Hacker News Reader

Comment by radiorental | Hacker News Reader

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 clearly not inline with the current Reddit usage, this is not the approach to get to that goal.

I am struggling to think of big drops like this working, anyone?

View on HN

> 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 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...

"It's basically the same site, just with minor colour and layout changes."

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.

Talking about gmail...

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/04/gmail-com-redesign-l...

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.

Advance owns more than 50% of the stock. That pretty much gives them control, doesn't it?

As I recall, Conde nast no longer controls reddit

To be fair, they are only "dropping" it on a small subset of users for the time being.

I read 1%, which is a whole lot. But the previous poster's (very valid, I find) point is not to roll out a vast redesign slowly to all users, but rather small changes (possibly with testing on small groups beforehand).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com