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Reddit's redesign could kill discussion subreddits

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Re: Reddit's redesign could kill discussion subreddits

#171

Post by lbotos »

2bitencryption wrote: post #168
StellarTabi wrote: post #161

Two reasons why Reddit isn't "digg-ing" their own grave right now: 1. This change is much smaller and less destructive than digg's big change (although the long term effects can be just as destructive). 2. When Digg's redesign caused an exodus, Reddit was extremely well known as "that ugly digg clone" and "this digg link was on Reddit yesterday". Reddit doesn't have a well known established "number two" the way digg…

You've painted a picture in my mind of Reddit as this massive blob connecting Discord, so-called "fringe communities", etc. It actually makes me appreciate Reddit a bit more -- it can be garbage, but it's also a bit of a centralized meeting place for so many smaller communities. Even if the bulk of those smaller communities doesn't take place on Reddit itself, they still flow through Reddit. Reddit is like the centra…

Right! I've always appreciated that through one login, I got the equivalent of basically endless forums. Sure, I do miss the "tight-knit" nature of the forums of the late 90's, but reddit still gives value.

Re: Reddit's redesign could kill discussion subreddits

#172

Post by msla »

2bitencryption wrote: post #168
StellarTabi wrote: post #161

Two reasons why Reddit isn't "digg-ing" their own grave right now: 1. This change is much smaller and less destructive than digg's big change (although the long term effects can be just as destructive). 2. When Digg's redesign caused an exodus, Reddit was extremely well known as "that ugly digg clone" and "this digg link was on Reddit yesterday". Reddit doesn't have a well known established "number two" the way digg…

You've painted a picture in my mind of Reddit as this massive blob connecting Discord, so-called "fringe communities", etc. It actually makes me appreciate Reddit a bit more -- it can be garbage, but it's also a bit of a centralized meeting place for so many smaller communities. Even if the bulk of those smaller communities doesn't take place on Reddit itself, they still flow through Reddit. Reddit is like the centra…

I dislike trying to talk about "The Reddit Community" for the same reason I'd dislike trying to talk about "The New York City Community" or "The Tokyo Community": You don't have a million-member community. You can talk about Dunbar's Number, you can talk about the simple fact nobody goes out and meets a million people even if they're all on the same website/within a half-mile radius of their home, but the result is the same.

It's possible to talk about "The Average Redditor" or "The Average New Yorker" or "The Average Tokyo Resident", because statistics isn't about community, but the whole reason Reddit has survived at the size it is is precisely because subreddits allow different people to have vastly different views of "what's on Reddit" based on subscription/unsubscription. This allows The_Donald and EnoughTrumpSpam and dozens of other communities which would fight like cats in a sack were they ever mixed to share the same service.

So Reddit isn't a community. It's a pre-made hosted platform to build a community meeting point that you can largely (or completely, via invitation-only private subreddits) insulate from all the other communities on the same platform.

Re: Reddit's redesign could kill discussion subreddits

#173

Post by TheBeardKing »

pknopf wrote: post #163
chaoticmass wrote: post #158

I miss being able to collapse comments by pressing the minus-sign button.

I'm not seeing that in the images I've seen so far, got a link? That would be a huge issue if they really did that. RES will probably step in and fix that.

You have to click the vertical line next to the comment which is a ridiculous change. The minus/plus signs were intuitive, now it's a line that switches to a plus sign.

Re: Reddit's redesign could kill discussion subreddits

#174

Post by noxToken »

chaoticmass wrote: post #158

I miss being able to collapse comments by pressing the minus-sign button.

The long bar (beneath the upvote/downvote buttons) that shows what level the current comment is at collapses comments by clicking it. Very unintuitive, and I only found it by accident.

Re: Reddit's redesign could kill discussion subreddits

#175

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #102
MisterTea wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As long as they don't totally lock computing down with Trusted Platform Modules and walled gardens and touch-only input, as long as we can still write Turing-complete code, we'll be the old men and women still being much faster and better at traversing the Internet clouds than the regular population. We'll be the last guerillas in the long-lost War on General Purpose Computing.

TPM isn’t about locking down machines - they’re about enabling the user (who is always in control) to establish a trust chain for software on the machine - and to serve as a secure store for cryptographic secrets so they become inaccessible from the rest of the system.

You can have lock-out without the TPM anyway - like the pre-Fingerprint reader iPhones.

Re: Reddit's redesign could kill discussion subreddits

#176

Post by mantas »

agumonkey wrote: post #141
mantas wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely didn't want to give impression that it's somehow worse. A well moderated board is lightyears ahead of a subreddit or, god forbid, FB group. Even half assed categorisation and search awesome. Today's forums could have proper full text search and pimped up moderation tools, possibly with some AI helpers on top.. Just thinking about it makes me drool.

I don't know if my interests shield me from bad subreddits but most of the one I glance at are fine, at worst they're just comatose but never toxic. I like reddit quite a bit, it has that weird organic value that overcome a lot of weirdness and subpar features. Still old boards were .. much more home like than most of the web 2.0 ever dreamed of.

Not that they're bad. There's definitely a lot of subreddits with a good charm. But they're PITA from information archive point of view. Browsing old threads is much harder than in classic BB. Thus people keep asking same question over and over again even more than in the old days :)

Hundreds-of-pages-over-a-decade historical threads don't happen on either of new platforms either :( Which is one of the lovely quirks of the old boards IMO.

Re: Reddit's redesign could kill discussion subreddits

#177

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

boobsbr wrote: post #152
baby wrote: post #63

A day before the re-design announcement I was explaining to a friend why Digg died and why Reddit would never dare re-designing their page. Oh boy was I wrong.

To me Digg died with the AACS censorship debacle. In hindsight, I understand Kevin Rose was trying to protect Digg from lawsuits that would effectively destroy the site, but the censorship did the same.

Digg died for me when they shifted the focus of their front-page from Technology and Headline News to more “mainstream” topics - eventually the frontoage was entirely NFL-related story links - this was a while after the AACS incident.

Re: Reddit's redesign could kill discussion subreddits

#178

Post by TeMPOraL »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #175
TeMPOraL wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as they don't totally lock computing down with Trusted Platform Modules and walled gardens and touch-only input, as long as we can still write Turing-complete code, we'll be the old men and women still being much faster and better at traversing the Internet clouds than the regular population. We'll be the last guerillas in the long-lost War on General Purpose Computing.

TPM isn’t about locking down machines - they’re about enabling the user (who is always in control) to establish a trust chain for software on the machine - and to serve as a secure store for cryptographic secrets so they become inaccessible from the rest of the system. You can have lock-out without the TPM anyway - like the pre-Fingerprint reader iPhones.

TPM technically isn't about locking users out, but will be (is) used this way - between enterprise customers and MAFIAA's desire for DRM, it's pretty much a given. It's a tool in the War on General Purpose Computing. Alone not enough to win it, and sure, theoretically useful for both sides, but for the enemies of general purpose computing it's an important cog in their war machine.

Re: Reddit's redesign could kill discussion subreddits

#179

Post by dkasper »

notatoad wrote: post #117
iampims wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe they are no longer owned by Condé Nast.

Correct, sort of. They are still owned by Conde Nast's parent company

Reddit is not owned or controlled by Conde Nast or Advance Publications anymore, however they are still a large shareholder.
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