131–140 of 286 posts
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.
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…
> I am struggling to think of big drops like this working, anyone? 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…
The most dramatic change has been to "community" features. Amazon feels it is enough of a monopoly now that it now longer has to attract customers through the ability to discuss things. The discussion boards were shut down, and similarly the ability to leave a comment under someone's product review was restructured so that that feature no longer serves to let people maintain a lively conversation among themselves about the author or musician. Many listings now only show by default reviews from customers who actually brought the product; this was done to tackle the problem of shill reviewers, but it also eviscerated the community that had popped up to share their feelings on even library loans because for nearly two decades Amazon had let anyone review and discuss books and music.
The page to see your review history has been changed so that it is now an infinite scroll. While infinite scroll is a very popular design choice these days, I can’t help but wonder if Amazon also wanted to make it difficult for the reviewers with 1000+ reviews to easily move their content to another site.
From reading Reddit threads about the redesign: pretty much everyone hates it, especially Reddit’s most passionate users, who have been very articulate, consistent, and aligned about exactly what they don’t like, and Reddit just keeps brushing them off and dismissing their point of view. Maybe the purpose of the redesign is something like monetization? Or maybe they are just out of touch and by the time they really u…
Of course it's about monetization. There's a difference between how Reddit-the-company (and its investors) view the site, and how its users do. It's like with cafés - visitors likes them quiet, and would very much enjoy having an electrical outlet near the table (to charge up phone) and even free Wi-Fi. But cafés aren't in business of making peoples' life better and more enjoyable, they're in business of selling coff…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't take a lot of genius, time, or money to set a link w/ url parameters or use a standard html form for e.g. upvoting or comment submission, and then override that with javascript for fancier UI / AJAX / avoid redirects, etc -- i.e., extra polish, rather than it being the only option and the site just becomes nonfunctional instead of degrading gracefully. This benefits more than just one tiny group of users:…
You're thinking as a developer and not as a business. A website that works perfectly well for 99% of visitors and adds the pizazz to keep them on the site is the goal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Weirdly enough, I just downvoted you because I disagree. Not sure what to deduce from that.
That people carry the toxic "make this post go away because I don't like it" mindset everywhere, even when they're explicitly asked not to? 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.
Here you go: https://openuserjs.org/scripts/kennethrapp/Hacker_News_Text_...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm with you on the JS stuff, the redesign screams "I want to be an app!" so desperately, I'm seriously considering leaving after a good 8 years on the site as well. Everything has that Javascript-delay on it, like it takes 0.5 seconds to click anything, scroll anything, etc. I gotta say though: >increased censorship That's ridiculous. They're "censoring" all kinds of bottom-of-the-barrel racist and disturbing shit w…
> That's ridiculous. They're "censoring" all kinds of bottom-of-the-barrel racist and disturbing shit They've also banned people legally arranging sales of alcohol, tobacco & firearms.
They're just covering their asses; it's not possible for them to watch every exchange so they have to ban all of it unfortunately.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
PhpBB or vBulletin reincarnations?
Actually I wouldn't mind, I miss the spirit of these boards. phpbb was hell, but it seems a lot of php things are now based on clean modules (even though a quick googling sheds doubts on the status of phpbb over symfony modules)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm with you on the JS stuff, the redesign screams "I want to be an app!" so desperately, I'm seriously considering leaving after a good 8 years on the site as well. Everything has that Javascript-delay on it, like it takes 0.5 seconds to click anything, scroll anything, etc. I gotta say though: >increased censorship That's ridiculous. They're "censoring" all kinds of bottom-of-the-barrel racist and disturbing shit w…
> That's ridiculous. They're "censoring" all kinds of bottom-of-the-barrel racist and disturbing shit They've also banned people legally arranging sales of alcohol, tobacco & firearms.
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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
At the risk of snark I don't have a clear way around, your definition of "good engineering" appears to be the same one that thinks a modern toilet is no better than a hole in the ground. Nobody that pays for developer time in 2018 is going to optimize their site for people that go out of their way to willfully turn off part of the stack. It's not gonna happen. Effort for no reward. The protocol you describe, just a b…