5 ms·

Divorce, Reddit-Style

60 points by robg 17y ago

pwmanagerdied 17y ago
If the author can't stand Reddit's interface... Which is why it’s shocking that Reddit has hung on to its similarly retro design, something that repeatedly stopped me from using it. It was only by overcoming the interface that I grasped Reddit’s great user base and functionality. (Huffman told me he found Web 2.0 trendiness to be “tacky,” which might explain why he didn’t embrace one good aspect of Web 2.0: usable, intuitive interfaces.) ...I wonder what he'd think of Hacker News. I guess some people just need clutter.
- potatolicious 17y ago
  I guess some people just need clutter. I guess some people just need gradients and column-stacking horizontal UIs. Oh, and REALLY LARGE FONTS.
- petercooper 17y ago
  (Huffman told me he found Web 2.0 trendiness to be “tacky,” which might explain why he didn’t embrace one good aspect of Web 2.0: usable, intuitive interfaces.) If Reddit isn't "usable" or "intuitive," I guess its ~200,000 users must be the cream of the crop when it comes to intelligence..
- dylanz 17y ago
  I "think" HN has something going in the fact that they don't allow certain, cluttery, ASCII text comment spam like other social destinations (like Reddit, Digg, etc). I'm going to test my hypothesis below. Please excuse me. I'll never do this again on this site. I promise ;) ………………….._,,-~’’’¯¯¯’’~-,, ………………..,-‘’ ; ; ;_,,---,,_ ; ;’’-,…………………………….._,,,---,,_ ……………….,’ ; ; ;,-‘ , , , , , ‘-, ; ;’-,,,,---~~’’’’’’~--,,,_…..,,-~’’ ; ; ; ;__;’-, ……………….| ; ; ;,’ , , , _,,-~’’ ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ¯’’~’-,,_ ,,-~’’ , , ‘, ;’, ……………….’, ; ; ‘-, ,-~’’ ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;’’-, , , , , ,’ ; | …………………’, ; ;,’’ ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;’-, , ,-‘ ;,-‘ ………………….,’-‘ ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;’’-‘ ;,,-‘ ………………..,’ ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;__ ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ‘-,’ ………………,-‘ ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;,-‘’¯: : ’’-, ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; _ ; ; ; ; ;’, ……………..,’ ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;| : : : : : :| ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ,-‘’¯: ¯’’-, ; ; ;’, …………….,’ ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ‘-,_: : _,-‘ ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; | : : : : : :| ; ; ; | ……………,’ ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ¯¯ ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;’-,,_ : :,-‘ ; ; ; ;| …………..,-‘ ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ,,-~’’ , , , , ,,,-~~-, , , , _ ; ; ;¯¯ ; ; ; ; ;| ..…………,-‘ ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;,’ , , , , , , ,( : : : : :) , , , ,’’-, ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;| ……….,-‘ ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;’, , , , , , , , ,’~---~’’ , , , , , ,’ ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;’,
  - dylanz 17y ago
    ... and the pedobear has been blocked. I rest my case.
    - deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
- ssharp 17y ago
  I much prefer HN's interface to Reddit's. I find Reddit's larger headlines, combined with inconsistent thumbnails, to be a bit sloppy.
  - zck 17y ago
    You can turn off the thumbnails in your preferences. Additionally, try the "compress the link display". Here's what I see when I go to reddit: http://imgur.com/angua http://imgur.com/angua . After one of the redesigns, where they introduced the thumbnails and expanded the whitespace, they introduced these options.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- mynameishere 17y ago
  It's crazy that reddit's interface gets criticized so much. You know what it looks like? http://www.reddit.com/search?q=dog&sort=new http://www.reddit.com/search?q=dog&sort=new http://www.google.com/search?q=dog&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a http://www.google.com/search?q=dog&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8... ...minus the incongruous map and with 1/10th the ads.
- adw 17y ago
  Many people'd disagree with you about what clutter is, I suspect. Take a site like http://informationarchitects.jp/ http://informationarchitects.jp/. They're a firm who specialise in news design: unsurprisingly, their site uses rigid typographic hierarchy underpinned by a grid. It feels really uncluttered to me, but it's clearly taken a lot of work to achieve that. Then take Craigslist, which is the other extreme. There's no graphics at all, but it's an amazingly cluttered layout. Both Reddit and Hacker News are nearer the Craigslist end of things than the iA one. None are the acme of good web typography. That's fair enough - Reddit, HN and Craigslist are all huge successes in their niches. However, the design decisions (or choice not to make any design decisions) do affect the tone of a place.
  - pwmanagerdied 17y ago
    Perhaps "clutter" wasn't the right word; maybe "crap" would have been a better choice.
    - adw 17y ago
      Yeah, I get where you're coming from. I think this is rooted in a false dichotomy (edit: in the original author's post more than anywhere else), though. You could tidy up the typography of Reddit and it'd look nicer, be easier to read, and be less visually noisy without adding a single "Web 2.0" gewgaw. But it'd change the feel of the place. Incidentally, The Elements of Typographic Style (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Typographic_Style http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Typographic_Sty...) is an amazing book; I reckon a bunch of people here would love it.
icey 17y ago
It's too bad that it turned out that way for Alexis and Steve. I love reddit, and I think they did a great job building a great community. Sure, it's got it's quirks, but I think that's half the fun of the site. Years after it was created, it still has most of the original feel that it used to - there's a little more 4chan these days, but proggit stays pretty decent; and there's some interesting communities like IamA. Either way, it will be interesting to see what those guys get up to next.
- nearestneighbor 17y ago
  "Too bad"? If I had $10M+ I don't think I'd want to keep a regular job either.
  - icey 17y ago
    Certainly the acquisition was great for them, but I think it would have been a different story if they'd gotten better support from Conde Nast.
pg 17y ago
Actually as acquisitions go this was a pretty good one. Much better than Yahoo's acquisition of Delicious, which basically destroyed it. Reddit continued to grow after the acquisition. Steve and Alexis worked for CN for several years, and as far as I know there was no bad blood when they left. Maybe CN could be making more money from it (I have no idea how much they do make), but I think they've learned a lot about how "social media" works, and it always seemed that was their main goal. If you boil this article down to the actual facts reported in it, it's nothing more than: The founders of a startup bought by a big company eventually quit. But that's the norm with acquisitions. It's ridiculous (or more precisely, linkbait) to call it a "divorce."
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- robg 17y ago
  Linkbait? That seems overly harsh. Sure, it's a story of what happens. The facts may be simple but the particulars are illustrative. "Founders leave, Reddit style" - really, that's different in kind and not degree?
  - qeorge 17y ago
    Linkbait is accurate. Your article's title and introduction imply drama which by all accounts is non-existent. Reducing to the more accurate title you've suggested above reveals this to be what it is: a non-story. However, I had never heard about the Google offer. That's pretty cool.
    - robg 17y ago
      Either you learned nothing and so it's a non-story. Or you learning something and so it's a story. Which is it? I found enough interesting details (including the acquisition price which I hadn't seen elsewhere) to make it a linkable story. Seems like a few folks agree. And I simply don't get this meta-complaining, especially since: Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did. Editors could have also changed the title here. Why have votes, flags, and even editorial control if you're just going to clutter the comments with meta-complaints?
nir 17y ago
It was a great deal for Reddit, but what did Conde Nast get out of it? Basically they get to foot the server bills for a community whose current #1 story is this: http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/a64i6/and_the_big_mild.. http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/a64i6/and_the_big_mild.... They certainly aren't making any income on Reddit, and I doubt comments like this one: http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/a64i6/and_the_big_mildly_nsfw_of_the_day_award_goes_to/c0g132e http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/a64i6/and_the_big_mild... help their brand much.
- rick888 17y ago
  They also just added an easier way for companies to purchase ad space. I'm curious about how often redditors actually click on ads (if they aren't using ad blocking software). My hunch is very rarely.
weegee 17y ago
I really like reddit, and have wasted far too much time reading articles linked there. At least I have the right to downvote an article or comment. Here on HN, even with a karma score of 120, I am not allowed to downvote a comment or article, which pretty much removes any reason to come here and participate in the first place. With two years on reddit, as a casual user who is allowed to fully participate, my Karma score is nearly 2500.
mkull 17y ago
So can the cat come out of the bag yet? What was the real acquisition price of reddit?
nailer 17y ago
Sure, Reddit is successful at being Reddit, but not at what Conde wanted to use it for: using social media to expand into other fields (as the article says). Look at Reddit, Digg, and HN. Then look at Cool Hunter, Perez Hilton, and Sartorialist. The minimalist style doesn't suit mainstream media who are highly visual folk. Lipstick.com, created by Reddit for Conde, took advantage of the social aspects of Reddit but was designed with a minimalist geek aesthetic. There was no chance this would ever be successful. Sugar Networks (who do PopSugar) would have been a much better acquisition for Conde.
forkqueue 17y ago
Interesting to note that the major motivation for them switching to the Amazon 'cloud' was to avoid procurement rather than the technical merits.
matthias 17y ago
I thought this would play out this way: 1. create white label styleable brandable badgeable reddit 2. give it to the web team of every conde nast publication to integrate with their site & strategy 3. vogue, gq, vanity fair and the like now have better websites with their own reddit-like implementations on their own domains. reddit itself is unscarred and gets traffic feeding back from these sites by cross populating stories. Not sure why they didn't do more of this as it was surely along the lines of what they were initially talking about. On the plus side, they haven't made a mess of reddit itself.

60 points by robg 17y ago

If the author can't stand Reddit's interface... Which is why it’s shocking that Reddit has hung on to its similarly retro design, something that repeatedly stopped me from using it. It was only by overcoming the interface that I grasped Reddit’s great user base and functionality. (Huffman told me he found Web 2.0 trendiness to be “tacky,” which might explain why he didn’t embrace one good aspect of Web 2.0: usable, intuitive interfaces.) ...I wonder what he'd think of Hacker News. I guess some people just need clutter.

potatolicious 17y ago
I guess some people just need clutter. I guess some people just need gradients and column-stacking horizontal UIs. Oh, and REALLY LARGE FONTS.
petercooper 17y ago
(Huffman told me he found Web 2.0 trendiness to be “tacky,” which might explain why he didn’t embrace one good aspect of Web 2.0: usable, intuitive interfaces.) If Reddit isn't "usable" or "intuitive," I guess its ~200,000 users must be the cream of the crop when it comes to intelligence..
dylanz 17y ago
I "think" HN has something going in the fact that they don't allow certain, cluttery, ASCII text comment spam like other social destinations (like Reddit, Digg, etc). I'm going to test my hypothesis below. Please excuse me. I'll never do this again on this site. I promise ;) ………………….._,,-~’’’¯¯¯’’~-,, ………………..,-‘’ ; ; ;_,,---,,_ ; ;’’-,…………………………….._,,,---,,_ ……………….,’ ; ; ;,-‘ , , , , , ‘-, ; ;’-,,,,---~~’’’’’’~--,,,_…..,,-~’’ ; ; ; ;__;’-, ……………….| ; ; ;,’ , , , _,,-~’’ ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ¯’’~’-,,_ ,,-~’’ , , ‘, ;’, ……………….’, ; ; ‘-, ,-~’’ ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;’’-, , , , , ,’ ; | …………………’, ; ;,’’ ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;’-, , ,-‘ ;,-‘ ………………….,’-‘ ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;’’-‘ ;,,-‘ ………………..,’ ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;__ ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ‘-,’ ………………,-‘ ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;,-‘’¯: : ’’-, ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; _ ; ; ; ; ;’, ……………..,’ ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;| : : : : : :| ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ,-‘’¯: ¯’’-, ; ; ;’, …………….,’ ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ‘-,_: : _,-‘ ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; | : : : : : :| ; ; ; | ……………,’ ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ¯¯ ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;’-,,_ : :,-‘ ; ; ; ;| …………..,-‘ ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ,,-~’’ , , , , ,,,-~~-, , , , _ ; ; ;¯¯ ; ; ; ; ;| ..…………,-‘ ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;,’ , , , , , , ,( : : : : :) , , , ,’’-, ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;| ……….,-‘ ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;’, , , , , , , , ,’~---~’’ , , , , , ,’ ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;’,
- dylanz 17y ago
  ... and the pedobear has been blocked. I rest my case.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
ssharp 17y ago
I much prefer HN's interface to Reddit's. I find Reddit's larger headlines, combined with inconsistent thumbnails, to be a bit sloppy.
- zck 17y ago
  You can turn off the thumbnails in your preferences. Additionally, try the "compress the link display". Here's what I see when I go to reddit: http://imgur.com/angua http://imgur.com/angua . After one of the redesigns, where they introduced the thumbnails and expanded the whitespace, they introduced these options.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
mynameishere 17y ago
It's crazy that reddit's interface gets criticized so much. You know what it looks like? http://www.reddit.com/search?q=dog&sort=new http://www.reddit.com/search?q=dog&sort=new http://www.google.com/search?q=dog&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a http://www.google.com/search?q=dog&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8... ...minus the incongruous map and with 1/10th the ads.
adw 17y ago
Many people'd disagree with you about what clutter is, I suspect. Take a site like http://informationarchitects.jp/ http://informationarchitects.jp/. They're a firm who specialise in news design: unsurprisingly, their site uses rigid typographic hierarchy underpinned by a grid. It feels really uncluttered to me, but it's clearly taken a lot of work to achieve that. Then take Craigslist, which is the other extreme. There's no graphics at all, but it's an amazingly cluttered layout. Both Reddit and Hacker News are nearer the Craigslist end of things than the iA one. None are the acme of good web typography. That's fair enough - Reddit, HN and Craigslist are all huge successes in their niches. However, the design decisions (or choice not to make any design decisions) do affect the tone of a place.
- pwmanagerdied 17y ago
  Perhaps "clutter" wasn't the right word; maybe "crap" would have been a better choice.
  - adw 17y ago
    Yeah, I get where you're coming from. I think this is rooted in a false dichotomy (edit: in the original author's post more than anywhere else), though. You could tidy up the typography of Reddit and it'd look nicer, be easier to read, and be less visually noisy without adding a single "Web 2.0" gewgaw. But it'd change the feel of the place. Incidentally, The Elements of Typographic Style (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Typographic_Style http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Typographic_Sty...) is an amazing book; I reckon a bunch of people here would love it.

icey 17y ago

It's too bad that it turned out that way for Alexis and Steve. I love reddit, and I think they did a great job building a great community. Sure, it's got it's quirks, but I think that's half the fun of the site. Years after it was created, it still has most of the original feel that it used to - there's a little more 4chan these days, but proggit stays pretty decent; and there's some interesting communities like IamA. Either way, it will be interesting to see what those guys get up to next.

nearestneighbor 17y ago
"Too bad"? If I had $10M+ I don't think I'd want to keep a regular job either.
- icey 17y ago
  Certainly the acquisition was great for them, but I think it would have been a different story if they'd gotten better support from Conde Nast.

pg 17y ago

Actually as acquisitions go this was a pretty good one. Much better than Yahoo's acquisition of Delicious, which basically destroyed it. Reddit continued to grow after the acquisition. Steve and Alexis worked for CN for several years, and as far as I know there was no bad blood when they left. Maybe CN could be making more money from it (I have no idea how much they do make), but I think they've learned a lot about how "social media" works, and it always seemed that was their main goal. If you boil this article down to the actual facts reported in it, it's nothing more than: The founders of a startup bought by a big company eventually quit. But that's the norm with acquisitions. It's ridiculous (or more precisely, linkbait) to call it a "divorce."

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
robg 17y ago
Linkbait? That seems overly harsh. Sure, it's a story of what happens. The facts may be simple but the particulars are illustrative. "Founders leave, Reddit style" - really, that's different in kind and not degree?
- qeorge 17y ago
  Linkbait is accurate. Your article's title and introduction imply drama which by all accounts is non-existent. Reducing to the more accurate title you've suggested above reveals this to be what it is: a non-story. However, I had never heard about the Google offer. That's pretty cool.
  - robg 17y ago
    Either you learned nothing and so it's a non-story. Or you learning something and so it's a story. Which is it? I found enough interesting details (including the acquisition price which I hadn't seen elsewhere) to make it a linkable story. Seems like a few folks agree. And I simply don't get this meta-complaining, especially since: Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did. Editors could have also changed the title here. Why have votes, flags, and even editorial control if you're just going to clutter the comments with meta-complaints?

nir 17y ago

It was a great deal for Reddit, but what did Conde Nast get out of it? Basically they get to foot the server bills for a community whose current #1 story is this: http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/a64i6/and_the_big_mild.. http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/a64i6/and_the_big_mild.... They certainly aren't making any income on Reddit, and I doubt comments like this one: http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/a64i6/and_the_big_mildly_nsfw_of_the_day_award_goes_to/c0g132e http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/a64i6/and_the_big_mild... help their brand much.

rick888 17y ago
They also just added an easier way for companies to purchase ad space. I'm curious about how often redditors actually click on ads (if they aren't using ad blocking software). My hunch is very rarely.

weegee 17y ago

I really like reddit, and have wasted far too much time reading articles linked there. At least I have the right to downvote an article or comment. Here on HN, even with a karma score of 120, I am not allowed to downvote a comment or article, which pretty much removes any reason to come here and participate in the first place. With two years on reddit, as a casual user who is allowed to fully participate, my Karma score is nearly 2500.

mkull 17y ago

So can the cat come out of the bag yet? What was the real acquisition price of reddit?

nailer 17y ago

Sure, Reddit is successful at being Reddit, but not at what Conde wanted to use it for: using social media to expand into other fields (as the article says). Look at Reddit, Digg, and HN. Then look at Cool Hunter, Perez Hilton, and Sartorialist. The minimalist style doesn't suit mainstream media who are highly visual folk. Lipstick.com, created by Reddit for Conde, took advantage of the social aspects of Reddit but was designed with a minimalist geek aesthetic. There was no chance this would ever be successful. Sugar Networks (who do PopSugar) would have been a much better acquisition for Conde.

forkqueue 17y ago

Interesting to note that the major motivation for them switching to the Amazon 'cloud' was to avoid procurement rather than the technical merits.

matthias 17y ago

I thought this would play out this way: 1. create white label styleable brandable badgeable reddit 2. give it to the web team of every conde nast publication to integrate with their site & strategy 3. vogue, gq, vanity fair and the like now have better websites with their own reddit-like implementations on their own domains. reddit itself is unscarred and gets traffic feeding back from these sites by cross populating stories. Not sure why they didn't do more of this as it was surely along the lines of what they were initially talking about. On the plus side, they haven't made a mess of reddit itself.