

Reeddit - Minimalist, elastic and read-only web app client for Reddit - cheeaun
http://berbaquero.github.com/reeddit/about/

======
redwood
Honestly IMO the biggest problem with reddit's subreddit UX is that you can't
choose the ratio of which subreddits are most important to you. Unfortunately
you're not really fixing that... I think that would be more powerful than
showing groups of subreddits.

In other words, I should be able to say "I want 30% of my links to come from
r/worldnews, 10% from r/science, 5% each from r/biology, r/programming,
r/chemistry, r/physics, r/neuro, 20% from r/foodforthought, and 20% from
r/truereddit.

Even a simple UI dragger that would let me boost the prominence of certain
subreddits in my feed would be great.. Otherwise, small but awesome subreddits
have a tough time getting seen anywhere near the top of my feed.

~~~
sillysaurus
_"I want 30% of my links to come from r/worldnews, 10% from r/science, 5% each
from r/biology, r/programming, r/chemistry, r/physics, r/neuro, 20% from
r/foodforthought, and 20% from r/truereddit."_

Huh. That's a really good idea.

~~~
martythemaniak
It is, but I think it's tough to do well. Google+ implements this thing where
you tell it how much of each circle to show, but then you have to do these
weights up front.

Ideally system would try to figure out what you like by measuring time spent
reading threads, upvotes, link clicks, etc and automatically set those weights
for you. This doesn't preclude giving users the options manually setting
weights, which could be another useful signal.

~~~
mhaymo
Take this idea to its extreme, and you've arrived at StumbleUpon.

------
FigBug
Looks good. I'm always looking for better ways to read reddit. I don't like
their UI.

I've been experimenting with the best way to read reddit. My first idea was a
specialized browser that has 5 tabs open. When you close one tab, another
automatically opens with the next unread story from the current subreddit.
That way, as fast as you could smack Ctrl+W, you'd get the the next unread
story, already loaded. It worked ok, but wasn't great.

<https://github.com/FigBug/Allochthon>
[https://github.com/downloads/FigBug/Allochthon/allochthon-
se...](https://github.com/downloads/FigBug/Allochthon/allochthon-setup.exe)

My next idea was the command line. Now I just type 'r subreddit_name' and it
opens up to 30 unread links. Seems the fastest way to read reddit.

<https://github.com/FigBug/r>

~~~
PommeDeTerre
The biggest problems with reddit aren't so much how to read it, but rather
what can be read there.

Most of the major subreddits are no longer worth following, unless you're
interested in hipsterism or curious about the meme-of-the-hour.

The smaller subreddits generally have limited traffic, resulting in very slow
discussion. Email mailing lists are far superior for discussions with this
size of a community.

Censorship has become an issue within some subreddits, too. It's not about
getting rid of blatant spammers any more. Far too often we've seen
contributing, albeit unorthodox, members of these communities banned for
expressing views that may be controversial, but still worth expressing.

Software won't fix these major problems. They're issues with the community
itself.

~~~
Posibyte
I think this is a radical idea, but hear me out: I fully believe the community
could be better curated if they took the down-vote button away. (Or, at least,
reserved it for the highest echelon of users)

Looking from the island of HackerNews, back to the continent of Reddit where I
wasted so many years of productivity, I've seen amazing wonders in the way HN
uses its down-vote systems. In essence, it's there to "nudge" the discussion
back into the right direction, and overall a great tool for curating a
community from those that have been decided by their peers to curate.

To me, a down-vote button puts an undue weight on the negativity of a
discussion. There's three states: "I liked this", in which you up-vote, "I
didn't like this", in which you ignore it, and "I didn't like this", in which
you down-vote. Even reddiquette dictates that it should only be used for
anything that doesn't contribute. It's very clear that's not how it's used,
and in my opinion that can only be fixed by changing the official meaning of
the button or restricting its use altogether. I think the latter has amazing
effects on community discussion, as I've seen here on HN.

Stuff I know I didn't discuss above: The effect of a non-focused forum
discussion, abuse in voting systems, impacts of large communities.

~~~
kybernetyk
Why have voting at all? I think that this kind of pre-filtering content only
encourages group think and isn't a good system at all.

~~~
heed
It order for reddit to be successful as a business it needs users. To gain and
to keep users they incorporate addiction mechanisms such as voting.

------
lftl
This is a bit pedantic, but elastic in design context usually refers to a
design element that changes with respect to the user's font size. Reedit, has
a few elements where that is the case, but I think the term that's more
descriptive is responsive, meaning the layout changes with respect to the
client's window size.

Saying it was elastic actually had my interest piqued, because you don't see
many layouts that really respond to text size any more.

~~~
bbx
You're right. It is responsive and not exactly elastic. But even without
changing your browser's width and just zooming in, the layout goes from 3
columns to 1 column and doesn't just make everything bigger. So you could say
it is elastic too in some way.

I used to experiment in elastic designs (using em for all widths) but it was
clearly difficult to maintain. But the main reason why I quit doing it is
because nowadays most browsers' zoom in function isn't only increasing the
font size but increasing all widths accordingly too. It's a _complete_ zoom
rather than a simple font increase.

------
yawgmoth
For me, the single most important feature is the speed with which the page
loads. I have given up on a handful of Reddit readers in particular because
i.reddit.com is very aggressive in only loading a small amount of data (i.e.
less comments) up front.

It would be great if I could easily toggle between two profiles of data
loading, low bandwidth mode and a high bandwidth mode.

------
jacobparker
I made a version for viewing in w3m (and other console-based browsers) and my
phone: <http://ja.cob.xxx/r/> (to get subreddits use urls like reddit. The
default is <http://ja.cob.xxx/r/programming+truereddit+literature> )

The font is big to make the stories easier to click on the phone. It is
missing basically every feature of reddit other than links and comment reading
because I do not use them (I do not have an account.)

Example comment page:
[http://ja.cob.xxx/r/programming/comments/15ye3l/scala_2100_n...](http://ja.cob.xxx/r/programming/comments/15ye3l/scala_2100_now_available/)

The source code is available at <https://github.com/j3parker/minimal-reddit>

------
dotjosh
I built a proof-of-concept that I put in the chrome store a year and a half
ago that looks just like this. I was just playing with angular and I didn't
realize 1000+ users would use it so it's been ignored since then.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reddit-
reader/hjee...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reddit-
reader/hjeeiboadmdglchgjlimiojgdjoadpol)

<https://github.com/dotjosh/redditreader>

------
d0m
Suggestion:

[http://berbaquero.github.com/reeddit/<Insert-reddit-
name...](http://berbaquero.github.com/reeddit/<Insert-reddit-name>); should
work!

~~~
tuananh
Author should add this. As a regular of /r/WTF, I felt this is what reddit
should be. Also, keyboard navigation, maybe?

Awesome work!

------
arrowgunz
This is so wonderful. First thing I liked about this is the ability to surf
real quick. Sifting through posts is a bliss. I am going to skip hitting
reddit.com now. reeddit is awesome.

------
telecuda
Links should not open in new tabs on the iPhone. It takes two extra taps to
close the image/story and go back. Nice job!

------
yawgmoth
Reminds me of the metro app, /r/etro

[http://www.addictivetips.com/windows-tips/retro-is-a-dual-
pa...](http://www.addictivetips.com/windows-tips/retro-is-a-dual-pane-modern-
reddit-browser-for-windows-8/)

------
wbkang
What's the difference between your channel vs. concatenating multiple
subreddits in the URL like /r/programming+science? Because the latter supports
more than 3 subreddits at once.

~~~
baquerober
No difference at all. I actually am concatenating the subreddits for the URL.
It's on my to-do list to allow any number of subreddit per channel. I just
haven't figured out an elegant way to do it on the mobile, yet.

------
matthuggins
I like the layout. One main reason I wouldn't use it is that I can't see how
many upvotes/downvotes each comment has, and I don't know how you have the
comments sorted right now.

~~~
baquerober
I am not changing the 'natural' way Reddit sorts the comments and posts -
which is basically based on the result of upvotes - downvotes through time.

------
janerik
Looks great. But on my Nexus 7 it shows the sidebar in portrait mode but hides
it in landscape.

Edit: Wow, just tested it for a few minutes. It's amazingly fast, works great.

~~~
baquerober
Author here. I haven't had the chance to test Reeddit directly on the Nexus 7,
but if the sidebar is hidden, you should be able to see it by swiping to the
right or tapping the subreddit name at the top.

~~~
janerik
No, neither swiping nor tapping the name on the top works.

------
vivatus
People should take a look at [Reditr](<http://reditr.com>). You can actually
do stuff instead of just reading.

------
PuerkitoBio
I love this UI so much more than the original. Anyone knows if something like
this exists for google groups? Both desktop and mobile UIs are horrible.

------
lefnire
What did you use to build this? Pretty slick

~~~
baquerober
In the Github project page (<https://github.com/berbaquero/reeddit#tools>) I
list the tools I used -- besides that, it's the usual combo of pure html + css
+ js.

------
tferris
Perfect

1\. Please make the same for HN

2\. Comments and their replies should be expanded (like HN and Reddit)

~~~
baquerober
It already exists for HN. It's called HackerWeb -- hackerwebapp.com

Edit: typo.

------
aba_sababa
"The most important information", but you don't show points? Sorry, but this
is unusable.

~~~
baquerober
I just thought that if you weren't able to vote on posts and comments in the
first place (being read-only), maybe the points were not relevant to the 'just
reading' experience.

~~~
personlurking
Not relevant in a sense, though what would be at the top of the subreddits
would in fact be the articles with the most points. While you couldn't vote
yourself, you would essentially be reading top voted content.

------
jbackus
Abstract the backend and implement additions for reading HackerNews and
Lobste.rs!

------
poppysan
This is not minimalist in my honest opinion. I can see people liking it
though!

------
donniezazen
You should include j/k shortcut for navigating in stories.

~~~
baquerober
A few people have asked for this, so this is going up in my to-do list.

------
TommyDANGerous
I like it but I wish they got the domain reeddit.com haha

------
brador
Is "Reddit" trademarked? Could there be an issue here?

~~~
nwh
Yes it is.

[http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4007:l5...](http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4007:l5k53w.2.2)

------
sidcool
HN has a soft corner for Reddit, which I like.

------
isarat
Excellent and it's super fast!

------
amasad
this is awesome. I never liked browsing reddit. but this is nice!

