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Comment by scrooched_moose | Hacker News Reader

It seems like they learned a lot of lessons from the Digg redesign and are being a lot smarter (or insidious...) about the transition. Digg rolled out massive changes overnight which caused a sharp, immediate rebuke.

Reddit has been slowly rolling out changes for a couple years, and at least so far are leaving the old interface available at old.reddit.com. The redesign is as bad or worse in every way; but it's so slow there hasn't been the organized revolt.

Reddit also has the advantage of doing it during a major UI shift - it's easy to justify design changes when everyone is heading for mobile browsers anyway. Digg didn't have that excuse.

It's funny though, I actually really like the new Digg. It's nothing like what it used to be, but it's a nice curated list of interesting articles, major headlines, and tech news.

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> Reddit also has the advantage of doing it during a major UI shift - it's easy to justify design changes when everyone is heading for mobile browsers anyway. Digg didn't have that excuse.

On the contrary, Digg’s UI changes were happening when “Web 2.0”-hype was peaking, including bold new web-design trends - many sites were actively redesigning themselves with a brighter theme and better visual-effects: this was around 2007-2010 when IE6-support was starting to be discounted by tech-oriented websites so they could start using new CSS features and alpha-channel PNG images that IE7, Firefox, and Opera supported.

I argue that the changes to their recommendation algorithm - and the introduction - and eventual promotion - of mainstream news (especially sports news) meant that their early users: technology news readers, lost interest in the site. The redesign of the site was a contributing factor, but a bad redesign is nowhere near as damaging to a site’s popularity than it losing relevance to its core user base.

Digg's decline began before Web2.0 and any redesign - it was mainly a result of the "bury brigades" killing anything that was remotely interesting through downvotes and leaving it to be a dull feed of mainstream news links, which got progressively worse over time.

Reddit has the bury brigades too in some of the more popular subreddits (the ones which you used to be subscribed to by default), but you can avoid them by only participating in the subreddits that interest you. This is where Reddit is a huge improvement over what digg was, but I wouldn't say it's immune to failure. The more they try to be the arbiters of what people ought to find interesting, the less people are going to put the effort into interacting with the platform as a whole.

5 mods control 92 of the top 500 subreddits. Those bury brigades are real, but instead they just remove what they don't want seen or promote content they do want seen with huge influence in the most popular subreddits. The same issue with Digg power users having too much control (among other reasons it failed) is also apparent on Reddit.

https://i.redd.it/bfhl8s6o2fn41.png

Yep. Check out r/redditminusmods

On average, 80-100% of the content of the frontpage is removed by mods every day.

> It seems like they learned a lot of lessons from the Digg redesign and are being a lot smarter (or insidious...) about the transition

+1. They learned how to boil the frog much better. Note how the top comments are recommending old.reddit as a valid option. While old is specifically there as an A/B test of sorts to prevent the most vocal people from leaving.

It's all quite amazing in a way...

I just don't get what is taking reddit so long. It has been a long time and at least once a week the "new" version forgets you are logged in and won't let you log in. Functionality from the old version like managing multireddits is still missing. Yet they are adding things like chat and the reddit public access network thing that no one seems to be using. Not to mention the things that are just bad about the new layout like how everything is hidden behind an extra click now.

Eh, I'm not sure I follow your reasoning. As you say, the reason there hasn't been a revolt is because the old UI is still up and working, but no matter how gradually they update the new one, the day they get rid of the old UI, there will be a revolt.

I guess the plan is that enough people will have started with the new UI and have never known the old one that even with the old people leaving, the site may still remain alive?

Yes, I wouldn't be surprised if a huge chunk of reddit users have never even seen the old UI before. Most users probably use the official app these days.

I recently switched from the new to the old UI simply because the new UI became very laggy after scrolling for some time, sometimes taking a second to react to clicks.

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