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Maybe they don't want to fix what's not broken. If their usage continues going up at acceptable rates year after year, then maybe they have all the features the

Maybe they don't want to fix what's not broken. If their usage continues going up at acceptable rates year after year, then maybe they have all the features they need right now. I have witnessed more than a few properties decline after site owners complicated the UI with stupid features barely anyone was asking for just for the sake of working on new stuff.

pmoriarty 9y ago
You can't even edit the title of a Reddit post. That's been known for years and nothing's been done about it.
- redthrowaway 9y ago
  That's almost certainly by design. Just as with tweets, it would be massively abused.
  - kalleboo 9y ago
    Yeah I'm pretty sure mods can...
  - adventured 9y ago
    Might make sense to make it optional per subreddit. Some communities are far less filled with trolls than others. Locked after N hours or minutes is also a potential solution elaboration that could give subreddits flexibility (on/off, if on then lock after N time options). Default it to locked. One more layer would be to enable only for established accounts and or based on the account behavior historically, and so on.
    - sillysaurus3 9y ago
      Please no. We've seen how much mods can be trusted when given toys. Any true Scotsman redditor will express their hatred for how often posts on /r/all are summarily locked by a mod. Often the justification is "lol no" or "I'm not spending my saturday policing the modqueue." Which is valid, but sucks for the 300k people that have to deal with it.
  - johnfn 9y ago
    Ages ago an admin said "yeah it would make sense for post titles to be edited within the first x minutes of making one", an incredibly low-hanging fruit that has been requested since forever. It still hasn't been added.
    - rickhanlonii 9y ago
      I can think of a few problems with this just off the top of my head: The first x minutes of a post are _heavily_ influential in the success of the post, editing after allows you to hijack successful titles for gain (spam) For large subs, posts only hit the top of /new for x minutes (for small x), editing after is basically useless if it's not successful in that time Mods patrol the /new queue as posts come in, allowing editing will complicate moderation which is already a difficult job
      - johnfn 9y ago
        I mean whatever your concerns are, the admins/developers of Reddit are okay with this change.
        orf 9y ago
        where ok, or at least one was in a comment posted 'ages ago'. That's very different.
      - squeaky-clean 9y ago
        At least allow mods to change titles. Even that isn't possible.
    - shalmanese 9y ago
      The reddit button for submitting a post still says "save". I brought it up to a reddit designer last year and apparently there's some mountain of technical debt that would make changing the label a week long task so its languished at the bottom of the priority queue for many years now.
  - CM30 9y ago
    I'm sorry, but this reason for not having title editing (and post editing on other sites like Twitter and GameFAQs) always bothered me to hell and back. Yes it could be misused, but go on any forum where you can edit titles or post content and look at how often such a feature actually does get abused. It pretty much never happens. Most people (like 99.99% of them) either use the functionality how it was intended or don't bother editing at all. I don't see the point of limiting a feature because about 0.1% of the userbase might theoretically abuse it in a certain situation. It's basically the social media/forum equivalent of the trolley problem and automated cars. Something that's going to happen very rarely at the most but draws a lot of discussion about 'what ifs'.
- fictioncircle 9y ago
  To be fair, doing so would require a bunch of cache invalidations and they've always barely had enough money to limp on to the next investor. It would also likely be abused. Its quite possible many features simply would raise their costs by .X% and therefore were impossible for that reason.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  I'd prefer a different approach: a true draft / submission cycle for more substantive works. This starts approaching a blogging or CMS system, but then, Reddit is already damned close to that, though with a larger community than most same. Under this model: * An item would be submitted. * If approvals / edit / drafting is set, it goes to a submission or edit queue. * A set of mods/editors would provide feedback and/or make edits (which of these apply depending on the sub). * The item is then submitted. This would allow for adjusting titles, self-text, formatting, etc. I'm not claiming this is something all subs would want, but some would (and I've a few specific ones in mind). For now, the fix is to delete the submission entirely and submit it anew. I've certainly done that within my own sub(s).
- Medaber 9y ago
  You can't enable this. Too much abuse. 1. Make a post "Who likes Ice Cream!?" 2. Wait for responses and upvotes. 3. Change post to "Who likes pedophilia?"
beager 9y ago
Also for context, Reddit found a lot of steam when Digg suffered a mass exodus based on seismic product shifts. I wouldn't be surprised if Reddit was consciously and unconsciously averse to that kind of mutation.
- hn_throwaway_99 9y ago
  Kudos to reddit for not following the trend of "lets redesign the site just because we can" ethos. Not only did the product shift kill Digg, I also think it led to the earlier downfall of Slashdot. I may be dating myself, but I remember how each revision of Slashdot made it less usable for me. The "cleaner, minimalist, lots of whitespace" designs that were in vogue actually made it much harder to navigate comment threads quickly and see good content easily while avoiding the chaff. Even today I prefer to use the desktop version of Reddit on my phone, because I can just go through content threads a lot faster than compared to their mobile site.
  - gtm1260 9y ago
    I agree! It feels like a good portion of the time when I see a new feature on a website it seems like it only exists because all the people needed to create it are employed at the company and we can't have them just sitting around all day.
    - FiveDegrees 9y ago
      I'm looking at you, Slack.
      - paulddraper 9y ago
        You mean Facebook?
      - hn_throwaway_99 9y ago
        Yes! Slack is dangerously close to the point of "every new feature makes it worse", while basic features that should work (scrolling to earlier in a channel that reloads history feels like a roulette wheel) stay broken.
colordrops 9y ago
But there are several issues they don't bother fixing either. They could at least address those.
JosephLark 9y ago
> Maybe they don't want to fix what's not broken Unfortunately, this doesn't appear to be the case. They haven't been hiding that they're gearing up for a major redesign. From what I've seen so far, I'm not at all excited for it. They launched user profiles recently, and it's an uninspired blocky design with way too much unnecessary whitespace for a desktop site. Also, even on desktop there is noticeable Javascript induced lag and content pop in. Although the rest of the profile page tries to look like a standard reddit page, it's actually entirely done with react and the subreddit/notification bar at the top has the same lag and content pop in. They're also hiring mainly for React frontend/Node.js backend, so I'm worried the entire redesign is going to be low density and slow.
- Roritharr 9y ago
  I'm in a weird position there. I've recently decided on react for most of our frontend in the future because of all the technical advantages this offers and the productivity benefits I see, but I still harbor reservations against react because in practice I've rarely seen react pages that feel snappy and fast, rather than choppy and slow.
  - SkyMarshal 9y ago
    Interesting observation, b/c one of the original value propositions of React's virtual dom model was faster rendering than most other frontend frameworks at the time. I wonder if it's gotten so complicated it lost that? If so, there are a number of other intentionally lightweight virtual dom frontend frameworks. Mithril, Riot, Preact, virtual-dom all come to mind, and there are a probably a few more.
    - bauerd 9y ago
      React's virtual dom/diffing is certainly not "slow". It's not the tool that's the problem, but how it's used. There's also more to perceived slowness than how fast your library reconciles the DOM, e.g. I too often encounter pages that will "preload" all their assets behind stupid loading screens, ill-timed CSS animations, modals on top of modals, React Components that badly wrap jQuery plugins, leaked callbacks, … tl;dr Don't blame tools but their usage
shawnz 9y ago
Recently Reddit introduced a new kind of user profile where you can make text posts to your own profile. It got a huge amount of negative feedback (although I'm coming around to it, personally), and many obvious features, such as being able to mix a user's posts and comments together like on the old profile page, were missing. They claimed they were all-hands-on-deck adding these highly requested features, and even now, over a month later, the only thing that's changed is a slightly bigger hyperlink to the comments page. That to me sounds like fixing what's not broken while ignoring what is.
- FridgeSeal 9y ago
  It (rightfully) copped a lot of flack because it is a terrible idea: Reddit users don't want another user-driven/user focused Facebook clone, they want a community and topic driven platform. I'm hoping that, like some of Reddit's other weird ideas, it kind of just gets abandoned and left to die.

pmoriarty 9y ago

You can't even edit the title of a Reddit post. That's been known for years and nothing's been done about it.

redthrowaway 9y ago
That's almost certainly by design. Just as with tweets, it would be massively abused.
- kalleboo 9y ago
  Yeah I'm pretty sure mods can...
- adventured 9y ago
  Might make sense to make it optional per subreddit. Some communities are far less filled with trolls than others. Locked after N hours or minutes is also a potential solution elaboration that could give subreddits flexibility (on/off, if on then lock after N time options). Default it to locked. One more layer would be to enable only for established accounts and or based on the account behavior historically, and so on.
  - sillysaurus3 9y ago
    Please no. We've seen how much mods can be trusted when given toys. Any true Scotsman redditor will express their hatred for how often posts on /r/all are summarily locked by a mod. Often the justification is "lol no" or "I'm not spending my saturday policing the modqueue." Which is valid, but sucks for the 300k people that have to deal with it.
- johnfn 9y ago
  Ages ago an admin said "yeah it would make sense for post titles to be edited within the first x minutes of making one", an incredibly low-hanging fruit that has been requested since forever. It still hasn't been added.
  - rickhanlonii 9y ago
    I can think of a few problems with this just off the top of my head: The first x minutes of a post are _heavily_ influential in the success of the post, editing after allows you to hijack successful titles for gain (spam) For large subs, posts only hit the top of /new for x minutes (for small x), editing after is basically useless if it's not successful in that time Mods patrol the /new queue as posts come in, allowing editing will complicate moderation which is already a difficult job
    - johnfn 9y ago
      I mean whatever your concerns are, the admins/developers of Reddit are okay with this change.
      - orf 9y ago
        where ok, or at least one was in a comment posted 'ages ago'. That's very different.
    - squeaky-clean 9y ago
      At least allow mods to change titles. Even that isn't possible.
  - shalmanese 9y ago
    The reddit button for submitting a post still says "save". I brought it up to a reddit designer last year and apparently there's some mountain of technical debt that would make changing the label a week long task so its languished at the bottom of the priority queue for many years now.
- CM30 9y ago
  I'm sorry, but this reason for not having title editing (and post editing on other sites like Twitter and GameFAQs) always bothered me to hell and back. Yes it could be misused, but go on any forum where you can edit titles or post content and look at how often such a feature actually does get abused. It pretty much never happens. Most people (like 99.99% of them) either use the functionality how it was intended or don't bother editing at all. I don't see the point of limiting a feature because about 0.1% of the userbase might theoretically abuse it in a certain situation. It's basically the social media/forum equivalent of the trolley problem and automated cars. Something that's going to happen very rarely at the most but draws a lot of discussion about 'what ifs'.
fictioncircle 9y ago
To be fair, doing so would require a bunch of cache invalidations and they've always barely had enough money to limp on to the next investor. It would also likely be abused. Its quite possible many features simply would raise their costs by .X% and therefore were impossible for that reason.
dredmorbius 9y ago
I'd prefer a different approach: a true draft / submission cycle for more substantive works. This starts approaching a blogging or CMS system, but then, Reddit is already damned close to that, though with a larger community than most same. Under this model: * An item would be submitted. * If approvals / edit / drafting is set, it goes to a submission or edit queue. * A set of mods/editors would provide feedback and/or make edits (which of these apply depending on the sub). * The item is then submitted. This would allow for adjusting titles, self-text, formatting, etc. I'm not claiming this is something all subs would want, but some would (and I've a few specific ones in mind). For now, the fix is to delete the submission entirely and submit it anew. I've certainly done that within my own sub(s).
Medaber 9y ago
You can't enable this. Too much abuse. 1. Make a post "Who likes Ice Cream!?" 2. Wait for responses and upvotes. 3. Change post to "Who likes pedophilia?"

beager 9y ago

Also for context, Reddit found a lot of steam when Digg suffered a mass exodus based on seismic product shifts. I wouldn't be surprised if Reddit was consciously and unconsciously averse to that kind of mutation.

hn_throwaway_99 9y ago
Kudos to reddit for not following the trend of "lets redesign the site just because we can" ethos. Not only did the product shift kill Digg, I also think it led to the earlier downfall of Slashdot. I may be dating myself, but I remember how each revision of Slashdot made it less usable for me. The "cleaner, minimalist, lots of whitespace" designs that were in vogue actually made it much harder to navigate comment threads quickly and see good content easily while avoiding the chaff. Even today I prefer to use the desktop version of Reddit on my phone, because I can just go through content threads a lot faster than compared to their mobile site.
- gtm1260 9y ago
  I agree! It feels like a good portion of the time when I see a new feature on a website it seems like it only exists because all the people needed to create it are employed at the company and we can't have them just sitting around all day.
  - FiveDegrees 9y ago
    I'm looking at you, Slack.
    - paulddraper 9y ago
      You mean Facebook?
    - hn_throwaway_99 9y ago
      Yes! Slack is dangerously close to the point of "every new feature makes it worse", while basic features that should work (scrolling to earlier in a channel that reloads history feels like a roulette wheel) stay broken.

colordrops 9y ago

But there are several issues they don't bother fixing either. They could at least address those.

JosephLark 9y ago

> Maybe they don't want to fix what's not broken Unfortunately, this doesn't appear to be the case. They haven't been hiding that they're gearing up for a major redesign. From what I've seen so far, I'm not at all excited for it. They launched user profiles recently, and it's an uninspired blocky design with way too much unnecessary whitespace for a desktop site. Also, even on desktop there is noticeable Javascript induced lag and content pop in. Although the rest of the profile page tries to look like a standard reddit page, it's actually entirely done with react and the subreddit/notification bar at the top has the same lag and content pop in. They're also hiring mainly for React frontend/Node.js backend, so I'm worried the entire redesign is going to be low density and slow.

Roritharr 9y ago
I'm in a weird position there. I've recently decided on react for most of our frontend in the future because of all the technical advantages this offers and the productivity benefits I see, but I still harbor reservations against react because in practice I've rarely seen react pages that feel snappy and fast, rather than choppy and slow.
- SkyMarshal 9y ago
  Interesting observation, b/c one of the original value propositions of React's virtual dom model was faster rendering than most other frontend frameworks at the time. I wonder if it's gotten so complicated it lost that? If so, there are a number of other intentionally lightweight virtual dom frontend frameworks. Mithril, Riot, Preact, virtual-dom all come to mind, and there are a probably a few more.
  - bauerd 9y ago
    React's virtual dom/diffing is certainly not "slow". It's not the tool that's the problem, but how it's used. There's also more to perceived slowness than how fast your library reconciles the DOM, e.g. I too often encounter pages that will "preload" all their assets behind stupid loading screens, ill-timed CSS animations, modals on top of modals, React Components that badly wrap jQuery plugins, leaked callbacks, … tl;dr Don't blame tools but their usage

shawnz 9y ago

Recently Reddit introduced a new kind of user profile where you can make text posts to your own profile. It got a huge amount of negative feedback (although I'm coming around to it, personally), and many obvious features, such as being able to mix a user's posts and comments together like on the old profile page, were missing. They claimed they were all-hands-on-deck adding these highly requested features, and even now, over a month later, the only thing that's changed is a slightly bigger hyperlink to the comments page. That to me sounds like fixing what's not broken while ignoring what is.

FridgeSeal 9y ago
It (rightfully) copped a lot of flack because it is a terrible idea: Reddit users don't want another user-driven/user focused Facebook clone, they want a community and topic driven platform. I'm hoping that, like some of Reddit's other weird ideas, it kind of just gets abandoned and left to die.