IAmA Ex-Digg Employee
reddit.com
reddit.com
Wow. I always thought Digg was a poorly designed site and thought reddit was brilliant with a minimalist bent.
I suspect it means something significant if a site can slowly gain traction over a long period of time, versus a flashy site that can seem like the next big thing for a week.
Easy come, easy go.
Their fall, still, couldn't be choreographed better: focus on short-term products and grand, sweeping changes; neglect of the community and the emerging competitive landscape.
Yes, but I bet the Digg crew paid more attention to such sites than to reddit.
And power users use http://redditenhancementsuite.com/ suite, and http://userstyles.org/styles/browse/reddit
But at the end up the day it's about reading and not decoration, changing the UI would be a disaster of Digg proportions.
Here's one example. On my computer, using reddit in fullscreen means that I have to deal with article titles and comments that span 1000+ horizontal pixels, whereas Digg constrains the width of its comments to 600 pixels wide. The same can be said for Hacker News.
I absolutely cannot stand this because reading text on screen at that width creates a tremendous amount of cognitive friction. Plus, there's no easy solution to this problem. If I snap the window to take up half my screen, the dumb (un-hideable) sidebar ends up eating most of that screen space. That means I have to manually resize my browser window to force a width that makes the site readable to me. I hate this about reddit.
This is a just a drop in the bucket of nitpicks I have with reddit. I use it because it entertains me, but I'm not a fan of its cluttered, low contrast, haphazardly designed UI.
I wrote a dotjs[1] script[2] that solves exactly this by letting you toggle the sidebar on and off.
[1]: http://defunkt.io/dotjs/ [2]: https://github.com/timothyandrew/.js/blob/master/reddit.com....
EDIT: Formatting
Perhaps you could argue it doesn't fit the "minimalist" design aesthetic. Which as popularly understood is not itself the embodiment of the philosophical concept of minimalism.
I have a theme for HN with this:
@-moz-document domain("news.ycombinator.com") {
.default {
max-width: 45em;
text-align: justify;
}
}
I don't really go to Reddit anymore, but you can use:
.usertext-body { max-width: 45em; }
.side { display: none }
It's also an amazing lack of understanding the competitive marketspace you're operating in.
The reason digg took off was because of two things, content + community. reddit also had those things (with an emphasis on communit(ies)). The digg team just simply didn't understand that they had the second piece. They thought they just had content + comments.
If you look at all of the efforts during Digg's lifecycle, from Digg labs to the redesigns, there was a clear lack of understanding of the need for the community part. From the endless lab projects showing submissions (content) in different ways, to the almost anarchic gamesmanship of gangs of submitters acting as de facto rule makers in the absence of a community guiding presence from digg (and digg's lack of understanding why these kinds of user cliques are bad), to the v4 debacle which was purely a content focused effort...digg never quite got the + community part...which reddit was simply designed to excel at.
That was the ex-employee's view of how a few users can ruin it for the rest of us. Something to keep in mind anytime someone complains about the moderators on Hacker News or Stack Overflow.