Reeddit - Minimalist, elastic and read-only web app client for Reddit

http://berbaquero.github.com/reeddit/about/

by cheeaun • 14 years ago

132 95 14 years ago

berbaquero.github.com

d0m• 14 years ago

Suggestion:

http://berbaquero.github.com/reeddit/<Insert-reddit-name...; should work!

tuananh• 14 years ago

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

Awesome work!

baquerober8• 14 years ago

I guess you mean accessing a subreddit by the URL. Good idea, I'll add to the to-do list. :)

lftl• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

FigBug• 14 years ago

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...

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

PommeDeTerre3• 14 years ago

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.

icebraining• 14 years ago

Email mailing lists are far superior for discussions with this size of a community.

Are there some worthy mailing lists for discussion out there? I´ve heard this opinion before, but I´ve never seen specific lists mentioned.

Karunamon4• 14 years ago

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

Each sub is its own community. If you're having troubles like you mentioned above, you haven't found the right ones yet.

w1ntermute2• 14 years ago

> 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.

Not true. There are several smaller subreddits with excellent communities and excellent moderation. The major issue is discovery - it took me years before I (accidentally) stumbled across these subreddits.

Posibyte• 14 years ago

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.

rmc5• 14 years ago

This is a good thing. Individual subreddits can and do have particular rules. For example, r/lgbt, r/transgender etc. all have rules banning homophobic or transphobic comments. In a world where trans people are killed for living as themselves (or driven to the edge of society and commit suicide), it's good to have a place where they don't have to continually verbally fight to support their human rights.

redwood3• 14 years ago

I disagree. There's no doubt, however, that a static reddit experience (e.g. one where you don't change your usage patterns over the years) will leave you bummed, as you've been.

If you continue to find the interesting subreddits -- and they're out there -- and cut the crap, you'll be fine! There as subreddits of essentially the same quality as HackerNews, for example, for many other subjects.

Perhaps some subject areas are more lacking than others. On a non-subject basis, but simply for in-depth interesting reading, like reddit was back in the day, I recommend these subreddits: - r/truereddit - r/truetruereddit - r/foodforthought

There's no doubt people are trying hard to keep things from getting worse (hence creating truetrue above on top of true). But if you remain part of the community I think you'll be surprised what an amazing ecosystems of subreddits have been created.

redthrowaway2• 14 years ago

>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.

Reddit's problem has never been spam. In fact, you alluded to it earlier in your post: it's quality.

"Censorship", aka moderation, is necessary to promote quality content. Wikipedia, /., and SO are all heavily moderated. So, too, is HN. Without moderation (censorship, in your words), content regresses to the LCD. This is bad, and worth preventing. Moderation achieves that.

mikelat• 14 years ago

The other problem is you can't really trust the bigger subreddits because of astroturfing and too many groups with something to gain. You can't know for sure who's up voting what you see who's down voting what you don't see. Often redditors will accept what they read as the rational voice of the people when it could be a corporate attempt to sway public opinion for example.

Honestly there isn't anything reddit can do. Its a side effect of a popular website run by users.

brianfryer• 14 years ago

Have you checked out www.scrolldit.com?

janerik2• 14 years ago

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.

baquerober8• 14 years ago

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.

janerik2• 14 years ago

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

telecuda• 14 years ago

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!

sidcool• 14 years ago

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

tferris• 14 years ago

Perfect

1. Please make the same for HN

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

baquerober8• 14 years ago

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

Edit: typo.

brador• 14 years ago

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

nwh• 14 years ago

Yes it is.

http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4007:l5...

victoro• 14 years ago

I was gonna say, the extra e in the product name is pretty inconspicuous. I know its probably a working title, but if OP keeps it, seems like a C&D waiting to happen.

StevenXC• 14 years ago

http://www.reddit.com/help/licensing

yawgmoth2• 14 years ago

Reminds me of the metro app, /r/etro

http://www.addictivetips.com/windows-tips/retro-is-a-dual-pa...

aba_sababa• 14 years ago

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

mertd• 14 years ago

What do you think about Hacker News? :)

zxcdw• 14 years ago

Gamification has gone a bit too far if points are as valuable as the provided content?

baquerober8• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

yawgmoth2• 14 years ago

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.

wbkang• 14 years ago

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.

baquerober8• 14 years ago

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.

dotjosh• 14 years ago

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://github.com/dotjosh/redditreader

jacobparker• 14 years ago

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...

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

redwood3• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

"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• 14 years ago

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.

frozenport2• 14 years ago

Also that r/atheism keeps up-voting itself. As a Atheist from birth I find them obnoxious and repetitive.

jlgreco2• 14 years ago

Wait, what does "up-voting itself" mean? Do people that use the numerous cat subreddits not vote for cat pictures?

I am under the impression the point of subreddits is to allow you to subscribe or not subscribe, so why not just not subscribe to r/atheism? That's how I use it anyway.

knocknock• 14 years ago

I agree that this is a huge problem that reddit has. I hardly ever see any stories on my frontpage from the smaller subreddits I subscribe to.

baddox• 14 years ago

Really? I have had the opposite experience: if I subscribe to a small an mostly inactive subreddit, I notice what I consider to be too many links from that subreddit on the front page.

heed2• 14 years ago

It might not be exactly the solution you're looking for, but the Reddit Enhancement Suite [1] has a dashboard where you can add subreddits as widgets and limit the number of stories you want to show per widget.

[1] http://redditenhancementsuite.com/

mosselman• 14 years ago

It seems to me that you do not want to be able to say that. You want to see relevant and interesting posts.

redwood3• 14 years ago

I've been on reddit long enough to know that in order to see what I consider interesting, requires a balance of what others (e.g. subreddits) consider interesting. However I have varying levels of interest in them, and some are small and cannot compete...

donniezazen• 14 years ago

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

baquerober8• 14 years ago

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

lefnire• 14 years ago

What did you use to build this? Pretty slick

baquerober8• 14 years ago

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.

amasad• 14 years ago

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

matthuggins• 14 years ago

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.

baquerober8• 14 years ago

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.

poppysan• 14 years ago

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

jbackus• 14 years ago

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

vivatus• 14 years ago

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

isarat• 14 years ago

Excellent and it's super fast!

arrowgunz• 14 years ago

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.

TommyDANGerous• 14 years ago

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

PuerkitoBio• 14 years ago

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.

Reeddit - Minimalist, elastic and read-only web app client for Reddit

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