Anyone else remember the great Digg exodus? It’s wild watching Reddit quickly following the footsteps. Steve Huffman (aka Spez) let his true colors shine, with (IPO) dollar signs in his eyes.
Fark redesign is now live (2007)
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Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)
#12I have a 14yo reddit account, and was a Digg user for years prior to that. While there were scandals like the HDDVD code stuff, ultimately the user-hostile Digg v4 redesign killed it for me- the day they forced it on everyone I never went back. Tonight watching all the subreddits go private is the first time I’ve ever felt like Reddit is the next to die.
If anyone from reddit corporate is reading this, understand that you’re playing with fire here. This week is critical to saving your platform.
Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)
#13One of the interesting thing about the open source federated alternatives (like Lemmy) is that each instance can run their own version of the UI. So even if the maintainers decide to completely redesign everything, nothing is stopping instances from staying on the old design forever.
The only major downside (and the one that will ensure Lemmy doesn't gain any significant traction after this) is that its incredibly underdeveloped and nowhere near as close to being able to replace Reddit as Mastedon was for Twitter.
Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)
#14And what exactly is user-hostile there? It doesn't look beautiful to my tastes, but functionally nothing is particularly complicated to understand.
I would be curious how well redesigns go over in general, given that users are used to things working a certain way.
Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)
#15One of the interesting thing about the open source federated alternatives (like Lemmy) is that each instance can run their own version of the UI. So even if the maintainers decide to completely redesign everything, nothing is stopping instances from staying on the old design forever.
The only major downside (and the one that will ensure Lemmy doesn't gain any significant traction after this) is that its incredibly underdeveloped and nowhere near as close to being able to replace Reddit as Mastedon was for Twitter.
Isn't there also the issue of federation itself, if users have to understand federation they'll just stick to regular Reddit. Going by the principle of "don't make me think", that is
Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)
#16I never used fark. Did they make a change to the structure of how users interacted with the site, or did they make a change to the UI only?
digg v4 was a disaster, but the exodus started before that when digg removed threaded comments.
Related: Wikipedia changed what pages actually looked like by moving a contents navigation bar to the left side and minimizing some other features.
It's the last UI change in a major website I can think of that didn't make me grimace.
Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)
#17I have a 14yo reddit account, and was a Digg user for years prior to that. While there were scandals like the HDDVD code stuff, ultimately the user-hostile Digg v4 redesign killed it for me- the day they forced it on everyone I never went back. Tonight watching all the subreddits go private is the first time I’ve ever felt like Reddit is the next to die. If anyone from reddit corporate is reading this, understand tha…
The problem is the business model is terrible. You need to sell ads to survive and the ads ruin the site.
Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)
#18Oh my god. I remember this happening, and I remember email drew about it at the time.
It really never did recover from this. I "grew up" on Fark, and lots of my early web projects were clones of it/inspired by it. Fark really was a special part of the internet, and it's sad that it fell off. I wonder if the fact that they never moved on from this design was Drew being gunshy about changing it again.
Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)
#19I like that you could use swear words by paying for it. > You can purchase FarkUnits for $10 for 100 FUs, or you can get a discount if you purchase in bulk. > Using it is easy. If you type a word with "fuck" or "shit" in your comment, a new button will pop up that says "Add Comment using SwearJar - 20FUs." Just click or tap that and those words won't be filtered to the customary 'fark' or 'shiat.'
This implies that the website is really called fuck.com (but censored), which is certainly … a choice.
Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)
#20Digg was also killed by a user-hostile redesign. Reddit was wise enough to keep its redesign indefinitely optional, at least.
When Reddit first introduced their terrible mobile site years ago, they thankfully left around the old i.reddit.com (also known as .compact) around, which I exclusively used and so didn't really care much about the horrendously user-hostile current mobile site, with its popup windows begging you to use the app. They removed it entirely a month or so ago. I now no longer use Reddit.