Very good point about the accessibility perspective regarding font size and contrast. I will also look into if the font should be replaced with a more readable one.
iPhone 15 Pro here and for me (old, eyesight finally starting to give up) they are a bit small and the contrast low - difficult to distinguish between the F and P in the middle channel of today's puzzle.
Could maybe do with the vertical bars being about 50% bigger and the letters scaled a bit more than that. Plus a high contrast option (white channels with black letters with white letters in the middle bit? Something like that anyway.)
There’s a CLI [0] that outputs html, alternatively you can encode the markwhen text as base64 and append it as a hash to timeline.markwhen.com which will render it. Would look like timeline.markwhen.com#mw=[base64 encoded text]
They created https://cheeaun.life, a timeline of their life, more than 10 years ago (which looks to be kept up to date), which was my inspiration for markwhen (https://markwhen.com).
Looks like markwhen[0]. When making it, which initially started out as a strictly timeline-making tool, I realized it is essentially a log or journal language - write a date, any date, and add some stuff to it. Good for notes, blogging, a calendar, etc etc.
I really can't believe there doesn't exist a good "home box."
There should be a product that you can buy (a computer) that you bring home, plug in, set up via your phone or computer that:
- can host websites
- can store your files and sync them to other devices
- control your home automation
- host your email
- anything else you might otherwise put on a server
And does it all EASILY with a simple phone or web UI.
Yes I know you can actually buy a computer or server or raspberry pi and put something like NextCloud or Home Assistant et al. on it, but the real barrier imo is the setup and configuration. Even I don't do all this because it seems daunting to configure all of it, and I consider myself a pretty technical person. I really just want to buy a box, plug it in, and like select which apps I want to use, and then it starts working for me.
Looks nice, but the marketing design ('make it just like Apple') doesn't match the product they're selling. Apple is technology for people afraid of technology, but self hosting is decidedly not for a technologically afraid audience.
How will they pay for maintaining all the apps and making sure that they are properly integrated into the platform as they get updated?
Exactly. That would be great. But I think a large portion of the target audience of the home box would rather set this up themselves.
Or not. I would much rather have something commercial (built on open source) like this so I can be more at ease that my data is safe, compared to doing everything myself.
> Reddit and Craigslist remain incredibly useful and valuable precisely because their software remains frozen in time
Craigslist, sure, but Reddit has fallen off a cliff in terms of content quality since the whole API/3rd party apps debacle. More confirmation of the author's point, I suppose - valuing the marginal user and a broader base over what's already there.
Everyone here is completely missing the point. It wasn't the API change, the 'new reddit' UI change, or frankly any other individual change. Those are symptoms of a greater problem - Reddit is social media that succeeded.
This exact same fall happens to any and all social media that succeeds, and is not in any way unique to Reddit.
It grows, and with growth comes complexity and greater expenses to keep it all propped up. In order to pay for those expenses, advertising revenue must increase. To increase advertising revenue, the site must be more 'family friendly' and have stricter moderation. More users means that you can't be as personal and must be more automated. You don't want bad publicity because that can turn advertisers away. If you want more advertising revenue you need more users, which means you need to sand off any rough edges and unique appeal and instead appeal as broadly as possible, regardless of the original intent of the site. To appeal broadly you must add every feature that everyone else has and forget being unique. Broader appeal brings in people who reduce the quality of the content. The larger the site gets, the more appealing it becomes to bots and propoganda. In order to maximize impact for either personal (ego) or professional (money/political) reasons, you need to post content that hits people where they're vulnerable - cute, funny, infuriating, etc.
So, the product experiences enshittification. It's just inevitable. It will always happen to social media if it grows.
You can have a small, niche social media that is good but will never grow - or you can have a large, casually-used social media that is awful. There is no in-between. Anything in-between inevitably slides towards one or the other.
It succeeded for a long time without becoming enshittified. It was the front page of the internet and it was great. Then they took VC funding. That changed everything. That was the driver for all the enshittification that followed. The VCs need to get a 10x return and they only have one playbook — the one you describe. But if they hadn't taken VC funding, maybe they could have found a different path.
If you remember Fark, they did the exact same thing. At some point in these sites' growth/success they always seem to have this irresistible compulsion to do The Grand Redesign which always, always shittifies itself.
I wonder if there were any dissenters inside of Reddit who have actually been on the Internet in 2007, desperately warning the designers that they were "Farking" themselves with that redesign.
What killed Fark was the founder ran for office and we all found out what a terrible person he is. It’s still fun to visit that ghost town and look at the tombstones occasionally.
Eh, I think the reason reddit was resilient against this effect was because of the balkanization resulting from the subreddit model. If you look at an individual subreddit, unless it is incredibly fringe, it will follow the 'social enshittification' model perfectly. Reddit has the advantage that a portion of users can migrate to a newer, still-fringe subreddit as a replacement.
Over time, though, the namespace starts to get cluttered. You have to go to r/realTrueSubreddit2 to find a decent community now. Also, r/realTrueSubreddit1 was taken by nazis/trolls who were mad at getting banned for using slurs.
I think Reddit is a bit different. They're not a company that is finding that optimizing metrics leads to targeting Marl (as per article). They're a company that decided that the optimal way forward is to intentionally push out their former users and replace them with as much Marl as possible.
And I think that makes sense. The original Reddit is full of technical people with ad blockers, weird hobbies, weird communities, and various undesirables. Keeping this herd of cats happy is extremely tricky, selling anything to them is extremely difficult, and there's all sorts of complex drama that needs managing.
So it seems that Reddit decided that to make the site more profitable, manageable and attractive to advertisers, all this weirdness needs to be pushed out over time. Drive out the technical users and weird unprofitable communities, and replace with as much mindless scrolling as possible.
Reddit seems to have easy sales. Specific subreddits can be targeted with specific ads really easily. So it should be easy to sell things there and easy to keep the users happy.
it's an interesting counter narrative then to the currently in vogue idea that you can stop individual ad targeting and instead target people based on their high level interests.
Reddit is like a distillation of that, the logical end point of it ... if that is a dead end, Google is in for a rough time with the pathway they are pursuing with Chrome.
My experience with Reddit ads (years ago now) wasn't that subreddit-level targeting was bad—there's a reason sponsored content is such a big marketing channel, after all—but rather that the ads platform just never worked very well.
And by "never worked very well," I don't just mean "We ran ads without good results." The whole experience was just sort of confusing and underwhelming, especially when compared to other channels like FB or Google. We suspected that the majority of our clicks were bots, based on our own analytics. The targeting always felt unreliable. Support interactions were weird. In general, the platform always just felt kind of... janky.
Don't know if that's still the case now, but at least as of a year or so ago, I knew a lot of people working in digital marketing who felt the same about the platform.
So the targeting wasn't just you choosing to run ads on /r/coffee and /r/programming? In my head the ads should be so easy to sell with how niche it is. But I also believe reddit could screw it up.
I've tried buying reddit ads. Maybe I was selling the wrong thing, or my ads sucked or whatever, but boy those ads didn't just not perform, they were just completely useless.
Can you elaborate on why you think reddit is pushing out the weirdness? I don't think it's a zero sum game, you can have both normies and weirdos in entirely separate subreddits.
Yeah, but what's the point of hosting them? Like what do you sell on r/dragonsfuckingcars? (no, I'm not joking)
And what does the existence of such a place at all mean to a prospective advertiser? Imagine a viral picture of your ad next to one of those posts.
But okay, let's ignore porn. How about subreddits that deal with subjects like depression, gender issues, politics, etc? What do you sell to those? Maybe a book or two but probably not very much. And they're also ripe for "hilarious" ad/content mismatches.
It seems to me that from the advertising point of view, Reddit would be a lot more desirable to advertise on if it was nothing but endless cute cat pictures.
How did advertisers become such puritans? Playboy magazine carried ads for normal products just fine. Every newspaper deals with "depression, gender issues, politics" and they somehow survived trough most of their history on advertising revenue.
Surely there should be marketers that see "Imagine a viral picture of your ad next to one of those posts." and realize that everything apart from "Imagine a viral picture of your ad" is often irrelevant.
They don't need to monetize every sub. Most subscribers to dragonsfuckingcars probably sub to several other subs that can be monetized. Keeping all the weird niche stuff around keeps users scrolling longer. Just keep them off /r/all.
The people who create the content (the reason people put reddit at the end of google searches) also like dragonsfuckingcars, and if you push them out they stop writing about their vacuum cleaners and the content becomes the default subreddits which are pretty much entirely people yelling political talking points at each other.
I think the changes to Reddit suggest that we (the ones complaining about Reddit) are but a small minority. I really thought Reddit would revert their API changes after seeing the community response, but then... nothing happened. This was the event that made me realize how far I am disconnected from its average user.
OP makes it seem like Reddit's users lose something when Reddit panders to a Marl. But I've observed that the majority of them don't care (enough). Some even like changes we view as invasive. I talked to someone once who told me "Aren't personalized ads so great? I was looking for new shoes, then I see an ad for the perfect shoes. A few clicks and now I have great shoes!" These people exist, and I suspect that they have to exist for ads to generate any revenue.
I do think that it's wrong to paint those who (still) use Reddit/etc. as brainless scroll-zombies, though. They just care about different things.
I can't say what percentage of Reddit users cared, but I can definitely say that the majority of Reddit participants—the people actually posting the content Reddit is trying to sell—have left. Reddit activity has dropped off a cliff: https://subredditstats.com/r/askreddit
But if I actually visit the subreddit, I see many posts from within the last 24 hours with 300+ comments each. Is it possible subredditstats.com had some kind of regression in its counting around that time? It could be related to the API changes.
That would make a lot of sense, I wonder if there's a good way to identify activity. Perhaps looking at the # of subscribers/active users that Reddit reports (but I'm not sure if historical data for this is kept).
Wow, I figured from hearsay that it was unchanged. Thanks for letting me know. I admit to being wrong about most people not caring, at least judging from the numbers you gave.
This is what's been somewhat hard about quitting/boycotting Reddit for me. Ultimately the community comes before the platform and Reddit happened to house a lot of good communities. I admit to breaking my boycott when the only answers I can seem to find for my exact question lie on Reddit. The same goes for my boycott of Stack Overflow, which I have to break even more often due to its ubiquity.
Those people sometimes exist in your own family too. My wife asked me to get rid of pi-hole because the sponsored links at the top of a Google results page no longer worked.
Other Reddit enshittification is their pushiness to use the mobile app. Great UX case study here, this guy makes them very entertaining - https://builtformars.com/case-studies/reddit
> on iPad the UI is extremely unintuitive and/or broken
The benefit of the desktop is being able to hover over buttons, most have tooltips with descriptions. This is not an excuse necessarily but I would liken it to landing on github.dev or vscode.dev without having seen or used VS code before. I really hate walkthroughs with tooltips (both as a user and a developer) but maybe I'll have to do something like that. What I do like about the current UI is that, by keeping control elements on the side and tabs on the bottom, I can have a consistent experience across devices and screen sizes.
Drawing more attention to the fact that there is a tabbed interface might help, seems like that was an issue.
Re: markwhen's syntax - I'll tell you what I like about it first, and then get into some of your points. I like that it is quite progressive. You don't need a header to start, nor groups, nor ranges necessarily, and you shouldn't have to think much about date formatting.
```
1 Aug 2023: hi
```
is a valid markwhen document. If a list of dates like that is all you need, that's great. If you need ranges you can add ranges. Need groups, add groups. Need metadata, add a header. I like that it follows a new user's experience, you don't necessarily have to start with everything from the beginning.
On groups and sections, people wanted nesting, soooo the simple hashtag syntax wasn't going to work without an end hashtag or something. So it doesn't mean nothing, it means the end of the group or section. Idk, I'm open to suggestions about it. I personally don't use nested groups and sections that much but people wanted it. There has to be some endGroup or endSection syntax I think, even if it's not those specific words
