5 ms·

IAmA Ex-Digg Employee

35 points by personlurking 14y ago

personlurking 14y ago
Q&A version http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/wjars/iama_exdigg_employee_ama/c5dwteu http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/wjars/iama_exdigg_empl...
stcredzero 14y ago
> For me, personally, we never really thought about Reddit too much. It was always just this poorly designed site that was slowly gaining traction. Wow. I always thought Digg was a poorly designed site and thought reddit was brilliant with a minimalist bent. I suspect it means something significant if a site can slowly gain traction over a long period of time, versus a flashy site that can seem like the next big thing for a week. Easy come, easy go.
- jmduke 14y ago
  Digg wasn't really "the next big thing for a week," though. I'd argue from 2005-2008 it was a monolithic company. Their fall, still, couldn't be choreographed better: focus on short-term products and grand, sweeping changes; neglect of the community and the emerging competitive landscape.
  - stcredzero 14y ago
    Digg wasn't really "the next big thing for a week," though. Yes, but I bet the Digg crew paid more attention to such sites than to reddit.
    - jmduke 14y ago
      Definitely; more specifically, the people pushing for v4 paid more attention to those sites than to reddit.
- WiseWeasel 14y ago
  I still think Reddit looks awful; it's the Craigslist of social news. The blue links filling a white page looks like 1995 to me. The original Digg at least looked somewhat clean and organized, with a sensible use of colors and lines to demarcate content. Hacker News is worlds above both, with stylishly simple design and colors that are easy on the eyes.
  - wyck 14y ago
    You realize that the users themselves control the look of the subs right? For example: http://www.reddit.com/r/googleplus/ http://www.reddit.com/r/googleplus/ , http://www.reddit.com/r/apple http://www.reddit.com/r/apple , http://www.reddit.com/r/diablo http://www.reddit.com/r/diablo, etc x 1 million. And power users use http://redditenhancementsuite.com/ http://redditenhancementsuite.com/ suite, and http://userstyles.org/styles/browse/reddit http://userstyles.org/styles/browse/reddit But at the end up the day it's about reading and not decoration, changing the UI would be a disaster of Digg proportions.
    - WiseWeasel 14y ago
      That's a terrible solution; while they're clever, and some are even nice, the inconsistency in interface for different subreddits is jarring, and the vast majority of users will not customize their interface at all. Pick a nice default interface, standardize it across the board, and maybe then let users pick a clever fun one that might be actually pretty good if they want. Having completely different interface widgets and navigation by default on different sections of the same site is probably a bad idea.
      - krsunny 14y ago
        Seems to work for stack exchange sites.
- dereg 14y ago
  How is Reddit considered minimalist? With every new day that I spend on Reddit, I lament the passing of Digg because Digg used to be superior to Reddit in design. Here's one example. On my computer, using reddit in fullscreen means that I have to deal with article titles and comments that span 1000+ horizontal pixels, whereas Digg constrains the width of its comments to 600 pixels wide. The same can be said for Hacker News. I absolutely cannot stand this because reading text on screen at that width creates a tremendous amount of cognitive friction. Plus, there's no easy solution to this problem. If I snap the window to take up half my screen, the dumb (un-hideable) sidebar ends up eating most of that screen space. That means I have to manually resize my browser window to force a width that makes the site readable to me. I hate this about reddit. This is a just a drop in the bucket of nitpicks I have with reddit. I use it because it entertains me, but I'm not a fan of its cluttered, low contrast, haphazardly designed UI.
  - tta 14y ago
    If I snap the window to take up half my screen, the dumb (un-hideable) sidebar ends up eating most of that screen space. I wrote a dotjs[1] script[2] that solves exactly this by letting you toggle the sidebar on and off. [1]: http://defunkt.io/dotjs/ http://defunkt.io/dotjs/ [2]: https://github.com/timothyandrew/.js/blob/master/reddit.com.js https://github.com/timothyandrew/.js/blob/master/reddit.com.... EDIT: Formatting
  - readme 14y ago
    Reddit is minimalist because it doesn't have a feature that resizes the link to a suitable size for your screen. That's the essence of minimalism, technologically. Perhaps you could argue it doesn't fit the "minimalist" design aesthetic. Which as popularly understood is not itself the embodiment of the philosophical concept of minimalism.
  - icebraining 14y ago
    Stylish is awesome for that, 'though it's only really useful if you know CSS. I have a theme for HN with this: @-moz-document domain("news.ycombinator.com") { .default { max-width: 45em; text-align: justify; } } Solves the problem really cleanly. I don't really go to Reddit anymore, but you can use: .usertext-body { max-width: 45em; } to fix the extra large lines, and hiding the sidebar can be done with: .side { display: none } By the way, this is one of the best advantages of websites over native apps: it's much easier to tame them to your needs. Even if you don't know how to program it yourself, http://userscripts.org http://userscripts.org and http://userstyles.org http://userstyles.org are incredible resources.
- vyrotek 14y ago
  Eventually people want a bit more than a list of links. Check out Diablo3's theme: http://www.reddit.com/r/diablo http://www.reddit.com/r/diablo
- bane 14y ago
  > For me, personally, we never really thought about Reddit too much. It was always just this poorly designed site that was slowly gaining traction. It's also an amazing lack of understanding the competitive marketspace you're operating in. The reason digg took off was because of two things, content + community. reddit also had those things (with an emphasis on communit(ies)). The digg team just simply didn't understand that they had the second piece. They thought they just had content + comments. If you look at all of the efforts during Digg's lifecycle, from Digg labs to the redesigns, there was a clear lack of understanding of the need for the community part. From the endless lab projects showing submissions (content) in different ways, to the almost anarchic gamesmanship of gangs of submitters acting as de facto rule makers in the absence of a community guiding presence from digg (and digg's lack of understanding why these kinds of user cliques are bad), to the v4 debacle which was purely a content focused effort...digg never quite got the + community part...which reddit was simply designed to excel at.
chrisaycock 14y ago
> I felt like there should have been more moderation tools for the users so they could better decide what they wanted to see. I like the way Reddit allows moderators and that's something Digg should have done a long time ago. That was the ex-employee's view of how a few users can ruin it for the rest of us. Something to keep in mind anytime someone complains about the moderators on Hacker News or Stack Overflow.

35 points by personlurking 14y ago

Q&A version http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/wjars/iama_exdigg_employee_ama/c5dwteu http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/wjars/iama_exdigg_empl...

stcredzero 14y ago

> For me, personally, we never really thought about Reddit too much. It was always just this poorly designed site that was slowly gaining traction. Wow. I always thought Digg was a poorly designed site and thought reddit was brilliant with a minimalist bent. I suspect it means something significant if a site can slowly gain traction over a long period of time, versus a flashy site that can seem like the next big thing for a week. Easy come, easy go.

jmduke 14y ago
Digg wasn't really "the next big thing for a week," though. I'd argue from 2005-2008 it was a monolithic company. Their fall, still, couldn't be choreographed better: focus on short-term products and grand, sweeping changes; neglect of the community and the emerging competitive landscape.
- stcredzero 14y ago
  Digg wasn't really "the next big thing for a week," though. Yes, but I bet the Digg crew paid more attention to such sites than to reddit.
  - jmduke 14y ago
    Definitely; more specifically, the people pushing for v4 paid more attention to those sites than to reddit.
WiseWeasel 14y ago
I still think Reddit looks awful; it's the Craigslist of social news. The blue links filling a white page looks like 1995 to me. The original Digg at least looked somewhat clean and organized, with a sensible use of colors and lines to demarcate content. Hacker News is worlds above both, with stylishly simple design and colors that are easy on the eyes.
- wyck 14y ago
  You realize that the users themselves control the look of the subs right? For example: http://www.reddit.com/r/googleplus/ http://www.reddit.com/r/googleplus/ , http://www.reddit.com/r/apple http://www.reddit.com/r/apple , http://www.reddit.com/r/diablo http://www.reddit.com/r/diablo, etc x 1 million. And power users use http://redditenhancementsuite.com/ http://redditenhancementsuite.com/ suite, and http://userstyles.org/styles/browse/reddit http://userstyles.org/styles/browse/reddit But at the end up the day it's about reading and not decoration, changing the UI would be a disaster of Digg proportions.
  - WiseWeasel 14y ago
    That's a terrible solution; while they're clever, and some are even nice, the inconsistency in interface for different subreddits is jarring, and the vast majority of users will not customize their interface at all. Pick a nice default interface, standardize it across the board, and maybe then let users pick a clever fun one that might be actually pretty good if they want. Having completely different interface widgets and navigation by default on different sections of the same site is probably a bad idea.
    - krsunny 14y ago
      Seems to work for stack exchange sites.
dereg 14y ago
How is Reddit considered minimalist? With every new day that I spend on Reddit, I lament the passing of Digg because Digg used to be superior to Reddit in design. Here's one example. On my computer, using reddit in fullscreen means that I have to deal with article titles and comments that span 1000+ horizontal pixels, whereas Digg constrains the width of its comments to 600 pixels wide. The same can be said for Hacker News. I absolutely cannot stand this because reading text on screen at that width creates a tremendous amount of cognitive friction. Plus, there's no easy solution to this problem. If I snap the window to take up half my screen, the dumb (un-hideable) sidebar ends up eating most of that screen space. That means I have to manually resize my browser window to force a width that makes the site readable to me. I hate this about reddit. This is a just a drop in the bucket of nitpicks I have with reddit. I use it because it entertains me, but I'm not a fan of its cluttered, low contrast, haphazardly designed UI.
- tta 14y ago
  If I snap the window to take up half my screen, the dumb (un-hideable) sidebar ends up eating most of that screen space. I wrote a dotjs[1] script[2] that solves exactly this by letting you toggle the sidebar on and off. [1]: http://defunkt.io/dotjs/ http://defunkt.io/dotjs/ [2]: https://github.com/timothyandrew/.js/blob/master/reddit.com.js https://github.com/timothyandrew/.js/blob/master/reddit.com.... EDIT: Formatting
- readme 14y ago
  Reddit is minimalist because it doesn't have a feature that resizes the link to a suitable size for your screen. That's the essence of minimalism, technologically. Perhaps you could argue it doesn't fit the "minimalist" design aesthetic. Which as popularly understood is not itself the embodiment of the philosophical concept of minimalism.
- icebraining 14y ago
  Stylish is awesome for that, 'though it's only really useful if you know CSS. I have a theme for HN with this: @-moz-document domain("news.ycombinator.com") { .default { max-width: 45em; text-align: justify; } } Solves the problem really cleanly. I don't really go to Reddit anymore, but you can use: .usertext-body { max-width: 45em; } to fix the extra large lines, and hiding the sidebar can be done with: .side { display: none } By the way, this is one of the best advantages of websites over native apps: it's much easier to tame them to your needs. Even if you don't know how to program it yourself, http://userscripts.org http://userscripts.org and http://userstyles.org http://userstyles.org are incredible resources.
vyrotek 14y ago
Eventually people want a bit more than a list of links. Check out Diablo3's theme: http://www.reddit.com/r/diablo http://www.reddit.com/r/diablo
bane 14y ago
> For me, personally, we never really thought about Reddit too much. It was always just this poorly designed site that was slowly gaining traction. It's also an amazing lack of understanding the competitive marketspace you're operating in. The reason digg took off was because of two things, content + community. reddit also had those things (with an emphasis on communit(ies)). The digg team just simply didn't understand that they had the second piece. They thought they just had content + comments. If you look at all of the efforts during Digg's lifecycle, from Digg labs to the redesigns, there was a clear lack of understanding of the need for the community part. From the endless lab projects showing submissions (content) in different ways, to the almost anarchic gamesmanship of gangs of submitters acting as de facto rule makers in the absence of a community guiding presence from digg (and digg's lack of understanding why these kinds of user cliques are bad), to the v4 debacle which was purely a content focused effort...digg never quite got the + community part...which reddit was simply designed to excel at.

chrisaycock 14y ago

> I felt like there should have been more moderation tools for the users so they could better decide what they wanted to see. I like the way Reddit allows moderators and that's something Digg should have done a long time ago. That was the ex-employee's view of how a few users can ruin it for the rest of us. Something to keep in mind anytime someone complains about the moderators on Hacker News or Stack Overflow.