Scrolldit is essentially an interface system for the reddit news site. If you’re already a reddit reader or are looking for new sources of information, Scrolldit can give you a great window into the social news community of reddit.com
When I first was told about Scrolldit, I had to do some research. Perhaps it is a situation of emerging from the rock I have been living under, but I didn’t know what reddit was, so Scrolldit didn’t seem to make a lot of sense at first either.
So I grabbed my travelling gear and hit the information superhighway to find out what I could.
Reddit, for those who don’t know, is essentially a social news site. Each of the news posts on the site is created and submitted by the users, who also in turn vote on each post they like or dislike, thereby driving the popular focus of the site as a gestalt of sorts. One might think of it as a compliment to craigslist in a way; whereas craigslist is a newspaper’s classified section created and maintained by the readers, reddit is the rest of the paper. That’s an oversimplification of the reddit experience, of course, but it should suffice for this post’s purposes.
Once I knew more about what reddit was and what I could do with it, I began to get really interested. Here was a source of public opinion and interest that I had hitherto completely missed out on. Scrolldit made the whole process of exploring the available data on reddit much easier and smoother, not to mention more visually appealing. That’s not to say there’s anything wrong, per se, with the reddit site itself but it is what I would call sparse in it’s aesthetic considerations. Scrolldit is almost like a graphic user interface for reddit in some ways. You can zoom in and out, and shift the view at your whim.
So this:
Becomes this:
In actual usage, Scrolldit works just like the regular browsing experience on reddit, just prettier. You’ll be able to type in news subjects and you’ll get a live feed of the current stories affected under that heading. Scrolldit will search them out via the reddit site itself, and present them in a flowing window cascade that is rather like a digital newspaper, in that it has a visual layout more common to the pages of a newspaper than a website. Each story is represented in it’s own column/link/box that you can click on to expand and read more. You can search through contents, front page headings, etc. and there are also a number of subject choices you can choose as well. If you select one of these you will be taken to that broad subject’s central node with the current stories. The whole thing is very user friendly and simple, intuitive and elegant, even. Additionally, since it is entirely site-based, you’ll only need a browser to run it, as opposed to installing something to your hard drive.
If you enjoy reading reddit, like socially based news sites, or are just looking for a new site to stumble on and distract you from work for the next few hours, Scrolldit is high on my list of suggestions. There’s a surprising depth and breadth to the subjects available to read about and you might just find yourself getting involved in the process of creating and approving the news yourself. Scrolldit is an excellent way to get started with or enhance your use of reddit in general. Until next time my friends.
Check out Scrolldit.com.
