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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

Their new design is comically bad at this point. I just loaded up Reddit full-screen on my desktop with a 2560x1440 resolution. I saw 3 posts above the fold in the default non-signed in format. Those 3 posts occupied the center 650px of the screen. There was a column to the right that took up a little over 300px and contained two ads among other site navigation stuff. The other 1600px of horizontal screen real estate was completely empty. I get the idea of mobile first design, but the new design is actively hostile to anyone using a screen larger than a tablet.

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> I get the idea of mobile first design, but the new design is actively hostile to anyone using a screen larger than a tablet.

Don't worry their mobile design is actively hostile to users too, you're getting the full experience. The mobile design also wastes a huge chunk of space pestering you to install the app. And the official app seems to have been built by the same clueless designers, so you need third party apps just to get a decent experience.

I'm starting to think I may have Stockholm syndrome, I shouldn't have to jump through so many hoops to get a usable experience, I'm probably better off voting with my feet.

It's not as hard to leave as you think. Just stop using it for a week. Once you look at it with fresh eyes you'll realize it for the cesspool that it is.

Just choose the Subreddits you chhose more carefully, and it won't be. I subscribe to a number of cheerful, friendly and useful subreddits, and that's it.

The only issue being that there are a number of small, focused subs that contain the best information and discussion on certain topics on the interwebs. I don't give a fuck about the site itself, but the people active in say r/machinelearning and a number of other subs are incredibly valuable to me.

There would have to be a mass exodus of entire subs for this to change. Which probably won't happen until the situation becomes untenable. I don't believe reddit's leadership, despite the harebrained ideas they have shown so far, would Digg themselves into such a hole.

Reddit offers three advantages over a traditional message board: voting, post previews, and a good search experience. All of those could be replicated elsewhere.

Their main advantage is the community, that's the hard part to replicate.

I don't think we're talking about the same reddit, in my experience their search engine has consistently been awful! On different occasions I was unable to retrieve a post I almost remembered the exact title of via the reddit search engine, but found it quickly through google with the "inurl:reddit.com/r/subreddit" option

Something must have changed in the last 2yrs or so since I was last active on the site. The search experience used to be notoriously bad and even non-existent ( If I remember correctly for a while the search box was just a link to a filtered google search). I've also come to look at voting as a negative feature. Nowadays I mostly use twitter for what I used to use reddit for - to keep up with current news. Twitter has its faults but one of its better features imo is being able to read tweets of every different kind of point of view with equal weight, without the filter of upvotes/downvotes by the majority mob.

*edit - I should say, without the filter of downvotes, since twitter has likes which is the equivalent of upvotes.

search has sucked from inception until now, if you want to find anything on reddit, even a post from today that dropped of the front page, you are better off using google and "site:reddit.com" to find it.

I still haven’t found a subreddit that’s better than the other existing communities for that topic. Can you list some examples of subtedddits that are _the_ forum to go to for their domain?

/r/celiac, /r/achalasia, /r/citypop, /r/deathgrips, /r/denver (and Portland, Austin, Santa Fe, Albuquerque... possibly some of these cities have bigger forums on FB, but it depends on your demographic. I can talk to 70 year olds about Albuquerque in the 60s on Facebook, but not necessarily what’s happening at Meow Wolf or with car thefts around Nob Hill or the electronic music show next week).

Reddit is the primary forum for obscure topics that don’t have large enough followings to support other communities, or have a demographic that overlaps enough with reddit that everyone just uses reddit.

For the last year or so I've just pulled a few niche subreddits into Inoreader via RSS so I can still get the value of the smaller subreddits without falling in to /all when bored.

Don't worry, they're also starting to limit third party apps to force you to use their lovely app.

That would solve the Stockholm syndrome and make it easy to go cold turkey.

The few subreddits I follow have also become hostile towards users wrt participation. People are banned frequently and questionable accounts vote in easily recognizable patterns.

I'm not saying there's a concerted effort (by Reddit or 3rd parties) to sway public opinion -- but it certainly feels that way.

And yes, the site has become horrible for usability.

I really wish someone with more free time than me would combine a bunch of current buzzwords (distributed, blockchain, whatever) and cook up something that was easy to use but still free from the tyranny of special interest and / or profit.

That's not to say that they shouldn't get rich in the process, just that they should be building something incorruptible.

I'll donate $1000 to a crypto address if others are willing to match.

Um...are you looking for steemit.com?

I was thinking about building a blockchain-backed, distributed forum like reddit alot lately. I haven't started anything yet, but if somebody reads this and is interested in building anything alike, or needs an helping hand, PM me.

Remember to keep mods (volunteers who curate a subreddit) separate from admistrators (employees with legal and $ constraints). They usually have no contact with each other.

So if you got banned from one sub for some reason, it was the mods. The beauty of reddit is, you're free to take your friends and, in 5 minutes, make another sub which you guys mod. Perhaps you'll outgrow whatever sub you're ditching.

> So if you got banned from one sub for some reason, it was the mods. The beauty of reddit is, you're free to take your friends and, in 5 minutes, make another sub which you guys mod. Perhaps you'll outgrow whatever sub you're ditching.

The problem is that you lose most of the community. Starting a new sub is easy, growing one is hard.

This is why you make it possible to fork a community, retain the content and as much or as little of the moderation decisions as you agree with.

> * The few subreddits I follow have also become hostile towards users wrt participation. People are banned frequently and questionable accounts vote in easily recognizable patterns.*

Which subreddits?

>People are banned frequently and questionable accounts vote in easily recognizable patterns.

Reddit makes it way too easy for bots to post and act like real humans. It's also way too easy to run multiple accounts to outweigh everyone else's votes and make a post seem more popular than it is.

Because of that, many mods are quick to ban suspicious-looking accounts, because on the subs where they don't, the conversation quickly becomes bots parroting the same thing over and over.

Reddit is gamed to shit by god-knows-who-all, and you can't trust anything on there that isn't a meme. The quick and easy answer is to forcibly mark bot posts as being made by a bot, which reddit won't do for whatever reason.

There's notabug.io, which is a federated link aggregator/discussion platform, has optional anonymity, and uses a PoW voting system (which allows for anonymous votes).

There's some interesting elements to the design, such as peers not needing to be in total agreement about the state of the world, so content can be replicated or moderated/censored/blocked at the whim of each peer, and each peer can build their own unique features on top of the same datasets (eg, different tagging or voting systems on different peers, while still working with the same underlying content).

> I really wish someone with more free time than me would combine a bunch of current buzzwords (distributed, blockchain, whatever) and cook up something that was easy to use but still free from the tyranny of special interest and / or profit.

Enter my project: https://notabug.io

But honestly at this point in its development code contributions are more important than crypto if you can spare it.

https://github.com/notabugio/notabug

I’m doing this, and I’ve been working on it full time since February. I don’t want to spam HN so I won’t copy / paste the link again, but I’ve posted it on this thread once, take a look if you’re interested.

>I just loaded up Reddit full-screen on my desktop with a 2560x1440 resolution

do any websites look good when you do that?

There are three views. Have you tried compact mode?

I would never actually use the site like that. However defaults are important and that is the default view for a user who is not signed in. That design is so bad that I almost wonder if it is a dark pattern to get people to sign up/in just so they can save a preference to avoid that view.

I agree that half the content being ads is pretty bad, but what makes the expanded view as a default so bad? I don't like it myself but e.g. 9gag is super popular and it uses this style.

I want to scan the headlines with my eyeballs, not the scroll bar.

I can't stand the expanded view, so I'm 100% on your side, just saying that the actual majority might not prefer it and consider it even bad.

It contains almost no relevant information

> defaults are important and that is the default view for a user who is not signed in.

This is a good point. I never have my browser save cookies / cache information between sessions. Now when I visit reddit I need to tick the "change view" box every single time?

Those were only added after the initial wave of criticism on the new/default design.

Thanks! I never even noticed you could do that when they switched to the new design.

it reminds me of mobile as I experience Reddit via the Apolloapp and wholly unsuited for desktop browsing. now you can pick one of the three display styles to get close to original but even then it is a slower experience

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