Fark redesign is now live (2007) • Hacker News Board

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#461

Post by dang » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 10:34 PM UTC

disappointed_h wrote: post #334

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

What are some examples of articles that you think would be of more interest to hackers?

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#462

Post by dang » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 10:35 PM UTC

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…

There have always been fluctuations and swings in HN's history, sometimes big swings, and those always bring these sorts of reflection. But then it fluctuates or swings its way back out.

Randomness inevitably includes sequences that seem non-random—sometimes longer than one would think possible from a random process.

If you have any ideas about how to further dampen hellthreads, I'm all ears. We can't just suppress them because that would produce an even more hellthreadish backlash.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#463

Post by sedatk » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 11:00 PM UTC

mcmoor wrote: post #363

sedatk wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Infinite scroll, for example, makes it easy to lose your reading progress with a simple refresh/reload. Paged UIs, on the other hand, don’t have that problem.

I'm not even sure if it's 3PA only feature but there's option to hide all posts that you've read (or scrolled past). After finding that feature now i want it everywhere there's infinite scroll because yeah otherwise it's unusable.

That feature's way less useful when you don't read each and every post in sequential order. Also sometimes I want to go back and look at something I've already read. That makes it complicated too.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#464

Post by version_five » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 11:47 PM UTC

disappointed_h wrote: post #334

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Where is the SNR better than HN though? Maybe lobste.rs, but there's almost no conversation. It's easier imo to ignore the stuff that I don't care about (despite regularly getting caught up in whatever dumb thing) and pick out the interesting gems, than anywhere else.

Put another way, there's a tradeoff between false positives, (hustle bro Musk story, say) and false negatives (a story that would generate good discussion not making the front page - yesterday there was one about the air India flight landing in Russia that had a bunch of political comments but also lots of interesting talk about other times planes landed on the wrong runway, taking off with one engine, etc.)

Since the cost of false negative is much higher than false positives, better to skew that way.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#465

Post by scumola » Tue, Jun 13, 2023, 12:02 AM UTC

CodeCompost wrote: post #160

Just wondering. If you were Reddit CEO and you were being pressured to turn it into a profitable company, how would you do it?

Fire Spez. Pay the people making the good apps to actually maintain their apps and keep up with the site's improvements, so there are multiple good apps, not just one crappy one. If they need money, there are already ads on reddit, charge more for the ads!

Don't fuck over the user base! Your users are what makes a site like reddit good! Don't they know that? Trim the fat (middle-management usually). Get out of the cloud if you're hosting servers in the cloud, move things on-prem. The cloud is great for flexibility, but for cost-savings, on-prem will always win. Whoever is the upper-management that approved the whole "charge for API use" - fire that guy too.

(rant) Too many websites have had upper-management take over and immediately change things that bring the site to its knees. This happens time and time again with new management. They think that they can bring some new life and revenue into the site and in the process, they cripple the product. It happened to evernote, dropbox, tons of great, cheap/free services that "couldn't support the freemium model anymore" so they cut cheap/free access to the product and people just went somewhere else. That's exactly what's happening now. (/rant)

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#466

Post by sedatk » Tue, Jun 13, 2023, 12:06 AM UTC

creshal wrote: post #64

sedatk wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Infinite scroll, for example, makes it easy to lose your reading progress with a simple refresh/reload. Paged UIs, on the other hand, don’t have that problem.

Reddit is especially obnoxious because the sorting algorithms are extremely volatile, and if you do scroll too far, you'll never find that particular piece of content again. Infinite scrolling in Twitter etc. is much less obnoxious.

> Infinite scrolling in Twitter etc. is much less obnoxious.

Yes, Twitter's much better on that aspect, partly because how different its design is, and partly because how they handle browsing mechanics.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#467

Post by midoridensha » Tue, Jun 13, 2023, 12:39 AM UTC

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #257

joshvm wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the LLM ML communities have moved to Discord for bleeding edge development, as far as I know.

Which is a damn shame, because discord is an unsearchable walled garden. I really, really don't hope much of reddit moves to discord, it would be a disaster for the usability of search engines.

Yeah, I feel like Discord is basically a more-modern version of IRC: it's not really useful for anyone who isn't already part of that channel.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#468

Post by dreamcompiler » Tue, Jun 13, 2023, 12:44 AM UTC

lapser wrote: post #149

Why is it that companies go towards bad UX when they start ramping up profits? Download size is one thing, but ignoring that, how is it that they thought the new (Reddit) website was a good idea? Sure it's mobile friendly, but it's barely useable on mobile and desktop? For example: why do I have to constantly click read more? This seems to be a common thing with all kinds of companies, Digg, Facebook, many others. It…

It used to be somewhat difficult to track a reader's progress solely from the browser's scrollbar. Not impossible, but it wasn't something the average code-camp newbie could figure out. So sticking a stupid "Read More" button on the page was the default solution.

That still seems to be the solution for a whole lot of websites, even though the Intersection Observer API now exists.

I don't get it.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#469

Post by dreamcompiler » Tue, Jun 13, 2023, 12:50 AM UTC

meerita wrote: post #165

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…

The key difference is HN doesn't sell ads, so there's no incentive to "improve" anything. I hope this stays true forever.

Re: Fark redesign is now live (2007)

#470

Post by treyd » Tue, Jun 13, 2023, 2:10 AM UTC

charlieyu1 wrote: post #251

MaKey wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate Discord for killing classic forums and therefore robbing us of good searchable niche content.

Not sure how Discord killed forums, they are more like IRC which had existed for a long time alongside forums.

There's a worrying number of instances where people managing a foss project using taking their GitHub issue tracker, discussion boards, or some other public forum / discussion board and deciding to lock it and direct users to a discord guild because it's "easier". Or new communities that start up exclusively on discord but would be better served by alternatives.

Except it's not easier, there was an instance where a community had been using a discord channel as a file sharing platform for mods. An administrator was doing some housekeeping of the channels and accidentally deleted the entire chat history (which is easier to do than it sounds), and so irrevocably deleted all of the uploaded files, some of which were never recovered.