179 upvotes, 10 direct replies (showing 10)
View submission: Out with 2016, in with 2017
Yes. The limiting factor for improvements isn't ideas, it's our ancient codebase and hesitation to break things like RES and custom styles. In that respect, I feel like we've been held hostage from a development point of view (Stockholm syndrome?). That's why we're so excited to rewrite desktop web. It's going to be a doozy, but worth it in the end.
I had no idea reddit had gotten to the point where RES breaking was considered a hindrance on its ability to update the site...
this is news to me, and something we'd have been more than happy to help coordinate with / work on - even as a bunch of unpaid schlubs. I've always expected reddit to periodically break RES - it relies on specific HTML structure and CSS classes to exist.
after years of just breaking RES before (which is FINE - RES is a volunteer run free extension, break it all you want), Reddit has in the past couple of years been kind enough in the past to say "hey, heads up, we might break RES or we want to know if this will break RES"? ... and that was great -- hey, reddit's trying to give us a heads up so we can maintain RES better!
but now you're phrasing it as if this beast I created has held back reddit's ability to innovate.. and that feels like buck-passing onto me and my team.
Comment by ductyl at 25/01/2017 at 20:37 UTC*
74 upvotes, 2 direct replies
EDIT: Oops, nevermind!
Comment by xhosSTylex at 25/01/2017 at 20:47 UTC
5 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Nothing really to say except, thanks for RES. If it's of any importance to either you, or admins, I usually won't come to the site without it. Doesn't help your side of the argument here I suppose, but it's a damn good extension.
Comment by aa93 at 25/01/2017 at 21:50 UTC
3 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I read it more as an acknowledgement of how important RES is to a huge amount of users than a singling out of RES as a blocking issue
RES is more important to my desktop Reddit experience than the vanilla site at this point, so I think if they had huge structural changes that left a large swath of users without those features for any amount of time there'd be a fair amount backlash.
Comment by TheLostKardashian at 26/01/2017 at 00:07 UTC
3 upvotes, 1 direct replies
It doesn't read like buck passing to me, more of a "we are admins and even we love/use RES" / "if RES stopped working entirely we'd be crucified and Digg'd".
I think basically they want RES to continue being cool and working and I don't think that much emphasis should be placed on RES. I think his point in bringing it up was just to give a specific example us end users can relate to.
There's probably a bunch of moderator and back-end/admin stuff that would need totally reworking with a redesign and recode or mod/admin stuff that currently doesn't exist because of the way Reddit is coded, but because we don't see those tools etc. or have to sit looking at the code to try and see how to shoehorn a new feature in, spez gave an example of something we can all relate to more i.e. RES.
I'm not a web developer, last year I started learning PHP by myself as a "hobby" after years of just editing other people's scripts to do certain stuff. I was able to build something usable after a month and I was like okay that wasn't worth putting off for years. But then I wanted to do something else with it and realised I should have laid out my MySQL tables differently or something because now the new thing I want to add is a ball ache to put in. We live and learn.
Comment by xiongchiamiov at 26/01/2017 at 16:01 UTC
2 upvotes, 1 direct replies
To provide an example from when I was still there: we added a new feature (I think it was quarantined subreddits?) where RES broke the explanatory splash page, leading to users who didn't know what was going on. There was nothing to imply it was RES's fault, so if they ever reported it as a bug, it was to us. It got fixed in RES trunk, but then took a year for an actual release to make it out to users. So for a year, everyone using RES had a pretty awful experience with a new feature we released.
Comment by robertgentel at 25/01/2017 at 20:47 UTC
9 upvotes, 1 direct replies
That's not what it read like at all to me. There were no aspersions cast your way, only imagined ones.
Comment by blasto_blastocyst at 25/01/2017 at 20:49 UTC
3 upvotes, 0 direct replies
That feels a bit unfair. It certainly looks like spez was acknowledging how much people like RES.
Comment by Couldnt_think_of_a at 25/01/2017 at 22:15 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Might I suggest you leverage your position as probably the only bloke who knows what he's doing with RES (depending on your intellectual rights also now you're hired). I'm not saying more pay makes up for an insult, but it certainly doesn't hurt.
Comment by Exaskryz at 25/01/2017 at 22:33 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
You can save us. Tell the reddit team to stop making changes. The site works as is.
Comment by lamarrotems at 25/01/2017 at 23:58 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
This needs to be up voted