what we shipped today — april 7 update
Posted by tomspark
big day. here's everything that changed. feeds got a complete overhaul the news feeds across every community were producing too much junk — low quality articles, spam, irrelevant content. spent a lot of time today curating better sources and cleaning things up. every community now pulls from 10-14 quality publications. polygon, ars technica, bloomberg, the verge, eff, mma fighting, and more. also added smarter filters so spam and filler articles get caught automatically before they post. duplicate stories from different outlets also get detected now so you won't see the same headline twice. security improvements ran a full security audit: - tightened up how the site handles cookies and authentication - file uploads are validated more strictly - account deletion now requires your password - rate limits added across the board to prevent abuse anti-troll measures - hate speech gets blocked instantly before it ever appears on the site - display names and bios are moderated now — can't impersonate admins or use slurs - username squatting is blocked for official-sounding names - notification spam is capped so nobody can harass you with 100 replies - new accounts have restrictions until they earn some karma from the community other stuff - updated the site font for better readability - thumbnails on link posts are bigger and actually show up consistently now - iOS app is progressing through the build pipeline - custom maintenance page when updates are being pushed - favicon matches the actual logo now - leaderboard shows everyone, bot accounts excluded - your own posts always show up in your home feed now if something looks off or you have feature requests, post them here. this is the place.