subset of stylings and options we'll eventually support. I figured it's best to stick to the bare minimum for now.

Let us know what you think!

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3181 sats \ 14 replies \ @chungkingexpress 5 Jan 2023

@k00b Have people been asking for this? If you have had a lot of comments requesting an easier to use editor fair enough, but I write on SN every day and I feel like this is just extra clunk and the current editor works flawlessly (It ain't broken).

I would advise you to please be very hesitant to make a change like this. It impacts those of us who are actually contributing to this site the most. I certainly would rather compose my posts in the current editor.

In the new one tab indentations don't even work and the icons are a bit too big and I don't see any extra functionality as you still have to paste in images from an external host etc.

If you were to tweak the current editor, I would suggest making the little markup help button on the right (M with down arrow) open a small alert box showing basic markup options like reddit instead of going to a new page.

Besides that, I feel there are other pieces of functionality that you could work on that would have higher ROI and not impact contributors, such as "recommend posts", DM functionality, etc.

579 sats \ 3 replies \ @kr 5 Jan 2023

I consistently notice that people really struggle adding photos to SN. Those folks have definitely been asking for a more familiar experience.

On the other hand, the topic of whether photos even belong on SN at all is one worthy of debate.

Aside from the photos, one potential benefit of a rich editor tool is that it may attract people to use SN as their blog, opening the door to more in-depth, thoughtful content.

Is there a middle ground that you think can support those who don’t want to deal with markdown and retain those who don’t want SN to turn into Reddit or Facebook?

364 sats \ 2 replies \ @k00b OP 5 Jan 2023

I'm curious for his answer.

The middle ground I've imagined is like Github's editor. The buttons insert the markdown for you.

33 sats \ 1 reply \ @kr 5 Jan 2023

i never noticed the write & preview tabs on github before, is that what inspired the current SN editor?

327 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b OP 5 Jan 2023

Might've. Most markdown editors have a preview tab.

364 sats \ 5 replies \ @TonyGiorgio 5 Jan 2023

I have to agree with this. Eat the sunken time and move on. I told @k00b already but the last person I know that moved to WYAOANDNA or whatever ended up shutting down their startup because of it.

It already has very poor markdown support. Slack went this similar direction and I aggressively despise it.

How does this provide substantial value to users and how is this gaining more users on sn? Near biggest feature development cost, right? Will this substantially provide as much value as the other features?

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @ek 6 Jan 2023

What is WYAOANDNA? Google doesn't help me.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @chungkingexpress 6 Jan 2023

It is a joke I think. WYSIWYG.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @chungkingexpress 5 Jan 2023

I think there can be a fallacy of change = progress. SN has landed on a goldmine in terms of easy, minimal UX that just works. I can look at it on a 24" monitor or an iPhone 7, or whatever, and it just works. It blows Bitcoin reddit out of the water. The risk of changing that is extremely high.

I reckon content discovery (recommended posts etc) and absorbing more of the millions of Bitcoin reddit users is the growth vector to explore here.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b OP 5 Jan 2023

I reckon content discovery (recommended posts etc) and absorbing more of the millions of Bitcoin reddit users is the growth vector to explore here.

How would recommended posts work?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b OP 5 Jan 2023

It's an attempt to make the core product - posting and commenting - easier to use.

Measuring a feature's absolute performance, let alone relative performance, is hard to do as you know.

I tend to believe though that making a product easier to use is exactly what moves the needle on usage (esp. when compared to tacking on features).

It needs to be both easier to use and better though. I'm not sure it's better as is right now.

66 sats \ 3 replies \ @k00b OP 5 Jan 2023

Thanks for the feedback. You make good points and I share your concerns.

There's a significant number of users that can't figure out markdown. Then there's another subset that don't even understand the point of using it over a WYSIWYG. On the other hand, literally anyone can understand a well done WYSIWYG. Do we want to keep the high contribution hurdle of learning/appreciating markdown to post here?

In the new one tab indentations don't even work and the icons are a bit too big and I don't see any extra functionality as you still have to paste in images from an external host etc.

It's explicitly a beta. I'm merely seeking feature parity at this point. Both of these would eventually be supported.

The goal is to make an editor good enough that

it's usable to people unfamiliar with markdown
an easier experience even for people familiar with markdown

We aren't there yet afaict but it seems worth exploring at the very least.

364 sats \ 0 replies \ @chungkingexpress 5 Jan 2023

(Have been sharing my thoughts on the stacker news Telegram, posting here for posterity!)

I think a deep-dive into the long-term vision is important.

Are people who are unfamiliar with markdown going to realistically contribute high-quality content and posts to a website about Bitcoin and technology? I think the vast majority of this cohort have been using Hacker News, Reddit, etc for the better part of a decade (would be a good piece of research to find out though).

I appreciate there may be a longer-term business goal to make a more general purpose website for the public that uses sats instead of upvotes. But this is a completely different design paradigm which would need to be built from the ground up. Trying to marry a specific niche forum with a broad purpose social media will just bring out the worst of both worlds I think.

Once the paradigm of WYSIWYG thinking comes in, then it is a slippery slope towards Facebookization, bringing in avatars? Then reels? This then leads to the Eternal September that has been lamented about.

I think there could be some very minor adjustments to the interface to give some better hints on markdown (Again, looking at old reddit). Simple text replies to posts are easy enough for anyone currently so there are no issues there. Nobody is being stopped from posting because of markdown.

Currently the quality of content on this site is literally a 10/10 and I am just raising the flag that any changes to core ingredients that are not fully validated and considered concerns me as it only risks making things worse!

50 sats \ 1 reply \ @TonyGiorgio 5 Jan 2023

I hear what you say about making things overall better as a whole. Probably depends on the direction you want to take SN, which we ourselves have no grand vision insights into. If the lack of easy to use bolds and underlines turns people off, then twitter would never have taken off.

I'm arm chairing here but build something people want despite a comment box being one way or another. I'm curious where the users are in this thread that have been waiting for this. Perhaps they don't know how to comment because it's using the old editor here.

364 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b OP 5 Jan 2023

Perhaps they don't know how to comment because it's using the old editor here.

lol ... to be fair, dissenters are usually much louder

then twitter would never have taken off

Twitter has character limits. Not exactly apples to apples.

528 sats \ 1 reply \ @TonyGiorgio 5 Jan 2023

I hate it.

But if you insist on having it, don't try to be cute and auto format my markdown inline with the editor, it doesn't work and you just have a user forever fighting the editor. Slack never figured it out and forever pissed off developers, I don't think you'll figure it out either tbh. Let it be a setting option or something but absolutely don't try to combine the two by converting the users markdown to your way of doing it.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b OP 5 Jan 2023

I hear you. I agree, the shortcuts are not a replacement for markdown. They are convenient though.

151 sats \ 2 replies \ @faithandcredit 5 Jan 2023

Ngl ruins the magic a bit for me since I like the simplicity of the current "editor"

9 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b OP 5 Jan 2023

Fair. I like the simplicity too. Many people (mostly non-programmers) struggle with markdown.

12 sats \ 0 replies \ @shyfire 5 Jan 2023

Setting!

307 sats \ 1 reply \ @ek 6 Jan 2023

What I like: +++ no need to switch between writing and preview + buttons for linking content (image or URL) since getting [] and () in markdown wrong is pretty common

What I don't like: - visual clutter: do we really need buttons for headings, bold, italic, indentation, quotes?

I get that some people may not be familiar with markdown, but showing a popup with the syntax (as others have mentioned here, I think a popup is better than linking to a different page) should get anyone up to speed fairly quickly. But I had a discussion with my girlfriend about this, she doesn't seem to agree and thinks buttons are necessary for most people so maybe I am biased haha

-- looks less "lean". Maybe buttons are too big? --- Why render markdown in text field when there is preview? What use is this:

- as you said yourself: it's buggy / error-prone / less obvious -- as others mentioned: I don't get how important this was/is. Are people really intimidated / not contributing because "markdown is too hard"? Did you maybe overshoot the goal with this since I think only posting images was not easy to understand?

Recommendations:

The middle ground I've imagined is like Github's editor. The buttons insert the markdown for you.

-- #118111

This would be far better than rendering markdown in the text field imo. With this, I can live with the buttons lol

Add CTRL+K feature of Github

When you mark a text and you press CTRL+K, it immediately formats the text to link to something.

For example, if I write test, mark it and then press CTRL+K, it gets replaced with [test](url) with the cursor having marked "url" (thus it will get replaced by what you type next)

Don't know if you were already aware of this feature. Gitlab has the same feature.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @ek 6 Jan 2023

BTW: I think it's great you showed us this work in progress to get feedback from the community.

I hope you don't think it was a bad idea because people are taking it apart and heavily criticizing it haha

I hope you show us more work in progress where appropriate.

200 sats \ 4 replies \ @kr 5 Jan 2023

this will be a big upgrade.

i found two small issues:

on mobile the icons render on two lines, with the image icon taking up a full line itself.
there is a strange border issue appearing for me. i think removing the translucent outer border on the text box will make the editor appear more refined.

873 sats \ 0 replies \ @TonyGiorgio 5 Jan 2023

The two rows on mobile was my biggest annoyance too.

200 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b OP 5 Jan 2023

Mobile toolbars are tricky - it's a lot of buttons to display in a small space.

Most mobile interfaces opt out of displaying them all together. Collapsing them in a dropdown is the best I've seen.

This will be particularly tricky to display deep in a comment thread that's working with even less width.

Still trying to find some inspiration I like.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @kr 5 Jan 2023

also, looks like the paragraph spaces i add to the editor don’t appear in the preview

33 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b OP 5 Jan 2023

When we render from markdown, we don't respect arbitrary whitespace. We can add support for it, but there are tradeoffs.

200 sats \ 0 replies \ @swmtr 5 Jan 2023

Markdown rules. I like it. A bit confusing though that if you write markdown the markdown characters disappear, but wysiwyg it is:).

I would vote on toggle as a first iteration and track the usage.

113 sats \ 1 reply \ @ThrillerX_ 5 Jan 2023

Would we have access to this when we initially post a link to SN to encourage to add context? or would it only be afterward?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b OP 5 Jan 2023

This would be available when posting discussions or commenting. Basically, any large text area.

It wouldn't be available on titles or other single text lines.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @husseinb 5 Jan 2023

As much as I love you SN WYSIWYG is so 90s it hurts ;)

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @lunanto 6 Jan 2023

Kudos to SN team for this, the hyperlink is my favourite feature.

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @cointastical 5 Jan 2023

Did something change already on SN to support this?

> line 1 > > line 2

Now looks like:

line 1

line 2

Used to look like:

line 1 [Blank line here] line 2

10 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b OP 5 Jan 2023

Yeah, I changed the CSS rules on render. Looks like I broke that.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b OP 6 Jan 2023

> this
> should

> be 
>
> fixed
> 
> now

this should

be

fixed

now