Live data from Hacker News

Fark redesign is now live (2007)

fark.com

181–190 of 475 posts

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

IMHO the federation aspect needs to be completely hidden from users unless they go out of their way to search for it. 99% of users don’t care about it, and offering instance options at signup must be killing conversion. As with all FOSS projects, it’s built by developers, for developers. The project badly needs a UX person streamline things.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#182
post #72

Earlier 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.

So you can join; it's just a different process you're not used to.

You can (and maybe should) host your own lemmy instance and participate in the discussions.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#183

I don't know if what's happening at Reddit is enough to kill it to be honest. A few subreddits I subscribe to (San Francisco, videos, etc) all went dark, claiming to be doing so "indefinitely". Effectively you cannot access those subreddits even to look at archived things. The Reddit staff/leadership can just decide to un-darken those subs and I'll "cross the picket lines". I suspect most are like me. That's the hone…

> The Reddit staff/leadership can just decide to un-darken those subs and I'll "cross the picket lines". I suspect most are like me. That's the honest truth.

But it’s not about lurkers. Who is going to moderate those subs and prevent them from turning into a cesspool of spam and other less savory content? Reddit is dependent on literally tens of thousands of volunteer moderators. Un-darkening subreddits is surely going to piss them off even more. Without moderators they can close their doors as no advertiser is going to want to put their brand name next to an endless stream of spam and filth.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#184
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit hosts its own ads, so seems like it would be relatively trivial to overcome the adblockers and insert them directly into the feed server side. Sure, that will piss a few people off, but more than this?

They should not use any CSS b/c lots of blocking is just based on elements and their style.

IIRC doesn't the FCC and equivalent regulatory authorities require online ads to be clearly distinguished?

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#185

And 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.

I think part of it is that SA's current culture really doesn't care about bringing new people in. The people there are quite happy talking to themselves on what they will happily call a dead forum. People leaving over time is the natural state of any platform; they're just below replacement rate and not too fussed over it.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#186
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

at this point, there is only 1 way to save reddit, and it's so drastic that they wont do it because the ones who need to do it are too blind or too far away * fire spez * promise a clear committed roadmap of mod tools * promise to review 3rd party API pricing, and delay the current rollout It's literally the only way that will be accepted by the 1% that keep the site running (read the Ennui engine principle)

Followed some of the links shared here, I fully agree now that the CEO should go. Earlier, he compromised the integrity of people’s speech by editing their posts: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/reddit-edit-post

I can see why they might want someone with the ability to edit posts (removing extreme TOS stuff - racism, hate speech etc). But that's probably not for the CEO and certainly shouldn't be used simply to "troll the trolls"

Also it's baffling to me that the CEO of reddit is a regular user and somehow isn't up in arms about how irritating it is to use the site.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#187

User redesigns are the main killers of websites. Consider the following examples: Digg, MySpace, Reddit, Slashdot, Facebook, Dropbox, and Typeform. These projects, among others, ultimately failed due to a misconception that they had a design problem or a desire to keep their design department occupied. Instead of following a clear vision, these projects were sacrificed in an attempt to please all users. HN should ref…

> HN should refrain from undergoing any major redesigns and instead focus on making minor adjustments.

I think HN should stay exactly the way it is. I know we all hate things like clicking for more comments at the bottom of popular posts, but this is like an antibody for the kind of user who wouldn't stop with that suggestion.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#188

And 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.

something awful had a forum for crappy users, called Fuck Youself and Die, but eventually the trolls and shitty users grew and the site was suffering, the mod war with those users is what 4chan was born from.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#189

User redesigns are the main killers of websites. Consider the following examples: Digg, MySpace, Reddit, Slashdot, Facebook, Dropbox, and Typeform. These projects, among others, ultimately failed due to a misconception that they had a design problem or a desire to keep their design department occupied. Instead of following a clear vision, these projects were sacrificed in an attempt to please all users. HN should ref…

It's hard to take you comment serious when you categorise Facebook and Dropbox as failed projects.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say the problem is that the user base are low value users. They're the sort of people who will do a mass protest because one for-profit company wants to charge another for-profit company money. Advertisers don't want to advertise to them, seriously. Any other company with a different user base with that amount of users and traffic would be making a billion a year easily. Probably multiple billions. But Reddit…

Thing is, high value users won't use a site that has no content. There's no there there any more without the userbase.

High value users are a completely different demographic.

Realistically, there are a large amount of people who don't care about the protests. They're going to be creating content. I wouldn't be surprised if the people most outraged are the ones who don't even comment that often.

Post reply on HN