Myst’s “inexplicable popularity”, along with games similar to it, was partially due to the advent of CD-ROMs becoming a viable medium for games. These games came out just before 3D graphics hit gaming. Myst was released at the same time as Doom. So these games existed in a time where CDs could hold much more data than disks, but most games were still 2D. So “pretty slideshow” games (along with FMVs) were a legitimate innovation at the time.

I’m not sure if this is technically feasible, but I’d like to be able to mark an entire community as being read. Sometimes I subscribe to a new community and I’m just interested in the newer posts. Or some communities, like some that present the news, have so much timely content that they can overwhelm my feed. I’d like to mark the whole community as read in order to keep my feed cleaner and more relevant.