101–110 of 286 posts
Can somebody please summarize what has changed? Maybe I don't use Reddit enough, but I just refreshed one of the subreddits that I like, and I can't find a difference. Possibly a caching issue?
Mobile phones. Again. It's always mobile phones that ruin good websites these days. They optimise for swipe, scroll and tap. Look, like, emoji. They don't optimise for text. In fact they are increasingly hostile to it. The Tinderfication of online dating has been a depressing race to the bottom. The internet was never going to be as great as we thought it was. No other technology has been. Folks thought the telegraph…
It's okay. You, like me, are starting to realize that our way of computing is becoming obsolete. How many kids are using keyboard and mouse vs touch screens? They grow up thinking "this is how you use a computer". To them the mouse/keyboard ruins the whole touch(mobile) experience. One day we'll be the old men yelling at internet clouds while sitting behind an old PC or some kind of open source terminal running an op…
We'll be the last guerillas in the long-lost War on General Purpose Computing.
I started using reddit in 2008. Although I doubt it was intentional reddit was a refuge from the "Best viewed with Javascript" modern web for many years. It worked just fine to browse and read with no JS enabled and was very snappy and low resource usage that way. Sure, you had to toggle JS back on to vote or post but that was easy enough. I left just before they pushed out the redesign due their increased censorship…
It's 2018 and you're criticizing a site for not running well with JS disabled. You're the one actively deciding to make websites harder to use, why should they design the site for you?
This benefits more than just one tiny group of users: it might also aid disabled users and accessibility software (not to mention the developers of that software), security nuts, people who turn js off to improve performance on low-spec machines (it's 2018 here, but more than a few countries have a four (or even three!) figure GDP/capita, so their machines aren't going to be 2018 machines. This is just off the top of my head, how many other groups might there be that would benefit?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well yes, that's what I meant. I keep forgetting there are still mobile devices with LCD screens...
Which makes AMOLED still not old enough to enter the general consciousness of the designers. They're optimizing for the screens they (and everyone they know) are used to.
>The iPhone X is the first iPhone to use an OLED display
Shocking, actually.
Mobile phones. Again. It's always mobile phones that ruin good websites these days. They optimise for swipe, scroll and tap. Look, like, emoji. They don't optimise for text. In fact they are increasingly hostile to it. The Tinderfication of online dating has been a depressing race to the bottom. The internet was never going to be as great as we thought it was. No other technology has been. Folks thought the telegraph…
It's okay. You, like me, are starting to realize that our way of computing is becoming obsolete. How many kids are using keyboard and mouse vs touch screens? They grow up thinking "this is how you use a computer". To them the mouse/keyboard ruins the whole touch(mobile) experience. One day we'll be the old men yelling at internet clouds while sitting behind an old PC or some kind of open source terminal running an op…
This is also as far as I know still true for a lot of other productivity-type uses of computers -- even though mobile and tablets are also used in some of this space, they often seem more auxiliary. Most of the serious professional tools for, say, business (eg spreadsheets, accounting, inventory, etc.) or even artistic uses (music, photo editing, etc.) also are primarily keyboard / mouse oriented. Tablet oriented tools definitely exist (especially in the art space), but a lot of times its not a primary use case, except perhaps in communication tools.
Mobile space is a walled garden, designed more simply for limited real estate and touch, with more difficulty to poke around (there is no real equivalent in the mobile world to open a web site, hit F12, and poke around). That's fine -- PCs / laptops haven't disappeared, and if a kid showed an interest in programming, you'd get them one. :)
Now, the original poster may have been referring to the new world of social. I did more enjoy the long form of social (eg blogs) that popped up in the 00s. Versus the current social world, dominated by only a few firms that are highly motivated to manipulate your feed, tweak your emotions, and optimize the dispersion of ads (and other low-quality tabloid junk). It's my "old man yells at cloud" pet peeve, I suppose. Not exactly a mobile device problem, though.
I started using reddit in 2008. Although I doubt it was intentional reddit was a refuge from the "Best viewed with Javascript" modern web for many years. It worked just fine to browse and read with no JS enabled and was very snappy and low resource usage that way. Sure, you had to toggle JS back on to vote or post but that was easy enough. I left just before they pushed out the redesign due their increased censorship…
I gotta say though:
>increased censorship
That's ridiculous. They're "censoring" all kinds of bottom-of-the-barrel racist and disturbing shit which simply should not be on a mainstream website (which reddit simply is now). I don't see any idealistic reason to keep /r/fatpeoplehate. The "everything that's legal" ideal is cute for some edgy website you create out of college, but a platform of reddit's size simply gives too much room for content to fall on the wrong side of the line.
Maybe the purpose of the redesign is something like monetization? Or maybe they are just out of touch and by the time they really understood the community’s point of view, the decisions had been made, so the Reddit employees tasked with handling the community response can’t really say or do much.
Top tier sites like reddit should not drop large, disruptive, releases like this. Take Amazon for example. If they went from the design 5-7 years ago straight to the current design, there would be uproar, Stock price dip etc. The incremental approach allows the site owner to both roll back bad ideas but also condition users into where the design is heading. (Correction: not Conde Nast) The owner, has a plan, which is…
Gmail has done major overhauls all in one go. So has Dropbox. Google calendars. Google earth. Apple's main site. Most newspaper's sites. Bitbucket. Facebook has had several. All of these have irritated some portion of users who decried the death of the product, yet eventually people get used to it. I think it works more often than not.
And if we went suddenly from Amazon of five years ago[1] to the Amazon of today I don't think there would be that much of an uproar. It's basically the same site, just with minor colour and layout changes.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20130316112319/http://www.amazon...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's 2018 and you're criticizing a site for not running well with JS disabled. You're the one actively deciding to make websites harder to use, why should they design the site for you?
Bad engineering in 2018 is still bad engineering. JS can be used to enhance the experience, and even build things otherwise impossible in the browser, and it's totally justified. But taking the newest, shinest web application framework and turning what's a tree of regular web documents into a web application, with data unaccessible if you don't run the entirety of its JS? That's just wrong.
The protocol you describe, just a bare tree of text links, already exists as Gopher. People mostly stopped using that.
Reddit is terrible for discussion anyway. You can't have a discussion when people can "downvote" your post. Nothing of value has been lost here. I say that as someone who used reddit heavily until about a month ago when I kicked the addiction.
Weirdly enough, I just downvoted you because I disagree. Not sure what to deduce from that.
At this point, the only reason I still hold a (read only) Reddit account is so I can turn implicit censorship like thresholding and front page blocks off. HN, unlike reddit, still has value as a discussion medium, but I wish that "showdead" didn't make the posts unreadable.