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Wellness Wednesday for February 21, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Well, I'm definitely not one of those people. I rather dislike that kind of weird zoomer tendency. But I'd say that the desire to have proper whitespacing is less like this sort of weird zoomer multitasking trend, since it's a desire for a simplistic and clear mechanism for consuming text. What you're describing sounds to me like it has more in common with old Reddit, since it lumps everything together into an information overload.

To be clear, I'm talking about this stuff (Googling revealed the term is apparently "sludge content"). I would have considered it less of multitasking/information overload thing and more of one where the user has trouble pacing their own information intake, with the Minecraft videos' most important aspect being that they convey the text a few words at a time at a fixed pace rather than presenting an overwhelming wall of everything at once. In other words, the users require something that's more IV and less pill (with the Minecraft video in the background being the saline in the metaphor). New Reddit seems to go in exactly that direction, as there is less on the screen at a given time, you have to take delaying actions to "advance", which results in a new morsel of information being displayed, and there is a lot of "incidentals" (whitespace, "designer" UI elements) to make it go down more smoothly.

I'm not clear on what you mean by this. Can you elaborate?

Comparing new [edit: themotte seems to autoedit new.reddit links into old.reddit...?] to old, for example, the latter immediately shows all of the discussion under /u/HyperConnectedSpace's post. The former is first gated under a "(+) 3 more replies"; when you press that, it still doesn't expand fully, but instead leave you with a "(+) 1 more reply", which, when pressed, sometimes (I still can't figure out what the conditions are) takes you away from the rest of the thread to a "you are looking at a single comment's thread" page. I've also seen a scenario in different threads where you have to press the (+) repeatedly for it to show even one additional comment; this may have to do with comments that were downvoted.

I don't know where I saw the picture thing (might only be some subs), and I also am failing to rediscover another obnoxious pattern where a small slice of a post's comments were expanded inline in the subreddit view instead of on its own page. In general, there seem to be a lot more distinct mystery interactables resulting in subtly different behaviours on a new reddit site, with the boundaries of each of them being unclear.

No

Superior hardware, I guess

takes you away from the rest of the thread to a "you are looking at a single comment's thread" page

Yes, I do find this annoying. I don't mind so much the "(+) 3 more replies", when it actually does work and when it also doesn't direct me away from the page.