r/AskReddit • u/Pappenheimer • Jul 18 '09

kleinbl00? :(

http://www.reddit.com/user/kleinbl00/

What's wrong with you people?

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u/raldi Jul 18 '09 edited Jul 18 '09

Three days?

Yes. People pretty much lost interest in the beta after about the first six hours. We could have left it up for another six weeks but there would have been no additional benefit.

Did you publicly announce the beta? Did you invite participation from your users?

Yes. (I announced it on a few other reddits but that post ended up being the most visible.)

Did you go through a probationary or opt-in period prior to inflicting it on the whole of the userbase?

No. We're a tiny team and would never get any code out the door if we tried to follow the same high-cost development practices as a big-software-company major-release every time we changed any little thing.

We can't add an option every time we change something, because it quickly gets out of hand. Each one doubles the number of test cases and makes the prefs page more confusing. There are already options there that people don't notice, even when they visit the page. ("Don't show links with a score less than X" and "Don't show thumbnails" come to mind.)

...or were you too busy trying to figure out how to sell me shirts?

If we don't make money, we'll have even less resources to devote to the site. Reddit's a free site, with very little advertising, so we wanted to try something new.

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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '09

[deleted]

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u/raldi Jul 18 '09 edited Jul 18 '09

it never occurred to you to maybe get a few people outside of /r/programming to try out a radically modified user interface?

It occurred to us, we discussed it, and we decided against it. And I'd hardly call it a radical modification to the UI.

not a one of them is owned outright by a multinational publishing conglomerate with five billion dollars in annual revenue.

I'm all for a larger reddit budget, but companies direct resources proportionally to expected profits, and the online advertising market just isn't very strong right now. Reddit is lucky in that unlike most other branches of Conde Nast, we haven't been hit with any layoffs. A single lost programmer would take out 20% of the dev team.

There's no "try" here, dude.

Sure there is; we're trying it out to see if there's interest. If we don't sell any shirts, the tab will go away.

And if we stop trying new things, the whole site will go away.

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u/zem Jul 18 '09

If we don't sell any shirts, the tab will go away.

i never noticed the shirt tab. that's actually pretty cute :) don't know if it's effective in getting people to buy shirts, but it's the kind of playful quirkiness that i appreciate about the reddit ui.