13 ms·
Employee #1: Reddit (2016)
- kangaroozach 6y agoHow did DIGG miss this boat?
- JohnJamesRambo 6y agoSold out too early.
- danhak 6y agoThey rolled out a catastrophically bad redesign of the site, resulting in a mass exodus of users directly to Reddit
- brailsafe 6y agoMaybe we'll see the same thing in reverse now that Reddit's pulled the same move ;)
- jedberg 6y agoReddit's redesign is visual for the most part. Digg fundamentally changed the way their site worked to highlight content from power users.
- eecks 6y agoWhat is crazy is that they just didn't roll back. Even if they had lost a ton of users surely they could have kept at least 30% and built on that for the next few years.
- trinix912 6y agoI actually like the new look. The old one was way too messy for my taste. I just don't like dealing with all the bugs of the new one.
- edgyquant 6y agoIt’s been years. With that said Reddit’s UX is /terrible,/ a subtle touch to the navbar scrolls to the top of the page which is a daily frustration when reading comments halfway down a huge page on my tablet. Videos on their site is another one, it doesn’t matter if I mute them when I scroll down and back up it unmutes. I wish their was an alternative I would love to never use Reddit again at this point, but all my obscure communities for TV shows, movies and stock trading are on there.
- dan1234 6y agoI find old.reddit.com to be the better experience on tablet/desktop, especially with the custom subreddit themes disabled.
- sbmthakur 6y agoi.reddit.com works nicely on Mobiles.
- trinix912 6y agoAnd having to constantly click on "Continue this thread" to read another comment or two (or maybe even 0). I understand that they wanted to stop endless threads from polluting the comment section, but they should make it possible to easily disable this behavior.
- CodesInChaos 6y agoIt's getting worse. On mobile they put the "load more comments" button behind a login wall a couple of months ago (i.reddit.com still works, but has other limitations).
- edgyquant 6y agoThat’s another thing, on my own profile the “load more comments” doesn’t work and hasn’t (not one time) since they rolled out this new design.
- oblio 6y agoThe amount of traffic both sites had at the time was minuscule to what Reddit has now. When you become huge, inertia is incredibly strong. It's all about enthusiasts and early adopters (who are very fickle) and late adopters and laggards (who are very much the opposite of fickle). Crossing the chasm. Reddit has crossed the chasm.
- allsystemsgo 6y agoReddit has also been burning plenty of bridges with its more conservative user base. It’s a smaller subset but they’re looking for an alternative.
- oblio 6y agoOne thing you have to remember with Reddit (and Facebook & co.) is that they're international. I think for Reddit about half the audience is American. A small subset of those are willing to leave Reddit for political problem, say, 5%. Even though the rest of the world is literally flooded with US political news (less so now that Trump is gone), most of the rest of the world doesn't really care about those things Americans are super passionate about. Reddit can remain huge even if half its US userbase leaves it. This point is even more salient for Facebook outrage, BTW.
- toyg 6y agoThey dodged that bullet by leaving the old UI around effectively forever. The minute they pull it, they risk a serious exodus.
- TameAntelope 6y agoSomeone is going to do to Reddit what Reddit did to Digg, and we'll all be saying "How did REDDIT miss this boat?" in 10 years...
- dextralt 6y agonot possible anymore. a platform that has reddit-tier moderation policy from the get-go would never gain traction
- jedberg 6y agoFor the record, reddit had more traffic than Digg before "the exodus". We had about double their traffic. There was a slight jump at that time, but for the most part most Digg users were already reddit users, they just became more active.
- TameAntelope 6y agoFair, "what Reddit did to Digg" is probably a multi-year user migration rather than the Digg 4.0 rollout specifically.
- mariusor 6y agoI doubt that it will happen exactly like this. Reddit has become a behemoth that caters more to the average consumer of social media than to the original tech crowd that represented its first members. The only way a new platform can compete with them is by having the individual communities of reddit move to it with individual governance and then, allowing these communities to interact with each other in some way. The alternatives that look promising today are based on ActivityPub, but they fall into the same trap that reddit has: they want to appeal and attract as many users as possible without regard for suitability or community building. I'm hoping that the ting I'm working on will be better, but I'm not there just yet.
- discordance 6y agoKevin Rose
- bink 6y agoI had the pleasure of working at Reddit for a few years. I even worked with Chris from time to time. He's one of those people that you can just tell is genuinely a good person shortly after meeting him. I'm happy for the success he and Reddit have seen recently. After reading "We are the Nerds"... well, I don't want to say I got the impression he was treated poorly. But it was very odd. He seems like a hidden founder which is weird considering how many treat Aaron Schwartz, given the stories told about them both in the book.
- spoonjim 6y agoWell people don’t write stories about Aaron Swartz because he worked at Reddit, they write about him because he was persecuted by the corporate-government complex.
- echelon 6y ago> because he was persecuted by the corporate-government complex. This isn't quite right either. They write them because he was awesome. Aaron helped in the development of RSS and Creative Commons. He was everywhere you looked, and all around incredibly insightful (his book reviews and blog are still amazing). He was also well connected: Tim Berners-Lee, Lawrence Lessig, John Gruber, Paul Graham, ... He was one of the brightest beacons for open source, open knowledge, the web, and open culture. He was incredibly well known and liked before the MIT / JSTOR witch hunt killed him. We lost a luminary. Our world would have been brighter if he were still around.
- toyg 6y agoIt's not like Aaron was treated much better by Reddit leadership... his profile was just higher before and after that experience.
- worker767424 6y agoWow, they all look so young. Imagine telling Alexis back then that he'd be married to Serena Williams and discover a fondness for snow.
- throwaway_2047 6y ago> I can’t tell you how many times I was on a call and the other person on the phone was referring to their engineering staff as “IT.” Can someone elaborate the difference? To me IT is more on the operation side while engineering is on development side. Would love to hear other perspective
- imgabe 6y agoIT works on the company's internal networking and computer equipment. Engineering builds the customer facing product.
- killtimeatwork 6y agoThis doesn't cover the millions of developers across the world who do neither - they code internal (i.e. not customer-facing) apps used by employees of the company.
- bitexploder 6y agoCultural difference. In a broad sense we are all in IT of course. However, the IT department usually means what the parent wrote inside of US corporations.
- Mauricebranagh 6y agoOnly in some countries
- kryptn 6y agoIMO Engineering builds and maintains the product, while IT enables Engineering and every other team to build, maintain, and sell the product.
- orisho 6y agoIn many countries that aren't the US, IT is used to refer to engineering too. For example, software engineers working in a Brazil bank are considered part of IT. This probably shows a lack of understanding of cultural differences by the person surprised by the use of the term rather than the speaker.
- aidenn0 6y agoSlightly OT, but what's a good flight search tool now that hipmunk has shut down? I was super bummed when that happened because they just presented so much useful information on a single screen.
- totalZero 6y agoI generally use Kayak. Used to use Skiplagged for hidden city ticketing as well. It certainly feels like price discovery has gotten a lot easier...and I tend to book with the airline anyway in case I have to deal with customer service.
- zaphirplane 6y agoKayak is silly expensive for me, maybe it’s my origin city. And the multiple airline for international is just messy
- tomerico 6y agoWhen looking for the cheapest tickets, I tend to search all three (which tend to give dramatically different fares for some reason): flights.google.com fareboom.com skyscanner.com
- grecy 6y agoand do so in an incognito window, preferably behind a VPN with an IP address from an undeveloped country.
- aidenn0 6y agoSearching for the cheapest tickets is easy. Hipmunk let me find reasonably priced tickets that fit my schedule better.
- ALittleLight 6y agoI tried to find something like a free API for flight details and prices to query. It surprised me that I didn't find something easy, complete, and free. Shouldn't the airlines want to make it easy for people to access their flight schedules and sell tickets? Maybe they do and I just didn't find it.
- dang 6y agoDiscussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12051173 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12051173
- jC6fhrfHRLM9b3 6y agoReddit is a Chinese asset.
- onethought 6y agoWhat does that mean?
- skinnymuch 6y agoAssuming Tencent matched funding to keep their equity for Reddit’s most recent $6B valuation funding in 2021, Tencent owns 10% of Reddit. I don’t think that’s a big deal but /shrug
- jC6fhrfHRLM9b3 6y agoSure, not a big deal that the Chinese Communist Party has a huge chunk of power in one of the biggest information hubs for people in the USA and beyond. China knows they're at war, nobody else does.
- jedberg 6y agoYou do realize that single digit percent ownership doesn't give them any access or control, right?
- ajsnigrutin 6y agoWait what? Single digit ownership of a billion dollar company gives you a lot of access and control. Especially if it's something that the other 90% don't care about, but you do (eg. chinese politics).
- toyg 6y agoIf they do, they're not very good at exercising that control. There is plenty of heavy (and heavily upvoted) criticism of the CCP all over Reddit.
- purple_ferret 6y agoReddit's greatest engineering decision of the past 5 years is leaving up old.reddit.com
- 0xdky 6y agoI am very interested to know what is the engineering overheads and increase in code complexity incurred in maintaining 2 different views. At NetApp, backward compatibility and ability to rollback across multiple releases was a hard requirement. This made the codebase real hard to understand and maintain.
- 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 6y agoThe moment old.reddit.com stops working is the moment I will stop using Reddit generally, the new design is just too slow for me to create a pleasant experience (and the UX of the redesign is overall very unpleasant). Ever since they began limiting viewing on mobile browsers I already stopped using Reddit with my mobile phone completely. There are ways to circumvent that of course, but I just can't be bothered.
- kache_ 6y agoNew reddit is an attempt to make it too painful to use reddit on a browser and instead edge you to use a mobile app.
- ubermonkey 6y ago
- 11thEarlOfMar 6y agoI like this format. Looking forward to seeing more of it.