But for Redditors who've shied away from creating their own communities in the past, the new toolset democratizes the process. In fact, they've devoted hours to doing it. Moderators running highly stylized subreddits, like r/GameOfThrones, already know how to make their communities feel unique. They distilled all of this data into a new set of tools like "post validation," which lets moderators easily create a filter for what can or can't be posted in a community, and a custom styling toolbox, which lets mods change the colors and banners on their subreddits with just a few clicks.įor most of the people Perez's team interviewed, these changes might feel redundant, or even tedious. "We had a massive spreadsheet of all the customizable things that all communities do," says Ben Rush, the UX design lead on the redesign. They looked at Reddit's top 2,000 communities, and tracked the things their moderators had done to customize the style. They asked some users to create diaries of how they'd used the site. Perez and his team spent hours every day, for weeks at a time, talking to moderators about the elaborate hacks they'd strung together to make Reddit work better. The design team took inspiration from these workarounds. The most engaged of the tribe, who moderate several communities, have dedicated hours to custom styling their subreddits in CSS, or coding bots to help "automod" their communities. It's commonly used by Reddit's moderators, some of whom spend hours every day refereeing their online communities. Reddit Enhancement Suite, one of the most popular tools, launched in 2010 to provide some the necessary features that Reddit's web client didn't. Ask any of Reddit's most active users how they browse the site, and they'll likely mention at least one third-party application. "By virtue of not having any significant product evolution in years, users end up doing a lot of things and figure out how to subsist on their own," he says. So he knew that Redditors are resourceful creatures. He was also a Redditor-a longtime lurker, as he puts it. "When you ask a designer, 'What would be your dream thing to change on the internet?' the answer is always: 'That Reddit thing needs a lot of love,'" says Perez. They talked about making Reddit more visual, making better use of the unique personality of each community. Everyone wanted to change the font, the navigation, the use of space in the sidebars. But this is your job now.'"īrainstorming was easy. Ohanian sent the screenshots to Perez in a Zip file. The design, however, had been preserved in amber. Those users brought with them a tide of new communities-some of which challenged Reddit's reputation for free speech in disturbing ways. The website had swollen from just over 2 million users in 2008 to over 330 million. After Ohanian and Huffman had left, the company cycled through new CEOs-one of whom quit because the job was too " stressful and draining," one of whom quit after suffering what she calls " one of the largest trolling attacks in history" by Reddit users. In the intervening years, Reddit had changed drastically both as a company and as a website. ![]() ![]() The problem was that there was no last decade of Reddit's design history. It wasn't that Ohanian had failed to capture the last decade of Reddit's design history-though he did leave Reddit in 2009, along with Huffman. But redesigning one like Reddit, which hadn't been touched in over a decade, was something else. Redesigning any major website is stressful. And throughout the site, there are new illustrations of Snoo, Reddit's alien mascot, exploring the vast planets of the Reddit universe. ![]() Come here to see new posts rising and be a part of the conversation") there's a prominent, blue button to create a new post. Beneath the description for r/all ("The most active posts from all of Reddit. New fonts make it easier to tell when you're clicking on a post or clicking on an outbound link. Posts now open in a "lightbox," without taking users out of their page. Next to it, a trio of buttons allow Redditors to view the site in three new ways: There's "card view," which looks a little like Facebook "classic view," which borrows the design language from current Reddit and "compact view," for users who want to scroll through tons of content quickly. On the "new" Reddit, you'll find the navigation bar replaced by a hamburger menu in the left corner that surfaces feeds, subscriptions, and profiles. The refreshed layout will be introduced to more users gradually over the coming months and, at least for now, users can switch back to the old layout at any time. Today, about one percent of Redditors will see the new design. The new design's "classic" look is similar to Reddit's old appearance, but it has been updated with bigger fonts, a more modern appearance, and a navigation bar that-when opened-appears along the page's left side.
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