At least Reddit had it's massive downward spiral years ago, no one can blame their current website layout on this.
I first realised this back in the 1990s when shitty default monitor resolution and refresh rate would literally inflict pain (headaches and eyestrain).
MS Windows 95 / 98 shipped with a default of 800x600@60Hz. This was on CRTs, many viewed under office flourescent lighting, which gave rise to a bloody awful flicker that people mistakenly attemtped to correct with "glare screens" and other useless crud.
The solution was simply to crank up refresh rate slightly. Bumping up resolution also gave more useful area and clearer, easier-to-read fonts. (This was also before Cleartype / sub-pixel rendering.)
And yet something like 90-95% of systems monitored ... somehow (possibly an early Web tool) revealed 800x600, and I believe 60 Hz refresh. This on systems which could easily be bumped to 1024x768 or better.
And this was literally a click away off the desktop.
Lesson Younger Me learned: users won't change any default.
So:
- Pick really good defaults. Autoconfigure for best experience if possible.
- If you want to cram things down users' throats, you can just change the default experience, especially on a SAAS app.
Well, on a 14 inch CRT with no DPI scaling it’s debatable whether a higher resolution was ‘better’.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130321082317/http://www.bbc.co...
Font selection dialogue: https://www.bbc.co.uk/staticarchive/0c3b043fb25425d17444ff8e...
https://neurologicexam.med.utah.edu/adult/cases/windows_disp...
The effect would still be finer resolution AND readable fonts. Less eyestrain.
Unlike, say, on present-generation MacOS, which does effectively limit upper-end display resolution.
It's possible that standards were still too rough, but the statistic left a strong impression on me. I believe the general concept is validated elsewhere as well --- I'm pretty sure Jacob Nielsen has a similar finding.
You can have the old UI with the base site given the correct settings/cookies.
old. and RES is my method as well
There's also https://i.reddit.com which is a similar but slightly different experience.
EDIT: per commenters below correcting my mistake, this is "the same" experience AFAWCT
Often .compact and i.reddit.com will interchange in my experience. (I forget which switches to which.)
Turns out I had at some point set an 80% zoom while visiting there on this particular browser. Sorry for the confusion!
https://old.reddit.com/r/beta/comments/8lv96l/feedback_pleas...
I would love to get Dang's perspective but it would be difficult for him to say anything.
But more specifically there is no nexus between the decline, or behaviour, and a desire to IPO and realize profit. Not all things co-relate, they can be contemporaneous and un-related.
Whatever Dan has, and he has a lot of "it" -it includes tolerance and forbearance, and an ability not to buy into the paranoia at large. I don't think he'd be part of an IPO decision logic which went "yea it's boring: lets profit and run" -there might be a "profit" and there might be a consequential "run" and there might be "its boring" but I don't personally see them as causally connected.
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
The actual quote has a bunch of links that I worth looking at. People were echo'ing your comment 7 years ago.
As to your comment itself, I don't think HN is degrading that fast? The low-quality "meme" responses usually get downvoted and while polarization is alive and well, most of it leads to interesting arguments so it's not necessarily a bad thing.
I've only been here for 2-3 years though so maybe it was different before.
I feel pretty strong about this. Usually, if I’m not convinced, I wouldn’t put it in such strong terms.
A few years ago, trying to have the same conversations on reddit, everything degraded into personal attacks eventually.
Sometimes things get flagged incorrectly, but usually within a few days issues get fixed. Sometimes you see a flurry of unneeded downvotes.. but scores don't matter much and things get worked out.
My sarcastic comments generally score poorly, my helpful ones do well - which is about the desired outcome.
The goal is not to prevent inflammatory takes or have scores reflect some ideal of values, just to keep the signal above the noise threshold.
I still get odd emails from other HNers and still have interesting conversations.