Welcome to the New Reason.com

All the same great content in a much nicer package

Welcome to the new and improved Reason.

We hope you'll find the new site easier and more pleasant to use. While we're still publishing the same great content you love (or love to hate), the new site should make it simpler for you to find some things you might have missed—including videos, podcasts, newsletters, and even events. (Plus our pals at Stossel and Volokh.)

Astute readers will notice that our longtime blog, Hit&Run, is gone. All the news, views, and abuse you're used to from Reason staffers will appear as standalone articles from now on. If you're a diehard for the reverse-chronological feed, you can always pop over to Latest to see what's new.

A note about how we made the new site: Instead of going to a fancy outside firm, we developed the whole site in-house. (We did the same thing when we redesigned the print magazine a while back.) That decision meant we could build the perfect site for a 50-year-old magazine which also happens to be a prolific video channel, a burgeoning podcast powerhouse, and your favorite online reporting and analysis destination. It also means you can expect to see evolution and improvements over time, so don't be shy about sending us feedback.

Of course, this new site—and journalism we do every day—is supported by your donations.

Comments

[a ab abc abcd abcde abcdef ahf]

Supported by our donations and constructive criticism:
Too much wasted vertical space.
Outlines around comments do nothing.
You admit that limited threading sucks; but rather than keep indenting, you removed the Reply buttons. Boo!
Latest is welcome in both combing all posts and being bookmarkable. But why is the comment icon not a bookmarkable URL?
Why have so many HTML tags ceased functioning? Blockquote primarily is a serious lack.
The new comment box should be at the end of comments, as it used to be; it encourages reading existing comments before adding our own.

[Joe M]

The reply buttons still exist.

[a ab abc abcd abcde abcdef ahf]

Not for too-deeply-indented comments.

[mad.casual]

you removed the Reply buttons.
EDIT.
FUCKING. BUTTON!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11111!!!!!!!!1111!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[robert capozzi]

Overall grade: A

The header typeface on my Chromebook makes lower-case "i" look like "l"s. Otherwise, good work.

[Demosthenes of Athens]

But do the squirrels work the same? It wouldn't be the same if Reason had figured out how to expel our furry friends.

[JeremyR]

Basically, it's now designed for reading vertically on smartphones. Those of us that use computers, with widescreen computer monitors, have to have look at 1/3 of our screen.

Improvement!

[Ron]

agree less information upfront now with more scrolling required. my local paper went the same route. I do read on my smart phone occasionally but only because there is no internet where I live. this site isn't to bad but the left off the home button after you read an article so its a search or reload to get back to the cover

[CE]

Yeah, pretty much a disaster. The font is horrible, the format is horrible, and it's become like Yahoo News, where they mix stories that are six months old with actual news.

Everyone doesn't read it on a smart phone.

At least there's still comments.

[David McElroy]

The new design is a huge improvement over the old one. It's far more graphically pleasing. The headline typeface is far stronger. And getting rid of that awful carousel of stories would have been worth it all by itself. I can't see a single thing about this one yet to call anything but a success.

Congratulation to the designers and editors involved. I've redesigned newspapers (in an old life as a newspaper editor) and I recently redesigned my personal website, so I have a pretty decent idea how much work went into this. Great job.

[Eric Hanneken]

There's just one RSS feed now? I can't subscribe to particular authors?

[freeAgent]

Where are you even seeing a single RSS feed? I can't find any RSS links on the new site. Thankfully, it looks like the old Feedburner feeds are still working, but I'm not sure for how long: http://feeds.feedburner.com/reason/AllArticles

[freeAgent]

Aha, some sleuthing based on the format of the Podcast feed yielded this: http://reason.com/latest/feed

That seems to work, and--even better--it isn't a Feedburner link.

[Rat on a train]

No brickbats?

[Deconstructed Potato]

In the 2019 Reason Great Leap Forward, Charles Oliver hardest hit.

[SIV]

Charles Oliver was the last libertarian at Reason. The purge is now complete. FORWARD !

[Jerryskids]

There's your brickbat right there.

[Katherine Mangu-Ward]

They're still here! They'll show up in the Latest feed and you can also see them at reason.com/brickbats or by clicking the orange BRICKBATS tag at the top of the most recent one.

[a ab abc abcd abcde abcdef ahf]

The brickbat I see is the same one I saw Saturday just after midnight and commented on. It says three comments but only shows my premature one, and says "comments closed".

It will be interesting to see the April 29th article which also posted prematurely.

[SIV]

Perhaps I was mistaken.

[I'm on the Koch payroll]

You know what the United States really needs? More immigration.

[Real Books]

You misspelled "irrigation".

[Fist of Etiquette]

Astute readers will notice that our longtime blog, Hit&Run, is gone.

Gasp!

I do admit I will miss the preview function. I liked my formatting to be perfect before subjecting my fellow reason consumers to it.

[Rat on a train]

Happy Tax Day!

[Jerryskids]

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Hell in a handbasket. I liked the old layout in that it was like browsing a magazine, there was at least a preview of the story and a "more" for the whole thing and now it looks like a news aggregator site. I get it, it's formatted for smartphones and I'm an old man yelling at clouds for thinking a phone is for making telephone calls and a computer is used for browsing porn the internet, but that's the way God intended it to be and that's the way I likes it.

[$park¥ is the Worst]

I’ve only been viewing this site on my phone for several years now but I agree with you. I preferred the old layout.

[CE]

Anything closer to Yahoo News is a step in the wrong direction.

[Robert]

It seems to be loading much faster rather than hanging my browsers. I'm always using old, castoff hard- and software, so this is a considerable improvement for me.

However, removing threading of comments is a disimprovement. I remember from before HyR comments were threaded, and it was a slog when you couldn't skip subthreads easily. I understand the threading was a lot of the burden on our hard- and software, because sometimes I used to have to resort to downloading and stripping the header and scripts to avoid hangs, but having the ability to read threaded when feasible was nice.

I'm afraid the PTB here were displeased at our learning that the comments were more interesting—& in recent time more libertarian—than the blog, and have redesigned the site to deemphasize the commentariat.

[markm23]

It hangs my Firefox browser frequently.

[Robert]

Oh, & for the record I'll repeat that the print magazine's redesign around the turn of the century was awful too, especially for old eyes. But that became moot since delivery became so awful as to not make subscriptions worthwhile any more either.

[Rich]

our longtime blog, Hit&Run, is gone.

End of an era. It used to be the greatest chatroom on the Intertoobs.

I'll reserve judgment on the New Reason for a while.

[Cyto]

Racist, Nazi, Trump-loving Republican Shill!

There, feel more at home?

[PurplePros]

Thanks for making the site more mobile friendly. Also, please share with your Reason ERT Podcast that I appreciate that you redesigned the site with journalists who #learnedtocode. My son and I will continue to support Reason and the Reason foundation. Well done.

[CE]

If it were any more mobile friendly, it would be a text message.

Some of us still read this on a real computer.

[Overt]

I'll repeat what others (and I) have said earlier. The optimization for mobile devices makes this a bad experience for desktop users. The extra large font, and then making comments double spaced means that I can get at most 2 comments on my screen before I have to scroll down.

It should not be hard to adjust your style sheets to provide more compact (vertically) styles when on the desktop.

[Nuwanda]

For those with scant knowledge of layout for the web, there's no contradiction between desktop and mobile layouts since competent designers make layouts responsive for all devices.

The redesign is not something a designer should feel happy about putting in their resume. It looks like an off-the-shelf theme has been thrown at the content and tweaked, badly.

Case in point: note how the text in the comment reply input is a different size and font than the text which is displayed when the comment is submitted. How does this get past a competent design team?

[Azathoth!!]

Still no edit button and now preview is gone as well.

And HampersdandR has been killed.

A very soviet upgrade.

[Cyto]

Gotta Have Preview!

Not that anyone uses it, unless you are posting a link. Typos may be annoying and make you look like you don't know the English language, but nobody wants to pull a SugarFree on a link.

[$park¥ is the Worst]

Agreed

[Cyto]

This is how the new threading looks. I wonder if I like it?

[Cyto]

I think I probably do.

[Real Books]

It's like the chocolate rations in "1984". The increases ("upgrades") leave you with less than you started with.

[Nuwanda]

MiniWeb

[Rufus The Monocled]

I thought I already commented on this?

Now I feel lost.

[Enemy of the State]

Hey, you guys now beat out the commenting section at the WSJ, which has gone all "Ladies Pearl Clutching Society", "we'll let you know which articles you can comment on and how" Gestapo on its subscribers.

Keep it FREE and UNCENSORED my fellow travelers....

[DaveSs]

That's what makes the Dissenter extension so great.
Adds a comment section to everything.

[DaveSs]

I dunno about this.

I do my reading primarily on a desktop, and it just doesn't seem friendly for that. Too narrow so lots of scrolling.

It does look good on mobile.

[Cyto]

I liked the clean new interface and the faster, tighter menu - it shows a commitment to the user experience. So I decided that it was time to try it without adblock again.

Ouch. Watching on a device with limitations, the ads are killing me. I think the big offender is the floating bar across the bottom. It keeps refreshing and popping up and down. While it does that I'm left in an unresponsive limbo - particularly distracting while typing. This may be because I'm typing on a netbook instead of my more powerful devices, but it is a killer. Plus, slow loading advertisements make the screen pause and jump under the mouse, making selecting items difficult. Plus, there is some add that keeps grabbing focus, popping me out of the text box as I type.

So even though I'm heaping praise upon you for moving the horrible, click-bait photo-links to fake articles under the comments, even the well-behaved ads from a mainstream provider like google are causing a pain in my posterior.

Maybe just because of the limited capability of this particular machine, so I'll give it a go on other platforms and see if there is a difference.

[Cyto]

A quick test - enabling ad-block just on this page eliminated all of those issues. The page is lickety-split quick and the focus and responsiveness in the text box is perfect.

Remember when google ads were those text-only boxes that loaded lightning quick and were never a distraction and never caused problems? Yeah, I suppose those days are long over....

[a ab abc abcd abcde abcdef ahf]

I do remember those. I actually looked at them, a little. Image ads suck and my brain is self-trained to ignore them.

[Longtobefree]

Finally found the brickbat. The silly little balloon says 3 comments. Click the damn thing, and it shows only "comments are closed". Looks like some minds are more free than others?
Does not meet my definition of "the same content", does not meet my definition of "a much nicer package".

[Cyto]

Yeah, it looks like it is designed to only allow comments for 1 day. But something is messed up.

It says "it is 00:00:01 here", presumably thinking that midnight has passed - despite being labeled as 4/15 (4:00 am).

Probably explains why it wasn't showing up as well. Must be a bug. And presumably it is being worked on, since the article magically appeared a few minutes back.

[a ab abc abcd abcde abcdef ahf]

That's my comment! I looked Saturday, just after midnight CA time, 3am Reason time, and there were two premature articles: the brickbat dated the 15th, and an ordinary article dated the 29th. I commented on both like a cat marks furniture. Now the brickbat shows up, claims three comments, only shows one, and says comments are closed.

[Sevo]

So this is the new AM Links?
"From the deep ocean, Seychelles president calls for action on climate"
[...]
“This issue is bigger than all of us, and we cannot wait for the next generation to solve it. We are running out of excuses to not take action, and running out of time,” the president said from a manned submersible 400 feet below the waves, on the seabed off the outer islands of the African nation."
http://www.sfgate.com/world/article/From-the-deep-ocean-Seychelles-president-calls-13766773.php

Yep, the walls are closing in!

[Sevo]

"California Rep. Eric Swalwell Is Running For President, Too, With A Focus on Guns"
[...]
""I see a country in quicksand, unable to solve problems and threats from abroad, unable to make life better for people here at home. Nothing gets done," Swalwell said in an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert Monday night.
[...]
One of the key issues the California Democrat, 38, is highlighting is one important to young voters in particular: gun safety."
https://www.wpr.org/california-rep-eric-swalwell-running-president-too-focus-guns

Yep, it's the beginning of the end!

[Brandybuck]

Aaargh! Someone moved my cheese!

[Cyto]

Nice turn-of-the-century business reference!

[CE]

They didn't just move my cheese, they replaced it with moldy cheese and said it was "new and improved blue cheese"!

[mad.casual]

Also, at anything below about 80% zoom, the font starts to 'corrode'. I usually browse the web at 67% zoom and, at that level, the font looks like I'm reading Civil War era tombstone rubbings. And, for reasons I'm not entirely clear on, the usual amount of white space seems even more vacuous.

[MasterThief]

I mostly browse at 75% so I can more comfortably run 2 instances of my browser split screen. The redesign looks like garbage that way

[Stilgar]

So.. who is the genius that thought this layout was a good idea? Reader interaction will plummet - I'm not clicking on every freakin link to read more than a one sentence intro.

Hopefully Reason will man up and admit failure quickly.

[Ron]

more clicks means more commercial money thus the experience is not to improve your life through fewer clicks its to make the advertisers pay for each click. our clicks are the treadmill that powers their lights. we are the squirrels in the machine

[Greg F]

Instead of going to a fancy outside firm, we developed the whole site in-house.

Who's 15 year old kid did you employ?

[Blowhard Woodchip]

The whining hasn't changed.

[crufus]

Could we get a direct menu link to Brickbats? They are the first thing I want to see.

[Uncle Jay]

I prefer the old package better.
Also, get an edit button.
After all, this is the 21st century, Reason.

[Real Books]

" this is the 21st century, Reason"

Of course it is. That's why function goes away but everything looks really cool on a smartphone.

[Your Mom]

I can't believe Grylliade.org outlasted Hit & Run! I feel old. I'm not browsing this on a smartphone, so I *am* old.

[Your Mom]

The date format on the comments looks dumb. Why are there dots instead of spaces? This free site should cater to my aesthetic preferences, dammit!

[CE]

It's the Euro style, like phone numbers. For people who don't know about IP addresses I guess.

[Your Mom]

Euro style? Fuck that foreign shit! PABST BLUE RIBBON!

[D.A. Ridgely]

"I can’t believe Grylliade.org outlasted Hit & Run!"

*shrug* The conversation is better there. Even the snark.

Wait 'till you see how long it outlasts the site without H&R.

[ThomasD]

Comments do not appear to be working well at all.

[Happy Taxation-Is-Theft Day! – ALibertarian.org]

[…] Report drop, Julian Assange‘s beard, Raymond Chandler’s vocabulary, Reason‘s schmancy new website, and how all the nerds in Washington were watching Game of Thrones last […]

[Yellow Tony]

Instead of going to a fancy outside firm, we developed the whole site in-house.
I can respect that. It's not perfect, but I'm glad you didn't use some third-party commenting service. Further, I'm pleased that you didn't add any editing and deletion* functionality. Muh internet points is thankfully absent too.
* The capability to delete should be present, but the option should only be available after five minutes of posting your shit.

[Longtobefree]

Can we get a change to the comment balloon so that one color shows for closed comments, and another for actual comments where you can comment?
Or is that too hard?

[Marty Albini]

A request rather than a comment.
I know you need the money so I get why the site has the sleazy clickbait ads at the bottom, but could a way be found to reward those with paid subscriptions to avoid the pop-up ads? The paid subscription ought to offset the ad revenue.

[Tony]

How do you do blockquotes is this italics working? I can do without an edit button if you must (but why must you?), but how do I preview? I don't know if tags work yet I can't preview to see if they do. Someone tell me how to do everything.

[Fist of Etiquette]

This is blockquoting. Does it work?

[Fist of Etiquette]

OMG IT DOESN'T

[Fist of Etiquette]

Let's try this again.

Does it? Does it work?

[Fist of Etiquette]

Okay, everyone can breathe easy now. I figured that much out at least.

[Tony]

So no preview, no edit, but a flag. How very soviet.

[Rockabilly]

I'd like to thank Reason for still letting me post my comments.

This is the only site left on the internets that hasn't kicked me off. I've been booted off the HuffNPuff, Alternet, Salon, etc, for having thoughtcrimes.

[Demagogisimus]

Very nicely done. Congratulations and thank you!!!

[m4019597]

Difficult to read, heavy on the JavaScript, doesn’t stick to chronological order for article list. Dates and times of articles missing in list, old stuff sneaked in.

Submitting a comment closes the comments section completely. When reopened, the recently submitted comment doesn’t appear, even as pending. Resubmitting it claims it’s a duplicate.

I don't like the font and color choices.

[Hank Phillips]

Reason's in-house bootstrapping does us proud. Even it the changes turn out bad, there won't be recriminations about letting outside vampires wreck the mag. And so far, nothing looks like a mistake--even for we who miss Brickbats already.