Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
Show HN: Scroll Reddit (scrolldit.com)
240 points by JonathanBouman on Nov 4, 2011 | hide | past | favorite | 73 comments



Wow, I wonder what people think when I tell them I spend a lot of time on reddit. This content looks absolutely nothing like what I'm used to seeing. I suppose I hide away in subreddits and miss all this weird frontpage material.

It looks so...alien.


Don't worry, multiple subreddits work as well on Scrolldit: http://www.scrolldit.com/?r=science%2Bprogramming%2Baww


What did you use to get that grid system that adapts to the screen width dynamically?

Any links to a tut on that?


That grid system is an awesome jQuery plugin built by David DeSandro: http://masonry.desandro.com


I love Masonry so much. I want to marry it.


This is really useful and well presented. Two things:

1. The flying boxes effect is cool at first, but it's annoying when you are trying to look at the articles near the source of the "boxplosion". They obscure (and on a slow browser) cause temporary occlusion of the stuff that I'd like to read. Maybe cause them to explode in the background, rather than the foreground?

2. Although the UI is simple and really nice looking, I think one of the most important pieces of information from Reddit is "popularity". Perhaps you can fit the number of votes next to each box. Or even better, add a single-bar bar chart with positive and negative votes like this:

+ + + | - -

Where each '+' or '-' in this representation is 100 votes or something like that.


Thanks for the feedback. 1. Good suggestion! I'll put it on my todo and see if it's possible. 2. Not sure if you saw it, but it is possible to hover the box and see the votes (bottom right). Most popular content is rendered on top (in some situations the order could slightly differ because of asynchronous calls being made in the background). Not showing the votes by default was because I try to keep it as clean as possible. I can fix you a parameter to set if you want to see the votes by default, let me know and I put it on the todo.



Here's another from one of my favorite subreddits (SFW):

http://www.scrolldit.com/?r=humanporn



Nice, although I find myself annoyed to have to wait after the vote counts to load (they only get fetched on mouse-over, right?)


That's true, only on hover. I did it to decrease the load on the clientside and on the side of Reddit itself, otherwise it is 50 iframes being loaded in the background for each render.


I think this is obscuring the hover on links. I'm on Firefox and when I hover over a link so I can see what subreddit it's in, the status bar shows it loading stuff from reddit, then reverts back to scrolldit.com.

Cool site, though. Could replace RSS for at least some of my reddit viewing.


Currently browsing the listentothis subreddit using your website, I must say it is quite enjoyable :)


it's a great UI for pictures.

PS: that desert/pool one is mine ;)


They need to start video on hover.


Uh how is that not a terrible idea / why are we too lazy to click play?


Mmm maybe with a timeout of a few seconds? Let me think about that.


I can't tell if this is a site meant to increase Reddit's usability or if it's a satire mocking the kind of content that Reddit too often features. Either way, very well done!


I love these -- http://reddpics.com is similar, and I love seeing different takes on a client representations of reddit.

I made http://imgist.com in the same vein -- it's a different take on making good image content easy to browse (on reddit in particular).


Without the flying windows, it'd be good.

Reminds me of http://news.peepcode.com/ a bit which might also interest folks. It's made up of Geoffrey's Twitter friends' links as posted on Twitter.


This is really good and cuts down on my #1 Reddit pet peeve, blind links / link bait titles.

One weird thing though — all your throbbers/spinners seem to be running backwards.


I was thinking of something similar. But I was thinking it should be a straight list (one article per row) and to the side should be a graphical bar. Mouse over the bar and the content goes away forever. So you can just swipe your mouse side-to-side over the bar to consume the content (and not see it again).


Absolutely good job! But like canadaduane said, the flying boxes effect could be annoying when scrolling down the page; and, on the other hand, your design fits imageboards (like 4ch) more, because when so many pictures showing up, I (like most people, I think) would not read the text.


I am assuming this uses the isotope jquery plugin, if anyone else is thinking about using dynamic grids like this I would suggest taking a look at the project. (free for non-commercial use) http://isotope.metafizzy.co/


It uses Masonry, from the same author as Isotope. Difference between those two is that Isotope uses GPU accelerated CSS animations. Sadly there are quite a few bugs when you combine CSS animations with flash (for example on the iPad), videos won't render on the proper position. Therefore I had to stay with masonry. Please let me know if someone is aware of a workaround. (Example of the bug: http://jsfiddle.net/desandro/t3Cmy/)


Good size on the posts - large enough to read on 13" screen.

Would like to see it centered (not sure if you are leaving the right margin for future ads)

Link to the comments?

You just increased my work productivity by 300% not having to click on every damn meme. Great work. Will use often.


Thanks! Good to hear you enjoy it on your 13' screen, one of my goals was to increase the usability of Reddit on mobile devices. Right margin is not left for ads, it's there because another box couldn't fit (try to play with your browser width to see what I mean). Comments are accessible through the title of the box. Have fun!


Would love a 1 column mobile version. Have been using this quite a bit. Nice work.


Wow! Hooking up to my monitor now for an 8 wide reddit overload. Beautiful.



It's nice, but picture only like panoptikos.com :)


Suggestion: could you change the "connection error" javascript dialog into something that doesn't block the page, e.g. a growl notification? My connection is spotty and I get that box a couple of times, rather disruptive.


Yes great idea and my avoiding reddit while working plan has been thwarted


Scrolldit.com is bugged in Opera, I tried to fix it but can't find out what goes wrong and how to solve it. Is there anyone here who can shed a light on it?


I think this actually makes my reddit browsing slower. I think looking left to right and having titles not aligned is slower than reading top to bottom.


Ok, may have scrolled on this page forever. When the page gets lots of content it gets slow. Could you remove the DOM elements at the top as you scroll?


That's indeed a problem if you scroll for a long time.

I can't really remove content from the DOM since that would cause other boxes to float back to the top (moving chaos in your window). Maybe replacing the images not in focus with a 1x1 pixel stretched to their size is a fix to decrease memory usage (although I think this will differ between browsers). Anyone here with a good idea how to fix this?


Typo in your twitter share button: "Scroll through* Reddit.com - http://scrolldit.com


Thanks for the typo! Fixed it in the latest version, expect it within a few minutes:)

Edit: New version with fix online.


You know what I have been doing the last hour? Scrolling Reddit :P I got to say, it's really a nice experience... Good work!


Nice! Glad you like it, spread the word :)!


This is actually pretty awesome. Nicely done.


I love it. This is one of the few Show HN posts I might actually use.

(Not to say other stuff is bad... I'm just not an early adopter)


I feel the same way. This saves me some time.


Pretty addicting scrolling feature. An overload of information but a cool graphical way to see what's going on.


This is not a slight against what you've done here - but damn, this does not make my ADD easier to deal with.


Works very well on my iPad. Well done!


Was one of the goals to make it work on iPads, great to hear you like it :)!


I sent this link to a coworker, and he was incapacitated for the rest of the work day. Good job!


For him you're not a coworker anymore, you turned into a friend ;-)


Whats the copyright situation around Reddit posts? Is putting ads on Reddit content allowed?


Not sure, but the ads you see are coming from Reddit itself ;-)



Panoptikos is indeed a nice mashup, however picture reddits only.


great freakin job man. I built reddpics.com last year. Your UI is much better.


Thanks lurchpop! Btw. Good job on reddpics, in some occasions it's faster as Scrolldit (I guess because of the prerendered thumbs), your site was one of my favorites before I build Scrolldit :)


This is really neat!

I never realized how much of the reddit content was internet memes :)


Thanks! Also give other subreddits a try, /r/listentothis (http://www.scrolldit.com/?r=listentothis) or /r/itookapicture (http://www.scrolldit.com/?r=itookapicture), those really show the power of the UI. Another thing to try is to visit it with a tablet :)


"Connection timeout." - That's the only thing I've seen so far.


What browser? Did you try to reload the page?


Safari. However, it's gone now. I guess it was a network problem on my side.


Love it. Maybe work on making it dynamic width?


Thanks, what do you exactly mean with dynamic width? Do you mean for each box other widths?


oh dang, just lost about 30m. will bookmark.


Great job. Needs a "pause" button IMO.


Already has a stop button for new top 50 check, I'm busy with optimizing the way it works (maybe load new content only if top is in focus)


scrollhn? :)


Already tried that, but I can't find a good reliable realtime datasource.

I could only find the news.ycombinator.com/bigrss feed (which blocks Yahoo YQL, so I can't convert it to jsonp). The workaround would be a proxy that circumvents the block, but I'm not sure if that's okay. Anyone from HN who could help me out?


I'm working on something similar but a little more like an HN-specific Flipboard in the browser.


I like it! The fixed-width column format ( http://canv.as uses it too) works really well for small chunks of random content.


loved for the few seconds before auto update kicked in.

remove that or add a toggle. or maybe update when i reach the top.


You can disable it by clicking the stop icon on the right of the loader :)




Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: