Products · Pattern or everyday thing
URLs
Raised as a usability problem by 13 people on Hacker News over 18 years (2009–2026), in 11 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Hard to tell where a URL's domain actually endsUnreviewed
20092026- Most significant part of the URL sits mid-string, hard for non-technical people to spot2025-11-03
- Non-technical people can't understand what the parts of a URL mean2021-06-11
- Hard for ordinary people to tell where a URL's domain actually ends2020-03-26
URLs are cryptic and don't reliably show which page is openUnreviewed
20092026- URLs are cryptic to people and don't reliably show which page they're on2021-06-11
- Showing different URLs to users depending on how they arrived is bad UX2015-09-20
- Shortened URLs hide the destination, making it hard to judge whether to visit2010-02-19
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 13 complaints
- Normal people can't parse domain names right-to-left to spot phishing links2026-04-02
- Shared links carry hidden state like timestamps that recipients can't interpret2025-11-03
- Most significant part of the URL sits mid-string, hard for non-technical people to spot2025-11-03
- URLs are cryptic to people and don't reliably show which page they're on2021-06-11
- Non-technical people can't understand what the parts of a URL mean2021-06-11
- Hard for ordinary people to tell where a URL's domain actually ends2020-03-26
- Separating parameters with ? and & is not intuitive for users editing URLs2017-07-08
- Showing different URLs to users depending on how they arrived is bad UX2015-09-20
- Typing URLs on smartphones is a pain, so people avoid them2013-08-19
- Separate /foo and /foo/ pages are confusing to tell apart2011-06-27
- Users can't tell why https:// appears and URLs stop being linkable when written as text2010-04-18
- Shortened URLs hide the destination, making it hard to judge whether to visit2010-02-19
- URL structure is confusing, so people can't tell which domain is real2009-05-17