> The mobile UX here is non existent.

It doesn't have any specialist mobile UX, but it also doesn't have any need for specialized mobile UX. It has pretty nearly the best mobile discussion UX I've seen simply by not trying too hard.

I have to zoom to click things.

It has clean UX for desktop. Which thankfully translates to mobile good enough because we built mobile concepts to deal with it (zooming).

But no, that doesn't mean it has mobile UX.

HN works really well on mobile. The only issue is that the voting arrows are a bit small but otherwise it is one of the mobile sites I use with the best UX experience.

Also you have to use a mobile browser that isn't fundamentally broken in it's handling of <pre> tags, which some people apparently won't or can't.

  # Otherwise the ends of really long lines scroll off the side of your phone and
  # you can't read them because your browser is a piece of junk.

The only other way to handle <pre> tags is to wrap these long lines, but i do not see how that is not fundamentally broken considering that the entire purpose of the <pre> tag is to show preformatted text.

What’s the expected behavior? I have to swipe to scroll the text.

I disagree. I browse hn almost exclusively on mobile and I think it is fantastic. Compared to other sites, many of which won’t even load when my connection is shoddy, jump around as they’re loaded, require me to turn off my ad blocker just to render properly, etc., and I’ll take hn’s mobile UX any day. Two examples of terrible “modern” mobile UX are (new) reddit and LinkedIn.

Yea but I'm not asking for a react rewrite I'm asking for fonts and UI elements to not by microscopic or disappear on me when I misclick on the wrong microscopic thing.