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Comment by arkh | Hacker News Reader

> design is over valued

I would be more specific. Designing so things look good is over valued. Designing so things are simple to use the first time but don't restrict the user later on are under valued.

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All the redesigns look Facebook-ish. Which make me wonder... Do the designers understand what people love about Reddit? The new interface looks void of information and way too distracting...

> All the redesigns look Facebook-ish.

This isn't by chance... Reddit is actively pushing themselves towards being the next Facebook, down to the whole "deprioritize subreddits/emphasize profile pages and groups of friends" mechanic. They just hope by boiling the frog slowly enough, people won't realize what's happening around them.

I strongly suspect they are aiming to sell sometime soon. The new rules, the new redesign, the attempt to facebook-ify the site.

Sell to whom? They already were bought in 2006 by Conde Nast

They want to IPO and cash out. They have explicitly stated that this is their goal.

Even this year's April Fool's event was called Circle of Trust and leans heavily on having groups of friends. Which, of course, sounds of so familiar.

Decentralized reddit using open protocols with each instance being a subreddit is going to be the next big step in decentralization.

It's about uniting forums without forums giving up their power.

Why do the instances need to be subs? It seems to me you just need NNTP extended to support voting and a few other features (most—probably all—of which could just be messages with new defined headers and, in some cases, no actual message body.)

I was thinking the other day. What if there was a browser extension that pulled in reddit/subreddit comment threads a la Alientube for the site or article you were viewing/searching. Literally anywhere you went on the internet for any hyperlink, you could check and see if there is a comment thread for that url. Decentralize the comment threads and related metadata onto something like IPFS and you have reddit but internet wide and you aren't limited to reddit's terrible search bar.

See this is why I don't do stuff like decentralized Reddit. What I proposed was my first idea but this is much better.

I wonder if decentralized voting for NNTP could actually be a good use case for some kind of block chain.

I wouldn't say these redesigns actually look very good... they're just easy. Maybe not to implement, but easy to imagine, easy to accept, and easy to make strict guidelines for.

And then you look other mediums of design, and you realize its only the software UI weenies who pull this out and think its something to be proud of. There's a reason you can slap bootstrap onto any website and have a "good" design; the result has nothing to do with the website itself.

> Designing so things are simple to use the first time but don't restrict the user later on are under valued.

Which is exactly what I'd say they had and are now throwing away.

and much harder to implement correctly

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