Hm. I don't think it would be that hard it would be to remake HN's UI using an old school UI component library. The up/down arrows could use the up/down buttons on this screenshot from macos's old color picker:
... But limited to only allow you up/downvote between -1 and 1.
Everything else could be done with buttons and a TextField / Label for comments and replying.
The web is a bit weird in that it taught us to build every UI as a giant scrolling document. And HN is no different. A more "classic" UI approach would be something like Thunderbird mail - with 2 panes: a "comments" tree on top and a "message body" down the bottom. That would be harder to read (since you'd need to click on the next message to jump to it). But it might encourage longer, more thoughtful replies.
A "traditional" UI for HN would surely look a lot like Usenet newsgroup readers. I think Thunderbird might even still support NNTP.
Usenet had a much better model for discussion groups/forums like HN in my view, though crucially for the modern world it is missing some kind of "comment voting"/user-driven moderation. I wonder if there's an HN<->NNTP gateway around somewhere?
Voting could be handled with comments with specific content - wouldn’t even need to have a body, as everything could be in the headers. Totals could be computed at the server, unless we wanted real NNTP-style distributed discussions.
https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/interface/dialogs/colo...
... But limited to only allow you up/downvote between -1 and 1.
Everything else could be done with buttons and a TextField / Label for comments and replying.
The web is a bit weird in that it taught us to build every UI as a giant scrolling document. And HN is no different. A more "classic" UI approach would be something like Thunderbird mail - with 2 panes: a "comments" tree on top and a "message body" down the bottom. That would be harder to read (since you'd need to click on the next message to jump to it). But it might encourage longer, more thoughtful replies.
Thunderbird: https://lwn.net/Articles/91536/
Or you could reimplement HN with classic controls and something like TB 114's UI:
https://www.ghacks.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/account_ma...
Probably still worse that what HN is now though.