Do you have any plans to fix the major accessibility issues? Scripting off graceful degradation would be really nice, since this whole CSR thing is a middle finger to a number of folks I know who might be interested in the place.
Likewise gutting down the bloat wouldn't hurt. Like the SVG sitting in the markup where it has no real business being. Most of your SVG seems to be monochromatic, turning them into font characters so they could be served by a single file and included from the stylesheet could really give the place a shot in the arm on bandwidth and caching models.
Same goes for the static scripting that seems to be inlined in the markup, get that into an external file so it has a chance to be cached. I know a lot of know-nothings keep mindlessly parroting that "moving style and scripting into the markup helps speed up the first render" -- but that's mostly nonsense fairy-tales not based at all in making pages actually load faster. Even if Google PageSpeed says it, doesn't make it true! Especially since they pulled the bait-and-switch from being a brilliant useful tool to being a broken unreliable marketing scam riddled with bad advice.
Some of the colour contrasts really need improvement too. See the green background on the various buttons that's too bright for the white text. A darker colour would mean I might have a chance of being able to see that the button says "submit" instead of just being an illegible blur. Same goes for the new chat area where that bright blue on your own posts results in the text being effectively illegible for a large chunk of the population -- myself included. There's a reason I have my own stylus override for apps.talkjs.com that reads:
.Message.tj_message--by-me {
border-color: #246;
background-color: #27C;
}
Just to fix that. Just like how I have this override user.css for hashnode itself:
.post-card.expanded .post-card-content,
.replies-container .single-reply-card .reply-content,
.write-card .create-writearea textarea {
font:normal 100%/150% arial,helvetica,sans-serif;
}
.post-card.expanded .post-card-data h1,
.post-card.featured-card h2 {
font:bold 125%/150% arial,helvetica,sans-serif;
}
.post-card-content {
font:normal 100%/150% arial,helvetica,sans-serif !important;
}
code, kbd, pre, samp {
font:normal 85%/125% consolas,monospace !important;
}
@media (min-width: 1025px) {
.post-card.expanded {
padding:1.5em;
}
}
.tj_message--by-me {
background:#468;
}
To drag it into legible and useful font-sizes and consistent legible fonts that aren't as willy-nilly ever-changing all-over the place.
Basically the front-end needs some work... even though overall I like the clean minimalist nature of it from the art side of design. It's shocking how many places would have shot themselves in the foot loading themselves down with tons of presentational images all over the place by now.
In that way Hashnode follows one of the more important aspects of proper design. The best design is one that goes unnoticed, it doesn't and shouldn't detract or distract from what's actually important on a website -- the CONTENT! The content and community you are building is the greatest strength here, to the point many of the shortcomings -- including those I just mentioned -- aren't hobbling you as badly as they could (and do) some other sites I can think of.