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Comment by dezwald | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious to know if it's reddit's GUi design/usability or it's content/community that keeps it a growing success.

For me, it's their design approach that i enjoy using, especially after reviewing their second project, hipmunk.

Interesting. I came to Reddit for the intelligent conversation compared to Digg. The commenting system was pretty great, as well as the subreddit system though, so I'd call it as a good mix of people and UI.

Eventually, I realized it was wasting my time like digg, just in a less obvious way. Also, the community had grown enough that those long joke threads and aggressive attempts at meme creation were hurting my enjoyment. These are not solvable problems on reddit in my opinion. I finally turned in the towel after an extremely long thread on how useless churches are in America: criticize all you want, (and I will certainly continue to do so), but churches feed and take care of homeless people and poor people in every county (and probably, town) of America.

My final solution was to add the following to my /etc/hosts file:

174.132.225.106 reddit.com www.reddit.com

This has saved me a lot of time. In exchange, I've missed (I imagine) many outrage-generating stories on US civil rights, a lot of great pictures of cats, and in exchange get to skip reading the perspectives of many, many 4chan alums.

The trick to post-2008 Reddit is to be very, very judicious about which sub-reddits you subscribe to. There are still quite a few gems. I've flirted with abandoning ship since the early 2009 hockey stick growth, but found peace by continuously weeding out sub-reddits that had gone bad. It's kind of like pruning a bonzai tree.

This is my go-to answer to anyone who complains about pun threads and whatnot. If you're running into that stuff, you're on the wrong subreddits. My discussions there are perfectly enjoyable since removing r/atheism, r/pics, r/reddit.com, etc.

I believed in that method, but in the end I'm still happier with my redirect. Signal to Noise ratio is WAY better. : )

There's another issue at play too, I feel. That is, Reddit doesn't change. Or, rather, it doesn't appear to. They add things (like subreddits or "gold") but the core mechanism rarely changes. The cost of changing people's muscle and visual memories is strongly underestimated.

Both, imho. Our design is based around giving tools for our users to create with (subreddits, self posts, commenting system etc) and letting them work their magic.

edit: unfortunately, we haven't got the benefit of a visible community on hipmunk - but that's a challenge for me to overcome as I try and build the same kind of fervent community on a site where no one can start a pun thread.

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