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Fark redesign is now live (2007)

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Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#301

Post by that_guy_iain »

MagnumOpus wrote: post #294
that_guy_iain wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The users have nothing to lose

Reddit users have Reddit to lose. A site that gives them hours of entertainment, allows them to access support groups, find out tips and tricks, get advice, and much more. It'll cost tens of millions a month to host another. Who has that?

VCs will get their money one way or another. Either they get their way with this and monetise users who previously were not monetised. Or they make profit other ways.

> and burning the 3rd party moderation

This here shows how out of touch you are with the reality of things. Third party moderation tools are staying. They're beneficial to Reddit, of course they're going to keep giving them free access.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#302

Post by yard2010 »

ihateolives wrote: post #158
nvy wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 excep…

I never realized how fast the web is today with no ads, esp. on mobile! I am never going back, ads are cancer for me, this is not how I roll

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#303

Post by smcl »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #299
smcl wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ahhhh sure, no worries!

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#304

Post by primax »

mr_mitm wrote: post #70
MattGaiser wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm a very attached reddit user and I have no idea what they could be doing with 2000 employees. I'm honestly shocked.

The development they've done in the past 5 years could have been done with like 50-100 people, including keeping all the SRE going. Insane.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#305

Post by SolarNet »

mrtksn wrote: post #236
BadBadJellyBean wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No but they still need mods. Otherwise the quality will quickly go so far downhill that no one wants to see use it anymore.

Is finding mods something hard to do?

Theoretically no, practically yes.

You basically need people willing to donate lots of their time to read new on a specific subreddit constantly (there is a reason (in a consequentialist sense) mods tend to enforce their opinion on every post, it's cause they spend hours reading every single one already, and the kind of person willing to do that probably has some (obsessive) opinions).

There are some subreddits where you can be a mod and you get pinged and you make decision, and so you can spend your time doing other things and still help, but they are very small. And there are some tools that let you take the "and I get pinged and I make a decision" up to the larger subreddit scale, and tools which make reading new easier to do... these are the tools reddit is going to get rid of / make pay only.

So yea, it's going to be even harder to find some poor schmuck with no life willing to donate a bunch of their free time to create high quality subreddits that comply with the admin's rules (which is actually what a lot of "do whatever you want" mods end up spending most of their time dealing with). And the people they do find are going to have even stronger personal influences on subreddits than the current ones do.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#306

Post by INTPenis »

Sander_Marechal wrote: post #143
zouhair wrote: 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.

I also went with kbin but I gotta say writing an essay to join someone's privately hosted service isn't a bad idea. This is what it was like when people were hosting servers on their personal phone lines.

If we want the internet to be federated, by the people, for the people yada yada, then this is what we'll have to get used to again. Big corps took it away for a while but do we really want their future?

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#307

Post by TeMPOraL »

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.

HN and Reddit are deeply intertwined at multiple levels. There's a cultural connection ("this site is turning into reddit" is a decade+-old meme that just can't die). There's a historical legacy one - HN came about because pg wanted to recreate the kind of culture Reddit had in its first two years, while the latter kept evolving past niche startup/tech content. There's a technological one - Reddit started as a Lisp success story (written/prototyped in Common Lisp, subsequently rewritten in Python), HN is written in pg's own Lisp dialect, Arc.

For better or worse, Reddit is part of HN's DNA. It's not just accidental phenotype similarity (both being link aggregation/commentary boards with up/down-voting karma mechanism) - HN is Reddit's younger sibling.

> Except the frontpage is filled with multiple Reddit stories with repetition of the same comments.

This is temporary. Reddit is going through a critical moment right now, but the amount of Reddit stories should start to decay in the next couple days or weeks (unless Reddit manages to turn it into a perpetual high-intensity crisis).

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#308

Post by chimeracoder »

grayrest wrote: post #154
Kiro wrote: 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…

The worst parts about the redesign, IMO:

- It inserts "ads" for other Reddit posts in the middle of a comment section. If you're not paying very close attention, it's easy to miss that you're literally not seeing all the comments on a post, because you have to scroll down past the "recommended reading" or whatever they call it and expand the comments below the fold.

- it often makes it impossible to see NSFW content on mobile websites without using the app, which is annoying if you click through from a Google search result on your phone. This applies to text posts too, which is all the more annoying because despite the name, the NSFW tag is used to tag more than just porn (hide spoilers for TV shows, punchlines of jokes, etc.)

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#309

Post by JoeyJoJoJr »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #95
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…

Here's my question: Can HN recover from this? It was already getting choppy with the election and cryptocurrency generating huge emotional hellthreads. Then came Musk and Mastodon. Now it's Reddit. HN is just turning into another hub of tech outrage. This site is giving me pain to read now. Want to see a contrast? Look at the comments on this Reddit drama and compare it against the original Digg redesign drama on HN…

Let’s hope that hacker news prevents new signups if a mass migration looks imminent. This is still a great place I hope it stays that way.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#310

Post by goykasi »

unglaublich wrote: post #260
AlecSchueler wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And do you think that new demographic will be willing to put in the same unpaid hours to moderate the site?

Nope. They'll just outsource this to underpaid contractors like Facebook does.

Even better, if they could leverage LLMs, they could maybe automate a large part of the initial moderation. They have already acknowledged that these models were likely trained on their data. Why not feed new posts back into it and determine about relevance (on vs off topic), attitude (compassion vs hate) or quality (written by a bot)?
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