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Fark redesign is now live (2007)

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Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#291

Post by rkangel »

shusaku wrote: post #156
Sander_Marechal wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm a fairly heavy Reddit user and I've been musing on what I would lose if Reddit shut down. I came to the conclusion that /r/nfl and /r/knitting were far and away the leaders (and in fact otherwise it might be a net positive as I wasn't scrolling through rubbish for hours). There isn't another form of sports coverage that is as rapid and universal (I paid for The Athletic for a while and that was decent), and the knitting subreddit is constantly giving me project ideas and things to learn.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#292

Post by Eisenstein »

ako wrote: post #105
libraryatnight wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe forums and digital commons shouldn't be.

How do you suggest they survive long term if the continue to lose money?

Stop spending so much money developing features that are useless for adding value to the site; stop hiring devs to create new 'resume' features like counter-productive reverse-blocking and hire devs to fix modding tools. Stop spending money hosting videos and multimedia when your core value is text conversations. Don't make stupid decisions like destroying your most popular features (the AMA subreddit, the secret santa) because you are stupid. Fire your CEO who is doing all of these things.

There is no reason reddit can't be profitable if they did these things. They don't need 100,000,000 users watching videos to bring in ad revenue. They need 10,000,000 users generating good content that ends up as top google results and they can find clever ways to monetize product tie-ins, annual meetups (those were a thing in a lot of cities a while ago), events, merch, and subscriptions. It isn't rocket science. The top stockholders just have to be satisfied to be millionaires instead of billionaires.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#293

Post by creshal »

pmlnr wrote: post #216
creshal wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> new users can be intimidated by the information overload The learn to use it? There's now a reverse trend in appliances: they use to be simple, now they are quite complicated, see washing machines, yet people handle it.

Some learn it, some don't. If your only goal is to get 100% of humanity to spend as much time as possible on your website, no matter if that's good for them or not, you need to make your app addicting even to people with no attention span.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#294

Post by MagnumOpus »

that_guy_iain wrote: post #145
boc wrote: post #12

I 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…

Realistically, I would say Reddit users are playing with fire. Reddit is owned and controlled by VCS who have been finding out playground in the hopes of future profits. We all know and understand the game. They hoped they built a website where the users were assets. The Reddit users think they are assets. However, it Reddit can’t make a profit off of them. They aren’t assets they are liabilities. Any site wanting to…

> Reddit users are playing with fire

The users have nothing to lose. Worst case Huffman and his owners go ahead with smashing and burning the 3rd party moderation and commenting infrastructure - they would have done that even without protests. Would Huffman ban the people who contribute and moderate the discussions and police spam for free, and hire paid mods instead? A week ago I'd have said that not even he is that boneheaded...

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#295

Post by capableweb »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #200
evolve2k wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think some context you might be missing is the intimate connection between Reddit and YC. Reddit is a YC story[1][2] and the founders even claim that Reddit was the first YC Company to launch[1]. As far as I understand it Reddit was one of those key early startups that Paul Graham modelled future YC around. Further reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz, rest-in-peace, was a and highly inflential in his contribution to RSS…

> I think some context you might be missing is the intimate connection between Reddit and YC. Reddit is a YC story[1][2] and the founders even claim that Reddit was the first YC Company to launch[1]. As far as I understand it Reddit was one of those key early startups that Paul Graham modelled future YC around. Reddit is definitely a YC story, and so is HN. But Reddit isn't HN's story. It's one of many. Except the fr…

> Reddit is definitely a YC story, and so is HN. But Reddit isn't HN's story. It's one of many.

That is true, but emotional/historical connections changes how people feel about things, even though it might not be "how it ought to be". Reddit is closer to YC and therefore closer to HN, no matter how independent HN should be from YC.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#296

Post by dreamcompiler »

Reddit management seem to be living in a bubble (as corporate managers often do). Inside the Reddit bubble, disgruntled users are a vocal minority who don't matter, Reddit -- not its users -- created the content that keeps the eyeballs coming back, apps are more convenient than websites, we own the user experience, we are leaving money on the table if we don't mine and sell more personal information, we have no competition, our barrier to entry is infinitely high, and our IPO will be the greatest IPO ever.

Either that or they know all the above is bullshit and they're just hoping they can cash out with FU money before the ship sinks.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#297

Post by Algent »

astrange wrote: post #265
aerio wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't funny, and he didn't make any jokes. He edited "fuck spez" comments to remove spez and substitute other mods. Fuck r/the_donald - but that's just blatant admin power misuse to deflect criticism. Very topical with all the "fuck u/spez" comments going around these days. https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-stev...

Admin abuse is inherently funny. It's like slapstick. It was funny on SA when the users paid to sign up in the first place, and it can only be more so when they're not even paying customers. Should've made it a wordfilter though. Those are more participatory. (You won't take this advice, which is why I've run a large popular internet forum before and you haven't.)

I completely agree, when he did that is was pretty funny (but a little pathetic he didn't dare to ban these users or this sub, either for money or political reasons).

Users reacted poorly and "shocked" site wide somehow that an admin could exerts admin right and edit database which as a sysadmin made me laugh a lot because I get occasional similar ones from our users when we do admin stuff.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#298

Post by goykasi »

zouhair wrote: post #205
gdubya wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like Mastodon to Twitter? I like the idea, but it's not really taking off, is it?

As long as Reddit's powerusers are still hoping for a retraction it won't, but if Reddit keep at it, I can see the move happening, especially for the big (over 500K) subreddits.

Lemmy is falling over with less than 100k users. How are they magically going to handle 5x, 10x, 100x? The platform is maybe interesting, but the devs need to own up to the fact that they dont have a scaling story -- written in rust is not a valid answer. Instances are already deciding not to federate, theres no network-wide search, signup flows sound ridiculous (pick server and write an essay? yah no), how do i move servers and what happens when an instance disappears?

In the one of the first big Apollo threads, one of the devs was spamming Lemmy throughout the discussion as the next great reddit replacement: easy, federated, more performant than reddit. I guess he almost got 1 out of 3 correct.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#299

Post by JumpCrisscross »

smcl wrote: post #283
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Can't really see how my comments suggest I'm "rail[ing] against" something

> how my comments suggest I'm "rail[ing] against" something

Sorry, clarified. Spez wanted something to attack.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#300

Post by dredmorbius »

esskay wrote: post #13
sunaurus wrote: post #8

One 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.

Mastodon grew from earlier tools (ActivityPub, GNU Social, StatusNet) dating to the early aughts.

I'd joined in 2016, kicked tyres for a bit, and increased my own usage around 2018. By the time Twitter's October Revolution arrived in 2022, the platform was sufficiently well-developed to both accommodate a substantial new influx and appeal to at least some of those new participants.

And Mastodon and the Fediverse had seen previous waves of adoption, often led by drama, dissatisfaction, or shutdowns at or of other networks (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc.).

What tends to occur is that systems evolve and develop over time, as do the communities making use of them. It's less that there's One Big Event than there are a succession of smaller ones ... until a tipping point is reached.

Where the Fediverse is in terms of the long slow implosions of Twitter and Reddit remains to be seen, but don't discount long-simmering discontent and the emergence of new options. As a podcast noted recently: even power users of Twitter refer to the service as "Hellsite", and that's a very unstable situation. People remain out of inertia and lack of alternatives, not from some deep and abiding love of the service. Reddit increasingly seems to be in a similar place.

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