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Fark redesign is now live (2007)

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Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#331

Post by Mindwipe »

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…

> If anyone from reddit corporate is reading this, understand that you’re playing with fire here. This week is critical to saving your platform.

I'm actually quite surprised we've not had a Verge/Techcrunch/The Information story with views from the inside yet. Reddit was always a quite leaky ship that treats staff badly. Internally there has to be some people side-eyeing and thinking that Huffman has lost the plot, especially with his AMA making the blackout worse. Morale is probably not high. Those hanging around for any kind of IPO payout probably know this is going to hit the financials of that quite badly.

If your role is anything to do with community outreach you have to know you will not be able to do your job for the next year at least - even if Reddit were to somehow tough this out, it's most engaged users and moderators now hate your guts.

Maybe journalists are waiting for the strikes to really hit and we'll see it today.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#332

Post by makeitdouble »

darreninthenet wrote: post #204
dacryn wrote: 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…

I'm with you that a site of that critical size probably won't die, not within a decade.

The same was AOL is actually not completely dead. Yahoo! is not dead, Digg isn't either, neither did MySpace. And I'd totally see Tumblr having a full come back to the front of the stage.

Another way to put it could be "dead to us" for any specific value of "us".

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#333

Post by LodeOfCode »

mrtksn wrote: post #74
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…

As much as I would like to believe that boycotts can work, I'm just too cynical after seeing all those boycotts doing nothing. My old.reddit.com homepage hasn't change much. Missing is r/ProgrammerHumor but r/Programming is there, alongside with r/darksky, r/wallstreetbets etc. All the porn seems to be there too, which might actually move some numbers if gone dark. The only sub which I care and it's gone is r/StableD…

The list of participating subreddits[0] includes ~3/4ths of the big subreddits. 7 of the 10 subs with over 30 million members[1], 81% with 20-30 million, 77% with 10-20 million, 80% with 5-10 million, and 71% with 1-5 million

I don't think the blackout will be limited by its scope so much as by its duration

[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/1401qw5/incomplet... [1]https://www.reddit.com/best/communities/1/

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#334

Post by disappointed_h »

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…

I would like to ask a different question: Why is the site Hacker news still called Hacker news?

I've been reading Hacker news since 2008, but as things stand now, I'm afraid I won't be reading it for much longer. Why? Because for the last (at least) few years, more and more often I catch myself asking: why is "Hacker news" even called "Hacker news" anymore?

Maybe this question will sound strange to some people here, but once upon a time in the past Hacker news used to have a lot of posts that were actually interesting to hackers. Today on HN mostly topics about entrepreneurship, economy, about unscrupulous rich people who make money from the corpses of others, and for whom the audience applauds in unison here, etc., prevail. We can say that the topics about everything that real hackers have never been interested in and which is the antithesis of hackers prevail here.

Guys, I guess we know what hackers are, what kind of people they are and what actually drives them? I say this because what we read here on HN has nothing to do with it. Why did this shift in interest occur? And, wouldn't it be great if the owners of this site would admit it, be honest and rename the site to, for example, "How to become the new Elon Musk"? I think that would be quite appropriate, because this place has nothing to do with hackers anymore, so it would be fair to admit that!

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#335

Post by jtode »

darreninthenet wrote: post #285
nebrie wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are alternatives. Lemmy has seen incredible growth over the past two weeks.

How do you fix the problem for the average user of why the (eg) recipe group on their Lemmy instance is empty, and when/if they do learn that other instances recipe groups are different groups, how they properly follow them all, and why it is their favourite one suddenly disappeared because their instance defed'd from that instance because the other instance also carried trumpsfavouriterecipes? I get and like the pri…

People keep talking about having the option to take your content and move as though freedom was a prison.

Likewise, the fact that there is a community of instances that have made the choice to have a pleasant space, free of troll farms spewing endless abuse, and are taking that seriously, really seems to have upset a lot of people around here.

You can't get the_donald on Reddit either, because fascists make a room stink like farts, and only people who've been huffing their poopy-smelling breath can't see that. I think what's really upsetting for those of the trollish mindset is that while removing the_donald and other fascist subs was more about keeping the site running smoothly and just getting rid of a headache, the decision to lock out gab and truth.social and anyone else who tolerates it is strictly an aesthetic one; they are no longer outcast because they're a pain in the ass, they're outcast because they suck and the whole community agrees.

I knew in 2016 that it was just the start of a process of smartening, where people get more optics into the nature of the world and the Internet's place in it. Seven years on, The Smartening proceeds apace, finding ways to have nice things, even with armies of chaos and division trying to tell us to be angry, to rage incoherently at our neighbors, doing everything they can to bring bad feelings into our lives.

The platforms are done because there's no more free money for them to play with, and when the big machines that run on that money can't fill up with another funding round, things are already grim and only getting worse. The fediverse is doing alright.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#336

Post by fleshdaddy »

SllX wrote: post #47
ripreddit420 wrote: post #11

Anyone else remember the great Digg exodus? It’s wild watching Reddit quickly following the footsteps. Steve Huffman (aka Spez) let his true colors shine, with (IPO) dollar signs in his eyes.

One of the major differences is that there’s no clear alternative. Digg and Reddit had a lot of overlap in what they were trying to do immediately prior to Digg’s redesign. Reddit was an obvious place to go if you preferred Digg up until that point. Now what’s the clear alternative to Reddit? Discord is probably the closest just from a UX perspective and I expect to be finding stuff there that I used to find on Reddi…

To be honest I think the problem for Reddit may be that no one really needs a direct alternative. For me it’s good at one thing which is reviews and in depth educational content on some of the more niche subs. For community though, people can use discord, for content consumption, people seem to be using tik tok, for political flame wars you have Twitter.

I don’t see a bright future for Reddit. A lot of the broad appeal back when I used it more was that it surfaced the best stuff from all over the internet so I didn’t have to sift through all the boring stuff but funny enough now the only time my little sister and her hip friends see Reddit posts is when the best ones have been turned into a tik tok. I doubt this is going to kill Reddit but honestly I think it’s been fighting a losing battle for a while now. I have a feeling its indirect competitors will keep getting better at providing the value reddit does over time in their own way and leave reddit with very little left to offer.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#337

Post by Maken »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #314
ycombinete wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general the lack of separate communities, and the technical posts that take up a good portion of the front page seem to guard against that kind of Eternal September on HN. The top of the front page right now: 1. Before Reddit and Digg, there was Fark. Then a user-hostile redesign killed it (fark.com) 2. Why Perl? 3. Video to Video with Stable Diffusion (Step-by-Step) – Stable Diffusion Art 4. The Surprising Power…

We can always hit the emergency button labeled "please post and upvote some Erlang stories quick!". Worked well in the past.

I think that was updated to a Rust button long ago.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#338

Post by TeMPOraL »

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.

Of course. "Intuitive" is just an excuse. Software now typically relies on some form of lock-in (subscription alone is a soft form of one), so acquiring new users is a priority. Appliances... they had their simplification trend too, and now they're getting complex again because you have to use smartphone apps to control them - but all the extra confusion is worth it, as the audience is already sort of captive (approximately everyone needs a fridge and a washing machine), and the app offers a whole new dimension of lock-in and abuse. What it doesn't offer is usability, of course.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#339

Post by bandrami »

yanderekko wrote: post #128
dacryn wrote: 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)

>It's literally the only way that will be accepted by the 1% that keep the site running (read the Ennui engine principle) What makes the activists here think that they can speak for this 1%?

I mean, personally I've been paying for a Premium membership for years now because I know good web communities need user financial support to be sustainable. So I have at least some moral right to a preference in the direction the site goes. I honestly wish they'd just done a bigger Premium beg-a-thon and see if they could meet their revenue needs that way; it's ultimately a much better model.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#340

Post by tazjin »

Algent wrote: post #297
astrange wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"funny but a little pathetic" fits a lot of Lowtax shenanigans very well, so it seems reasonable.
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