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>the company is literally re-writing all of its code Wow. >An early version of the new design, which we saw during our interview, looks similar to Facebook’s

>the company is literally re-writing all of its code Wow. >An early version of the new design, which we saw during our interview, looks similar to Facebook’s News Feed or Twitter’s Timeline: A never-ending feed of content broken up into “cards” with more visuals to lure people into the conversations hidden underneath. >“We want Reddit to be more visually appealing,” he explained, “so when new users come to Reddit they have a better sense of what’s there, what it’s for.” I fear this major re-design will be a mistake. HN is designed similarly to Reddit and if HN ever tried to do a major re-design, I think I would visit it less. I keep coming back to it because of its stories, comments, and its simplicity and minimalism. It has good content and is very easy to use and navigate.

phatbyte 9y ago
I still remember Digg. Great community, but once they changed the UX and some features, everything went downhill.
- metaphorm 9y ago
  the UX changes weren't the real problem, though they exacerbated the real problem. the real problem was a dramatic change in the content promotion algorithm that de facto transformed the front page of the site (which was much less cuztomizable than reddit's) into a corporate sponsored content billboard.
  - tyingq 9y ago
    The diggbar, wrapping the digg iframe around linked content wasn't well received either. I think that was a contributor to the downfall as well.
  - DaiPlusPlus 9y ago
    I don't care much either way about sponsored content - just relevance. I attribute Digg's downfall to when it started adding professional sports content to the front-page. I'm looking at the Archive.org history and it's pretty telling what happened: 2004 - https://web.archive.org/web/20041214033211/http://www.digg.com:80/ https://web.archive.org/web/20041214033211/http://www.digg.c... - Pretty much the same content as Slashdot, but with a cleaner UI. 2005 - https://web.archive.org/web/20050609031143/http://digg.com:80/ https://web.archive.org/web/20050609031143/http://digg.com:8... - No significant change 2006 - https://web.archive.org/web/20060615092431/http://digg.com:80/ https://web.archive.org/web/20060615092431/http://digg.com:8... New "Web 2.0" site design - less industry news, but still technology-centric. 2007 - https://web.archive.org/web/20070613060232/http://digg.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20070613060232/http://digg.com/ - Slight redesign, but note the addition of the Sports and Entertainment categories - but at least an article on the Double Slit experiment has six times as many diggs as a Sports Illustrated gossip piece. 2008 - https://web.archive.org/web/20080730182035/http://digg.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20080730182035/http://digg.com/ - Zero pure technology stories or industry pieces on the frontpage at all - it's all general interest - the site's content is unrecognizable from four years prior. 2009, 2010 and beyond continue this trend. Notice the similarities with Reddit - albeit Reddit progressing at a slower pace: Despite similar ages, Digg took five years to go from niche to mainstream, Reddit's mainstream appeal came after eight or nine years. Reddit has the advantage of making it easy to opt-out of irrelevant interest areas, but it can't keep everyone happy. HN is my go-to for news because the content is relevant even without me having to log-in, but Reddit's default homepage is no interest to me unless I login, which I'm less likely to do from a computer I don't own.
  - velobro 9y ago
    There is tons of corporate sponsored content on Reddit but Reddit has learned from Digg's mistakes and made the ads appear like normal posts made by normal users. Basically Reddit is what happens when product placement ads go to the extreme
mfoy_ 9y ago
Yeah, I really appreciate the spartan quality to the UI. IT simply lists the topics, be they link submissions or text-posts, with a score and a comment count. I also really like the Reddit forum / discussion UI. It makes it very easy to see who is replying to what, and let's you easily hide or collapse away whole uninteresting side-conversations. I fear any "Facebook-style" visual embellishments will actually make it harder to discover the underlying conversations...
- nxsynonym 9y ago
  The whole appeal of reddit for me is the conversation - similar to HN. I don't want a flashy link aggregator, I want bare bones design with a link/img and discussion. That's it. Anything that tries to model its UX/design on Facebook loses my interest immediately.
  - sebtoast 9y ago
    I don't like flashy Facebook/Twitter UI either but I wouldn't mind as long as they had an option to switch to "simple/text only UI" or something similar. "Please select the interface you want: New flashy Facebook-like mode® or Boring text mode®."
Danihan 9y ago
Yep, they are trying so hard to rollout Digg v4, it's ironic.
joekrill 9y ago
I believe Reddit's code is open source -- is that still correct? I'd guess this "rewrite" won't be? In any event, I find it hard to believe this won't be Digg all over again.
- loomer 9y ago
  All of reddit's code, except spam prevention, is open source.
loceng 9y ago
This could easily kill Reddit. I hope they'd do deep-long A/B test.
- cat199 9y ago
  ... because that worked really well for slashdot.
  - loceng 9y ago
    Well, you need to use intuition as well to design the test as well as get qualitative feedback.
tarr11 9y ago
I still use i.reddit.com which I think is a better mobile interface. It loads very fast, I can scan through posts very quickly, and it uses very little mobile bandwidth. If I want to click through and see an image, I can easily do that. They keep adding more things to the default mobile interface (suggestions, ads, pictures) that slow it down and make me avoid using it. I think they don't realize how much of their community actually likes that reddit is text based. Changing to an image based platform or video based would be disappointing.
- yoodenvranx 9y ago
  The old mobile page is awesome and the day they kill it is the day I will stop using reddit on mobile.
  - Markoff 9y ago
    why not use Sync, Boost or Slide? honestly if it were not for desktop i would not even know how looks Reddit at the moment, all clients are superior to their website and official client that's like visiting hacker news website from mobile instead of using Materialistic
    - anonred 9y ago
      The HN mobile site is perfectly fine now that they tweaked the CSS. I personally find all Reddit apps to be too opinionated and prefer the reduced mobile site + an RSS reader for smaller communities.
afro88 9y ago
So they're doing a Digg. End of an era. What's the "reddit" that everyone will migrate to when they change the UX?
- mpfundstein 9y ago
  steem would be cool
- uncoder0 9y ago
  Voat (https://voat.co/ https://voat.co/) is also an option I've heard of before but never used. However I just looked at their front page and the number 2 post is titled 'How to solve the Voat's antisemitism problem' and the image contains an antisemitic slur so that's not very promising.
  - nameless912 9y ago
    Voat is a complete shithole these days unfortunately. It was very quickly overrun by disgruntled members of Reddit's alt-right fringe community.
    - debacle 9y ago
      The free speech part of Voat is great. I don't think it's so much overrun as that the only people there are the ones with radical opinions. I wouldn't use Voat for other reasons, but that's just me.
      - herrkanin 9y ago
        I will never understand this romanticising of free speech on private platforms. Why would a service that cares about its members _ever_ implement free speech policies? That's just asking for assholes. If anything, popular services should have _more_ filtering and removal of asshole users.
        conception 9y ago
rexicus 9y ago
Reddit is pretty bad without the RES extension, it's not surprising they want to change that.
celticninja 9y ago
Yeah they should learn from digg. I still have thumbnails turned off on Reddit and hate the site when they are visible. Moving further away from a text heavy screen is a bad idea.
- cylinder 9y ago
  Same here. Nine year member, no thumbnails. I'm pretty sure the people running Reddit now aren't even aware that Reddit became prominent only because Digg bungled a redesign that sent users fleeing.
  - ryanmerket 9y ago
    It was a content model change, not the pixels that sent users to Reddit. Digg started allowing brands who paid them to have a firehose (RSS feed) post ability.
rpazyaquian 9y ago
_Why_ exactly are they doing a redesign? Is there something deeply wrong with the current one? Is there something it's not accomplishing? It just smells of executive/marketing meddling to me.
- dbbk 9y ago
  This is explained in the article.
yoodenvranx 9y ago
> the company is literally re-writing all of its code The old and ugly mobile website is _perfect_ (apart from some bugs). The new one is a horrible piece of garbage.
- kilroy123 9y ago
  I disagree. I use the extension reddit enhancement suite and _that_ makes it useable.
  - Semaphor 9y ago
    For the desktop site, yeah. But whenever I mistakenly end up on the new mobile site (usually by using the in-app browser of my HN app, normal links open in Reddit Sync) I'm annoyed. It's slow and crappy.
    - JamesLefrere 9y ago
      It's not perfect, but it's not the end of the world. I'd prefer it if they'd stop the 'oh, but the app is 50% faster' modals; who installs apps like that these days?
    - Mahn 9y ago
      I just resort to using the desktop version on mobile. I can't really stand the current mobile design, let alone their app, way too much space wasted.
      - mintplant 9y ago
        https://i.reddit.com https://i.reddit.com
  - robszumski 9y ago
    I agree, I have no idea how you use Reddit without it. If there people out there clicking on URLs/pictures, then going back to see the context/comments, I would love to hear how long this process takes you. This is my main negative to using Reddit on mobile, which I almost never do because it would lake about 200 taps to view a small amount of content.
untog 9y ago
I too think that a major re-design will be a mistake. But on the other hand, it doesn't have to be. Everyone assumes it'll be awful because previous efforts have failed, but who knows?
Vinnl 9y ago
I recall seeing a comment by reddit's CEO that the new mobile website saw 4x more engagement. That probably gives them the confidence that this will pay off.
chaostheory 9y ago
As long as reddit allows sub-reddits to display their feeds how they like, they should be fine. reddit's strength is allowing reddit to be tailored to every individual user.
- synunlimited 9y ago
  Well the are already phasing out custom subreddit CSS so I don't think it will be part of the new design. https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/66q4is/the_web_redesign_css_and_mod_tools/ https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/66q4is/the_web_red...
  - chaostheory 9y ago
    making reddit more homogeneous for everyone will probably be a mistake. customization was really what made everyone flock to reddit post digg
    - simonswords82 9y ago
      Really? I can't stand the custom CSS, feels like every sub Reddit is a unique website. I've had custom CSS disabled for as long as I've used CSS, I thought it was a terrible idea.
      - paganel 9y ago
        The CSS customization really does work wonders for things like sports-related subreddits or national sub-reddits, where you can attach your hometown/county to your profile name, so that everybody can make fun of you and you can make fun or everybody else (the same goes for /r/europe). I also found CSS customization extremely valuable for the /r/syriancivilwar subreddit, where users can attach the flag of a certain faction from that war to their username: Government, Al-Nusra (or whatever they're called now), the Kurds etc. At some point a couple of years ago there were several users who had the ISIS flag attached to their username. That was an excellent way of knowing where the other party was coming from when writing down their comments.
pmoriarty 9y ago
I can't think of a single popular site redesign that actually made the site better. They're almost inevitably worse, usually much worse. A common failing is trying to make the design more shiny and pretty while decreasing functionality, dumbing the site down, adding bloat, and slowing the site down to a crawl. I really hope Reddit does not go down this road, because they really have a good thing going now. It would be a real shame to ruin it.
- sirtastic 9y ago
  I can think of one. Google's material design. I love it and feel it tied their apps together while making them easier to use.
  - iamatworknow 9y ago
    It's all subjective, of course, but if a Material app starts getting more complex the bare bones nature of the UI actually starts making it more confusing to use in my opinion. Maybe I just haven't used it enough, but every time I look at a Google Cloud Platform console or something it takes me longer than I think it should to find what I'm looking for.
  - wl 9y ago
    Material design ruined Google News on the desktop.
    - shawnee_ 9y ago
      Yes, a thousand times, yes. To me, this is the worst and most offensive redesign of something so pivotal to research, investigative reporting, everything beyond the surface. Being able to dig and dig and find out who is reporting what pieces of the story. I don't CARE if there are 12 articles about the same thing if there are truly 12 different legitimate reports about the event of interest. I want to see all 12 sources in their original place, date stamp, author, etc. The original links are where the real stories hide... not in this curated crap. Thomas Jefferson said: "Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper." Google already has all the news indexed; why it is choosing to provide less surface area over which to sell its ads is something that makes absolutely no sense. Company press releases are a gold mine of information. These used to be so prominent in news.google.com; they are completely gone. Multiple pages of results. Gone. All so the already-digested news can belch all over cell phones. I see it as an attack on our democracy. Basically, censorship. But apparently they don't care.
turbinerneiter 9y ago
"HN is designed similarly to Reddit and if HN ever tried to do a major re-design, I think I would visit it less." Wait, are you saying there is people reading HN without custom CSS?
accountyaccount 9y ago
Most major redesigns end up being a mistake. It's cool that they're re-writing, but they should change things for users in an iterative way or they're going to get extreme backlash. People do not respond well to drastic change to the point where even quantifiable positive change is often met with complaints. It could very well be superior, but the moment someone says "like Facebook" about any sort of newsfeed the response will essentially be "BURN THE WITCH"
- sloppycee 9y ago
  Honest question, why is it cool that they're re-writing? To me this signals that the company has stagnated, or has grown beyond technology; it's an engineering team with no new ideas, no innovation, that's desperately trying to remain relevant in a company that is becoming less and less about the technology. That's just my experience, but think about it. If a company has other revenue streams they can capture using new tech, how could they justify a rewrite vs. developing that new tech?
  - accountyaccount 9y ago
    A lot has changed since they started, I imagine it's a nice "if you had to start all over again how would you do it differently" moment. A lot of companies don't really get that chance, hence: cool. Now, maybe it's completely wrong for them and they shouldn't be — that's a totally fair assessment. I honestly don't know.
am1988 9y ago
This sounds awful. Time to startup a competitor kills reddit the same way they killed digg?
kdamken 9y ago
FUCK. The design of reddit is one of their biggest assets. It's perfect for what the site is there to do. You can quickly and easily skim through and look at what's interesting to you. It sets them apart from the garbage design of a majority of sites out there. I don't want facebook, and I don't want digg. This is really sad to hear.
tommynicholas 9y ago
I'd be surprised if they implement a change as jarring as it sounds like they're considering. We'll see though.
mrkrabo 9y ago
If you click here (no need to be logged in) you get the HTML layout of the rewrite. https://www.reddit.com/profile-beta-confirmation https://www.reddit.com/profile-beta-confirmation https://www.reddit.com/user/kn0thing https://www.reddit.com/user/kn0thing Seems to be JS-heavy.
- joools 9y ago
  "JS-heavy" says it all. Thing is slow as hell. It's not quite as bad UI-wise as I thought it could be, but I'm not sure why all these sites are pushing in the direction they are. I think the interest in static site generators and brutalist design says something... I agree with others that Reddit will be in for a rude awakening if the performance doesn't get a lot better.
cylinder 9y ago
Holy crap. This is going to kill Reddit. The digg moment is finally here. Where do we all go next?
beepboopbeep 9y ago
Didn't DIGG try a similar approach? I can't quite remember what killed DIGG off for most folks
- flying_kangaroo 9y ago
  From what I remember it was mostly too many advertisers trying to push their accounts/products to the front page and killing a lot of the user-generated content people wanted. Helped that reddit was primed and ready as exactly the site the migrators were looking for. We don't quite have the same alternatives ready to go rn.
kbenson 9y ago
The moment they make reddit less of a bulletin board is the moment I imagine I'll end up using it less. Partially because it will be less useful for finding what I want on there easily, and partially because it will be less useful for what everyone else wants, so they'll post less, so there will be less to find. The subs that want more graphical options seem largely able to do so with customizations for their subreddits.
JosephLark 9y ago
I'm not surprised about the total rewrite at all. I've mentioned before about how reddit appears to only be hiring for Node.js and React. I am not enthusiastic about the redesign at all. From what I've seen so far, it will be uninspired, blocky, and slow. There is a preview of the direction here, on the new profiles page [0]. This may be because I'm not logged in at the moment, but it does seem a little faster than it was when they first launched it at least, but it is still slow. As an example of the slowness that is to come, click from 'Posts' to 'Comments' and watch it blank out before loading in new content. They "improved" something else (user reports) recently [1], and again the redesign is uninspired, blocky, slow, and more painful to actually use. What really gets me about reddit is that in a thread like that they get tons of (free) feedback, and don't bother responding to any of it. The admin that submitted that thread is down in the depths of those comments replying to a meme post instead of any of the feedback. Many mods are against the change, and they don't get a reply either. [0] https://www.reddit.com/user/spez https://www.reddit.com/user/spez [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/6oi3jw/improvements_to_the_report_feature/ https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/6oi3jw/improvement...
- andrenotgiant 9y ago
  can't agree more, I understand why they feel the need to update but I think the direction is just a reaction to current trends, they're not tapping into what really makes reddit tick. -un-needed design - Reddit gets money and hires a designer, designers want to make something fresh and elegant and beautiful! Just let it be text, all the sites that people really use on the open internet are just text. Wikipedia, Craigslist, Google Search, Reddit, text! -un-needed new stack - Reddit gets money and hires a developer, developers want to use React and Node.js because it's fresh and elegant and beautiful! The only place I see any potential benefit from react-ification is in super-high pace threads like sports games or big AMA's, but reddit's long tail is essentially static content please dont make me initialize 300kb of javascript OS every time I hit a reddit thread from Google.
praneshp 9y ago
Also good luck selling a new design to the hive mind.
- ubernostrum 9y ago
  They already did -- the official reddit mobile app, and default mobile skin of the site, are already close to what's being described, and mobile use of reddit is pretty heavy. If it were going to cause a mass exodus, it would've already.
  - praneshp 9y ago
    Mobile use is heavy, but any idea about the default app? I use Relay Pro on android, which is very popular. I don't know about the non-default iphone apps though.
  - rjbwork 9y ago
    Who actually uses the official reddit mobile app? RIF is king on android, baconreader is decent. Alien Blue reigns on iOS.
    - ryanwaggoner 9y ago
      Alien Blue is gone, I think. Reddit acquired and replaced with their app. Which currently has 5 stars and 700+ reviews, fwiw.
    - dbbk 9y ago
      By what metric are you basing that on?
paganel 9y ago
> I fear this major re-design will be a mistake. HN is designed similarly to Reddit and if HN ever tried to do a major re-design, I think I would visit it less I've been a reddit user for 11 years now (and a lurker for a year before that), I think I was the first (and I think only) blogger from my country that wrote about reddit's rewrite from Lisp, I've seen the comments section implemented, the move to programming.reddit.com, the move back to sub-reddits, the exodus coming from digg, the "what has pg had for breakfast?" memes, the Ron Paul memes, the 2006 astroturfing by the Israelis, the 2008 astroturfing by the Russians, the Obama memes in 2008, I've seen it all. As such, I think that the re-design that they're talking about will be a huge mistake. It's enough that they've managed to mess with some users' profile pages which are now unusable (they now look like some sort of FB/MySpace kind of thingies), but making the first page (or the first page of any sub-reddit, for that matter) a mess like FB's front-page will just kill the product for people like me.
- xster 9y ago
  Not just the rewrite but I worry very much about their entire current philosophical approach to transparent content vs view curations. The selective content filtering with r/popular vs r/all, the ever heavier embedding of native ads in the mobile apps, spez editing user comments in database, ohanian hiding in the background while yishan and ellen took the heat. I fear the redesign is just a symptom of a larger widening philosophical divergence between the founders and the Ron-Paul-sympathetic user base.
- crazypyro 9y ago
  Its especially hilarious considering Reddit really took off because of Digg making a huge re-design mistake. One thing that drives me nuts about the new profile pages is that comments are not even shown on the first page when it was the almost the ENTIRE content of the previous "profile" page. Really silly to hide it behind the 2nd tab and only cater to content submitters who are a massive minority of users (but that's obviously where the corporate money will come from...)
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 9y ago
    It's the constant pressure from VC's for better monetization. One of the features being discussed on the thread over on Reddit that is planned to be introduced is a location-based front page. This will make targeted ads by location an easier product for Reddit to sell and mine data from.
vram22 9y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect ?
ArmandGrillet 9y ago
I also fear a redesign, the core of Reddit is a fast consumption of a high number of links and text snippets. Everything that goes against readability and speed (i.e. ads or a pretty UI) will hurt my experience... but should increase their revenue. I really fear the future of Reddit, it's a website that I deeply love but I cannot see how it can be improved or made sustainable as what makes it so good is also what makes it a place where ads do not have their place. Hacker News offers a very similar experience but I trust YC and its community. HN is a small place run by people that could recreate this website in a day, I don't see how it could ever die or change in a bad way. That's not the case of Reddit.
rb808 9y ago
Maybe re-write is back end improvements rather than UX change? The site often is overloaded which could be the reason they want to rewrite.
technofiend 9y ago
Wow they're going to Digg themselves into oblivion, pun definitely intended!
iblaine 9y ago
I completely agree. Part of what has made reddit great has been being scrappy. Reddit hardly had the resources to roll out new features. Like craigslist, the site has remained relatively unchanged over the years. This $200M will be used to expand the operations. The new employees will be put to work on new features. And those new features are going to kill reddit. It'll be like Digg all over again.
flukus 9y ago
> I fear this major re-design will be a mistake. The awful mobile app/site justifies this opinion. If there weren't alternative mobile apps then I would already have left reddit. Here's hoping we can go with something more distributed and standards based this time so we don't have to keep jumping from ship to ship like this.
makecheck 9y ago
I hope they aren't using the mobile version for inspiration, either. To this day I "request desktop site" on mobile because information density and pinch-zoom are too valuable to give up for UI du Jour.
- bschwindHN 9y ago
  Their mobile UI is one of the biggest shitpiles I've ever had the displeasure of using. Minimum one second loading splashes, low information density, and if your tab gets evicted from memory and you want to return, it'll complain that "something went wrong"
ljk 9y ago
the re-design sounds like reddit4 in the making
imron 9y ago
Did they learn nothing from the digg exodus? >“We want Reddit to be more visually appealing,” "Visually appealing" isn't the reason people visit reddit.
- kagamine 9y ago
  thing is, reddit is visually appealing. It's a list of links in purest form. If it wasn't saturated with gifs, images and shitposting, it would be ideal UX. It works quite well in Lynx (the comnand line browser on Linux) which is a pretty good test of an easily navigable, content first, site. My main reddit account is 8+ years old (predecessor accounts long forgotten) and over the years on web-dev and UX subreddits there have been numerous user's redesigns put forward all of which have one thing in common: they all fail to grasp that simplicity is what made it popular and keeps it popular. On a 10 year old laptop PC it still works, loads fast and functions. RES (hardware depending) expands it and slows it down, but is not a necessary tool to make the experience acceptable. I guarantee reddit is on a downward slide. But for myself, it's good it's becoming less interesting to visit because it is a time vampire, where once it was a valuable source of information.
frik 9y ago
> Reddit is re-writing all of its code ... new design ... looks similar to Facebook News Feed ... Sounds like Digg.com v4. We all know the rewrite and new design didn't work out, people left for Reddit and back to /. and to HN. It's time for HN to add different channels ;)
glenstein 9y ago
I share your sentiment that a significant redesign could be a huge mistake. I think resisting the urge to redesign over the years has been huge for the growth of Reddit. And I think even a perfect redesign will be instinctually rejected by large swaths of the community (Markos Moulitsas used to say 1/3 of the community will hate a redesign no matter what it is.) In reddit's case the potential for rejection comes not just from typical human nature reasons but from specific cultural reasons particular to reddit: its propensity for hiveminding and collective freakouts, and consolidating around a narrative. They may be too big at this point to be undone by a redesign. But I hope the devs really, really know what they are doing.
nimchimpsky 9y ago
> if HN ever tried to do a major re-design, I'd love it if they did. I find its minimalism too extreme, and the way they hyperlink unintuitive,
im3w1l 9y ago
Piss off one early adopter power user to bring in a hundred casuals. You've served your purpose.
chakalakasp 9y ago
I am reminded of the time FARK did a minor remode on their site. Users were maaaaaad. Then, the site's effective senior VP wandered in and told everyone they'd get over it. They did not. A small but significant of why Reddit is as big as it is is the exodus of users after Digg and FARK started monkeying with formats and generally went deaf when users freaked out.
- richman777 9y ago
  I dont see why they're marketing this so positively given the Digg fiasco. I feel like it's "remember when digg was redesigned and everyone hated it and came to Reddit? Well we're gonna redesign the site too!"
- blhack 9y ago
  Ha, I remember that too. I actually emailed Drew and tried to explain how the site didn't feel "sticky" for me anymore. I never did end up going back.
mcbits 9y ago
I haven't used their app, but I use the desktop site with the custom subreddit CSS option disabled because otherwise I wouldn't be able to tolerate it. Even /r/webdev is more usable with the default styles, and the ones that disable downvoting are downright offensive. If they're just cleaning up that side of the fence, it could be an improvement.
rockyj 9y ago
Absolutely. Before reddit "digg" was the big site. And suddenly digg died and all users moved to reddit. And digg died because of a "re-design". Can't believe reddit is doing the same mistake.
hu80u 9y ago
Good content can be found all over the place. HN and Reddit aren't a prerequisite. You will find it or it will find you. Don't worry.
hacksonx 9y ago
Speaking of redesigns, am I the only one hating the material design feel added to google chrome settings?
NOSHSHNACKERS 9y ago
HN is a Slashdot replacement - Reddit is a Digg replacement. Facebook is an AOL replacement - Google is a yahoo myspace replacement They will all look alike one day in every single way
bnolsen 9y ago
another reason i like reddit is that i can easily load it up on a bedside fanless cherry trail system with no lag. Redos pretty much guarantee added bloat and response time. Sounds like reddit might go the way of that other post site that preceded reddit whose name I can't remember...ohh yeah, digg...
angus-prune 9y ago
Reddit became popular because Digg pulled exactly this redesign and drove away all their users. Who wants to join me in founding the next Reddit, ready for the exodus?
eip 9y ago
Anyone remember Stumbleupon?

phatbyte 9y ago

I still remember Digg. Great community, but once they changed the UX and some features, everything went downhill.

metaphorm 9y ago
the UX changes weren't the real problem, though they exacerbated the real problem. the real problem was a dramatic change in the content promotion algorithm that de facto transformed the front page of the site (which was much less cuztomizable than reddit's) into a corporate sponsored content billboard.
- tyingq 9y ago
  The diggbar, wrapping the digg iframe around linked content wasn't well received either. I think that was a contributor to the downfall as well.
- DaiPlusPlus 9y ago
  I don't care much either way about sponsored content - just relevance. I attribute Digg's downfall to when it started adding professional sports content to the front-page. I'm looking at the Archive.org history and it's pretty telling what happened: 2004 - https://web.archive.org/web/20041214033211/http://www.digg.com:80/ https://web.archive.org/web/20041214033211/http://www.digg.c... - Pretty much the same content as Slashdot, but with a cleaner UI. 2005 - https://web.archive.org/web/20050609031143/http://digg.com:80/ https://web.archive.org/web/20050609031143/http://digg.com:8... - No significant change 2006 - https://web.archive.org/web/20060615092431/http://digg.com:80/ https://web.archive.org/web/20060615092431/http://digg.com:8... New "Web 2.0" site design - less industry news, but still technology-centric. 2007 - https://web.archive.org/web/20070613060232/http://digg.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20070613060232/http://digg.com/ - Slight redesign, but note the addition of the Sports and Entertainment categories - but at least an article on the Double Slit experiment has six times as many diggs as a Sports Illustrated gossip piece. 2008 - https://web.archive.org/web/20080730182035/http://digg.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20080730182035/http://digg.com/ - Zero pure technology stories or industry pieces on the frontpage at all - it's all general interest - the site's content is unrecognizable from four years prior. 2009, 2010 and beyond continue this trend. Notice the similarities with Reddit - albeit Reddit progressing at a slower pace: Despite similar ages, Digg took five years to go from niche to mainstream, Reddit's mainstream appeal came after eight or nine years. Reddit has the advantage of making it easy to opt-out of irrelevant interest areas, but it can't keep everyone happy. HN is my go-to for news because the content is relevant even without me having to log-in, but Reddit's default homepage is no interest to me unless I login, which I'm less likely to do from a computer I don't own.
- velobro 9y ago
  There is tons of corporate sponsored content on Reddit but Reddit has learned from Digg's mistakes and made the ads appear like normal posts made by normal users. Basically Reddit is what happens when product placement ads go to the extreme

mfoy_ 9y ago

Yeah, I really appreciate the spartan quality to the UI. IT simply lists the topics, be they link submissions or text-posts, with a score and a comment count. I also really like the Reddit forum / discussion UI. It makes it very easy to see who is replying to what, and let's you easily hide or collapse away whole uninteresting side-conversations. I fear any "Facebook-style" visual embellishments will actually make it harder to discover the underlying conversations...

nxsynonym 9y ago
The whole appeal of reddit for me is the conversation - similar to HN. I don't want a flashy link aggregator, I want bare bones design with a link/img and discussion. That's it. Anything that tries to model its UX/design on Facebook loses my interest immediately.
- sebtoast 9y ago
  I don't like flashy Facebook/Twitter UI either but I wouldn't mind as long as they had an option to switch to "simple/text only UI" or something similar. "Please select the interface you want: New flashy Facebook-like mode® or Boring text mode®."

Danihan 9y ago

Yep, they are trying so hard to rollout Digg v4, it's ironic.

joekrill 9y ago

I believe Reddit's code is open source -- is that still correct? I'd guess this "rewrite" won't be? In any event, I find it hard to believe this won't be Digg all over again.

loomer 9y ago
All of reddit's code, except spam prevention, is open source.

loceng 9y ago

This could easily kill Reddit. I hope they'd do deep-long A/B test.

cat199 9y ago
... because that worked really well for slashdot.
- loceng 9y ago
  Well, you need to use intuition as well to design the test as well as get qualitative feedback.

tarr11 9y ago

I still use i.reddit.com which I think is a better mobile interface. It loads very fast, I can scan through posts very quickly, and it uses very little mobile bandwidth. If I want to click through and see an image, I can easily do that. They keep adding more things to the default mobile interface (suggestions, ads, pictures) that slow it down and make me avoid using it. I think they don't realize how much of their community actually likes that reddit is text based. Changing to an image based platform or video based would be disappointing.

yoodenvranx 9y ago
The old mobile page is awesome and the day they kill it is the day I will stop using reddit on mobile.
- Markoff 9y ago
  why not use Sync, Boost or Slide? honestly if it were not for desktop i would not even know how looks Reddit at the moment, all clients are superior to their website and official client that's like visiting hacker news website from mobile instead of using Materialistic
  - anonred 9y ago
    The HN mobile site is perfectly fine now that they tweaked the CSS. I personally find all Reddit apps to be too opinionated and prefer the reduced mobile site + an RSS reader for smaller communities.

afro88 9y ago

So they're doing a Digg. End of an era. What's the "reddit" that everyone will migrate to when they change the UX?

mpfundstein 9y ago
steem would be cool
uncoder0 9y ago
Voat (https://voat.co/ https://voat.co/) is also an option I've heard of before but never used. However I just looked at their front page and the number 2 post is titled 'How to solve the Voat's antisemitism problem' and the image contains an antisemitic slur so that's not very promising.
- nameless912 9y ago
  Voat is a complete shithole these days unfortunately. It was very quickly overrun by disgruntled members of Reddit's alt-right fringe community.
  - debacle 9y ago
    The free speech part of Voat is great. I don't think it's so much overrun as that the only people there are the ones with radical opinions. I wouldn't use Voat for other reasons, but that's just me.
    - herrkanin 9y ago
      I will never understand this romanticising of free speech on private platforms. Why would a service that cares about its members _ever_ implement free speech policies? That's just asking for assholes. If anything, popular services should have _more_ filtering and removal of asshole users.
      - conception 9y ago

rexicus 9y ago

Reddit is pretty bad without the RES extension, it's not surprising they want to change that.

celticninja 9y ago

Yeah they should learn from digg. I still have thumbnails turned off on Reddit and hate the site when they are visible. Moving further away from a text heavy screen is a bad idea.

cylinder 9y ago
Same here. Nine year member, no thumbnails. I'm pretty sure the people running Reddit now aren't even aware that Reddit became prominent only because Digg bungled a redesign that sent users fleeing.
- ryanmerket 9y ago
  It was a content model change, not the pixels that sent users to Reddit. Digg started allowing brands who paid them to have a firehose (RSS feed) post ability.

rpazyaquian 9y ago

_Why_ exactly are they doing a redesign? Is there something deeply wrong with the current one? Is there something it's not accomplishing? It just smells of executive/marketing meddling to me.

dbbk 9y ago
This is explained in the article.

yoodenvranx 9y ago

> the company is literally re-writing all of its code The old and ugly mobile website is _perfect_ (apart from some bugs). The new one is a horrible piece of garbage.

kilroy123 9y ago
I disagree. I use the extension reddit enhancement suite and _that_ makes it useable.
- Semaphor 9y ago
  For the desktop site, yeah. But whenever I mistakenly end up on the new mobile site (usually by using the in-app browser of my HN app, normal links open in Reddit Sync) I'm annoyed. It's slow and crappy.
  - JamesLefrere 9y ago
    It's not perfect, but it's not the end of the world. I'd prefer it if they'd stop the 'oh, but the app is 50% faster' modals; who installs apps like that these days?
  - Mahn 9y ago
    I just resort to using the desktop version on mobile. I can't really stand the current mobile design, let alone their app, way too much space wasted.
    - mintplant 9y ago
      https://i.reddit.com https://i.reddit.com
- robszumski 9y ago
  I agree, I have no idea how you use Reddit without it. If there people out there clicking on URLs/pictures, then going back to see the context/comments, I would love to hear how long this process takes you. This is my main negative to using Reddit on mobile, which I almost never do because it would lake about 200 taps to view a small amount of content.

untog 9y ago

I too think that a major re-design will be a mistake. But on the other hand, it doesn't have to be. Everyone assumes it'll be awful because previous efforts have failed, but who knows?

Vinnl 9y ago

I recall seeing a comment by reddit's CEO that the new mobile website saw 4x more engagement. That probably gives them the confidence that this will pay off.

chaostheory 9y ago

As long as reddit allows sub-reddits to display their feeds how they like, they should be fine. reddit's strength is allowing reddit to be tailored to every individual user.

synunlimited 9y ago
Well the are already phasing out custom subreddit CSS so I don't think it will be part of the new design. https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/66q4is/the_web_redesign_css_and_mod_tools/ https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/66q4is/the_web_red...
- chaostheory 9y ago
  making reddit more homogeneous for everyone will probably be a mistake. customization was really what made everyone flock to reddit post digg
  - simonswords82 9y ago
    Really? I can't stand the custom CSS, feels like every sub Reddit is a unique website. I've had custom CSS disabled for as long as I've used CSS, I thought it was a terrible idea.
    - paganel 9y ago
      The CSS customization really does work wonders for things like sports-related subreddits or national sub-reddits, where you can attach your hometown/county to your profile name, so that everybody can make fun of you and you can make fun or everybody else (the same goes for /r/europe). I also found CSS customization extremely valuable for the /r/syriancivilwar subreddit, where users can attach the flag of a certain faction from that war to their username: Government, Al-Nusra (or whatever they're called now), the Kurds etc. At some point a couple of years ago there were several users who had the ISIS flag attached to their username. That was an excellent way of knowing where the other party was coming from when writing down their comments.

pmoriarty 9y ago

I can't think of a single popular site redesign that actually made the site better. They're almost inevitably worse, usually much worse. A common failing is trying to make the design more shiny and pretty while decreasing functionality, dumbing the site down, adding bloat, and slowing the site down to a crawl. I really hope Reddit does not go down this road, because they really have a good thing going now. It would be a real shame to ruin it.

sirtastic 9y ago
I can think of one. Google's material design. I love it and feel it tied their apps together while making them easier to use.
- iamatworknow 9y ago
  It's all subjective, of course, but if a Material app starts getting more complex the bare bones nature of the UI actually starts making it more confusing to use in my opinion. Maybe I just haven't used it enough, but every time I look at a Google Cloud Platform console or something it takes me longer than I think it should to find what I'm looking for.
- wl 9y ago
  Material design ruined Google News on the desktop.
  - shawnee_ 9y ago
    Yes, a thousand times, yes. To me, this is the worst and most offensive redesign of something so pivotal to research, investigative reporting, everything beyond the surface. Being able to dig and dig and find out who is reporting what pieces of the story. I don't CARE if there are 12 articles about the same thing if there are truly 12 different legitimate reports about the event of interest. I want to see all 12 sources in their original place, date stamp, author, etc. The original links are where the real stories hide... not in this curated crap. Thomas Jefferson said: "Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper." Google already has all the news indexed; why it is choosing to provide less surface area over which to sell its ads is something that makes absolutely no sense. Company press releases are a gold mine of information. These used to be so prominent in news.google.com; they are completely gone. Multiple pages of results. Gone. All so the already-digested news can belch all over cell phones. I see it as an attack on our democracy. Basically, censorship. But apparently they don't care.

turbinerneiter 9y ago

"HN is designed similarly to Reddit and if HN ever tried to do a major re-design, I think I would visit it less." Wait, are you saying there is people reading HN without custom CSS?

accountyaccount 9y ago

Most major redesigns end up being a mistake. It's cool that they're re-writing, but they should change things for users in an iterative way or they're going to get extreme backlash. People do not respond well to drastic change to the point where even quantifiable positive change is often met with complaints. It could very well be superior, but the moment someone says "like Facebook" about any sort of newsfeed the response will essentially be "BURN THE WITCH"

sloppycee 9y ago
Honest question, why is it cool that they're re-writing? To me this signals that the company has stagnated, or has grown beyond technology; it's an engineering team with no new ideas, no innovation, that's desperately trying to remain relevant in a company that is becoming less and less about the technology. That's just my experience, but think about it. If a company has other revenue streams they can capture using new tech, how could they justify a rewrite vs. developing that new tech?
- accountyaccount 9y ago
  A lot has changed since they started, I imagine it's a nice "if you had to start all over again how would you do it differently" moment. A lot of companies don't really get that chance, hence: cool. Now, maybe it's completely wrong for them and they shouldn't be — that's a totally fair assessment. I honestly don't know.

am1988 9y ago

This sounds awful. Time to startup a competitor kills reddit the same way they killed digg?

kdamken 9y ago

FUCK. The design of reddit is one of their biggest assets. It's perfect for what the site is there to do. You can quickly and easily skim through and look at what's interesting to you. It sets them apart from the garbage design of a majority of sites out there. I don't want facebook, and I don't want digg. This is really sad to hear.

tommynicholas 9y ago

I'd be surprised if they implement a change as jarring as it sounds like they're considering. We'll see though.

mrkrabo 9y ago

If you click here (no need to be logged in) you get the HTML layout of the rewrite. https://www.reddit.com/profile-beta-confirmation https://www.reddit.com/profile-beta-confirmation https://www.reddit.com/user/kn0thing https://www.reddit.com/user/kn0thing Seems to be JS-heavy.

joools 9y ago
"JS-heavy" says it all. Thing is slow as hell. It's not quite as bad UI-wise as I thought it could be, but I'm not sure why all these sites are pushing in the direction they are. I think the interest in static site generators and brutalist design says something... I agree with others that Reddit will be in for a rude awakening if the performance doesn't get a lot better.

cylinder 9y ago

Holy crap. This is going to kill Reddit. The digg moment is finally here. Where do we all go next?

beepboopbeep 9y ago

Didn't DIGG try a similar approach? I can't quite remember what killed DIGG off for most folks

flying_kangaroo 9y ago
From what I remember it was mostly too many advertisers trying to push their accounts/products to the front page and killing a lot of the user-generated content people wanted. Helped that reddit was primed and ready as exactly the site the migrators were looking for. We don't quite have the same alternatives ready to go rn.

kbenson 9y ago

The moment they make reddit less of a bulletin board is the moment I imagine I'll end up using it less. Partially because it will be less useful for finding what I want on there easily, and partially because it will be less useful for what everyone else wants, so they'll post less, so there will be less to find. The subs that want more graphical options seem largely able to do so with customizations for their subreddits.

JosephLark 9y ago

I'm not surprised about the total rewrite at all. I've mentioned before about how reddit appears to only be hiring for Node.js and React. I am not enthusiastic about the redesign at all. From what I've seen so far, it will be uninspired, blocky, and slow. There is a preview of the direction here, on the new profiles page [0]. This may be because I'm not logged in at the moment, but it does seem a little faster than it was when they first launched it at least, but it is still slow. As an example of the slowness that is to come, click from 'Posts' to 'Comments' and watch it blank out before loading in new content. They "improved" something else (user reports) recently [1], and again the redesign is uninspired, blocky, slow, and more painful to actually use. What really gets me about reddit is that in a thread like that they get tons of (free) feedback, and don't bother responding to any of it. The admin that submitted that thread is down in the depths of those comments replying to a meme post instead of any of the feedback. Many mods are against the change, and they don't get a reply either. [0] https://www.reddit.com/user/spez https://www.reddit.com/user/spez [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/6oi3jw/improvements_to_the_report_feature/ https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/6oi3jw/improvement...

andrenotgiant 9y ago
can't agree more, I understand why they feel the need to update but I think the direction is just a reaction to current trends, they're not tapping into what really makes reddit tick. -un-needed design - Reddit gets money and hires a designer, designers want to make something fresh and elegant and beautiful! Just let it be text, all the sites that people really use on the open internet are just text. Wikipedia, Craigslist, Google Search, Reddit, text! -un-needed new stack - Reddit gets money and hires a developer, developers want to use React and Node.js because it's fresh and elegant and beautiful! The only place I see any potential benefit from react-ification is in super-high pace threads like sports games or big AMA's, but reddit's long tail is essentially static content please dont make me initialize 300kb of javascript OS every time I hit a reddit thread from Google.

praneshp 9y ago

Also good luck selling a new design to the hive mind.

ubernostrum 9y ago
They already did -- the official reddit mobile app, and default mobile skin of the site, are already close to what's being described, and mobile use of reddit is pretty heavy. If it were going to cause a mass exodus, it would've already.
- praneshp 9y ago
  Mobile use is heavy, but any idea about the default app? I use Relay Pro on android, which is very popular. I don't know about the non-default iphone apps though.
- rjbwork 9y ago
  Who actually uses the official reddit mobile app? RIF is king on android, baconreader is decent. Alien Blue reigns on iOS.
  - ryanwaggoner 9y ago
    Alien Blue is gone, I think. Reddit acquired and replaced with their app. Which currently has 5 stars and 700+ reviews, fwiw.
  - dbbk 9y ago
    By what metric are you basing that on?

paganel 9y ago

> I fear this major re-design will be a mistake. HN is designed similarly to Reddit and if HN ever tried to do a major re-design, I think I would visit it less I've been a reddit user for 11 years now (and a lurker for a year before that), I think I was the first (and I think only) blogger from my country that wrote about reddit's rewrite from Lisp, I've seen the comments section implemented, the move to programming.reddit.com, the move back to sub-reddits, the exodus coming from digg, the "what has pg had for breakfast?" memes, the Ron Paul memes, the 2006 astroturfing by the Israelis, the 2008 astroturfing by the Russians, the Obama memes in 2008, I've seen it all. As such, I think that the re-design that they're talking about will be a huge mistake. It's enough that they've managed to mess with some users' profile pages which are now unusable (they now look like some sort of FB/MySpace kind of thingies), but making the first page (or the first page of any sub-reddit, for that matter) a mess like FB's front-page will just kill the product for people like me.

xster 9y ago
Not just the rewrite but I worry very much about their entire current philosophical approach to transparent content vs view curations. The selective content filtering with r/popular vs r/all, the ever heavier embedding of native ads in the mobile apps, spez editing user comments in database, ohanian hiding in the background while yishan and ellen took the heat. I fear the redesign is just a symptom of a larger widening philosophical divergence between the founders and the Ron-Paul-sympathetic user base.
crazypyro 9y ago
Its especially hilarious considering Reddit really took off because of Digg making a huge re-design mistake. One thing that drives me nuts about the new profile pages is that comments are not even shown on the first page when it was the almost the ENTIRE content of the previous "profile" page. Really silly to hide it behind the 2nd tab and only cater to content submitters who are a massive minority of users (but that's obviously where the corporate money will come from...)
- SOLAR_FIELDS 9y ago
  It's the constant pressure from VC's for better monetization. One of the features being discussed on the thread over on Reddit that is planned to be introduced is a location-based front page. This will make targeted ads by location an easier product for Reddit to sell and mine data from.

vram22 9y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect ?

ArmandGrillet 9y ago

I also fear a redesign, the core of Reddit is a fast consumption of a high number of links and text snippets. Everything that goes against readability and speed (i.e. ads or a pretty UI) will hurt my experience... but should increase their revenue. I really fear the future of Reddit, it's a website that I deeply love but I cannot see how it can be improved or made sustainable as what makes it so good is also what makes it a place where ads do not have their place. Hacker News offers a very similar experience but I trust YC and its community. HN is a small place run by people that could recreate this website in a day, I don't see how it could ever die or change in a bad way. That's not the case of Reddit.

rb808 9y ago

Maybe re-write is back end improvements rather than UX change? The site often is overloaded which could be the reason they want to rewrite.

technofiend 9y ago

Wow they're going to Digg themselves into oblivion, pun definitely intended!

iblaine 9y ago

I completely agree. Part of what has made reddit great has been being scrappy. Reddit hardly had the resources to roll out new features. Like craigslist, the site has remained relatively unchanged over the years. This $200M will be used to expand the operations. The new employees will be put to work on new features. And those new features are going to kill reddit. It'll be like Digg all over again.

flukus 9y ago

> I fear this major re-design will be a mistake. The awful mobile app/site justifies this opinion. If there weren't alternative mobile apps then I would already have left reddit. Here's hoping we can go with something more distributed and standards based this time so we don't have to keep jumping from ship to ship like this.

makecheck 9y ago

I hope they aren't using the mobile version for inspiration, either. To this day I "request desktop site" on mobile because information density and pinch-zoom are too valuable to give up for UI du Jour.

bschwindHN 9y ago
Their mobile UI is one of the biggest shitpiles I've ever had the displeasure of using. Minimum one second loading splashes, low information density, and if your tab gets evicted from memory and you want to return, it'll complain that "something went wrong"

ljk 9y ago

the re-design sounds like reddit4 in the making

imron 9y ago

Did they learn nothing from the digg exodus? >“We want Reddit to be more visually appealing,” "Visually appealing" isn't the reason people visit reddit.

kagamine 9y ago
thing is, reddit is visually appealing. It's a list of links in purest form. If it wasn't saturated with gifs, images and shitposting, it would be ideal UX. It works quite well in Lynx (the comnand line browser on Linux) which is a pretty good test of an easily navigable, content first, site. My main reddit account is 8+ years old (predecessor accounts long forgotten) and over the years on web-dev and UX subreddits there have been numerous user's redesigns put forward all of which have one thing in common: they all fail to grasp that simplicity is what made it popular and keeps it popular. On a 10 year old laptop PC it still works, loads fast and functions. RES (hardware depending) expands it and slows it down, but is not a necessary tool to make the experience acceptable. I guarantee reddit is on a downward slide. But for myself, it's good it's becoming less interesting to visit because it is a time vampire, where once it was a valuable source of information.

frik 9y ago

> Reddit is re-writing all of its code ... new design ... looks similar to Facebook News Feed ... Sounds like Digg.com v4. We all know the rewrite and new design didn't work out, people left for Reddit and back to /. and to HN. It's time for HN to add different channels ;)

glenstein 9y ago

I share your sentiment that a significant redesign could be a huge mistake. I think resisting the urge to redesign over the years has been huge for the growth of Reddit. And I think even a perfect redesign will be instinctually rejected by large swaths of the community (Markos Moulitsas used to say 1/3 of the community will hate a redesign no matter what it is.) In reddit's case the potential for rejection comes not just from typical human nature reasons but from specific cultural reasons particular to reddit: its propensity for hiveminding and collective freakouts, and consolidating around a narrative. They may be too big at this point to be undone by a redesign. But I hope the devs really, really know what they are doing.

nimchimpsky 9y ago

> if HN ever tried to do a major re-design, I'd love it if they did. I find its minimalism too extreme, and the way they hyperlink unintuitive,

im3w1l 9y ago

Piss off one early adopter power user to bring in a hundred casuals. You've served your purpose.

chakalakasp 9y ago

I am reminded of the time FARK did a minor remode on their site. Users were maaaaaad. Then, the site's effective senior VP wandered in and told everyone they'd get over it. They did not. A small but significant of why Reddit is as big as it is is the exodus of users after Digg and FARK started monkeying with formats and generally went deaf when users freaked out.

richman777 9y ago
I dont see why they're marketing this so positively given the Digg fiasco. I feel like it's "remember when digg was redesigned and everyone hated it and came to Reddit? Well we're gonna redesign the site too!"
blhack 9y ago
Ha, I remember that too. I actually emailed Drew and tried to explain how the site didn't feel "sticky" for me anymore. I never did end up going back.

mcbits 9y ago

I haven't used their app, but I use the desktop site with the custom subreddit CSS option disabled because otherwise I wouldn't be able to tolerate it. Even /r/webdev is more usable with the default styles, and the ones that disable downvoting are downright offensive. If they're just cleaning up that side of the fence, it could be an improvement.

rockyj 9y ago

Absolutely. Before reddit "digg" was the big site. And suddenly digg died and all users moved to reddit. And digg died because of a "re-design". Can't believe reddit is doing the same mistake.

hu80u 9y ago

Good content can be found all over the place. HN and Reddit aren't a prerequisite. You will find it or it will find you. Don't worry.

hacksonx 9y ago

Speaking of redesigns, am I the only one hating the material design feel added to google chrome settings?

NOSHSHNACKERS 9y ago

HN is a Slashdot replacement - Reddit is a Digg replacement. Facebook is an AOL replacement - Google is a yahoo myspace replacement They will all look alike one day in every single way

bnolsen 9y ago

another reason i like reddit is that i can easily load it up on a bedside fanless cherry trail system with no lag. Redos pretty much guarantee added bloat and response time. Sounds like reddit might go the way of that other post site that preceded reddit whose name I can't remember...ohh yeah, digg...

angus-prune 9y ago

Reddit became popular because Digg pulled exactly this redesign and drove away all their users. Who wants to join me in founding the next Reddit, ready for the exodus?

eip 9y ago

Anyone remember Stumbleupon?