19 ms·

Fark redesign is now live (2007)

432 points by MrThoughtful 3y ago

pharmakom 3y ago
It has a better mobile experience than Reddit
rahidz 3y ago
"You'll get over it."
- TimedToasts 3y ago
  I remember this too. Honestly I should go back and thank the mod/poster because that little splash of cold water prepared me for everything that has come after that. I think about it every now then when I run into the newer variations of that theme.
Apocryphon 3y ago
Digg was also killed by a user-hostile redesign. Reddit was wise enough to keep its redesign indefinitely optional, at least.
- drumhead 3y ago
  The API prices are a de facto redesign for many users because they'll have to use the less than adequate official product now.
- wvenable 3y ago
  Their mobile app is the new user-hostile redesign. I had no idea before today that they had experimented with cutting off mobile web access in favour of the app[1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36287411 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36287411
- kyriakos 3y ago
  for reddit based on the current mobile behaviour on android which doesn't allow you to use mobile version and forces you to use the app it means its no longer optional
- chc4 3y ago
  When Reddit first introduced their terrible mobile site years ago, they thankfully left around the old i.reddit.com (also known as .compact) around, which I exclusively used and so didn't really care much about the horrendously user-hostile current mobile site, with its popup windows begging you to use the app. They removed it entirely a month or so ago. I now no longer use Reddit.
  - u801e 3y ago
    At least old.reddit.com still works and it's usable, more or less, on mobile.
    - Apocryphon 3y ago
      Yeah that’s what I use
- hayst4ck 3y ago
  There was a snarky comment in the IAMA when spez said "old.reddit.com isn't going away", and the person responded with a link to spez saying the exact same thing with the exact same words about the API 6 years ago. Google's "don't be evil" had to go away too. Capitalism can't make room for considerations such as proliferation of evil.
  - astrange 3y ago
    > Capitalism can't make room for considerations such as proliferation of evil. People only believe in corporate slogans when they can use them to make cynical points about abandoning them, but nevertheless, these things exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation
    - hayst4ck 3y ago
      That was legitimately interesting, thanks.
  - jkaplowitz 3y ago
    Google actually never officially got rid of their “don’t be evil” phrase, even if I agree with you that they are far worse at adhering to it than they used to be, and I suspect too many of their current executives have no attachment to it beyond not wanting the pointless employee morale or PR hit of actually removing it. The reason people think it got removed is two events: One, when Google Inc reorganized to create its Alphabet Inc corporate parent in 2015, the “Don’t be evil” motto stayed with the Google LLC subsidiary that still today handles most of what we associate with the name Google. For Alphabet, they added “Do the right thing” instead of moving “Don’t be evil” to the new top of the corporate hierarchy. Two, in 2018 they moved Don’t be evil away from the preface of Google’s code of conduct. But they moved it to the last sentence, which is at least far more prominent than burying it in the middle, let alone removing it entirely. I used to work for Google years ago, before all of the events I’m discussing and with no personal connection myself to those events. (Obviously I’m speaking only for myself here and not for them.) I think nowadays their level of morality as an organization is slightly better than or comparable to most other prominent tech megacorps, whereas they used to be atypically much better than that. The same deterioration has occurred in how good or bad of an employer they are - they used to be great, but now they’re slightly better than or similar to most other prominent tech megacorps. Still not worse than their peers in either morality or employee experience. But as much as “don’t be evil” is still officially there. It’s definitely far less of a corporate focus than it used to be, which I find quite sad.
- miked85 3y ago
  It was impressive how quickly Digg killed itself with the terrible redesign. Back then, Reddit was mostly considered a knockoff. It actually was to a large degree, but everyone moved to it very quickly.
brokenkebaby 3y ago
And what exactly is user-hostile there? It doesn't look beautiful to my tastes, but functionally nothing is particularly complicated to understand.
- MattGaiser 3y ago
  I would be curious how well redesigns go over in general, given that users are used to things working a certain way.
- thom 3y ago
  Some people still use old.reddit.com which I find superior purely because it reveals more content with fewer clicks.
- sedatk 3y ago
  Infinite scroll, for example, makes it easy to lose your reading progress with a simple refresh/reload. Paged UIs, on the other hand, don’t have that problem.
  - creshal 3y ago
    Reddit is especially obnoxious because the sorting algorithms are extremely volatile, and if you do scroll too far, you'll never find that particular piece of content again. Infinite scrolling in Twitter etc. is much less obnoxious.
    - sedatk 3y ago
      > Infinite scrolling in Twitter etc. is much less obnoxious. Yes, Twitter's much better on that aspect, partly because how different its design is, and partly because how they handle browsing mechanics.
  - mcmoor 3y ago
    I'm not even sure if it's 3PA only feature but there's option to hide all posts that you've read (or scrolled past). After finding that feature now i want it everywhere there's infinite scroll because yeah otherwise it's unusable.
rurban 3y ago
I like that you could use swear words by paying for it. > You can purchase FarkUnits for $10 for 100 FUs, or you can get a discount if you purchase in bulk. > Using it is easy. If you type a word with "fuck" or "shit" in your comment, a new button will pop up that says "Add Comment using SwearJar - 20FUs." Just click or tap that and those words won't be filtered to the customary 'fark' or 'shiat.'
- 1f60c 3y ago
  This implies that the website is really called fuck.com (but censored), which is certainly … a choice.
  - OkGoDoIt 3y ago
    But wasn’t that obvious? Fark is a cleaner, sillier way of saying f*ck.
    - yosito 3y ago
      What the fark are you talking about? ;)
  - rgoulter 3y ago
    This reminds me of how "Rooster Teeth" is a more polite phrasing of "cock bite"; a phrase which was used in their first online content.
  - wahnfrieden 3y ago
    that's so obvious? Even as an American
    - 1f60c 3y ago
      Maybe if you're British. :-) Or maybe I'm just one of today's lucky 10,000.
  - mkovach 3y ago
    Drew has commented on the origins of fark.com. Basically, he was drunk and looking for a funny name. Fark.com come was available. So, basically, a "here, hold my beer" domain name.
sunaurus 3y ago
One of the interesting thing about the open source federated alternatives (like Lemmy) is that each instance can run their own version of the UI. So even if the maintainers decide to completely redesign everything, nothing is stopping instances from staying on the old design forever.
- esskay 3y ago
  The only major downside (and the one that will ensure Lemmy doesn't gain any significant traction after this) is that its incredibly underdeveloped and nowhere near as close to being able to replace Reddit as Mastedon was for Twitter.
  - politelemon 3y ago
    Isn't there also the issue of federation itself, if users have to understand federation they'll just stick to regular Reddit. Going by the principle of "don't make me think", that is
    - sunaurus 3y ago
      In my experience, people understand federation quite easily if you just use the e-mail analogue. Even completely non-technical folks understand that regardless of whether they are on Gmail or Outlook or iCloud mail, they can send e-mail to users of other platforms.
      - Gareth321 3y ago
        IMHO the federation aspect needs to be completely hidden from users unless they go out of their way to search for it. 99% of users don’t care about it, and offering instance options at signup must be killing conversion. As with all FOSS projects, it’s built by developers, for developers. The project badly needs a UX person streamline things.
      - goykasi 3y ago
        But they dont care about how email works. Type 'mom' in to, type message, hit send, call mom to let her know you sent an email. Same with reddit/others. Most users dont care about how it works or what makes it special or what the tech stack is. They want content: fast, easy, not crashing and in one spot.
ripreddit420 3y ago
Anyone else remember the great Digg exodus? It’s wild watching Reddit quickly following the footsteps. Steve Huffman (aka Spez) let his true colors shine, with (IPO) dollar signs in his eyes.
- SllX 3y ago
  One of the major differences is that there’s no clear alternative. Digg and Reddit had a lot of overlap in what they were trying to do immediately prior to Digg’s redesign. Reddit was an obvious place to go if you preferred Digg up until that point. Now what’s the clear alternative to Reddit? Discord is probably the closest just from a UX perspective and I expect to be finding stuff there that I used to find on Reddit in the near future; but it’s not as close as Digg and Reddit were, and a lot of the people that made Reddit into what it was have an issue with Discord’s walled off nature.
  - deafpolygon 3y ago
    How is Discord even a closest alternative? Everything is on its own "server" and conversations happen in real-time, not async like Reddit.
    - MaKey 3y ago
      I hate Discord for killing classic forums and therefore robbing us of good searchable niche content.
      - charlieyu1 3y ago
        Not sure how Discord killed forums, they are more like IRC which had existed for a long time alongside forums.
        treyd 3y ago
        There's a worrying number of instances where people managing a foss project using taking their GitHub issue tracker, discussion boards, or some other public forum / discussion board and deciding to lock it and direct users to a discord guild because it's "easier". Or new communities that start up exclusively on discord but would be better served by alternatives. Except it's not easier, there was an instance where a community had been using a discord channel as a file sharing platform for mods. An administrator was doing some housekeeping of the channels and accidentally deleted the entire chat history (which is easier to do than it sounds), and so irrevocably deleted all of the uploaded files, some of which were never recovered.
boc 3y ago
I have a 14yo reddit account, and was a Digg user for years prior to that. While there were scandals like the HDDVD code stuff, ultimately the user-hostile Digg v4 redesign killed it for me- the day they forced it on everyone I never went back. Tonight watching all the subreddits go private is the first time I’ve ever felt like Reddit is the next to die. If anyone from reddit corporate is reading this, understand that you’re playing with fire here. This week is critical to saving your platform.
- scrame 3y ago
  no,this is for that IPO. /s if needed
- rapsey 3y ago
  The problem is the business model is terrible. You need to sell ads to survive and the ads ruin the site.
  - hackernewds 3y ago
    and when you try to rein in expenses to show less ads, the community begins to propose $10M buyouts and every refrain from reasonable optimizations of their API calls.
    - imauser 3y ago
      The developer has already clarified that Apollo was not the top user of the API. It was also confirmed by a Reddit employee.
    - nvy 3y ago
      It's patently obvious that they're just trying to drive up ad impression numbers on the app to inflate their financials before IPO/acquisition.
      - rapsey 3y ago
        Reddit is still not profitable.
hayst4ck 3y ago
I never used fark. Did they make a change to the structure of how users interacted with the site, or did they make a change to the UI only? digg v4 was a disaster, but the exodus started before that when digg removed threaded comments. Related: Wikipedia changed what pages actually looked like by moving a contents navigation bar to the left side and minimizing some other features. It's the last UI change in a major website I can think of that didn't make me grimace.
blhack 3y ago
Oh my god. I remember this happening, and I remember email drew about it at the time. It really never did recover from this. I "grew up" on Fark, and lots of my early web projects were clones of it/inspired by it. Fark really was a special part of the internet, and it's sad that it fell off. I wonder if the fact that they never moved on from this design was Drew being gunshy about changing it again.
- jfengel 3y ago
  I briefly conversed with Drew on what seemed like the obvious next step of threaded conversations. He was clear that this way kept things in order for him, and didn't let stuff get bogged down. In other words I think he's happy with it, and doesn't want it to change. The main change since then was more ads or paid accounts, which seems a fair tradeoff. Anybody who wants Reddit knows (or knew) where to find it.
phendrenad2 3y ago
What exactly did they change?
- SilverBirch 3y ago
  They are going to charge high fees for usage of the APIs so that 3rd party clients and bots are priced out of working.
  - phendrenad2 3y ago
    That's Reddit lol, we're talking about Fark here
pcwelder 3y ago
>It looks too spaced out People have similar complaints with Reddit re-design (so do I). What's with making websites "prettier" instead of more usable?
- creshal 3y ago
  People who're already used to a website will prefer a dense layout, but new users can be intimidated by the information overload. But measuring and improving user retention is hard, and might need expensive measures like improving content quality, it's much easier to optimize onboarding new users by shuffling some stylesheets around. KPIs fulfilled, who cares about the rest.
  - pmlnr 3y ago
    > new users can be intimidated by the information overload The learn to use it? There's now a reverse trend in appliances: they use to be simple, now they are quite complicated, see washing machines, yet people handle it.
    - creshal 3y ago
      Some learn it, some don't. If your only goal is to get 100% of humanity to spend as much time as possible on your website, no matter if that's good for them or not, you need to make your app addicting even to people with no attention span.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      Of course. "Intuitive" is just an excuse. Software now typically relies on some form of lock-in (subscription alone is a soft form of one), so acquiring new users is a priority. Appliances... they had their simplification trend too, and now they're getting complex again because you have to use smartphone apps to control them - but all the extra confusion is worth it, as the audience is already sort of captive (approximately everyone needs a fridge and a washing machine), and the app offers a whole new dimension of lock-in and abuse. What it doesn't offer is usability, of course.
- deleted 3y ago
yarg 3y ago
I can't help but feel that the only answer to this is peer to peer distributed social networking. But who has the impetus to make such a thing?
- draluy 3y ago
  Mastodon?
  - yarg 3y ago
    They need to do a far better job of server discoverability as well as account transfer. Needing to click through server after server with none of them accepting new users is a discouraging experience.
no_butterscotch 3y ago
I don't know if what's happening at Reddit is enough to kill it to be honest. A few subreddits I subscribe to (San Francisco, videos, etc) all went dark, claiming to be doing so "indefinitely". Effectively you cannot access those subreddits even to look at archived things. The Reddit staff/leadership can just decide to un-darken those subs and I'll "cross the picket lines". I suspect most are like me. That's the honest truth. I'm already annoyed by the darkening of these subs and would like Reddit staff to just make the executive decision to un-darken them. If the mods want to resign from moderating in protest then do so, if that leaves AI moderators or harsher requirements to qualify for posting then so be it. But don't darken the sub and make it blocked to everyone.
- ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
  if you don't like people suspending you (and/or everyone else) from their subreddit, you can always create your own, or deal with the root cause of why they're doing it > don't darken the sub and make it blocked to everyone don't tell people what to do with their subreddit ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- GlacierFox 3y ago
  Try not to embolden yourself by claiming you're on some sort of virtual picket line after a weak-ass post like this :S.
- Aaargh20318 3y ago
  > The Reddit staff/leadership can just decide to un-darken those subs and I'll "cross the picket lines". I suspect most are like me. That's the honest truth. But it’s not about lurkers. Who is going to moderate those subs and prevent them from turning into a cesspool of spam and other less savory content? Reddit is dependent on literally tens of thousands of volunteer moderators. Un-darkening subreddits is surely going to piss them off even more. Without moderators they can close their doors as no advertiser is going to want to put their brand name next to an endless stream of spam and filth.
implements 3y ago
Farks discussion of today’s Reddit Blackout: https://www.fark.com/comments/12887520/Reddit-to-get-drunk-on-Monday-shut-down-more-than-just-its-politics-tabs https://www.fark.com/comments/12887520/Reddit-to-get-drunk-o...
- gigglesupstairs 3y ago
  It's like I landed in 90s forum talking about stuff happening in 2023. It's a weird feeling.
mihaaly 3y ago
Along the redesign matter - I do not know Frak - I realized that since UX design became a strongly self aware and proud so called profession with axioms and rulebooks the usability of the UI gone s*t, in general. Probably those are pretty s*t, but functionality wise just pure s*t. Compared to ugly but pratcical older things before made by UX unaware product developers without aesthetical sense but focusing on the function. UX is important, that is what make something usable for the purpose but somehow the more they work on it the worse it becomes. At least this is my generic observation throughout the years and decades, with little exceptions. Probably it is just a coincidence that the emergence of the UX brought useless products, I do not know. But I could annoy people around me with specifics and examples for hours, how something born useless or made useless with hard hard work with lots of efforts from a marginally or pretty usable state. When it was or could have been better. Probably the one worth to mention now is the Windows 11 that drives me away slowly but surely from the Windows Universe, despite the difficulty of the transition which becomes the less difficulty compared to using it on. Its reputation was never that good in this regard, it always been hip to criticise, I know people complained intensely about previous version that I could live with, but this one, this is a new league of ignorantly forced through renovation of ruined functionality with the only benefit that it occupies the UX folks there, keeping them in payroll.
marban 3y ago
I was the creator of the OG Popurls which at the time was the #1 traffic driver for Reddit and Digg; and also created Twidroid the very first Android Twitter client which became one of the reasons for shutting down 3rd party apps after its acquisition. Since I'm a sucker for anything old-school Web, I've been working on a Digg 1.0 rehash for a while now so if any of you wants to beta test let me know.
- HeckFeck 3y ago
  I would be happy to give a look through it, email in my bio. I dig that sort of thing, someone did something similar with classic MySpace: https://spacehey.com/ https://spacehey.com/. We just need Bebo back and we're sorted ;)
  - blitzar 3y ago
    Hang on ... you left off geocities. The internet is not complete without it.
    - grishka 3y ago
      https://neocities.org https://neocities.org: *exists*
      - blitzar 3y ago
        I will see you in a week when I emerge from experiencing all that has to offer.
- yosito 3y ago
  Today is the day to launch a public beta!
- a2tech 3y ago
  I'd love to see that--jbudde@a2tech.us
- Bluecobra 3y ago
Kiro 3y ago
I don't think this is true. The redesign was not bad and the reaction is the classic one that happens for all redesigns, good or bad. After a while people acclimatize to the new design and feel that's the original one. If you revert the redesign after that people will shout "bring back the old design!" even if that's exactly what you did.
- weare138 3y ago
  I agree. Fark is still chugging along. How many sites has it outlived now?
- grayrest 3y ago
  As a longtime Reddit user, I immediately disliked the redesign but since I've been on the other side I decided it give it a month. I now deliberately dislike the redesign. I get most of my value out of reddit in the text subreddits and the conversation view in the redesign is awful. Things are highly collapsed and following a conversation requires repeated expansions. The comment count without loading more is extremely limited and when you scroll down there's an interstitial callout about the subreddit's all time popular posts. The redesign is fine for top level content in the picture/video/meme subreddits. Content emphasis aside, it feels incredibly slow. Waterfall loading and 2-300ms response times. I've spent quite a bit of time reflecting on design decisions and I think the design brief/product vision is simply opposed to my interests. I feel bad about complaining about another team's work but my complaints aren't the knee-jerk reaction you're complaining about.
  - Kiro 3y ago
    I personally think reddit is an example of an actual bad redesign, so I'm not saying this is true for all redesigns. I do however think it was true for Fark, at least from how I remember it. With that said, I don't think old.reddit is that good either unless you only want to read text-only posts, and it's pretty much unusable on mobile.
    - chimeracoder 3y ago
      > With that said, I don't think old.reddit is that good either unless you only want to read text-only posts, and it's pretty much unusable on mobile. Old Reddit is nearly unusable on mobile, but it's still better than the new Reddit on mobile, which is... actually quite impressive (and not in a good way).
jfengel 3y ago
That was 16 years ago, and it's going along just fine. I don't think it ever held a really dominant position. It was never famous or well known. It seems content to have a loyalish fan base who either see ads or pay to remove them. That seems to pay to keep it alive and a smallish staff to keep it running, and it doesn't seem to desire any more than that. The comments right from the beginning of that thread are sarcastic about how everyone else seems to act as if the world has ended at every redesign. It's hardly user hostile. It just gives enough for a decent conversation on news items that rarely merit more than a few laughs and sarcastic comments. They keep it light with aggressive moderation, and that seems to suit the people who fund it. And it doesn't have any aspirations higher than that.
- milsorgen 3y ago
  Fark was pretty well known back in the day. Certainly not /. levels of famous but online people of a certain age all seem to remember the name.
- Nursie 3y ago
  I paid for fark for a while back then, even organised a couple of London fark get togethers in the mid 00s. It was great fun at the time, but I guess I got bored with the format and the snark and at some point life moved on. I don't remember site design being part of it...
- ratg13 3y ago
  >I don't think it ever held a really dominant position. It was never famous or well known. Calling one of the most visited sites on the internet in the early 2000s “not dominant” is odd.
chillbill 3y ago
The unfortunate thing is that there isn’t an alternative. I’d like to see Reddit die as much as the next guy but considering there doesn’t seem to be a replacement it will be difficult for people who are used to it to just drop it. I hope that this may mean a federated alternative (or basically back to the old days of phpNuke forums and the like) but I somehow doubt it.
- amsterdorn 3y ago
  That's because there hasn't really been a need for one. But that could change rapidly.
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
lapser 3y ago
Why is it that companies go towards bad UX when they start ramping up profits? Download size is one thing, but ignoring that, how is it that they thought the new (Reddit) website was a good idea? Sure it's mobile friendly, but it's barely useable on mobile and desktop? For example: why do I have to constantly click read more? This seems to be a common thing with all kinds of companies, Digg, Facebook, many others. It's not like you can't build ads into the current site, right? Tracking can be easily built-in these days. Sure it'll decrease initial download speeds, but the UX won't be as terrible as what they keep coming up with.
- 23B1 3y ago
  I'm guessing it's because UX as a field has gone from focusing on usability and aesthetics to darkpatterns in the service of commercialization.
- robador 3y ago
  Not based on anything I can verify, but my feeling is that when a company gets to a certain size and becomes high profile, it will attract certain types of employees as well. The more high profile, the more a UI/UX department will want to put their stamp on it. Instead of looking at what would make the product more user friendly and accessible, they'll be attracted to the shiny new things that they can do, simply because they can. The little nuances that are present in the old are allowed to fester until all of them combined lead to a general view that the whole thing is crap. Instead of doing small incremental improvements, they'll convince everybody (up to c-level) that a complete overhaul is the only way to move forward. This usually tends to happen in an echo chamber, where everybody who doesn't have the same vision of grandeur is excluded as part of the conversation. That, combined with business goals around profitability, is a dangerous thing to happen, and from my experience usually ends up in tears. But hey, I like boring things ;-)
  - lapser 3y ago
    But a complete revamp doesn't necessarily mean bad UI/UX. It just means something different. It can be done in an equally good or better way. In comparison, the Reddit UI was just horrendous. It's barely usable. Without old.reddit or 3rd party apps, I would have probably stopped using Reddit by now due to how horrendous it is to use.
Randomizer42 3y ago
What’s with all the hyperbole? Reddit Fail?
dontupvoteme 3y ago
And before/In parallel to Fark was SomethingAwful, which to my knowledge never did any meaningful redesigns and quasi died out because.. well i'm not even sure why, just a lot of us ended up leaving. Though I guess there's still some skeleton userbase left. Apologies to any goons if i'm misrepresenting things.
- peruvian 3y ago
  SA just never got new users to replace the ones that left or grew out of the site. Younger millennials went to Reddit and other social media. The weirder ones went on 4chan.
- HeckFeck 3y ago
  > i'm not even sure why In a word? Lowtax. It's quite the wild ride (with a few dark turns, regrettably): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhjMv9nxxWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhjMv9nxxWk
- becquerel 3y ago
  I think part of it is that SA's current culture really doesn't care about bringing new people in. The people there are quite happy talking to themselves on what they will happily call a dead forum. People leaving over time is the natural state of any platform; they're just below replacement rate and not too fussed over it.
- russdpale 3y ago
  something awful had a forum for crappy users, called Fuck Youself and Die, but eventually the trolls and shitty users grew and the site was suffering, the mod war with those users is what 4chan was born from.
  - astrange 3y ago
    4chan was not a revenge website against SA, this is some kind of narrative written by later generations of twitter journalists. A revenge forum would have the same $10 to sign up rule. (But the SA admins did delete the 4chan thread on the day its traffic surpassed SA.)
CodeCompost 3y ago
Just wondering. If you were Reddit CEO and you were being pressured to turn it into a profitable company, how would you do it?
- ratg13 3y ago
  Give people API keys / OAuth tokens for reddit premium users that would allow use with third party apps. Fire spez.
- ddng 3y ago
  slowly add costs to the apis. he gave people such a short notice and the price was too much. or better yet - make the reddit app so good....people wouldn't want to use another one.
- shibopo 3y ago
  Profitable for IPO for profitable to survive? It's way too late now but when Spez first came in, he had insane amounts of good will. He should've been just honest and transparent with server costs and how much Reddit Gold and ads were bringing in. They used to have a Reddit gold target. From there, they can slowly implement API charges to make a tiny profit so they don't just lose money there or implement Reddit Gold/Premium tiers that offer way better benefits.
- rahidz 3y ago
  Fire half their employees. Seriously, what do their 2000(!) employees even do? Mod tools are a joke, moderators do it for free, and the official app pales in comparison to hobbyist ones. NFT side-projects I suppose.
- scumola 3y ago
  Fire Spez. Pay the people making the good apps to actually maintain their apps and keep up with the site's improvements, so there are multiple good apps, not just one crappy one. If they need money, there are already ads on reddit, charge more for the ads! Don't fuck over the user base! Your users are what makes a site like reddit good! Don't they know that? Trim the fat (middle-management usually). Get out of the cloud if you're hosting servers in the cloud, move things on-prem. The cloud is great for flexibility, but for cost-savings, on-prem will always win. Whoever is the upper-management that approved the whole "charge for API use" - fire that guy too. (rant) Too many websites have had upper-management take over and immediately change things that bring the site to its knees. This happens time and time again with new management. They think that they can bring some new life and revenue into the site and in the process, they cripple the product. It happened to evernote, dropbox, tons of great, cheap/free services that "couldn't support the freemium model anymore" so they cut cheap/free access to the product and people just went somewhere else. That's exactly what's happening now. (/rant)
meerita 3y ago
User redesigns are the main killers of websites. Consider the following examples: Digg, MySpace, Reddit, Slashdot, Facebook, Dropbox, and Typeform. These projects, among others, ultimately failed due to a misconception that they had a design problem or a desire to keep their design department occupied. Instead of following a clear vision, these projects were sacrificed in an attempt to please all users. HN should refrain from undergoing any major redesigns and instead focus on making minor adjustments. It is worth noting that some HN users frequently suggest redesigns, believing that it would improve the forum. However, I must emphasize that if HN were to heed all user suggestions, it would risk becoming a desolate space within a few months. In support of this notion, one could say that a Volvo is akin to a Porsche designed by a committee.
- bob1029 3y ago
  > HN should refrain from undergoing any major redesigns and instead focus on making minor adjustments. I think HN should stay exactly the way it is. I know we all hate things like clicking for more comments at the bottom of popular posts, but this is like an antibody for the kind of user who wouldn't stop with that suggestion.
- tourist2d 3y ago
  It's hard to take you comment serious when you categorise Facebook and Dropbox as failed projects.
  - jkaplowitz 3y ago
    I think they were indeed being sarcastic or satirical.
  - meerita 3y ago
    Dropbox went from good user experience and design style to bizarre current-thing design style back then. It backfired so bad people fleed from the platform. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15393684 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15393684
- placesalt 3y ago
n3storm 3y ago
OSNews was launched in 1997
barrenko 3y ago
My bigger wish - why do all the current social networks desperately want do die?
klrants 3y ago
Reddit can replace posters with an AI that has been trained on their volunteer work. Then you need another AI that clicks on ads. No humans required.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
nrawe 3y ago
I think the big problem is that they are trying to turn something which is more akin to a utility into a product that can be IPO’d. What they used to be (simple, free, centralised forum software) doesn’t interest the market; so they’re having to try and package it as a social network. Rightly or wrongly, the market has an understanding of how to value that and things like data collection and deployment, DAUs, mobile vs non-mobile usage (again, more about data collection), and the oh so relevant deployment of AI/ML. It’s why, we all know, there is hate speech and such on the platform which could be handled more actively but isn’t: they need the DAUs. It’s the big issue with “build it and they will come” type endeavours like this: you have to know you’ll do when they get there.
lmm 3y ago
Fark's biggest own goal was the Tumblr-like removal of the boobies category.
pjmlp 3y ago
And before that everyone was on Usenet, and piracy killed it. And Gamedev, Flipcode,.... This stuff comes and goes, get used to it.
epigramx 3y ago
I think most people aren't aware that during the digg exodus there were also not that many alternatives or at least not that many alternatives people were aware of, so that played a major role because it was a very easy choice when there were not that many choices. But I also think a new technological paradigm for social media is needed entirely (decentralized).
cersei 3y ago
They probably NEED to show the investors that Reddit can make money. So it might be a win or bust moment for them.
Onewildgamer 3y ago
I am wondering, HN can spawn a few subreddit like channels maybe with Image, Video support later. HN is the best place in internet that encourages good discussions, reddit communities can vastly benefit from the familiar UI experience, good enough backend. Maybe all the mods can write a petition to create HN communities and foster the communities here. Lemmy, kbin are all fine but come on I'll take HN any day over others. Am I missing something?
- Kye 3y ago
  Relevant historical note: That's how Reddit started. In the beginning, it was just Reddit. Not much different from HN. Then they added subreddits, and what was reddit became /r/Reddit.com until they closed it. https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/ https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/
jordiburgos 3y ago
I want to continue reading and participating in the communities that I was using on Reddit. Where do I go now?
Khaine 3y ago
The re-design didn't kill fark.com, it was the attack on its users, which started with the "crackdown on misogyny" which meant cracking down on anything negative against women and then has expanded from there. The re-design and this were the one-two punch on that community. Since then, it has been a shell of itself. You can argue about the merits of those changes, but it is those changes that changed the community, practically fatally so. I think this also marked the death of the early 2000s internet culture, which had been formed on places like fark.
dreamcompiler 3y ago
Reddit management seem to be living in a bubble (as corporate managers often do). Inside the Reddit bubble, disgruntled users are a vocal minority who don't matter, Reddit -- not its users -- created the content that keeps the eyeballs coming back, apps are more convenient than websites, we own the user experience, we are leaving money on the table if we don't mine and sell more personal information, we have no competition, our barrier to entry is infinitely high, and our IPO will be the greatest IPO ever. Either that or they know all the above is bullshit and they're just hoping they can cash out with FU money before the ship sinks.
- Meph504 3y ago
  IMO, I certainly think it is the goal, I think they are trying to invent a projected revenue stream, increasing ad track through 1st party views, and layoffs are all about looking more valuable for IPO. None of it seems to increase value to current users, invite new users, or actually grow the business.
AltruisticGapHN 3y ago
Could this be the ramifications of AI though? (edit: I mean, in light of StackOverflow also changing their policies recently) Not only are the LLMs like GPT effectively doing scraping like never before, without any legal oversight, AI is also automating and causing much more pressure on those social sites. The future is bleak, LLMs are going to destroy what little "Far West" we still had and turn all the open sites into even more walled gardens. So far AI is just creating bullshit art, and destroying the open internet.
- GaggiX 3y ago
  AIs, in particular LLM models, are not scraping the internet, that's done by traditional software.
  - AltruisticGapHN 3y ago
    Oh come on. You know what I mean. Companies like OpenAI are basically appropriating value created by others by feeding the so called "public" data into their LLMs. Therefore stealing content on a massive scale. You and I are not getting rewarded a single cent for all the time we spent on StackOverflow, or Reddit, or here on HN etc. I´m looking at the big picture here. So what I was trying to say is I can see how more and more social sites and services that have open APIs are going to rethink how they share their data seeing as all the value is being sucked dry out of them AND then repurposed as a new, privately owned product.
- Xarodon 3y ago
  > doing scraping without any legal oversight What is this supposed to mean? What role do you think lawyers play in scraping the internet?
classified 3y ago
"Then a user-hostile redesign killed it" is the story of anything and everything software. It would be far shorter to enumerate what hasn't been killed by a user-hostile redesign.
weinzierl 3y ago
In all cases we don't know if the user-hostile redesign was the root cause or just a symptom.
throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
Am I the only person who is rooting for all social media to die? (Including this one) The only reason I come here is to find interesting articles, but mostly it's nonsense editorials by extremists, "best practice" by novices, thinly veiled advertisement clickbait by companies, generic news from generic news sites, press releases, Twitter threads... That's most of what is on the front page here. The comments section is a mess. Experts get downvoted for stating facts, know it alls beating up people for making mistakes, goody-two-shoes lecturing people for not following rules, pedantry galore, the bizarre hangups of straight white libertarian code bros, sycophants, newbies passing off nonsense as sage wisdom, and up/down votes being nearly random and mostly based on emotional response to rhetoric or whatever mirrors their opinions. The sad truth is that if they tried to fix all these problems, there'd be like 3 comments and 7 new posts a day. To keep something popular and engaging it has to be crap and controversial.
- thealchemistdev 3y ago
  > the bizarre hangups of straight white libertarian code bros Dang. I was with you all the way until the bigotry. Level up, dude; there are more important things to focus on.
  - throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
    Found the straight white libertarian code bro!
- losername_ 3y ago
  I too am tantilised by the idea of social media, and most of the newsmedia, going out like a light overnight. I'd happily see it take businesses whose model rely upon it with them - including this current approach to 'AI' and political campaigning. Would it be the start of the world or the end?
losername_ 3y ago
Before there was FARK, or any of these Web 2.0 popular content aggregators there was The Temple of The Screaming Electron.
markdown 3y ago
I don't understand any of this at all. Do most Americans really believe they're entitled to free access to Reddit? I've spent years of my life on reddit, and enjoyed most of it. For that, I'm truly grateful to spez and all the others that make it work. I 100% support them charging for the service over injecting ever more ads. It's bizarre to me that folk are getting upset and abusive because reddit wants to charge parasitic apps for the privilege. I don't get it.
- popularrecluse 3y ago
  It's a glorified bulletin board. The users are the content. The party can move somewhere else.
  - markdown 3y ago
    Except the point is that it can't. I hope they stick by their decision. I'd love to see the whiners leave for Truth Social or whatever else is on offer.
geekpowa 3y ago
Audiences are fickle and audiences captured during a websites golden period of explosive growth steadily move away over time. I am daily fark user for 20+ years. The site certainly is past its prime but this is just the natural lifecycle of many online communities I suspect. I wouldn't characterize it as dead. I wouldn't characterize its decline from peak popularity as caused by user-hostile actions of its owners. I don't think fark is a useful cautionary tale in context of reddit. Probably a more useful example might be slashdot. Fark has made changes: with its ux and its moderation policies and implementation of those policies at times, users grumbled. It's perilous to actively antagonize your audience, to take away things from them that have genuine utility for them. A site dies when you drive away your key content creators and contributors. None of these things happened at Fark I believe. Another useful example of a site that stepped back from the brink of mass audience exodus is onlyfans and their rolled back attempt to ban adult content.
- a2tech 3y ago
  My wife and I were both TotalFarkers from the time they introduced it until about 15 years ago when we made the switch to Reddit. The redesign was, and still is, shit. I just logged into my old account (which amazingly still works) and the interface is AWFUL. It was bad before, but its just gotten worse. The level of discourse in the threads (not a great sample, I just clicked on a few) seems not great and very few posts.
- rahidz 3y ago
  >It's perilous to actively antagonize your audience, to take away things from them that have genuine utility for them. A site dies when you drive away your key content creators and contributors. None of these things happened at Fark I believe. While it wasn't a key point in me leaving, I switched from Fark to Reddit around the time they started cracking down on Foobies/porn because of "misogyny" and not wanting to offend advertisers.
mensetmanusman 3y ago
Maybe /. will swoop in and the cycle will be complete.
raydev 3y ago
Wow, haven't heard the "fark" name in a long time. I understand why this has been posted, but much like ill-informed comparisons to Digg, Reddit will be fine. Reddit has a much larger and more diverse audience now, and likely a majority are exclusively using the iOS/Android apps.
- xeromal 3y ago
  I'm with you on this one. Nothing is going to really happen save a few small subs going dark permanently, but I do recall reading something a while back that said 3rd party apps accounted for 30% of traffic. I think the rest was split between the web and the first-party apps.
glonq 3y ago
I loved Fark, especially their photoshop contests (which I recall using Paint Shop Pro for).
Jemm 3y ago
Oh man, this makes me miss Odd Todd.
sireat 3y ago
I think it is time to check Fark again after a 16 year hiatus. At the time one of the reasons for moving from Fark to Reddit was that browsing Reddit looked more "professional" - ie something you could get away with at work... EDIT: I checked and it seems... dead There are still a few sub sections and most articles get single digit comments. I really thought Fark would have grown in these years. It seemed to have carved a niche for aspiring radio DJs for "news of the weird variety".

432 points by MrThoughtful 3y ago

pharmakom 3y ago

It has a better mobile experience than Reddit

rahidz 3y ago

"You'll get over it."

TimedToasts 3y ago
I remember this too. Honestly I should go back and thank the mod/poster because that little splash of cold water prepared me for everything that has come after that. I think about it every now then when I run into the newer variations of that theme.

Apocryphon 3y ago

Digg was also killed by a user-hostile redesign. Reddit was wise enough to keep its redesign indefinitely optional, at least.

drumhead 3y ago
The API prices are a de facto redesign for many users because they'll have to use the less than adequate official product now.
wvenable 3y ago
Their mobile app is the new user-hostile redesign. I had no idea before today that they had experimented with cutting off mobile web access in favour of the app[1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36287411 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36287411
kyriakos 3y ago
for reddit based on the current mobile behaviour on android which doesn't allow you to use mobile version and forces you to use the app it means its no longer optional
chc4 3y ago
When Reddit first introduced their terrible mobile site years ago, they thankfully left around the old i.reddit.com (also known as .compact) around, which I exclusively used and so didn't really care much about the horrendously user-hostile current mobile site, with its popup windows begging you to use the app. They removed it entirely a month or so ago. I now no longer use Reddit.
- u801e 3y ago
  At least old.reddit.com still works and it's usable, more or less, on mobile.
  - Apocryphon 3y ago
    Yeah that’s what I use
hayst4ck 3y ago
There was a snarky comment in the IAMA when spez said "old.reddit.com isn't going away", and the person responded with a link to spez saying the exact same thing with the exact same words about the API 6 years ago. Google's "don't be evil" had to go away too. Capitalism can't make room for considerations such as proliferation of evil.
- astrange 3y ago
  > Capitalism can't make room for considerations such as proliferation of evil. People only believe in corporate slogans when they can use them to make cynical points about abandoning them, but nevertheless, these things exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation
  - hayst4ck 3y ago
    That was legitimately interesting, thanks.
- jkaplowitz 3y ago
  Google actually never officially got rid of their “don’t be evil” phrase, even if I agree with you that they are far worse at adhering to it than they used to be, and I suspect too many of their current executives have no attachment to it beyond not wanting the pointless employee morale or PR hit of actually removing it. The reason people think it got removed is two events: One, when Google Inc reorganized to create its Alphabet Inc corporate parent in 2015, the “Don’t be evil” motto stayed with the Google LLC subsidiary that still today handles most of what we associate with the name Google. For Alphabet, they added “Do the right thing” instead of moving “Don’t be evil” to the new top of the corporate hierarchy. Two, in 2018 they moved Don’t be evil away from the preface of Google’s code of conduct. But they moved it to the last sentence, which is at least far more prominent than burying it in the middle, let alone removing it entirely. I used to work for Google years ago, before all of the events I’m discussing and with no personal connection myself to those events. (Obviously I’m speaking only for myself here and not for them.) I think nowadays their level of morality as an organization is slightly better than or comparable to most other prominent tech megacorps, whereas they used to be atypically much better than that. The same deterioration has occurred in how good or bad of an employer they are - they used to be great, but now they’re slightly better than or similar to most other prominent tech megacorps. Still not worse than their peers in either morality or employee experience. But as much as “don’t be evil” is still officially there. It’s definitely far less of a corporate focus than it used to be, which I find quite sad.
miked85 3y ago
It was impressive how quickly Digg killed itself with the terrible redesign. Back then, Reddit was mostly considered a knockoff. It actually was to a large degree, but everyone moved to it very quickly.

brokenkebaby 3y ago

And what exactly is user-hostile there? It doesn't look beautiful to my tastes, but functionally nothing is particularly complicated to understand.

MattGaiser 3y ago
I would be curious how well redesigns go over in general, given that users are used to things working a certain way.
thom 3y ago
Some people still use old.reddit.com which I find superior purely because it reveals more content with fewer clicks.
sedatk 3y ago
Infinite scroll, for example, makes it easy to lose your reading progress with a simple refresh/reload. Paged UIs, on the other hand, don’t have that problem.
- creshal 3y ago
  Reddit is especially obnoxious because the sorting algorithms are extremely volatile, and if you do scroll too far, you'll never find that particular piece of content again. Infinite scrolling in Twitter etc. is much less obnoxious.
  - sedatk 3y ago
    > Infinite scrolling in Twitter etc. is much less obnoxious. Yes, Twitter's much better on that aspect, partly because how different its design is, and partly because how they handle browsing mechanics.
- mcmoor 3y ago
  I'm not even sure if it's 3PA only feature but there's option to hide all posts that you've read (or scrolled past). After finding that feature now i want it everywhere there's infinite scroll because yeah otherwise it's unusable.

rurban 3y ago

I like that you could use swear words by paying for it. > You can purchase FarkUnits for $10 for 100 FUs, or you can get a discount if you purchase in bulk. > Using it is easy. If you type a word with "fuck" or "shit" in your comment, a new button will pop up that says "Add Comment using SwearJar - 20FUs." Just click or tap that and those words won't be filtered to the customary 'fark' or 'shiat.'

1f60c 3y ago
This implies that the website is really called fuck.com (but censored), which is certainly … a choice.
- OkGoDoIt 3y ago
  But wasn’t that obvious? Fark is a cleaner, sillier way of saying f*ck.
  - yosito 3y ago
    What the fark are you talking about? ;)
- rgoulter 3y ago
  This reminds me of how "Rooster Teeth" is a more polite phrasing of "cock bite"; a phrase which was used in their first online content.
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  that's so obvious? Even as an American
  - 1f60c 3y ago
    Maybe if you're British. :-) Or maybe I'm just one of today's lucky 10,000.
- mkovach 3y ago
  Drew has commented on the origins of fark.com. Basically, he was drunk and looking for a funny name. Fark.com come was available. So, basically, a "here, hold my beer" domain name.

sunaurus 3y ago

One of the interesting thing about the open source federated alternatives (like Lemmy) is that each instance can run their own version of the UI. So even if the maintainers decide to completely redesign everything, nothing is stopping instances from staying on the old design forever.

esskay 3y ago
The only major downside (and the one that will ensure Lemmy doesn't gain any significant traction after this) is that its incredibly underdeveloped and nowhere near as close to being able to replace Reddit as Mastedon was for Twitter.
- politelemon 3y ago
  Isn't there also the issue of federation itself, if users have to understand federation they'll just stick to regular Reddit. Going by the principle of "don't make me think", that is
  - sunaurus 3y ago
    In my experience, people understand federation quite easily if you just use the e-mail analogue. Even completely non-technical folks understand that regardless of whether they are on Gmail or Outlook or iCloud mail, they can send e-mail to users of other platforms.
    - Gareth321 3y ago
      IMHO the federation aspect needs to be completely hidden from users unless they go out of their way to search for it. 99% of users don’t care about it, and offering instance options at signup must be killing conversion. As with all FOSS projects, it’s built by developers, for developers. The project badly needs a UX person streamline things.
    - goykasi 3y ago
      But they dont care about how email works. Type 'mom' in to, type message, hit send, call mom to let her know you sent an email. Same with reddit/others. Most users dont care about how it works or what makes it special or what the tech stack is. They want content: fast, easy, not crashing and in one spot.

ripreddit420 3y ago

Anyone else remember the great Digg exodus? It’s wild watching Reddit quickly following the footsteps. Steve Huffman (aka Spez) let his true colors shine, with (IPO) dollar signs in his eyes.

SllX 3y ago
One of the major differences is that there’s no clear alternative. Digg and Reddit had a lot of overlap in what they were trying to do immediately prior to Digg’s redesign. Reddit was an obvious place to go if you preferred Digg up until that point. Now what’s the clear alternative to Reddit? Discord is probably the closest just from a UX perspective and I expect to be finding stuff there that I used to find on Reddit in the near future; but it’s not as close as Digg and Reddit were, and a lot of the people that made Reddit into what it was have an issue with Discord’s walled off nature.
- deafpolygon 3y ago
  How is Discord even a closest alternative? Everything is on its own "server" and conversations happen in real-time, not async like Reddit.
  - MaKey 3y ago
    I hate Discord for killing classic forums and therefore robbing us of good searchable niche content.
    - charlieyu1 3y ago
      Not sure how Discord killed forums, they are more like IRC which had existed for a long time alongside forums.
      - treyd 3y ago
        There's a worrying number of instances where people managing a foss project using taking their GitHub issue tracker, discussion boards, or some other public forum / discussion board and deciding to lock it and direct users to a discord guild because it's "easier". Or new communities that start up exclusively on discord but would be better served by alternatives. Except it's not easier, there was an instance where a community had been using a discord channel as a file sharing platform for mods. An administrator was doing some housekeeping of the channels and accidentally deleted the entire chat history (which is easier to do than it sounds), and so irrevocably deleted all of the uploaded files, some of which were never recovered.

boc 3y ago

I have a 14yo reddit account, and was a Digg user for years prior to that. While there were scandals like the HDDVD code stuff, ultimately the user-hostile Digg v4 redesign killed it for me- the day they forced it on everyone I never went back. Tonight watching all the subreddits go private is the first time I’ve ever felt like Reddit is the next to die. If anyone from reddit corporate is reading this, understand that you’re playing with fire here. This week is critical to saving your platform.

scrame 3y ago
no,this is for that IPO. /s if needed
rapsey 3y ago
The problem is the business model is terrible. You need to sell ads to survive and the ads ruin the site.
- hackernewds 3y ago
  and when you try to rein in expenses to show less ads, the community begins to propose $10M buyouts and every refrain from reasonable optimizations of their API calls.
  - imauser 3y ago
    The developer has already clarified that Apollo was not the top user of the API. It was also confirmed by a Reddit employee.
  - nvy 3y ago
    It's patently obvious that they're just trying to drive up ad impression numbers on the app to inflate their financials before IPO/acquisition.
    - rapsey 3y ago
      Reddit is still not profitable.

hayst4ck 3y ago

I never used fark. Did they make a change to the structure of how users interacted with the site, or did they make a change to the UI only? digg v4 was a disaster, but the exodus started before that when digg removed threaded comments. Related: Wikipedia changed what pages actually looked like by moving a contents navigation bar to the left side and minimizing some other features. It's the last UI change in a major website I can think of that didn't make me grimace.

blhack 3y ago

Oh my god. I remember this happening, and I remember email drew about it at the time. It really never did recover from this. I "grew up" on Fark, and lots of my early web projects were clones of it/inspired by it. Fark really was a special part of the internet, and it's sad that it fell off. I wonder if the fact that they never moved on from this design was Drew being gunshy about changing it again.

jfengel 3y ago
I briefly conversed with Drew on what seemed like the obvious next step of threaded conversations. He was clear that this way kept things in order for him, and didn't let stuff get bogged down. In other words I think he's happy with it, and doesn't want it to change. The main change since then was more ads or paid accounts, which seems a fair tradeoff. Anybody who wants Reddit knows (or knew) where to find it.

phendrenad2 3y ago

What exactly did they change?

SilverBirch 3y ago
They are going to charge high fees for usage of the APIs so that 3rd party clients and bots are priced out of working.
- phendrenad2 3y ago
  That's Reddit lol, we're talking about Fark here

pcwelder 3y ago

>It looks too spaced out People have similar complaints with Reddit re-design (so do I). What's with making websites "prettier" instead of more usable?

creshal 3y ago
People who're already used to a website will prefer a dense layout, but new users can be intimidated by the information overload. But measuring and improving user retention is hard, and might need expensive measures like improving content quality, it's much easier to optimize onboarding new users by shuffling some stylesheets around. KPIs fulfilled, who cares about the rest.
- pmlnr 3y ago
  > new users can be intimidated by the information overload The learn to use it? There's now a reverse trend in appliances: they use to be simple, now they are quite complicated, see washing machines, yet people handle it.
  - creshal 3y ago
    Some learn it, some don't. If your only goal is to get 100% of humanity to spend as much time as possible on your website, no matter if that's good for them or not, you need to make your app addicting even to people with no attention span.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    Of course. "Intuitive" is just an excuse. Software now typically relies on some form of lock-in (subscription alone is a soft form of one), so acquiring new users is a priority. Appliances... they had their simplification trend too, and now they're getting complex again because you have to use smartphone apps to control them - but all the extra confusion is worth it, as the audience is already sort of captive (approximately everyone needs a fridge and a washing machine), and the app offers a whole new dimension of lock-in and abuse. What it doesn't offer is usability, of course.
deleted 3y ago

yarg 3y ago

I can't help but feel that the only answer to this is peer to peer distributed social networking. But who has the impetus to make such a thing?

draluy 3y ago
Mastodon?
- yarg 3y ago
  They need to do a far better job of server discoverability as well as account transfer. Needing to click through server after server with none of them accepting new users is a discouraging experience.

no_butterscotch 3y ago

I don't know if what's happening at Reddit is enough to kill it to be honest. A few subreddits I subscribe to (San Francisco, videos, etc) all went dark, claiming to be doing so "indefinitely". Effectively you cannot access those subreddits even to look at archived things. The Reddit staff/leadership can just decide to un-darken those subs and I'll "cross the picket lines". I suspect most are like me. That's the honest truth. I'm already annoyed by the darkening of these subs and would like Reddit staff to just make the executive decision to un-darken them. If the mods want to resign from moderating in protest then do so, if that leaves AI moderators or harsher requirements to qualify for posting then so be it. But don't darken the sub and make it blocked to everyone.

ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
if you don't like people suspending you (and/or everyone else) from their subreddit, you can always create your own, or deal with the root cause of why they're doing it > don't darken the sub and make it blocked to everyone don't tell people what to do with their subreddit ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
GlacierFox 3y ago
Try not to embolden yourself by claiming you're on some sort of virtual picket line after a weak-ass post like this :S.
Aaargh20318 3y ago
> The Reddit staff/leadership can just decide to un-darken those subs and I'll "cross the picket lines". I suspect most are like me. That's the honest truth. But it’s not about lurkers. Who is going to moderate those subs and prevent them from turning into a cesspool of spam and other less savory content? Reddit is dependent on literally tens of thousands of volunteer moderators. Un-darkening subreddits is surely going to piss them off even more. Without moderators they can close their doors as no advertiser is going to want to put their brand name next to an endless stream of spam and filth.

implements 3y ago

Farks discussion of today’s Reddit Blackout: https://www.fark.com/comments/12887520/Reddit-to-get-drunk-on-Monday-shut-down-more-than-just-its-politics-tabs https://www.fark.com/comments/12887520/Reddit-to-get-drunk-o...

gigglesupstairs 3y ago
It's like I landed in 90s forum talking about stuff happening in 2023. It's a weird feeling.

mihaaly 3y ago

Along the redesign matter - I do not know Frak - I realized that since UX design became a strongly self aware and proud so called profession with axioms and rulebooks the usability of the UI gone s*t, in general. Probably those are pretty s*t, but functionality wise just pure s*t. Compared to ugly but pratcical older things before made by UX unaware product developers without aesthetical sense but focusing on the function. UX is important, that is what make something usable for the purpose but somehow the more they work on it the worse it becomes. At least this is my generic observation throughout the years and decades, with little exceptions. Probably it is just a coincidence that the emergence of the UX brought useless products, I do not know. But I could annoy people around me with specifics and examples for hours, how something born useless or made useless with hard hard work with lots of efforts from a marginally or pretty usable state. When it was or could have been better. Probably the one worth to mention now is the Windows 11 that drives me away slowly but surely from the Windows Universe, despite the difficulty of the transition which becomes the less difficulty compared to using it on. Its reputation was never that good in this regard, it always been hip to criticise, I know people complained intensely about previous version that I could live with, but this one, this is a new league of ignorantly forced through renovation of ruined functionality with the only benefit that it occupies the UX folks there, keeping them in payroll.

marban 3y ago

I was the creator of the OG Popurls which at the time was the #1 traffic driver for Reddit and Digg; and also created Twidroid the very first Android Twitter client which became one of the reasons for shutting down 3rd party apps after its acquisition. Since I'm a sucker for anything old-school Web, I've been working on a Digg 1.0 rehash for a while now so if any of you wants to beta test let me know.

HeckFeck 3y ago
I would be happy to give a look through it, email in my bio. I dig that sort of thing, someone did something similar with classic MySpace: https://spacehey.com/ https://spacehey.com/. We just need Bebo back and we're sorted ;)
- blitzar 3y ago
  Hang on ... you left off geocities. The internet is not complete without it.
  - grishka 3y ago
    https://neocities.org https://neocities.org: *exists*
    - blitzar 3y ago
      I will see you in a week when I emerge from experiencing all that has to offer.
yosito 3y ago
Today is the day to launch a public beta!
a2tech 3y ago
I'd love to see that--jbudde@a2tech.us
Bluecobra 3y ago

Kiro 3y ago

I don't think this is true. The redesign was not bad and the reaction is the classic one that happens for all redesigns, good or bad. After a while people acclimatize to the new design and feel that's the original one. If you revert the redesign after that people will shout "bring back the old design!" even if that's exactly what you did.

weare138 3y ago
I agree. Fark is still chugging along. How many sites has it outlived now?
grayrest 3y ago
As a longtime Reddit user, I immediately disliked the redesign but since I've been on the other side I decided it give it a month. I now deliberately dislike the redesign. I get most of my value out of reddit in the text subreddits and the conversation view in the redesign is awful. Things are highly collapsed and following a conversation requires repeated expansions. The comment count without loading more is extremely limited and when you scroll down there's an interstitial callout about the subreddit's all time popular posts. The redesign is fine for top level content in the picture/video/meme subreddits. Content emphasis aside, it feels incredibly slow. Waterfall loading and 2-300ms response times. I've spent quite a bit of time reflecting on design decisions and I think the design brief/product vision is simply opposed to my interests. I feel bad about complaining about another team's work but my complaints aren't the knee-jerk reaction you're complaining about.
- Kiro 3y ago
  I personally think reddit is an example of an actual bad redesign, so I'm not saying this is true for all redesigns. I do however think it was true for Fark, at least from how I remember it. With that said, I don't think old.reddit is that good either unless you only want to read text-only posts, and it's pretty much unusable on mobile.
  - chimeracoder 3y ago
    > With that said, I don't think old.reddit is that good either unless you only want to read text-only posts, and it's pretty much unusable on mobile. Old Reddit is nearly unusable on mobile, but it's still better than the new Reddit on mobile, which is... actually quite impressive (and not in a good way).

jfengel 3y ago

That was 16 years ago, and it's going along just fine. I don't think it ever held a really dominant position. It was never famous or well known. It seems content to have a loyalish fan base who either see ads or pay to remove them. That seems to pay to keep it alive and a smallish staff to keep it running, and it doesn't seem to desire any more than that. The comments right from the beginning of that thread are sarcastic about how everyone else seems to act as if the world has ended at every redesign. It's hardly user hostile. It just gives enough for a decent conversation on news items that rarely merit more than a few laughs and sarcastic comments. They keep it light with aggressive moderation, and that seems to suit the people who fund it. And it doesn't have any aspirations higher than that.

milsorgen 3y ago
Fark was pretty well known back in the day. Certainly not /. levels of famous but online people of a certain age all seem to remember the name.
Nursie 3y ago
I paid for fark for a while back then, even organised a couple of London fark get togethers in the mid 00s. It was great fun at the time, but I guess I got bored with the format and the snark and at some point life moved on. I don't remember site design being part of it...
ratg13 3y ago
>I don't think it ever held a really dominant position. It was never famous or well known. Calling one of the most visited sites on the internet in the early 2000s “not dominant” is odd.

chillbill 3y ago

The unfortunate thing is that there isn’t an alternative. I’d like to see Reddit die as much as the next guy but considering there doesn’t seem to be a replacement it will be difficult for people who are used to it to just drop it. I hope that this may mean a federated alternative (or basically back to the old days of phpNuke forums and the like) but I somehow doubt it.

amsterdorn 3y ago
That's because there hasn't really been a need for one. But that could change rapidly.

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

lapser 3y ago

Why is it that companies go towards bad UX when they start ramping up profits? Download size is one thing, but ignoring that, how is it that they thought the new (Reddit) website was a good idea? Sure it's mobile friendly, but it's barely useable on mobile and desktop? For example: why do I have to constantly click read more? This seems to be a common thing with all kinds of companies, Digg, Facebook, many others. It's not like you can't build ads into the current site, right? Tracking can be easily built-in these days. Sure it'll decrease initial download speeds, but the UX won't be as terrible as what they keep coming up with.

23B1 3y ago
I'm guessing it's because UX as a field has gone from focusing on usability and aesthetics to darkpatterns in the service of commercialization.
robador 3y ago
Not based on anything I can verify, but my feeling is that when a company gets to a certain size and becomes high profile, it will attract certain types of employees as well. The more high profile, the more a UI/UX department will want to put their stamp on it. Instead of looking at what would make the product more user friendly and accessible, they'll be attracted to the shiny new things that they can do, simply because they can. The little nuances that are present in the old are allowed to fester until all of them combined lead to a general view that the whole thing is crap. Instead of doing small incremental improvements, they'll convince everybody (up to c-level) that a complete overhaul is the only way to move forward. This usually tends to happen in an echo chamber, where everybody who doesn't have the same vision of grandeur is excluded as part of the conversation. That, combined with business goals around profitability, is a dangerous thing to happen, and from my experience usually ends up in tears. But hey, I like boring things ;-)
- lapser 3y ago
  But a complete revamp doesn't necessarily mean bad UI/UX. It just means something different. It can be done in an equally good or better way. In comparison, the Reddit UI was just horrendous. It's barely usable. Without old.reddit or 3rd party apps, I would have probably stopped using Reddit by now due to how horrendous it is to use.

Randomizer42 3y ago

What’s with all the hyperbole? Reddit Fail?

dontupvoteme 3y ago

And before/In parallel to Fark was SomethingAwful, which to my knowledge never did any meaningful redesigns and quasi died out because.. well i'm not even sure why, just a lot of us ended up leaving. Though I guess there's still some skeleton userbase left. Apologies to any goons if i'm misrepresenting things.

peruvian 3y ago
SA just never got new users to replace the ones that left or grew out of the site. Younger millennials went to Reddit and other social media. The weirder ones went on 4chan.
HeckFeck 3y ago
> i'm not even sure why In a word? Lowtax. It's quite the wild ride (with a few dark turns, regrettably): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhjMv9nxxWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhjMv9nxxWk
becquerel 3y ago
I think part of it is that SA's current culture really doesn't care about bringing new people in. The people there are quite happy talking to themselves on what they will happily call a dead forum. People leaving over time is the natural state of any platform; they're just below replacement rate and not too fussed over it.
russdpale 3y ago
something awful had a forum for crappy users, called Fuck Youself and Die, but eventually the trolls and shitty users grew and the site was suffering, the mod war with those users is what 4chan was born from.
- astrange 3y ago
  4chan was not a revenge website against SA, this is some kind of narrative written by later generations of twitter journalists. A revenge forum would have the same $10 to sign up rule. (But the SA admins did delete the 4chan thread on the day its traffic surpassed SA.)

CodeCompost 3y ago

Just wondering. If you were Reddit CEO and you were being pressured to turn it into a profitable company, how would you do it?

ratg13 3y ago
Give people API keys / OAuth tokens for reddit premium users that would allow use with third party apps. Fire spez.
ddng 3y ago
slowly add costs to the apis. he gave people such a short notice and the price was too much. or better yet - make the reddit app so good....people wouldn't want to use another one.
shibopo 3y ago
Profitable for IPO for profitable to survive? It's way too late now but when Spez first came in, he had insane amounts of good will. He should've been just honest and transparent with server costs and how much Reddit Gold and ads were bringing in. They used to have a Reddit gold target. From there, they can slowly implement API charges to make a tiny profit so they don't just lose money there or implement Reddit Gold/Premium tiers that offer way better benefits.
rahidz 3y ago
Fire half their employees. Seriously, what do their 2000(!) employees even do? Mod tools are a joke, moderators do it for free, and the official app pales in comparison to hobbyist ones. NFT side-projects I suppose.
scumola 3y ago
Fire Spez. Pay the people making the good apps to actually maintain their apps and keep up with the site's improvements, so there are multiple good apps, not just one crappy one. If they need money, there are already ads on reddit, charge more for the ads! Don't fuck over the user base! Your users are what makes a site like reddit good! Don't they know that? Trim the fat (middle-management usually). Get out of the cloud if you're hosting servers in the cloud, move things on-prem. The cloud is great for flexibility, but for cost-savings, on-prem will always win. Whoever is the upper-management that approved the whole "charge for API use" - fire that guy too. (rant) Too many websites have had upper-management take over and immediately change things that bring the site to its knees. This happens time and time again with new management. They think that they can bring some new life and revenue into the site and in the process, they cripple the product. It happened to evernote, dropbox, tons of great, cheap/free services that "couldn't support the freemium model anymore" so they cut cheap/free access to the product and people just went somewhere else. That's exactly what's happening now. (/rant)

meerita 3y ago

User redesigns are the main killers of websites. Consider the following examples: Digg, MySpace, Reddit, Slashdot, Facebook, Dropbox, and Typeform. These projects, among others, ultimately failed due to a misconception that they had a design problem or a desire to keep their design department occupied. Instead of following a clear vision, these projects were sacrificed in an attempt to please all users. HN should refrain from undergoing any major redesigns and instead focus on making minor adjustments. It is worth noting that some HN users frequently suggest redesigns, believing that it would improve the forum. However, I must emphasize that if HN were to heed all user suggestions, it would risk becoming a desolate space within a few months. In support of this notion, one could say that a Volvo is akin to a Porsche designed by a committee.

bob1029 3y ago
> HN should refrain from undergoing any major redesigns and instead focus on making minor adjustments. I think HN should stay exactly the way it is. I know we all hate things like clicking for more comments at the bottom of popular posts, but this is like an antibody for the kind of user who wouldn't stop with that suggestion.
tourist2d 3y ago
It's hard to take you comment serious when you categorise Facebook and Dropbox as failed projects.
- jkaplowitz 3y ago
  I think they were indeed being sarcastic or satirical.
- meerita 3y ago
  Dropbox went from good user experience and design style to bizarre current-thing design style back then. It backfired so bad people fleed from the platform. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15393684 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15393684
placesalt 3y ago

n3storm 3y ago

OSNews was launched in 1997

barrenko 3y ago

My bigger wish - why do all the current social networks desperately want do die?

klrants 3y ago

Reddit can replace posters with an AI that has been trained on their volunteer work. Then you need another AI that clicks on ads. No humans required.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

nrawe 3y ago

I think the big problem is that they are trying to turn something which is more akin to a utility into a product that can be IPO’d. What they used to be (simple, free, centralised forum software) doesn’t interest the market; so they’re having to try and package it as a social network. Rightly or wrongly, the market has an understanding of how to value that and things like data collection and deployment, DAUs, mobile vs non-mobile usage (again, more about data collection), and the oh so relevant deployment of AI/ML. It’s why, we all know, there is hate speech and such on the platform which could be handled more actively but isn’t: they need the DAUs. It’s the big issue with “build it and they will come” type endeavours like this: you have to know you’ll do when they get there.

lmm 3y ago

Fark's biggest own goal was the Tumblr-like removal of the boobies category.

pjmlp 3y ago

And before that everyone was on Usenet, and piracy killed it. And Gamedev, Flipcode,.... This stuff comes and goes, get used to it.

epigramx 3y ago

I think most people aren't aware that during the digg exodus there were also not that many alternatives or at least not that many alternatives people were aware of, so that played a major role because it was a very easy choice when there were not that many choices. But I also think a new technological paradigm for social media is needed entirely (decentralized).

cersei 3y ago

They probably NEED to show the investors that Reddit can make money. So it might be a win or bust moment for them.

Onewildgamer 3y ago

I am wondering, HN can spawn a few subreddit like channels maybe with Image, Video support later. HN is the best place in internet that encourages good discussions, reddit communities can vastly benefit from the familiar UI experience, good enough backend. Maybe all the mods can write a petition to create HN communities and foster the communities here. Lemmy, kbin are all fine but come on I'll take HN any day over others. Am I missing something?

Kye 3y ago
Relevant historical note: That's how Reddit started. In the beginning, it was just Reddit. Not much different from HN. Then they added subreddits, and what was reddit became /r/Reddit.com until they closed it. https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/ https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/

jordiburgos 3y ago

I want to continue reading and participating in the communities that I was using on Reddit. Where do I go now?

Khaine 3y ago

The re-design didn't kill fark.com, it was the attack on its users, which started with the "crackdown on misogyny" which meant cracking down on anything negative against women and then has expanded from there. The re-design and this were the one-two punch on that community. Since then, it has been a shell of itself. You can argue about the merits of those changes, but it is those changes that changed the community, practically fatally so. I think this also marked the death of the early 2000s internet culture, which had been formed on places like fark.

dreamcompiler 3y ago

Reddit management seem to be living in a bubble (as corporate managers often do). Inside the Reddit bubble, disgruntled users are a vocal minority who don't matter, Reddit -- not its users -- created the content that keeps the eyeballs coming back, apps are more convenient than websites, we own the user experience, we are leaving money on the table if we don't mine and sell more personal information, we have no competition, our barrier to entry is infinitely high, and our IPO will be the greatest IPO ever. Either that or they know all the above is bullshit and they're just hoping they can cash out with FU money before the ship sinks.

Meph504 3y ago
IMO, I certainly think it is the goal, I think they are trying to invent a projected revenue stream, increasing ad track through 1st party views, and layoffs are all about looking more valuable for IPO. None of it seems to increase value to current users, invite new users, or actually grow the business.

AltruisticGapHN 3y ago

Could this be the ramifications of AI though? (edit: I mean, in light of StackOverflow also changing their policies recently) Not only are the LLMs like GPT effectively doing scraping like never before, without any legal oversight, AI is also automating and causing much more pressure on those social sites. The future is bleak, LLMs are going to destroy what little "Far West" we still had and turn all the open sites into even more walled gardens. So far AI is just creating bullshit art, and destroying the open internet.

GaggiX 3y ago
AIs, in particular LLM models, are not scraping the internet, that's done by traditional software.
- AltruisticGapHN 3y ago
  Oh come on. You know what I mean. Companies like OpenAI are basically appropriating value created by others by feeding the so called "public" data into their LLMs. Therefore stealing content on a massive scale. You and I are not getting rewarded a single cent for all the time we spent on StackOverflow, or Reddit, or here on HN etc. I´m looking at the big picture here. So what I was trying to say is I can see how more and more social sites and services that have open APIs are going to rethink how they share their data seeing as all the value is being sucked dry out of them AND then repurposed as a new, privately owned product.
Xarodon 3y ago
> doing scraping without any legal oversight What is this supposed to mean? What role do you think lawyers play in scraping the internet?

classified 3y ago

"Then a user-hostile redesign killed it" is the story of anything and everything software. It would be far shorter to enumerate what hasn't been killed by a user-hostile redesign.

weinzierl 3y ago

In all cases we don't know if the user-hostile redesign was the root cause or just a symptom.

throwawaaarrgh 3y ago

Am I the only person who is rooting for all social media to die? (Including this one) The only reason I come here is to find interesting articles, but mostly it's nonsense editorials by extremists, "best practice" by novices, thinly veiled advertisement clickbait by companies, generic news from generic news sites, press releases, Twitter threads... That's most of what is on the front page here. The comments section is a mess. Experts get downvoted for stating facts, know it alls beating up people for making mistakes, goody-two-shoes lecturing people for not following rules, pedantry galore, the bizarre hangups of straight white libertarian code bros, sycophants, newbies passing off nonsense as sage wisdom, and up/down votes being nearly random and mostly based on emotional response to rhetoric or whatever mirrors their opinions. The sad truth is that if they tried to fix all these problems, there'd be like 3 comments and 7 new posts a day. To keep something popular and engaging it has to be crap and controversial.

thealchemistdev 3y ago
> the bizarre hangups of straight white libertarian code bros Dang. I was with you all the way until the bigotry. Level up, dude; there are more important things to focus on.
- throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
  Found the straight white libertarian code bro!
losername_ 3y ago
I too am tantilised by the idea of social media, and most of the newsmedia, going out like a light overnight. I'd happily see it take businesses whose model rely upon it with them - including this current approach to 'AI' and political campaigning. Would it be the start of the world or the end?

losername_ 3y ago

Before there was FARK, or any of these Web 2.0 popular content aggregators there was The Temple of The Screaming Electron.

markdown 3y ago

I don't understand any of this at all. Do most Americans really believe they're entitled to free access to Reddit? I've spent years of my life on reddit, and enjoyed most of it. For that, I'm truly grateful to spez and all the others that make it work. I 100% support them charging for the service over injecting ever more ads. It's bizarre to me that folk are getting upset and abusive because reddit wants to charge parasitic apps for the privilege. I don't get it.

popularrecluse 3y ago
It's a glorified bulletin board. The users are the content. The party can move somewhere else.
- markdown 3y ago
  Except the point is that it can't. I hope they stick by their decision. I'd love to see the whiners leave for Truth Social or whatever else is on offer.

geekpowa 3y ago

Audiences are fickle and audiences captured during a websites golden period of explosive growth steadily move away over time. I am daily fark user for 20+ years. The site certainly is past its prime but this is just the natural lifecycle of many online communities I suspect. I wouldn't characterize it as dead. I wouldn't characterize its decline from peak popularity as caused by user-hostile actions of its owners. I don't think fark is a useful cautionary tale in context of reddit. Probably a more useful example might be slashdot. Fark has made changes: with its ux and its moderation policies and implementation of those policies at times, users grumbled. It's perilous to actively antagonize your audience, to take away things from them that have genuine utility for them. A site dies when you drive away your key content creators and contributors. None of these things happened at Fark I believe. Another useful example of a site that stepped back from the brink of mass audience exodus is onlyfans and their rolled back attempt to ban adult content.

a2tech 3y ago
My wife and I were both TotalFarkers from the time they introduced it until about 15 years ago when we made the switch to Reddit. The redesign was, and still is, shit. I just logged into my old account (which amazingly still works) and the interface is AWFUL. It was bad before, but its just gotten worse. The level of discourse in the threads (not a great sample, I just clicked on a few) seems not great and very few posts.
rahidz 3y ago
>It's perilous to actively antagonize your audience, to take away things from them that have genuine utility for them. A site dies when you drive away your key content creators and contributors. None of these things happened at Fark I believe. While it wasn't a key point in me leaving, I switched from Fark to Reddit around the time they started cracking down on Foobies/porn because of "misogyny" and not wanting to offend advertisers.

mensetmanusman 3y ago

Maybe /. will swoop in and the cycle will be complete.

raydev 3y ago

Wow, haven't heard the "fark" name in a long time. I understand why this has been posted, but much like ill-informed comparisons to Digg, Reddit will be fine. Reddit has a much larger and more diverse audience now, and likely a majority are exclusively using the iOS/Android apps.

xeromal 3y ago
I'm with you on this one. Nothing is going to really happen save a few small subs going dark permanently, but I do recall reading something a while back that said 3rd party apps accounted for 30% of traffic. I think the rest was split between the web and the first-party apps.

glonq 3y ago

I loved Fark, especially their photoshop contests (which I recall using Paint Shop Pro for).

Jemm 3y ago

Oh man, this makes me miss Odd Todd.

sireat 3y ago

I think it is time to check Fark again after a 16 year hiatus. At the time one of the reasons for moving from Fark to Reddit was that browsing Reddit looked more "professional" - ie something you could get away with at work... EDIT: I checked and it seems... dead There are still a few sub sections and most articles get single digit comments. I really thought Fark would have grown in these years. It seemed to have carved a niche for aspiring radio DJs for "news of the weird variety".