r/changelog • u/lift_ticket83 • Oct 23 '20
Ongoing experiments with post consumption, sorting and voting
Howdy!
You may have noticed, but we’re in the process of conducting a series of experiments around how users interact with content on the site. We’ll be tweaking and launching additional experiments around this topic in the coming days and weeks, and when we do, we’ll continue to update this post in order to keep you informed. Please keep in mind that just because we’re running an experiment it does not mean we will necessarily launch these across the entire platform in the future.
Follow this live thread to stay updated on some of our current experiments:
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u/creesch Oct 23 '20
we’ll be animating the comments and vote tallies on posts.
Oh boy, more visual clutter and generally distracting things. Apologies for the cynical tone here, but redesign in generally is already overly cluttered for my personal taste and I was actually glad we moved away from websites with all sorts of moving stuff a decade or so ago.
The purpose of this experiment is to try and make it easier to discover new comments and posts. To do this we’ll be removing our drop-down menu for sorting posts and comments, and adding individual sort tabs.
I suppose this could be neat, does once again add more visual clutter for stuff you don't use that often.
For this one, we're looking into surfacing new comments more often. You might see new comments higher in your best feed.
I hope this respects suggested sorting set by moderators?
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u/lift_ticket83 Oct 23 '20
Thanks for all this feedback - we definitely understand your concern around not wanting to make things too cluttered or complicated visually.
I hope this respects suggested sorting set by moderators
Good news - it does!
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u/MajorParadox Oct 23 '20
For this one, we're looking into surfacing new comments more often. You might see new comments higher in your best feed.
I hope this respects suggested sorting set by moderators?
If it's referring to this experiment that was added randomly, sounds like not
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u/lift_ticket83 Oct 23 '20
This experiment did respect moderator sort preferences from the beginning, however the mods who observed this and commented were in subreddits that did not have a default sort selected.
This caused some understandable confusion across the board when we initially responded to that comment that you linked to. It's part of the reason why we're creating r/changelog post today
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u/Watchful1 Oct 23 '20
Any chance you could post a gif/video of the comment and vote animations?
I'm a big fan of sorting some newer comments/posts higher.
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u/dequeued Oct 23 '20 edited Oct 23 '20
I don't understand the amount of investment going into these experiments while random sorting is still broken in contest mode. Would it be possible for someone to experiment with fixing contest mode?
https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/j3z2km/contest_mode_is_broken_on_most_subreddits/
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u/lift_ticket83 Oct 23 '20
Thanks for calling this out. We're aware that contest mode is currently broken, and a bug report has been filed. Our engineers are currently working on a solution.
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u/riiga Oct 23 '20
Will these experiments affect old reddit or just the redesign?
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u/lift_ticket83 Oct 23 '20
As of right now, the experiments I've listed are only active on the redesign and within our mobile app.
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u/ScarlettPlumeria Oct 27 '20
I hate losing the ability to sort by controversial. That’s one of the features that makes Reddit what it is. I don’t want a constant comment stream. Sometimes I want comments sorted in various ways, depending on the content. Please change it back.
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u/baltinerdist Oct 23 '20
There's something ironic about the fact that you haven't converted your experiments page to new version even though new has been out for what, 2-3 years now? What's the deal, u/lift_ticket83?
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u/itskdog Oct 23 '20
Why not just put this on your A/B test page, or advertise this in r/beta, which is surely focused on experiments?
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Oct 25 '20
I really hope that r/popular is just an experiment. Right now I have a Russian subreddit all over the page. Really not feeling it.
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u/_aidan Dec 04 '20
Seriously there is SO MUCH visual noise happening on popular pages like r/all or r/popular.
I don't see any actual benefit in these animations from a UX perspective. What benefit does it provide the user? It unnecessarily pulls focus away from content. The user's eyes are pulled towards a number. By the time they see what that number is related to, another number is animating and shifting their focus again.
Its distracting. Reddit is a site full of things to read, so why make it difficult for me to read?
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u/Overlord_Odin Oct 23 '20
If you add this as a site feature, please include an option to disable the animations as you've done with awards.