411–420 of 438 posts
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Despite it's flaws, HN has a far superior user experience compared to Reddit. It's not even comparable.
So? I wan't comparing HN with Reddit. I meant that HN is very popular without having an amazing user experience, specially on mobile.
What is your complaint about mobile?
The only app I use to browse Reddit is old.reddit.com. It's still great on mobile if you have a browser with proper text reflow (ie. Opera on Android, since all others can't be bothered). But everytime I end up seeing the "new" design it's instantly repelling, I can't browse it even once. This is Digg all over again!
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Could you point to specific deficiencies of HN?
No pagination, as mentioned. No way to keep up with new comments on a post (Reddit doesn't have this either). No notifications on reply, so it's difficult to get answers to clarifying questions (/threads helps but isn't it). Ever-increasing indentation makes deep threads hard to read. Generally hard to read and hard to click on mobile. None fatal, but also none particularly tough to fix!
The lack of response notification is a feature, though yes, it can be annoying, and I find the degree to which comments or questions go unresponded is ... disappointing. That said, notifications abuse by modern Web / App systems is rampant. I'd like some sort of middle-ground, perhaps a responses / notifications link which would consolidate these. "Threads" is the closest there is to that, though it includes all a person's comments whether (newly) responded to or not.
Mobile experience is pretty poor, agreed, though it's sufficient for reading logged-out (my preferred mode). Composing text on mobile devices is a category error.
Deep threads (and greyed text with downvotes) is a very intentional site design. pg's discussed that in the past, see:
"What I've Learned from Hacker News" (2009) https://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html>
Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=495053>
And four years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19210923>
Some of the site styling can be overridden with CSS. I apply the following on desktop:
Dred's HN CSS Madhackery: https://pastebin.com/gLXiqKyd
There's also a dark mode I've created:
Dred's HN CSS Madhackery -- Dark Mode: https://pastebin.com/6PF3dCXH
Then there’s the issue of getting permanent “zero tolerance” bans for comments less than racism or other discrimination or hate speech. Honestly I kind of appreciate where Elon Musk is coming from lifting bans on people like Donald Trump… of course in typical human fashion, he bans people on Twitter for MUCH less than hate speech- like tracking his private jet or being critical of his thoughts or actions. Unfortunately, I have yet to observe anyone with authority who A) advocates for free speech and B) doesn’t restrict it when it’s content they don’t like.
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Let's be clear though: this is exactly what happened. Digg was the place to go, and then they fucked it up and everyone migrated to Reddit. Now Reddit is fucking it up, and even if everyone migrates somewhere else, that new somewhere else is going to fuck it up too once they get to the point of "we need to be profitable at all costs". What we actually need is some way to convince users to pay for the services they us…
In short, it's time to return to SomethingAwful. Everything old is new again! Do you have stairs in your house!
Reddit is past its expiration date anyway and I'm surprised no one has created a challenger site. Perhaps this was due to Reddit's friendliness toward programmatic access but it seems they are taking that away. This is a good opportunity to create a new community, and essentially take back messaging from the corporations (let's be real about what reddit is) and put it back into the hands of the people.
There have been challengers, but they're always swarmed by undesirable vagrants kicked off of reddit.
>The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
For the most part, people are fine as long as the boat does rock TOO much, and for the most part Reddit's boat hasn't rocked to the extent Digg did back in the day. It may not even be possible for that to happen with the current population of users. Digg's exodus happened in 2005-6 right before the big boom of social media in 2008-10. The users were generally pretty saavy back then.
These days? Everyone uses social media, and inevitably with any mainstream, most people will only use it very casually, perhaps amongst a small friend group or for very casual browsing. They never comment,they may never even check comments. As long as the content comes, they won't even be aware of the sausage underneat from power users. But they are also the real lifeblood of the site.
These sorts of sites may be too big to fail now. You can't promote a site based on "hey we're not X". It just needs to have the right content at the right time a la TikTok. Sadly, one big incentive of that may include monetizing people for making posts and participating, and that sort of goes against the whole premise of the classic internet forums of the 90's/00's
Reddit is past its expiration date anyway and I'm surprised no one has created a challenger site. Perhaps this was due to Reddit's friendliness toward programmatic access but it seems they are taking that away. This is a good opportunity to create a new community, and essentially take back messaging from the corporations (let's be real about what reddit is) and put it back into the hands of the people.
I think the toothpaste is out of the tube on creating good communities like the Reddit of yesteryear. Between lowering the barrier to entry (and average age) with phones, astroturfing and bots, and the overall impossibility of moderation, I just don't see it happening anymore. We need to go back to purposely small communities.
I think that's really the only way for this to work going forward if you want a reasonable volume of quality discussion. It's a job so mods need to get paid.
>We need to go back to purposely small communities.
I'm not against it. But I haven't seen an example of a modern (~last 10 years) small community that just ends up having a dearth of discussion. I'm talking less than one post and 5 comments a day kinds of discussions. It's really hard to find that sweet spot, and arguably harder to maintain it without ballooning out of control or stagnating and losing users.
Discord seems closest to this, but it has the same problems from server to server. either you are part of some small guild server and discussion only ramps up for large events or you have a larger general server and it's just a hose of random quips, barely different from a chat stream.