It isn't necessarily considered great design inside either, judging by how popular Hacker News plugins and readers are.
But a pretty strong argument can be made that, for sites focused primarily on text and reading, simple layouts may sometimes sometimes be better than complex ones.
Other than this, I agree. Black on white is fine, and hell no, don't make the background slightly gray. If my display is too bright I turn the brightness down.
There are two interpretations of your question, which do you mean?
1. What is wrong with leaving HTML completely unstyled and allowing the browser to apply its defaults?
2. Why is it that the default settings applied by (most) browsers are so awful?
The answer to the first is pretty much, as another HNer noted, the topic of the Better Motherfucking Website page. The defaults suck.
Why the defaults suck is ... probably an accident of history that's difficult to undo. Browsers default to no margins and a whole slew of other stuff, and CSS requires that you either start from known defaults or explicitly style each and every element.
If every browser used its own distinct set of deviations-from-default for various entities, CSS would be even more of a hack than it already is.
Some of the fault also surely lies with standards organisations, including the W3C. If they elected for specific defaults to be applied to all pages, and, by some miracle, browser vendors actually adhered to these, you could conceivably have a world in which most Web pages didn't need much if any styling, and where users could choose to apply default styling to pages.
I do this presently via uBlock and uMatrix on desktop, and via ReaderMode on Mobile. I virtually always prefer the simplified, standardised view to a site's native design.
The default styles are lousy because there's no reasonable standard on how pristine HTML5 untouched by CSS should look. So browser developers make assumptions because they figure everybody will just use CSS anyway.
> HN is kept this way on purpose. That the GenPop doesn't like it is a feature, not a bug.
The "GenPop" don't even know this site exists and, if they did, would be turned away by the content, not the layout.
That argument is made here often, that somehow liking the plainness of HN's layout is a shibboleth to detect quality users, but i've never really bought into it. Sites like Craigslist, Reddit and 4chan manage to do quite will with relatively simple looks and broader appeal.
I wasn't really trying to make an argument out of it; I think there's a direct quote from pg floating somewhere that this is one of the reasons HN's design is kept bare-bones. I may be misremembering though.
EDIT: I found one quote:
"So the most important thing a community site can do is attract the kind of people it wants. A site trying to be as big as possible wants to attract everyone. But a site aiming at a particular subset of users has to attract just those—and just as importantly, repel everyone else. I've made a conscious effort to do this on HN. The graphic design is as plain as possible, and the site rules discourage dramatic link titles. The goal is that the only thing to interest someone arriving at HN for the first time should be the ideas expressed there."
Fair enough, but even if pg said it I still disagree with the premise, albeit respectfully. You can have a site with a simple layout which features the content without having ugliness be a conscious design principle. The problem lies in the assumption that plain design will "repel" one kind of user, but attract another, I don't believe it does.
> You can have a site with a simple layout which features the content without having ugliness be a conscious design principle.
That I agree 100% with. I too believe that. Hell, I find myself liking simple layouts more than what's the usual startup trend for pretty backgrounds (and background videos; whoever does that deserves to have their Internet access limited to crappy 3G modem with fixed rate of $0.1/MB) and fluff.
Personally, I think HN is actually too simple. Reddit seems uglier, but they have lots of very small features that greatly support discussion on the site. I actually think that the interface for general discussion on-line lies somewhere between HN and Reddit - simple but useful tree-like forum.
One thing i've found odd about HN is that the only really customizable feature for logged in account seems to be the background color of the top bar, after you get enough karma. Just imagine how many complaints people wouldn't be making if they could adjust the default text size, line height or some other colors?
Yeah. I don't really understand why this feature even exists. Maybe it's some artifact of HN's history, pg experimenting with that particular part of HN's engine in Arc or something? Because this and all the other things you've mentioned can be accomplished by user setting up an additional CSS for the website client-side, with an implicit assumption that audience here is generally smart enough to figure out how to do this.
Also, the orange bar is basically the single visual element that makes HN HN, so I don't know why people would even like to customize it...
Back in the day, Myspace would embed any arbitrary CSS you pasted into your profile. I'm not suggesting Hacker News make itself that hackable (it would be hilarious, though, if they added that "feature" to the thread submission form) but it seems like it should be a bit more hackable than it is, given its nature.
It gets the job done for the audience. It's very fast. There is no clutter.
Therefore it's almost great design. Up/down buttons too close together for reliable use on touch screens (because of the inability to correct a mistap) is what's keeping it one step short of greatness.
Design is experience. Graphic design is almost orthogonal.
I mean look at the front of hacker news.
Speed. Read.