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A comment on Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B. Parent comment

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
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/

[ Parent | on HN ]
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.

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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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
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).
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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.
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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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by willhslade on Tuesday June 20, 2017 @12:19AM (#14592173)
Scroll down.
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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.
[ Parent | on HN ]
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.
[ Parent | on HN ]
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.
[ Parent | on HN ]
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.
[ Parent | on HN ]
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.
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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.
[ Parent | on HN ]
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
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.
[ Parent | on HN ]
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!
[ Parent | on HN ]
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
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.
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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.
[ Parent | on HN ]
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.
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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.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reddit Is Raising Funds at a Valuation of $1.7B by paulddraper on Friday June 16, 2017 @11:45PM (#14574156)
You mean Facebook?
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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
[ Parent | on HN ]
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...
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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.
[ Parent | on HN ]
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.
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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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
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?
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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
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