261–270 of 451 posts
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Any site which requires this type of thing to signup sounds like one I don't want to be a part of. Seems like a recipe for a hive mind.
You get a hive mind or you get regression to the mean, by which I mean you either aggressively filter for people with specific qualities, which is apparently a hive mind scenario, or you end up with the same kind of commentators you find on every other let-everyone-in platform.
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Yes, I came to realise that when it comes (among other subjects) to 'tech' criticism, it easier to have an open discussion with various points of view on HN than on my generic national subreddit. That takes the biscuit! I just wish someone could come up with a new Usenet ( instead of a dozen of open-source copies of damn Twitter ). Something that doesn't depend on a company or a couple of individuals. In similar vein…
What is wrong with the "old" Usenet? It's still there, there is only a need for a decent web gateway and some tutorials on how to run nntp servers.
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Yes, a thousand times, yes. To me, this is the worst and most offensive redesign of something so pivotal to research, investigative reporting, everything beyond the surface. Being able to dig and dig and find out who is reporting what pieces of the story. I don't CARE if there are 12 articles about the same thing if there are truly 12 different legitimate reports about the event of interest. I want to see all 12 sour…
I stopped using it for what I used it before. But I haven't found a replacement yet.
Redesigns like this make me wish more designers thought in terms of a toggle option for users who don't want the slick and shiny. Seems like such an obvious, idiot-proof solution to pissing off your users en masse.
Can anybody name a successful ground-up redesign of a popular website? Or a successful from-scratch rewrite of a heavily used codebase?
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Also good luck selling a new design to the hive mind.
They already did -- the official reddit mobile app, and default mobile skin of the site, are already close to what's being described, and mobile use of reddit is pretty heavy. If it were going to cause a mass exodus, it would've already.
>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…
Another good example of this is a car forum called AudiWorld after Internet Brands took it over. Initially, it ran on a super minimalistic forum script that loaded incredibly quickly and worked well for the community. It was certainly ugly yes, but it's what the members liked and had gotten used to.
Then IB came in, converted the whole site to vBulletin on a whim and pretty much killed the community there and then. The members revolted, people left the community in droves and a successor with the old software sprung up immediately to get the refugees from the site. [1]
One poorly thought out move to 'redesign' the site nearly killed a large forum and ended up creating one of its more popular competitors in the process. It's like a mini version of what happened with Digg, except possibly even worse.
[1] http://8bit.minimal.net/post/87727243/how-to-destroy-a-commu...
Frankly, I love Reddit. If you pick and choose the right communities, it can be an amazing resource for everything from tech discussions, to local news, to emotional support. However, I will strongly agree with the perception problem, there's also a lot of bad on Reddit and its structure as a series of echo chambers doesn't help.
They should invest in some PR to let people know it's a platform, not a monolithic community. Although some people identify as "Redditors" which kind of undermines that point...
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They should invest in some PR to let people know it's a platform, not a monolithic community. Although some people identify as "Redditors" which kind of undermines that point...
I agree. I've heard people say, "I don't understand why you use Reddit. I visited the front page and it is total garbage." But I've never heard anyone say the same thing about YouTube, even though its front page is just as bad.
On Reddit, however, there’s a huge amount of great content I’m unlikely to stumble upon unless I’m seeking. This makes behavior based recommendations difficult. I think a combination of curated views (software eng front, political junkie, counter culture, etc) and machine based recommendation like YouTube could do great things for reddit.
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I disagree. I use the extension reddit enhancement suite and _that_ makes it useable.
For the desktop site, yeah. But whenever I mistakenly end up on the new mobile site (usually by using the in-app browser of my HN app, normal links open in Reddit Sync) I'm annoyed. It's slow and crappy.
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Also good luck selling a new design to the hive mind.
They already did -- the official reddit mobile app, and default mobile skin of the site, are already close to what's being described, and mobile use of reddit is pretty heavy. If it were going to cause a mass exodus, it would've already.