With the fall of the once popular Digg social voting site came the rise of better alternatives like Reddit.
If you look at Digg today you will notice that the site took a big dive in recent years. From thousands of so called diggs (that is votes) for popular stories to one or two hundred on the frontpage. Reddit on the other hand seems to have thrived in past years.
With the rise came add-ons and userscripts to improve various aspects of the Reddit site and user experience.
The Reddit Enhancement Suite has been recently updated to version 4 for all supported browsers. It adds a custom dashboard to Reddit that adds features to the popular site.
When you first install the add-on you will probably not notice a big difference to the way the Reddit web page looked before.
What you will see on the other hand is a new button at the top right corner of the screen (next to the user information) that opens the dashboard, settings console and night or day mode (the latter turns the white background into black and changes various other styles on the page).
The group edit bar at the very top on Reddit may look different as well as you get direct shortcuts on the top right to add groups directly on the page you are on without leaving it.
The Settings Console is where all the new features and changes can be activated and configured.
Buttons at the top lead to configuration menus to configure accounts, comments, filters, the user interface and users.
This can be overwhelming at first as there is a lot to explore on this page.
Lets take a look at each menu:
- Accounts: Option to enable the account switcher which stores Reddit usernames and password pairs to switch between accounts effortlessly. Also configured to show comment karma next to link karma and to hide the user bar showing the username, karma and link to preferences.
- Comments: Adds a comment navigator to easily find comments, options to hide all child comments, live comment previews, keeping track of the comments count, option to save comments and to display parent comments when hovering over the parent link of a comment.
- Filters: Filter out not safe for work contents, add keywords to filter out, ignore subreddits and domains. Add a spam button on Reddit for easy post reporting.
- User interface: The biggest section offers a lot of different tweaks and changes. This includes adding keyboard navigation to Reddit, auto-loading new posts at the end of each page automatically for an neverending stream of posts, an inline image viewer or showing an unread message count.
- Users: Options to highlight users in comment threads, ignore users and tag users.
Here are a couple of examples where Reddit Enhancement Suite helps you improve how you use Reddit:
- The "show parent on hover" feature displays the parent comment when you hover over the "parent" link of a comment.
- Comment navigator to easily find comments by specific user groups, e.g. original poster, friends, or moderators.
- Filter all NSFW links automatically.
- Configure domains that you want to ignore on Reddit.
- Configure Reddit to display one endless stream of posts instead of having to switch pages.
- Boatload of keyboard shortcuts to navigate Reddit.
- Quick messaging options to message users from anywhere on Reddit.
Those are just a couple of the improvements that Reddit Enhancement Suite brings to the table.
The Reddit Enhancement suite is available for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Safari. It can be downloaded directly from the official project website.
Everything is much nicer to use than before! I also hope they've fixed the Opera 'checking for updates' bug.
I hope F.B. Purity gets this kind of makeover love.
Well, that really sounds interesting, however, I think maybe there is a chance now for a small size blog to get some attention in Digg if those BIG GUNs are leaving for Reddit, I seldom share on those social bookmarking sites but now I will try them out :)