Can anybody name a successful ground-up redesign of a popular website? Or a successful from-scratch rewrite of a heavily used codebase?
Reddit raises $200M at a $1.8B valuation
171–180 of 451 posts
Re: Reddit raises $200M at a $1.8B valuation
#172I don't get why a company who keeps the entire Internet talking on a daily basis is only worth less than $2B but a company that lets teens take snaphots and share them is worth many billions.
You don't understand? It's like this: valuation is based off how many users x how much each user is worth (in terms of targeted advertising). Reddit has a lot of users but it's hard to build user profiles for targeted advertising as there's a lot of anonymity and shot posting. Teen snapshot sites are worth more because because its real people, posting real things. That data is valuable.
I feel that reddit has enough data to effectively target ads. If I subscribe to /r/cars, chances are I like cars (if I make a post asking "What is the best car to buy for $X?" I'm probably in the market for a new car). If I post in a city subreddit, chances are I live there. If I post in /r/programming, I'm probably a programmer. There are also third-party analyzers that can take a reddit user's data and give a pretty good guess of their demographics based on their public post history as well.
I feel that if someone were to target ads to me based on the subreddits that I subscribe to, they'd be far more relevant to my interests than Facebook ads. Facebook shows me clickbait spam that my friends liked; I almost never see any interesting ads there. Reddit certainly has more advertiser friendly information than Snap does. On Snapchat, you share photos with your friends and Snap knows nothing about you other than your location. Reddit on the other hand has confirmed interests.
Re: Reddit raises $200M at a $1.8B valuation
#173The announcement on Reddit also says they are changing their privacy policy to remove support for 'Do Not Track' https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/6qptzw/with_...
While concerning and something to be aware about, they are offering granular privacy settings in place of DNT.
Will they be opt-out? You betcha! Still, at least they exist...
Re: Reddit raises $200M at a $1.8B valuation
#174>the company is literally re-writing all of its code Wow. >An early version of the new design, which we saw during our interview, looks similar to Facebook’s News Feed or Twitter’s Timeline: A never-ending feed of content broken up into “cards” with more visuals to lure people into the conversations hidden underneath. >“We want Reddit to be more visually appealing,” he explained, “so when new users come to Reddit the…
I can't think of a single popular site redesign that actually made the site better. They're almost inevitably worse, usually much worse. A common failing is trying to make the design more shiny and pretty while decreasing functionality, dumbing the site down, adding bloat, and slowing the site down to a crawl. I really hope Reddit does not go down this road, because they really have a good thing going now. It would b…
> I can't think of a single popular site redesign that actually made the site better.
Depends on your definition of "better".
Facebook has done several redesigns that the audience has groaned about and here we are 1 billion users later. TechCrunch did a large redesign several years, and here we are, still reading TC articles. The list goes on and on...
Re: Reddit raises $200M at a $1.8B valuation
#175>the company is literally re-writing all of its code Wow. >An early version of the new design, which we saw during our interview, looks similar to Facebook’s News Feed or Twitter’s Timeline: A never-ending feed of content broken up into “cards” with more visuals to lure people into the conversations hidden underneath. >“We want Reddit to be more visually appealing,” he explained, “so when new users come to Reddit the…
I can't think of a single popular site redesign that actually made the site better. They're almost inevitably worse, usually much worse. A common failing is trying to make the design more shiny and pretty while decreasing functionality, dumbing the site down, adding bloat, and slowing the site down to a crawl. I really hope Reddit does not go down this road, because they really have a good thing going now. It would b…
I recall Digg did a complete redesign for version 4, even the backend systems and database. And the users abandoned it shortly after launch.
Re: Reddit raises $200M at a $1.8B valuation
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it is starting to happen already. A few too many jokey comments appearing, puns and the like.
People have been saying this for almost as long as Hacker News has existed.
So it's like Mad Magazine and was 'at its best' when you first started reading/using it?
Re: Reddit raises $200M at a $1.8B valuation
#177>the company is literally re-writing all of its code Wow. >An early version of the new design, which we saw during our interview, looks similar to Facebook’s News Feed or Twitter’s Timeline: A never-ending feed of content broken up into “cards” with more visuals to lure people into the conversations hidden underneath. >“We want Reddit to be more visually appealing,” he explained, “so when new users come to Reddit the…
> I fear this major re-design will be a mistake. HN is designed similarly to Reddit and if HN ever tried to do a major re-design, I think I would visit it less
I've been a reddit user for 11 years now (and a lurker for a year before that), I think I was the first (and I think only) blogger from my country that wrote about reddit's rewrite from Lisp, I've seen the comments section implemented, the move to programming.reddit.com, the move back to sub-reddits, the exodus coming from digg, the "what has pg had for breakfast?" memes, the Ron Paul memes, the 2006 astroturfing by the Israelis, the 2008 astroturfing by the Russians, the Obama memes in 2008, I've seen it all. As such, I think that the re-design that they're talking about will be a huge mistake. It's enough that they've managed to mess with some users' profile pages which are now unusable (they now look like some sort of FB/MySpace kind of thingies), but making the first page (or the first page of any sub-reddit, for that matter) a mess like FB's front-page will just kill the product for people like me.
Re: Reddit raises $200M at a $1.8B valuation
#178>the company is literally re-writing all of its code Wow. >An early version of the new design, which we saw during our interview, looks similar to Facebook’s News Feed or Twitter’s Timeline: A never-ending feed of content broken up into “cards” with more visuals to lure people into the conversations hidden underneath. >“We want Reddit to be more visually appealing,” he explained, “so when new users come to Reddit the…
So they're doing a Digg. End of an era. What's the "reddit" that everyone will migrate to when they change the UX?
Steemit.com probably. It literally pays to post or comment there. Still rough around the edges right now, in part because the algorithms aren't as good as Reddit's, and in part because it has a small user base, but it has huge potential.
Re: Reddit raises $200M at a $1.8B valuation
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree. I use the extension reddit enhancement suite and _that_ makes it useable.
I agree, I have no idea how you use Reddit without it. If there people out there clicking on URLs/pictures, then going back to see the context/comments, I would love to hear how long this process takes you. This is my main negative to using Reddit on mobile, which I almost never do because it would lake about 200 taps to view a small amount of content.
New tab guy reporting in. I just open a few articles at a time, and go to the comments if I feel I need more input on the issue. I haven't noticed it impacting my workflow. I've used RES on and off, but when I install a new browser I always forget to add it, and rarely miss it.
Re: Reddit raises $200M at a $1.8B valuation
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
So many comments here and not a single mention of "Slashdot Beta". It was a huge disaster, every single article had complaints about it while it was in effect. They changed owners shortly after and it's still a running joke years later.
I was going to quip that reddit has gone full-Digg.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Coke
'nuff said.
Every brand that has a large enough following will run into pitchforks for large redesigns - a lot of people are fans for something.
If you want to do this successfully, take a slice from Facebooks playbook. Their site looks nothing like 10 years ago, yet they somehow did all those radical UI changes gradually over years, always one step at a time, (mostly) listening to their user base inbetween.