The person you're replying to is most likely making a low-effort troll post on how large webapps tend to be now. Keep in mind that most of what's downloaded would be cached, and the response from an up / down vote would be considerably smaller than 10KB.

> would be cached

For heavy users of the site, sure. For someone who has stopped by for the first time, well, good luck with customer acquisition is all I can say.

Something tells me that YC isn't about acquiring users to have a unicorn exit of HackerNews.

Shitting on users is bad no matter what site you make.

you call it low-effort but in fact the person doesn't see it as obvious satire.

It really does seem this is exactly how modern web app redesigns are done.

Sarcasm

Not only are we supposed to assume good faith comments on HN, reddit-type snark is looked down upon for a reason.

Per HN guidelines, 'don't talk shit you wouldn't say in person.' There is so much ridiculous rhetoric on HN these days, satire is difficult to discern.

Edit: Re-reading the original comment in its entirety, rather than focusing on numbers, I guess it's obvious satire. I naively assumed that's not the convention on HN.

Since he's probably too modest to mention it himself, the user you're replying to is the founder of the news aggregator and forum site Tildes [1] which is pretty much the gold standard of modern forum site design imho. If anyone has the right to make this comment it's him.

[1] https://tildes.net

>which is pretty much the gold standard of modern forum site design

Wait, what?

>open-source link aggregator with no ads or tracking (currently in invite-only alpha)

HN is over 12 years old and much larger. Suggesting an alpha-level service is the "gold standard" is pure hyperbole.

I'm not familiar with the founder, so I am not making any judgement; and, I support the basic premise of their project.

I think they were just talking about the design. HN is certainly a lot more active and successful overall, but it's extremely minimal for both design and functionality (which is part of its appeal).

Tildes's design has a lot more to it, including better responsiveness for mobile use, a built-in theme system with multiple themes (including dark ones), full markdown (CommonMark/"GitHub Flavored Markdown") support, syntax highlighting for code, etc. There are lots of aspects of it that would be nice to have on HN.

Thanks! I'm honestly a pretty terrible designer overall and there's still a lot that's bad about Tildes's design, but it's slowly improving. There are some major changes coming soon, and hopefully those will help some more too.

It looks pretty good. I would add a bit of left margin (can be responsive, it looks good currently in a narrow/mobile window) but the rest is gold.

Any chance of an invite?

Definitely (open for anyone else too) - there's no messaging on HN though, so just send me an email to the address in the announcement post: https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes