Overall, the Bank Python environment seems to be indicative of how cultural norms prune the design space. If you suggested this stuff in a normal environment you would get shut down pretty quickly. However, it seems to have worked well in that space so maybe it isn’t as crazy as it sounds on paper. What other ideas do you think we haven’t explored because of normative pressures?
Honestly, I’ve come to appreciate forums more with time. While I love lobster.rs, voting on comments and using that to weigh opinions takes away the feeling of community. Forums feel much flatter and approachable. I should probably spend more time on those parts of the internet.
Reddit is an outlier in actually still providing old.reddit for those that prefer it. Any other social network would have switched over to the new one without any sort of transition.
The transition is happening. There’s a lot wrong with new.reddit but at least it supports the three-backslashes method of indicating code in Markdown (instead of the standard way of preceding each line with at least 4 spaces). A lot of the submissions in the daily solutions thread for Advent of Code are from people for whom this works perfectly, but it looks like garbage in old. The mods are fighting a losing battle trying to keep the threads usable for old reddit users.
I optimistically assume that some people on the Reddit dev team still remember how Reddit got big because Digg forced a terrible UX transition without a way to opt out.
I don’t see any evidence that Reddit has a dev team that gives two shits about Reddit. The experience is terrible and has been terrible for years. I dunno, maybe they are just wildly incompetent. I’m not sure which interpretation is more charitable. But in any case, they clearly do not use Reddit, because if you were a Reddit dev who was also a Reddit user, an itch that you would 100% have scratched when new Reddit launched is that code formatting is inconsistent between new and old Reddit. It just is not that hard to use the same Markdown rendering tool across stacks. Yeah, there’s some weirdness about CommonMark and the original Gruber Markdown is underspecified and blah blah, but it is a completely solvable problem that is totally in their wheelhouse to solve, and they have not made even a single step of progress on it. People write Markdown parsers for fun. They just don’t care.
Fun fact: I wrote the Markdown parser that New Reddit uses, for fun. I also executed the transition to CommonMark-based Markdown at GitHub. Working on Markdown stacks used by sites as big as these is pretty intense. I think your analysis is off the mark.
Working on Markdown stacks used by sites as big as these is pretty intense.
I definitely agree with you that having millions of messages run through a parser is going to effectively fuzz out tons of weird shit, so it’s not something you do casually, but I still don’t see how having two parsers that work completely differently makes any sense. Either stick to the old Reddit parser because it’s tried and true or switch to a new one because it’s faster and more capable, but why would you only sort of switch in some views but not others? I’m sure there’s some weird and bad architecture that makes it hard to change old reddit, but I cannot imagine working on Reddit for 40 hours a week and not fixing it eventually. New Reddit isn’t actually new anymore; it’s been around for years. At some level, it has to come down to people saying “I just work here; I don’t care that the product is bad; I’m not going to waste my time pressing for a fix because it’s difficult and it’s not my department.”
Couldn’t agree more. I see backwards-incompatible UI changes as a form of fairly cavalier disrespect for one’s users (I’m looking at you, Firefox), and very much in the same category as breaking API compatibility without warning. The user is a critical part of the overall functioning system, not unlike whatever library or service is on the other side of an API – changes to the interface they use should be managed accordingly. Adding a new keyboard shortcut? Sure. Arbitrarily changing an existing one? Bzzzt Nope.
“Copy link location” moved from very reachable A to L. So you need to move your left hand all the way to the right side of the keyboard or put down the mouse. Sigh.
Precisely the example I was thinking of. (If you’re not aware, there’s a hack that can be applied to revert it, but it’s irritating to have to re-apply on every update, and who knows how long it’ll keep working.)
I can’t read the thread (have hard blocked Reddit from my work laptop) so don’t know if this was linked there already but there was this interesting article about Bank Python couple months back:
https://calpaterson.com/bank-python.html
Overall, the Bank Python environment seems to be indicative of how cultural norms prune the design space. If you suggested this stuff in a normal environment you would get shut down pretty quickly. However, it seems to have worked well in that space so maybe it isn’t as crazy as it sounds on paper. What other ideas do you think we haven’t explored because of normative pressures?
Versioning all UIs you produce so users can stay on the old UI while the backend just doesn’t care.
Yes I understand how this could be a lot of work in proxying to map old abstractions on top of new backends.
We do already version APIs though, so why not UIs?
I think the people hanging on to old.reddit.com just shed a solitary tear.
The day old reddit dies is the day I… move to 4chan? IDK what else there is even.
the day I start wasting a lot less time online!
Active forum communities still exist!
Honestly, I’ve come to appreciate forums more with time. While I love lobster.rs, voting on comments and using that to weigh opinions takes away the feeling of community. Forums feel much flatter and approachable. I should probably spend more time on those parts of the internet.
Lobsters instances focused on the particular subcommunity maybe? There are some I could see going that route.
Perhaps teddit is an option for you, even now.
Lemmy.
Reddit is an outlier in actually still providing old.reddit for those that prefer it. Any other social network would have switched over to the new one without any sort of transition.
The transition is happening. There’s a lot wrong with new.reddit but at least it supports the three-backslashes method of indicating code in Markdown (instead of the standard way of preceding each line with at least 4 spaces). A lot of the submissions in the daily solutions thread for Advent of Code are from people for whom this works perfectly, but it looks like garbage in old. The mods are fighting a losing battle trying to keep the threads usable for old reddit users.
I optimistically assume that some people on the Reddit dev team still remember how Reddit got big because Digg forced a terrible UX transition without a way to opt out.
This is assuming that anyone in the dev team has a voice in the management of the company. I highly doubt it.
I don’t see any evidence that Reddit has a dev team that gives two shits about Reddit. The experience is terrible and has been terrible for years. I dunno, maybe they are just wildly incompetent. I’m not sure which interpretation is more charitable. But in any case, they clearly do not use Reddit, because if you were a Reddit dev who was also a Reddit user, an itch that you would 100% have scratched when new Reddit launched is that code formatting is inconsistent between new and old Reddit. It just is not that hard to use the same Markdown rendering tool across stacks. Yeah, there’s some weirdness about CommonMark and the original Gruber Markdown is underspecified and blah blah, but it is a completely solvable problem that is totally in their wheelhouse to solve, and they have not made even a single step of progress on it. People write Markdown parsers for fun. They just don’t care.
Fun fact: I wrote the Markdown parser that New Reddit uses, for fun. I also executed the transition to CommonMark-based Markdown at GitHub. Working on Markdown stacks used by sites as big as these is pretty intense. I think your analysis is off the mark.
I definitely agree with you that having millions of messages run through a parser is going to effectively fuzz out tons of weird shit, so it’s not something you do casually, but I still don’t see how having two parsers that work completely differently makes any sense. Either stick to the old Reddit parser because it’s tried and true or switch to a new one because it’s faster and more capable, but why would you only sort of switch in some views but not others? I’m sure there’s some weird and bad architecture that makes it hard to change old reddit, but I cannot imagine working on Reddit for 40 hours a week and not fixing it eventually. New Reddit isn’t actually new anymore; it’s been around for years. At some level, it has to come down to people saying “I just work here; I don’t care that the product is bad; I’m not going to waste my time pressing for a fix because it’s difficult and it’s not my department.”
Couldn’t agree more. I see backwards-incompatible UI changes as a form of fairly cavalier disrespect for one’s users (I’m looking at you, Firefox), and very much in the same category as breaking API compatibility without warning. The user is a critical part of the overall functioning system, not unlike whatever library or service is on the other side of an API – changes to the interface they use should be managed accordingly. Adding a new keyboard shortcut? Sure. Arbitrarily changing an existing one? Bzzzt Nope.
“Copy link location” moved from very reachable A to L. So you need to move your left hand all the way to the right side of the keyboard or put down the mouse. Sigh.
Precisely the example I was thinking of. (If you’re not aware, there’s a hack that can be applied to revert it, but it’s irritating to have to re-apply on every update, and who knows how long it’ll keep working.)
Overall this sounds pretty great.
Bank Python is great.
Bank Programs built in Bank Python…
I can’t read the thread (have hard blocked Reddit from my work laptop) so don’t know if this was linked there already but there was this interesting article about Bank Python couple months back: https://calpaterson.com/bank-python.html
Lots of good articles in that calpeterson blog.
That’s the article linked from the Reddit thread.
Story’s linking some reddit discussion instead of the article.
Why the indirection?
The linked thread is a q&a with someone who’s worked on these systems.
Except it isn’t - the link goes to a Reddit discussion about the Bank Python article. There is a thread within the comments where someone is doing an AMA, but it is difficult to find.
The link should be changed - either to go directly to Cal Peterson’s article, or to link to the appropriate thread of comments.
You’re totally right, I thought because it was at the top it was the linked thread. Apologies
huh, I messed that up then, I intended to link directly to the ama subthread :-/