Well, with SO, at least you can search on Google and view the version cached by Google just fine.
With Reddit however, these days almost all comments are locked behind “view entire discussion” or “continue this thread”. In fact, just now I searched for something for which the most relevant discussion was on Reddit; Reddit was down so I opened the cached version, and was literally greeted by five “continue this thread”s and nothing else. What a joke.
Reddit's attempts at dark patterns are embarrassing from all perspectives. If you use dark patterns it's a laughably abysmal implementation. If you abhor dark patterns, it's a frustration.
They've actually done a masterful job of finding this balance. I've been on reddit for 15 years and would have quit if they didn't leave the old interface available.
I honestly thought Reddit would die when they introduced Reddit awards, it seemed like such an obvious cash grab. You can't underestimate the amount of community momentum that the site has though.
Yeah it's crazy how bad user-hostile reddit.com has become. Fortunately old.reddit.com is still available, but for how long? If only Javascript did not exist, it would be impossible for UX people to come up with something that bad.
> only Javascript did not exist, it would be impossible for UX people to come up with something that bad.
Arrange the html so that the list of comments is at the end (via css). Keep the http connection open, have the show more button send some of request, and when you receive that request send the rest of the page over the original http connection.
As usual, solve people problems via people, not tech.
② A submit button or link to a URL that returns status 204 No Content.
(CSS image loading in any form is not as robust because some clients will have images disabled. background-image is probably (unverified claim!) less robust than pseudoelement content as accessibility modes (like high contrast) are more likely to strip background images, though I’m not sure if they are skipped outright or load and aren’t shown. :active is neither robust nor correct: it doesn’t respond to keyboard activation, and it’s triggered on mouse down rather than mouse up. Little tip here for a thing that people often get wrong: mouse things activate on mouseup, keyboard things on keydown.)
“Continue this thread” links don’t depend on JavaScript at all.
“View entire discussion” couldn’t be implemented perfectly with <details> in its present form, but you can get quite close to it with a couple of different approaches.
I think the infinite scrolling of subreddits is about the only thing that would really be lost by shedding JavaScript. Even inline replies can be implemented quite successfully with <details> if you really want.
Why wait? Teddit has been a great substitute for reading in a mobile browser, and making an iOS shortcut for transforming Reddit links was pretty straightforward.
Impossible? Man, it's crazy how fast people forget things like good old fashioned <form> GETs and POSTs. It would obviously be a full page refresh, but other than that the same awful UX could still be implemented.
I guess there is a market for search engine (maybe accessed through tor) which does not care about robots.txt, DMCAs, right to be forgotten etc. Bootstrapping it should not be that hard since it can also provide better results for some queries since nobody is fighting about the position until it's widely known.
I'm not sure how far are we from being able to do full text internet search. Or rather even quote search, preferably some fuzziness options. That would be cool, Google's quotation marks were really neat back when they were working.
That's the good old Easter eggs, perhaps a memory from when Reddit was a nice place. They stop appearing and are replaced by dark patterns once sites jump the shark.
I reod some people use false slugs in the robots.txt as a honey pot of sorts. IPs that actually read the robots.txt, ignore the disallow, and still access the uri are outright banned.
It might be related to the time few years ago when Google added exclusions for user agent t1300 in regard to its founders. Gort seems to be a robot from old scifi and bender might be something similar.
> I guess there is a market for search engine (maybe accessed through tor) which does not care about robots.txt, DMCAs, right to be forgotten etc. Bootstrapping it should not be that hard since it can also provide better results for some queries since nobody is fighting about the position until it's widely known.
There is a solution for all this mess and I'm blocking HN and a few different domains until I implement at least the first step after which I can share it here.
Also, even if search engines are allowed, old.reddit.com pages are not canonical (<link rel="canonical"> points to the www.reddit.com version, which is actually reasonable behavior), so pages there would not be crawled as often or at all.
With Reddit however, these days almost all comments are locked behind “view entire discussion” or “continue this thread”. In fact, just now I searched for something for which the most relevant discussion was on Reddit; Reddit was down so I opened the cached version, and was literally greeted by five “continue this thread”s and nothing else. What a joke.