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Fark redesign is now live (2007)

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Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#61

Post by creshal »

pcwelder wrote: post #33

>It looks too spaced out People have similar complaints with Reddit re-design (so do I). What's with making websites "prettier" instead of more usable?

People who're already used to a website will prefer a dense layout, but new users can be intimidated by the information overload.

But measuring and improving user retention is hard, and might need expensive measures like improving content quality, it's much easier to optimize onboarding new users by shuffling some stylesheets around. KPIs fulfilled, who cares about the rest.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#62

Post by Dalewyn »

nvy wrote: post #24
ramraj07 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I sincerely hope Reddit feels the pressure and goes back, they have taken a bet in a different landscape as Digg: 1. The vast majority of Reddit users (maybe not the contributors) use the native app. I myself do as well. So this api change doesn’t affect me immediately (of course it does indirectly by restricting moderation and bots). 2. I open Reddit today and it’s different but not inferior. I’d argue the rea…

>The vast majority of Reddit users (maybe not the contributors) use the native app. I myself do as well. The idea that you'd willingly use an app with baked-in ads is insane to me, to say nothing of the fact that the official app performs very poorly and could charitably be described as "dogshit UX".

The problem is you don't have the mindset of Joe Average. It's something most of us lose as we become nerds, enthusiasts, professionals, etc. We become disconnected with the commons.

As a Joe Average, computers are an appliance and the internet is merely a service like broadcast television. Reddit is merely a channel on broadcast television like CNN or BBC, and it's natural to use Reddit to use Reddit. Do you watch something other than BBC to watch BBC?

I agree with the crowd saying that this subreddit privatisation strike will have limited effect at most. Most people don't care and aren't affected, and that's the cold reality. Reddit itself is far beyond the point of critical mass, if there are even whispers that this strike is insufficient that means it is insufficient in the grander scale.

As another bit of anecdote, I remember when Digg died. It died overnight. Literally. One day everyone was talking about and on Digg, the next day everyone wasn't. When something on the internet dies, it dies. There are no rumors or murmurs of impending death, it just dies.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#63

Post by sunaurus »

politelemon wrote: post #15
esskay wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In my experience, people understand federation quite easily if you just use the e-mail analogue. Even completely non-technical folks understand that regardless of whether they are on Gmail or Outlook or iCloud mail, they can send e-mail to users of other platforms.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#64

Post by creshal »

sedatk wrote: post #35
brokenkebaby wrote: post #5

And what exactly is user-hostile there? It doesn't look beautiful to my tastes, but functionally nothing is particularly complicated to understand.

Infinite scroll, for example, makes it easy to lose your reading progress with a simple refresh/reload. Paged UIs, on the other hand, don’t have that problem.

Reddit is especially obnoxious because the sorting algorithms are extremely volatile, and if you do scroll too far, you'll never find that particular piece of content again.

Infinite scrolling in Twitter etc. is much less obnoxious.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#66

Post by libraryatnight »

rapsey wrote: post #32
nvy wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's patently obvious that they're just trying to drive up ad impression numbers on the app to inflate their financials before IPO/acquisition.

Reddit is still not profitable.

Maybe forums and digital commons shouldn't be.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#68

Post by mihaaly »

Along the redesign matter - I do not know Frak - I realized that since UX design became a strongly self aware and proud so called profession with axioms and rulebooks the usability of the UI gone s*t, in general. Probably those are pretty s*t, but functionality wise just pure s*t. Compared to ugly but pratcical older things before made by UX unaware product developers without aesthetical sense but focusing on the function. UX is important, that is what make something usable for the purpose but somehow the more they work on it the worse it becomes. At least this is my generic observation throughout the years and decades, with little exceptions. Probably it is just a coincidence that the emergence of the UX brought useless products, I do not know. But I could annoy people around me with specifics and examples for hours, how something born useless or made useless with hard hard work with lots of efforts from a marginally or pretty usable state. When it was or could have been better. Probably the one worth to mention now is the Windows 11 that drives me away slowly but surely from the Windows Universe, despite the difficulty of the transition which becomes the less difficulty compared to using it on. Its reputation was never that good in this regard, it always been hip to criticise, I know people complained intensely about previous version that I could live with, but this one, this is a new league of ignorantly forced through renovation of ruined functionality with the only benefit that it occupies the UX folks there, keeping them in payroll.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#69

Post by deafpolygon »

SllX wrote: post #47
ripreddit420 wrote: post #11

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.

One of the major differences is that there’s no clear alternative. Digg and Reddit had a lot of overlap in what they were trying to do immediately prior to Digg’s redesign. Reddit was an obvious place to go if you preferred Digg up until that point. Now what’s the clear alternative to Reddit? Discord is probably the closest just from a UX perspective and I expect to be finding stuff there that I used to find on Reddi…

How is Discord even a closest alternative? Everything is on its own "server" and conversations happen in real-time, not async like Reddit.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#70

Post by mr_mitm »

MattGaiser wrote: post #40
rapsey wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is the business model is terrible. You need to sell ads to survive and the ads ruin the site.

I personally don't find the ads at all objectionable on the old.reddit.com site. They blend in with the other content reasonably well (so you see a Jetbrains ad when on /r/programmerhumor), don't slow down the site, either fit the flow well or hang out on the side, etc. I find the targeting to be good enough that I look forward to the ads to a certain extent as I have found all sorts of fun products that way.

Plus, they have the Reddit gold program.

Not sure if that is enough, but does Reddit really need 2000 employees and hundreds of millions of CV money? I have a hard time estimating what it costs to run a site like Reddit.

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