I'm having a spot of trouble following items through the "shuffle".

Perhaps one could divide the horizontal space such that each story gets it own invisible vertical band. A translucent coloured dot exists where the band intersects the story's present position. The dot traces a light line behind it from left to right. When the story falls off the page its band is collapsed. You know how long a story stays on the page so running out of space isn't a problem.

More simply, one could leave a single-period trail, with one terminus where the story was and the other where it is, persisting for only a moment after each shuffle.

Thank you very much for your thoughtful suggestion! I'm definitely looking for ideas on how to make the animation easier to follow.

For anyone curious, I built it using TypeScript, d3.js, mongoDB, and node.js. I'm planning to open source it after I've made some facelifts on the codebase :)

Why do you need d3.js for this ?

The complexity of the project does not make it absolutely vital (the animation could be done in plain jQuery with a little more hassle), but it was fun and I wanted to try it :)

Yarg. I wish this better-represented the fact that reddit is a platform for communities (subreddits) but so it goes. Long before subreddits, here's what reddit looked like in the first months after Steve and I launched it: http://reddit.blogspot.com/2006/12/time-machine.html

How do you work around their suggested API limits of one request every 2 seconds and one request per-page every 30 seconds?

Edit: I see this is a history. Though the question still stands for many reddit clients. I want to use the API, but find the terms too limiting for what I want to do.

Can't you use your own server to get the data you want from the Reddit API only once, and then serve this as many times as you want (since the server is yours)?

But what if I want comments from 1200 threads? It will take me 40 minutes at one request every two seconds. I understand why reddit (and other API's) do the limit, I just want to find a way to experiment w/ new commenting UI's and still withstand the HN/reddit effect when showing it off.

needs to be a pause, some things disappear before I can even read the heading.

Yeah, now the only way to pause is pressing the < > buttons at the top. I'm planning to make the navigation controls always visible, so you will be able to pause even if you've scrolled down.

Impressive! Well done.

This only goes back one year. I would hardly call that a "history" of Reddit.