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Life & fun · December 18, 2022

I built a Hacker News userscript to make this site more legible

My personal itch to scratch just recently has been the umpteen formatting foibles of HackerNews. So, in the spirit of making the web more personal again, I knocked up a TamperMonkey userscript to fix up the worst of my personal bugbears. This isn't an attempt at a complete rebrand/redesign of the site, instead it's just fixing up what I think are the biggest design/readability issues whilst trying to remain true to the site's existing aesthetic. Key features: * Base font size increased * A little more room around headings * Top menu bar is full-width and with a little more padding…

I built a Hacker News userscript to make this site more legible launched on December 18, 2022 with 102 votes, #422 of 3,688 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 3 years on.

Visit github.com ↗Alternativestop 11% of December 2022

In plain words

This is a TamperMonkey userscript that improves the readability of Hacker News by adjusting typography and layout. It increases base font size, adds spacing around headings, expands the top menu bar, makes downvoted comments easier to read with background styling instead of faint text, limits comment line length for better readability, and formats quoted text to look like proper blockquotes. The script maintains Hacker News's existing aesthetic while addressing common formatting issues.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

A bunch of personal scripts to make using websites more pleasant - website-customisations/news.ycombinator.com at main · mgladdish/website-customisations

In the maker’s words, at launch

My personal itch to scratch just recently has been the umpteen formatting foibles of HackerNews. So, in the spirit of making the web more personal again, I knocked up a TamperMonkey userscript to fix up the worst of my personal bugbears. This isn't an attempt at a complete rebrand/redesign of the site, instead…

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