What’s with all the hyperbole? Reddit Fail?
Fark redesign is now live (2007)
151–160 of 475 posts
Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)
#152I don't think this is true. The redesign was not bad and the reaction is the classic one that happens for all redesigns, good or bad. After a while people acclimatize to the new design and feel that's the original one. If you revert the redesign after that people will shout "bring back the old design!" even if that's exactly what you did.
I agree. Fark is still chugging along. How many sites has it outlived now?
Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)
#153And before/In parallel to Fark was SomethingAwful, which to my knowledge never did any meaningful redesigns and quasi died out because.. well i'm not even sure why, just a lot of us ended up leaving.
Though I guess there's still some skeleton userbase left. Apologies to any goons if i'm misrepresenting things.
Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)
#154I don't think this is true. The redesign was not bad and the reaction is the classic one that happens for all redesigns, good or bad. After a while people acclimatize to the new design and feel that's the original one. If you revert the redesign after that people will shout "bring back the old design!" even if that's exactly what you did.
As a longtime Reddit user, I immediately disliked the redesign but since I've been on the other side I decided it give it a month. I now deliberately dislike the redesign. I get most of my value out of reddit in the text subreddits and the conversation view in the redesign is awful. Things are highly collapsed and following a conversation requires repeated expansions. The comment count without loading more is extremely limited and when you scroll down there's an interstitial callout about the subreddit's all time popular posts. The redesign is fine for top level content in the picture/video/meme subreddits. Content emphasis aside, it feels incredibly slow. Waterfall loading and 2-300ms response times. I've spent quite a bit of time reflecting on design decisions and I think the design brief/product vision is simply opposed to my interests. I feel bad about complaining about another team's work but my complaints aren't the knee-jerk reaction you're complaining about.
Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Now it's Reddit vs what? For tech news, you are looking at it. For everything else there is YouTube + comment section, stack exchange, Discord channels, … People don’t necessarily need a “clone” replacement. Edit: OK. What exactly is so offensive about this post? People use Reddit in different ways. Those others site may be perfectly good substitutes for them. If you want a “feed” you can comment on, YouTube can do…
There’s a niche of medium lived discussions that are paced slowly and contextualized that the model of hn and reddit serve. The examples you gave don’t seem to fit.
People use Reddit in different ways. I suspect for many, those examples are perfectly good substitutes.
Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lemmy and its instances could be it.
I've tried to register a Lemmy account but I can't. Many instances require you to write an essay about why you want to join, why you picked your username, etc, and then wait for approval. The Lemmy instances I found that don't do this appear to be overloaded. Kbin.social seems to be more stable, even if it's alpha software. And it integrates with Lemmy.
On a related note, I tried to find an alternative to /r/nfl a few months ago, signed up for a good looking community, and am still waiting for manual admin approval apparently. It makes me wonder how many of these medium size forums are being killed by bots?
Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not trying to be. They only care about the value of the equity, not about profitability. It'd pretty easy to be a profitable company with a $10 million turnover, but you're not going to be a unicorn this way. Founders and VC wants high return on their equity, and today being enormous without profitability is valued more than being reasonable and profitable.
spez's comment "We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive. Unlike some of the 3P apps, we are not profitable." suggests a real concern about not being profitable. In fact, the whole ordeal reeks of panic – a last ditch attempt to right the ship before bankruptcy sets in. There was once an age where investors would buy in simply on the belief of unicornedness, but that ship sailed several months ago. Inv…
There's no reason to buy's spez's words, nor any other executives in any company for that matter, their job is to spread a narrative.
In fact, if profitability was the goal, then he should have been ousted at this point, because he's been back for 8 years now without succeeding to make the company profitable.
I don't think he is that inapt, and that his board is stupid to let him in charge despite such a failure, profitability was just never the goal. Getting the biggest possible IPO is the goal, but the timing is actually very bad for them for the reason you mention and now they're trying as hard as they can, including by creating fake subreddits with translated old content for non-English speakers (at least French and German speakers).
Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)
#158Earlier 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 idea that you'd willingly use an app with baked-in ads is insane to me
Do you have any friends outside tech circles?
Any time I see friends from non-tech industry browse web on their computers I wince so hard. I can't understand how they stand it but it's normal for them. It's also normal for them to wait few secons until pages/apps load because all the crap. Those people make up 99,9% of users everywhere except select sites like HN.
Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)
#159Earlier 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.
If one of the most visited website/app in the world with highly cacheable and free content can't be profitable the internet is doomed.
But did they try to be?
Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)
#160Just wondering. If you were Reddit CEO and you were being pressured to turn it into a profitable company, how would you do it?