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Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by jliptzin on Friday June 16, 2017 @09:45PM (#14573829)
Maybe they don't want to fix what's not broken. If their usage continues going up at acceptable rates year after year, then maybe they have all the features they need right now. I have witnessed more than a few properties decline after site owners complicated the UI with stupid features barely anyone was asking for just for the sake of working on new stuff.
Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by JosephLark on Saturday June 17, 2017 @01:01AM (#14574354)
> Maybe they don't want to fix what's not broken

Unfortunately, this doesn't appear to be the case. They haven't been hiding that they're gearing up for a major redesign.

From what I've seen so far, I'm not at all excited for it. They launched user profiles recently, and it's an uninspired blocky design with way too much unnecessary whitespace for a desktop site. Also, even on desktop there is noticeable Javascript induced lag and content pop in. Although the rest of the profile page tries to look like a standard reddit page, it's actually entirely done with react and the subreddit/notification bar at the top has the same lag and content pop in. They're also hiring mainly for React frontend/Node.js backend, so I'm worried the entire redesign is going to be low density and slow.

Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by Roritharr on Saturday June 17, 2017 @04:33AM (#14574913)
I'm in a weird position there. I've recently decided on react for most of our frontend in the future because of all the technical advantages this offers and the productivity benefits I see, but I still harbor reservations against react because in practice I've rarely seen react pages that feel snappy and fast, rather than choppy and slow.
Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by SkyMarshal on Saturday June 17, 2017 @05:08AM (#14574984)
Interesting observation, b/c one of the original value propositions of React's virtual dom model was faster rendering than most other frontend frameworks at the time. I wonder if it's gotten so complicated it lost that?

If so, there are a number of other intentionally lightweight virtual dom frontend frameworks. Mithril, Riot, Preact, virtual-dom all come to mind, and there are a probably a few more.

Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by coldtea on Saturday June 17, 2017 @06:38AM (#14575210)
>Interesting observation, b/c one of the original value propositions of React's virtual dom model was faster rendering than most other frontend frameworks at the time. I wonder if it's gotten so complicated it lost that?

That has been shown to not hold in actual benchmarks. The real DOM is plenty fast if you do it right.

Here's Facebook's Dan Abramov (of Redux fame): "Myth: React is “faster than DOM”. Reality: it helps create maintainable applications, and is fast enough for most use cases."

https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/842329893044146176?la...

https://objectpartners.com/2015/11/19/comparing-react-js-per...

Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by bauerd on Saturday June 17, 2017 @05:47AM (#14575072)
React's virtual dom/diffing is certainly not "slow". It's not the tool that's the problem, but how it's used. There's also more to perceived slowness than how fast your library reconciles the DOM, e.g. I too often encounter pages that will "preload" all their assets behind stupid loading screens, ill-timed CSS animations, modals on top of modals, React Components that badly wrap jQuery plugins, leaked callbacks, …

tl;dr Don't blame tools but their usage

Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by quadrupleslap on Saturday June 17, 2017 @05:11PM (#14577769)
React can certainly be fast enough but isn't it completely unnecessary for a mostly-static site like Reddit?
Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by komali2 on Monday June 19, 2017 @01:29PM (#14588677)
Yea, I would say so... I guess from a developer standpoint it makes it easy to just have a "Post" component with various elements. I did this for a Reddit clone using Angular and ng-repeat and whatnot. I don't think it's performance beneficial though.
Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by NewEntryHN on Saturday June 17, 2017 @07:50AM (#14575458)
Most of the performance loss is due to using a frontend framework at all. Differences in such frameworks is then little. You need two round-trips at each page-load because you need the base HTML page then the data and rendering in the browser is orders of magnitude slower than rendering server-side with a good rendering engine.

I understand the point of frontend frameworks for SPA, not so much for Reddit profile pages which are literally single, static, pages.

Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by p49k on Saturday June 17, 2017 @08:11AM (#14575549)
You can render React server-side on first page load, though, and there will be no lag waiting for the page to render and initialize. I think that most people don't do it because there is extra work involved, but IMO if you're a huge site like Reddit, there's no excuse for not doing so, it seems like laziness.
Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by sotojuan on Saturday June 17, 2017 @07:09AM (#14575315)
It's not React specifically. It's just JS. Reddit already has the worst performing mobile site because it's full of JS.
Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by beager on Friday June 16, 2017 @09:59PM (#14573881)
Also for context, Reddit found a lot of steam when Digg suffered a mass exodus based on seismic product shifts. I wouldn't be surprised if Reddit was consciously and unconsciously averse to that kind of mutation.
Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by hn_throwaway_99 on Friday June 16, 2017 @10:51PM (#14574029)
Kudos to reddit for not following the trend of "lets redesign the site just because we can" ethos. Not only did the product shift kill Digg, I also think it led to the earlier downfall of Slashdot. I may be dating myself, but I remember how each revision of Slashdot made it less usable for me. The "cleaner, minimalist, lots of whitespace" designs that were in vogue actually made it much harder to navigate comment threads quickly and see good content easily while avoiding the chaff.

Even today I prefer to use the desktop version of Reddit on my phone, because I can just go through content threads a lot faster than compared to their mobile site.

Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by ktta on Friday June 16, 2017 @11:05PM (#14574058)
Reddit is actually facing a lot of flak for their plan of disabling CSS. This has made several of the subreddits announce themselves as Pro-CSS - sort of a rebel against the admins.

https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/66q4is/the_web_red...

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProCSS/

Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by sillysaurus3 on Friday June 16, 2017 @11:21PM (#14574103)
I've been following some of that. It's difficult to call, but I don't think it's a serious problem for Reddit, if they do it right.

Situations like this are extremely difficult to predict accurately. It could become a big problem. But it has a decent chance of blowing over.

The main issue is to harness the energy that the moderators currently put into their subreddit. They're not sad that CSS is going away. They're sad their toys are being taken away from them. That's not to trivialize it, not at all -- people like to tinker, and playing with your subreddit and putting your markings on it is a toy for adults. It's a game. It's necessary to replace that with something that feels equally deep and immersive.

Or, you know, just don't mess with the status quo. But if you're going to do it, I think that's why people are rebelling. Not because the functionality is gone, but because they're losing a creative outlet.

Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by sorenjan on Saturday June 17, 2017 @12:27AM (#14574260)
They've since decided to keep the custom CSS: https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/6auyq9/reddit_is_p...

What's worse is that their new mobile site and their profile pages use more whitespace. A sign of things to come probably.

Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by SomeStupidPoint on Saturday June 17, 2017 @02:01AM (#14574523)
I can't even use their mobile website, I have to just use the desktop one (which has a delayed popup banner that shifts the page a second after load telling me to download their app).
Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by foepys on Saturday June 17, 2017 @02:48AM (#14574635)
You can use https://i.reddit.com. it is so much faster than m.reddit.com, it's unbelievable. Really shows how those JavaScript frameworks slow down everything and have a severe impact on my browsing experience. When reddit closes down i.reddit.com, I will not use Reddit on mobile anymore; maybe not even on desktop.
Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by icefo on Saturday June 17, 2017 @06:30AM (#14575181)
Thanks I had no idea that i.reddit existed. It's so much better than the standard mobile version. I don't understand why they don't focus on making reddit fast and reliable.

Making it beautiful with nice animations should come second and the mobile version still crash a few times a day for me.

Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by pbhjpbhj on Saturday June 17, 2017 @06:24AM (#14575168)
They've been dicking about with it making it harder to choose the mobile version. One time, earlier this year, I got a "use the app" screen with no option to continue - you could block the overlay though.

Recently they added a useless interstitial.

It's interesting to me they say the app is faster; presumably they're artificially slowing the mobile site just to push app installs.

Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by willhslade on Tuesday June 20, 2017 @12:19AM (#14592173)
Scroll down.
Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by watter on Saturday June 17, 2017 @07:10AM (#14575317)
The worst part is the banner advertises features that I absolutely do not want.
Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by dzhiurgis on Friday June 16, 2017 @11:25PM (#14574116)
I haven't seen a single sub where CSS would add value. The worst example is r/science where colourful tags make it especially noisy.
Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by epmatsw on Friday June 16, 2017 @11:47PM (#14574160)
Besides spoiler tags, check out any of the sports subs: r/cfb, r/NFL, r/NBA have team flair, schedules, and scoreboards. Without those and the inline images, those communities would lose a lot of their fun.
Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by yxhuvud on Saturday June 17, 2017 @02:20AM (#14574563)
Spoiler tags is something that really should get a nonCSS solution though, as they work really crappy on mobile.
Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by paganel on Saturday June 17, 2017 @05:07AM (#14574983)
r/soccer would most probably become half-dead over-night if the team flairs were to disappear. Almost each and every time when I'm reading a comment on there I first look at the flair of the redditor who had made the comment, so that I know who am I answering to. Sports-related discussions are a lot more heated and personal compared to what usually happens on sites like HN or how r/programming was at the beginning. I've actually seen grown people cry with real tears because of a football match, I'm yet to see a programmer cry because some other programmer has used spaces instead of tabs or vice-versa.
Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by elgenie on Friday June 16, 2017 @11:37PM (#14574144)
CSS adds tons of value in sports subreddits. It's used to display stuff like the league standings and details on the day's game.
Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by SomeStupidPoint on Saturday June 17, 2017 @02:02AM (#14574526)
....So turn it off?

Reddit has a setting to disable custom CSS on subreddits, so it doesn't make sense why you'd force the subreddits not to have it.

Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by dzhiurgis on Saturday June 17, 2017 @06:11PM (#14577950)
I did disable sitewise around a year ago, but occasionally get reminded when browsing in incognito.
Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by twic on Saturday June 17, 2017 @06:54AM (#14575270)
r/rust used CSS on April Fool's day to add overenthusiastic Rust Evangelism Strike Force-type exclamations to the end of everyone's posts. That was pretty funny. FEARLESS CONCURRENCY!
Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by dredmorbius on Friday June 16, 2017 @11:40PM (#14574150)
https://reddit.com/r/dredmorbius

Availability hueristic and personal bias. There are others.

CSS is a tool. Often, but not always misused.

Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by verall on Saturday June 17, 2017 @10:35AM (#14576059)
Lots of meme subs hold a lot of their value in their CSS.
Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by gtm1260 on Friday June 16, 2017 @10:59PM (#14574042)
I agree! It feels like a good portion of the time when I see a new feature on a website it seems like it only exists because all the people needed to create it are employed at the company and we can't have them just sitting around all day.
Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by FiveDegrees on Friday June 16, 2017 @11:37PM (#14574142)
I'm looking at you, Slack.
Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by hn_throwaway_99 on Saturday June 17, 2017 @12:23AM (#14574250)
Yes! Slack is dangerously close to the point of "every new feature makes it worse", while basic features that should work (scrolling to earlier in a channel that reloads history feels like a roulette wheel) stay broken.
Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by paulddraper on Friday June 16, 2017 @11:45PM (#14574156)
You mean Facebook?
Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by hkon on Saturday June 17, 2017 @08:03AM (#14575517)
This seems like a first principle. You find this in every organization which has served it's purpose. Lawmakers, developers, activist groups
Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by ryl00 on Friday June 16, 2017 @11:49PM (#14574166)
.compact is still my preferred way of browsing Reddit on my phone. It seems to be slowly losing functionality (e.g., can no longer submit links or text posts), but the compactness of content is a big plus for me...
Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by Yhippa on Saturday June 17, 2017 @11:14AM (#14576225)
When linking to other parts of the site I notice I'll get bounced to the mobile version of Reddit even when I'm on .compact. The mobile version is so space-inefficient which is worse because I'm on a small mobile screen.
Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by wvenable on Friday June 16, 2017 @11:36PM (#14574139)
Digg and Reddit kind of came out of the lack of change at Slashdot. Slashdot had many problems with obvious solutions and originally digg was just slashdot where users could submit stories.
Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by zhte415 on Saturday June 17, 2017 @09:40AM (#14575849)
And kuro5hin, where users sit around on stories endlessly trolling them or asking for clarification before they got published.

Kuro5hin did achieve some of the most amazing content, however.

Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by samstave on Saturday June 17, 2017 @11:06AM (#14576193)
I haven't been on K5 for ages .. can you recollect some of amazing content to tell me what I may have missed?
Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by ngold on Saturday June 17, 2017 @02:14AM (#14574549)
They understand they exist because people go there. V3 Digg will alaways be burned in their minds. Replace them and that lesson is lost. And another Voat will replace them. Hopefully without being taken over by a bunch of broke Nazis
Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by pinpeliponni on Saturday June 17, 2017 @04:06AM (#14574835)
You call forging votes, and banning large parts of the community a "seismic product shifts" ? :)
Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by pmoriarty on Friday June 16, 2017 @09:50PM (#14573843)
You can't even edit the title of a Reddit post. That's been known for years and nothing's been done about it.
Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by redthrowaway on Friday June 16, 2017 @09:54PM (#14573860)
That's almost certainly by design. Just as with tweets, it would be massively abused.
Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by johnfn on Friday June 16, 2017 @10:15PM (#14573930)
Ages ago an admin said "yeah it would make sense for post titles to be edited within the first x minutes of making one", an incredibly low-hanging fruit that has been requested since forever.

It still hasn't been added.

Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by rickhanlonii on Saturday June 17, 2017 @12:27AM (#14574258)
I can think of a few problems with this just off the top of my head:

The first x minutes of a post are _heavily_ influential in the success of the post, editing after allows you to hijack successful titles for gain (spam)

For large subs, posts only hit the top of /new for x minutes (for small x), editing after is basically useless if it's not successful in that time

Mods patrol the /new queue as posts come in, allowing editing will complicate moderation which is already a difficult job

Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by squeaky-clean on Saturday June 17, 2017 @03:37AM (#14574755)
At least allow mods to change titles. Even that isn't possible.
Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by johnfn on Saturday June 17, 2017 @01:41AM (#14574466)
I mean whatever your concerns are, the admins/developers of Reddit are okay with this change.
Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by orf on Saturday June 17, 2017 @10:48AM (#14576121)
where ok, or at least one was in a comment posted 'ages ago'. That's very different.
Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by shalmanese on Saturday June 17, 2017 @04:42AM (#14574933)
The reddit button for submitting a post still says "save". I brought it up to a reddit designer last year and apparently there's some mountain of technical debt that would make changing the label a week long task so its languished at the bottom of the priority queue for many years now.
Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by adventured on Friday June 16, 2017 @10:05PM (#14573898)
Might make sense to make it optional per subreddit. Some communities are far less filled with trolls than others. Locked after N hours or minutes is also a potential solution elaboration that could give subreddits flexibility (on/off, if on then lock after N time options). Default it to locked. One more layer would be to enable only for established accounts and or based on the account behavior historically, and so on.
Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by sillysaurus3 on Friday June 16, 2017 @10:14PM (#14573926)
Please no. We've seen how much mods can be trusted when given toys. Any true Scotsman redditor will express their hatred for how often posts on /r/all are summarily locked by a mod. Often the justification is "lol no" or "I'm not spending my saturday policing the modqueue." Which is valid, but sucks for the 300k people that have to deal with it.
Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by CM30 on Saturday June 17, 2017 @10:46AM (#14576116)
I'm sorry, but this reason for not having title editing (and post editing on other sites like Twitter and GameFAQs) always bothered me to hell and back.

Yes it could be misused, but go on any forum where you can edit titles or post content and look at how often such a feature actually does get abused.

It pretty much never happens. Most people (like 99.99% of them) either use the functionality how it was intended or don't bother editing at all.

I don't see the point of limiting a feature because about 0.1% of the userbase might theoretically abuse it in a certain situation. It's basically the social media/forum equivalent of the trolley problem and automated cars. Something that's going to happen very rarely at the most but draws a lot of discussion about 'what ifs'.

Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by kalleboo on Friday June 16, 2017 @10:04PM (#14573896)
Yeah I'm pretty sure mods can...
Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by fictioncircle on Friday June 16, 2017 @10:01PM (#14573886)
To be fair, doing so would require a bunch of cache invalidations and they've always barely had enough money to limp on to the next investor. It would also likely be abused.

Its quite possible many features simply would raise their costs by .X% and therefore were impossible for that reason.

Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by dredmorbius on Friday June 16, 2017 @11:44PM (#14574155)
I'd prefer a different approach: a true draft / submission cycle for more substantive works.

This starts approaching a blogging or CMS system, but then, Reddit is already damned close to that, though with a larger community than most same.

Under this model:

* An item would be submitted.

* If approvals / edit / drafting is set, it goes to a submission or edit queue.

* A set of mods/editors would provide feedback and/or make edits (which of these apply depending on the sub).

* The item is then submitted.

This would allow for adjusting titles, self-text, formatting, etc. I'm not claiming this is something all subs would want, but some would (and I've a few specific ones in mind).

For now, the fix is to delete the submission entirely and submit it anew. I've certainly done that within my own sub(s).

Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by shawnz on Saturday June 17, 2017 @02:26AM (#14574579)
Recently Reddit introduced a new kind of user profile where you can make text posts to your own profile. It got a huge amount of negative feedback (although I'm coming around to it, personally), and many obvious features, such as being able to mix a user's posts and comments together like on the old profile page, were missing. They claimed they were all-hands-on-deck adding these highly requested features, and even now, over a month later, the only thing that's changed is a slightly bigger hyperlink to the comments page. That to me sounds like fixing what's not broken while ignoring what is.
Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by FridgeSeal on Saturday June 17, 2017 @06:54AM (#14575273)
It (rightfully) copped a lot of flack because it is a terrible idea: Reddit users don't want another user-driven/user focused Facebook clone, they want a community and topic driven platform.

I'm hoping that, like some of Reddit's other weird ideas, it kind of just gets abandoned and left to die.

Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by colordrops on Saturday June 17, 2017 @12:22AM (#14574245)
But there are several issues they don't bother fixing either. They could at least address those.