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Fark redesign is now live (2007)

fark.com

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Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#241
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe instead of this banning 3rd part Apps. They could charge all users 9.99 or 19.99 a month. Thus generate revenue for the IPO.

The problem with this approach (not just for Reddit, but for all internet content sites) is that $9.99 is a significant investment when there are other sites providing content for free. The choice the user has to make isn't "Is Reddit worth $9.99?" but more like "Is Reddit better value at $9.99 than some other website at $0.00?", and Reddit is probably never going to win in that process for the majority of people. It…

Not to mention it’s actually the users generating the content.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#243
post #84

I 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 extreme…

I personally think reddit is an example of an actual bad redesign, so I'm not saying this is true for all redesigns. I do however think it was true for Fark, at least from how I remember it.

With that said, I don't think old.reddit is that good either unless you only want to read text-only posts, and it's pretty much unusable on mobile.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#244

Digg was also killed by a user-hostile redesign. Reddit was wise enough to keep its redesign indefinitely optional, at least.

There was a snarky comment in the IAMA when spez said "old.reddit.com isn't going away", and the person responded with a link to spez saying the exact same thing with the exact same words about the API 6 years ago. Google's "don't be evil" had to go away too. Capitalism can't make room for considerations such as proliferation of evil.

> Capitalism can't make room for considerations such as proliferation of evil.

People only believe in corporate slogans when they can use them to make cynical points about abandoning them, but nevertheless, these things exist:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#245
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> (removing extreme TOS stuff - racism, hate speech etc) Why would you edit these? Deletion seems far superior, do you want people to go around editing out the racism of peoples posts? Seems absurd.

> Deletion seems far superior, do you want people to go around editing out the racism of peoples posts?

The generous argument for would be it preserves any redeeming value in the offending comment. The practical answer is he (EDIT: spez) wanted something to rail against.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#246
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)

Reddit won't die for the same reason Facebook won't... there's no real viable alternative for the majority of the users. It might become a bit shitter, it might lose a few users who are a bit more tech savvy or from the "old days of the internet" who'll find themselves fedi or forum based alternatives but the majority will keep getting what they want out of it without a reason to move - most users probably use the of…

There are viable alternatives, but the average user simply does not care. And by average user I mean someone who literally doesn't bother to use the official reddit client.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#247
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)

Is there any good reads wrt the blowback on cost of the API? I've only read that it costs $0.25 per 1000 calls which seems relatively cheap, but I haven't looked into how it affects use cases.

1000 calls isn't much when basic actions such as an upvote/downvote are an individual API call, and comments are heavily paginated.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#248
post #77

I was the creator of the OG Popurls which at the time was the #1 traffic driver for Reddit and Digg; and also created Twidroid the very first Android Twitter client which became one of the reasons for shutting down 3rd party apps after its acquisition. Since I'm a sucker for anything old-school Web, I've been working on a Digg 1.0 rehash for a while now so if any of you wants to beta test let me know.

I would be happy to give a look through it, email in my bio. I dig that sort of thing, someone did something similar with classic MySpace: https://spacehey.com/ . We just need Bebo back and we're sorted ;)

Hang on ... you left off geocities. The internet is not complete without it.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#249
I think most people aren't aware that during the digg exodus there were also not that many alternatives or at least not that many alternatives people were aware of, so that played a major role because it was a very easy choice when there were not that many choices. But I also think a new technological paradigm for social media is needed entirely (decentralized).
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