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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 desig

by 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.

by dereg 14y ago

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.