

IAmA Ex-Digg Employee - personlurking
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/wjars/iama_exdigg_employee_ama/

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stcredzero
_> For me, personally, we never really thought about Reddit too much. It was
always just this poorly designed site that was slowly gaining traction._

Wow. I always thought Digg was a poorly designed site and thought reddit was
brilliant with a minimalist bent.

I suspect it means something significant if a site can slowly gain traction
over a long period of time, versus a flashy site that can seem like the next
big thing for a week.

Easy come, easy go.

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dereg
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.

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readme
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.

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chrisaycock
> _I felt like there should have been more moderation tools for the users so
> they could better decide what they wanted to see. I like the way Reddit
> allows moderators and that's something Digg should have done a long time
> ago._

That was the ex-employee's view of how a few users can ruin it for the rest of
us. Something to keep in mind anytime someone complains about the moderators
on Hacker News or Stack Overflow.

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personlurking
Q&A version

[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/wjars/iama_exdigg_empl...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/wjars/iama_exdigg_employee_ama/c5dwteu)

