Their new design is comically bad at this point. I just loaded up Reddit full-screen on my desktop with a 2560x1440 resolution. I saw 3 posts above the fold in the default non-signed in format. Those 3 posts occupied the center 650px of the screen. There was a column to the right that took up a little over 300px and contained two ads among other site navigation stuff. The other 1600px of horizontal screen real estate was completely empty. I get the idea of mobile first design, but the new design is actively hostile to anyone using a screen larger than a tablet.
> I get the idea of mobile first design, but the new design is actively hostile to anyone using a screen larger than a tablet.
Don't worry their mobile design is actively hostile to users too, you're getting the full experience. The mobile design also wastes a huge chunk of space pestering you to install the app. And the official app seems to have been built by the same clueless designers, so you need third party apps just to get a decent experience.
I'm starting to think I may have Stockholm syndrome, I shouldn't have to jump through so many hoops to get a usable experience, I'm probably better off voting with my feet.
For the last year or so I've just pulled a few niche subreddits into Inoreader via RSS so I can still get the value of the smaller subreddits without falling in to /all when bored.
It's not as hard to leave as you think. Just stop using it for a week. Once you look at it with fresh eyes you'll realize it for the cesspool that it is.
The only issue being that there are a number of small, focused subs that contain the best information and discussion on certain topics on the interwebs. I don't give a fuck about the site itself, but the people active in say r/machinelearning and a number of other subs are incredibly valuable to me.
There would have to be a mass exodus of entire subs for this to change. Which probably won't happen until the situation becomes untenable. I don't believe reddit's leadership, despite the harebrained ideas they have shown so far, would Digg themselves into such a hole.
I still haven’t found a subreddit that’s better than the other existing communities for that topic. Can you list some examples of subtedddits that are _the_ forum to go to for their domain?
/r/celiac, /r/achalasia, /r/citypop, /r/deathgrips, /r/denver (and Portland, Austin, Santa Fe, Albuquerque... possibly some of these cities have bigger forums on FB, but it depends on your demographic. I can talk to 70 year olds about Albuquerque in the 60s on Facebook, but not necessarily what’s happening at Meow Wolf or with car thefts around Nob Hill or the electronic music show next week).
Reddit is the primary forum for obscure topics that don’t have large enough followings to support other communities, or have a demographic that overlaps enough with reddit that everyone just uses reddit.
Reddit offers three advantages over a traditional message board: voting, post previews, and a good search experience. All of those could be replicated elsewhere.
I don't think we're talking about the same reddit, in my experience their search engine has consistently been awful!
On different occasions I was unable to retrieve a post I almost remembered the exact title of via the reddit search engine, but found it quickly through google with the "inurl:reddit.com/r/subreddit" option
Something must have changed in the last 2yrs or so since I was last active on the site. The search experience used to be notoriously bad and even non-existent ( If I remember correctly for a while the search box was just a link to a filtered google search). I've also come to look at voting as a negative feature. Nowadays I mostly use twitter for what I used to use reddit for - to keep up with current news. Twitter has its faults but one of its better features imo is being able to read tweets of every different kind of point of view with equal weight, without the filter of upvotes/downvotes by the majority mob.
*edit - I should say, without the filter of downvotes, since twitter has likes which is the equivalent of upvotes.
search has sucked from inception until now, if you want to find anything on reddit, even a post from today that dropped of the front page, you are better off using google and "site:reddit.com" to find it.
Just choose the Subreddits you chhose more carefully, and it won't be. I subscribe to a number of cheerful, friendly and useful subreddits, and that's it.
The few subreddits I follow have also become hostile towards users wrt participation. People are banned frequently and questionable accounts vote in easily recognizable patterns.
I'm not saying there's a concerted effort (by Reddit or 3rd parties) to sway public opinion -- but it certainly feels that way.
And yes, the site has become horrible for usability.
I really wish someone with more free time than me would combine a bunch of current buzzwords (distributed, blockchain, whatever) and cook up something that was easy to use but still free from the tyranny of special interest and / or profit.
That's not to say that they shouldn't get rich in the process, just that they should be building something incorruptible.
I'll donate $1000 to a crypto address if others are willing to match.
Remember to keep mods (volunteers who curate a subreddit) separate from admistrators (employees with legal and $ constraints). They usually have no contact with each other.
So if you got banned from one sub for some reason, it was the mods. The beauty of reddit is, you're free to take your friends and, in 5 minutes, make another sub which you guys mod. Perhaps you'll outgrow whatever sub you're ditching.
> So if you got banned from one sub for some reason, it was the mods. The beauty of reddit is, you're free to take your friends and, in 5 minutes, make another sub which you guys mod. Perhaps you'll outgrow whatever sub you're ditching.
The problem is that you lose most of the community. Starting a new sub is easy, growing one is hard.
There's notabug.io, which is a federated link aggregator/discussion platform, has optional anonymity, and uses a PoW voting system (which allows for anonymous votes).
There's some interesting elements to the design, such as peers not needing to be in total agreement about the state of the world, so content can be replicated or moderated/censored/blocked at the whim of each peer, and each peer can build their own unique features on top of the same datasets (eg, different tagging or voting systems on different peers, while still working with the same underlying content).
>People are banned frequently and questionable accounts vote in easily recognizable patterns.
Reddit makes it way too easy for bots to post and act like real humans. It's also way too easy to run multiple accounts to outweigh everyone else's votes and make a post seem more popular than it is.
Because of that, many mods are quick to ban suspicious-looking accounts, because on the subs where they don't, the conversation quickly becomes bots parroting the same thing over and over.
Reddit is gamed to shit by god-knows-who-all, and you can't trust anything on there that isn't a meme. The quick and easy answer is to forcibly mark bot posts as being made by a bot, which reddit won't do for whatever reason.
I was thinking about building a blockchain-backed, distributed forum like reddit alot lately. I haven't started anything yet, but if somebody reads this and is interested in building anything alike, or needs an helping hand, PM me.
> I really wish someone with more free time than me would combine a bunch of current buzzwords (distributed, blockchain, whatever) and cook up something that was easy to use but still free from the tyranny of special interest and / or profit.
I’m doing this, and I’ve been working on it full time since February. I don’t want to spam HN so I won’t copy / paste the link again, but I’ve posted it on this thread once, take a look if you’re interested.
> * The few subreddits I follow have also become hostile towards users wrt participation. People are banned frequently and questionable accounts vote in easily recognizable patterns.*
I would never actually use the site like that. However defaults are important and that is the default view for a user who is not signed in. That design is so bad that I almost wonder if it is a dark pattern to get people to sign up/in just so they can save a preference to avoid that view.
> defaults are important and that is the default view for a user who is not signed in.
This is a good point. I never have my browser save cookies / cache information between sessions. Now when I visit reddit I need to tick the "change view" box every single time?
I agree that half the content being ads is pretty bad, but what makes the expanded view as a default so bad? I don't like it myself but e.g. 9gag is super popular and it uses this style.
it reminds me of mobile as I experience Reddit via the Apolloapp and wholly unsuited for desktop browsing. now you can pick one of the three display styles to get close to original but even then it is a slower experience
Reddit has presumably decided now is the right time to monetize the existing user base rather than continuing to focus on growth. Reddit's lifeblood is recirculating and remixing content. Given the political climate around copyright with things like Article 13 in the EU it's entirely possible Reddit will be very difficult to run in a few years. Now might be the right time to focus on revenue.
What would bigger growth/userbase/SERP for Reddit look like? That is, while keeping its spartan social network characteristics. Even with the redesign (which I’m not a huge fan of personally) and the attempt to increase visibility of user profiles, Reddit still feels more like Craigslist/USENET than Quora or Facebook.
I too would focus on getting money out if the choice is between money and more users, when you're the fourth biggest site in the US and the sixth biggest site worldwide (as of a month ago; if I remember correctly; based on Alexa stats).
They have a couple more compact options, one with small thumbnails and one with none. Just hit one of the view buttons in the upper left and it stays that way until you change it (at least if you're logged in, otherwise I don't know).
But something I don't like is that clicking headlines takes you to the discussion, you need to click a tiny link to get the actual article. This is still true when you're already in the discussion, which makes no sense.
And for some reason they don't display subreddits' descriptive sidebar text, which sometimes has convenient links.
Luckily, so far they'd rather have people viewing the old design than leaving the site, and have a way to opt out, which after a week or so I did. The old site's not as pretty, but I find it more readable and usable, and I haven't found any tempting features in the new design.
No idea, unfortunately; that Mastodon page is all I know of it. I'm keeping an eye on it though, just in case. I agree that that would definitely be cool.
I just hope they always allow users some way to switch to the old Reddit as an option. I had to uncheck the second box in the beta options, at the bottom of preferences. https://i.imgur.com/xnHdFuE.png
If it's anything like their mobile site, they'll leave the ability to use the old site, but it will grow more and more broken as they fail to maintain it, and eventually become unusable.
There are so many things about their new design and changes that are very negative for new visitors. I’ve encountered a dozen bugs and niggling flaws which as an experienced user I can work around, and recognize as an error, but a new user would not understand.
For example, say you come to reddit, you get the new mobile design. You do a search. It tells you no results were found and there’s nothing else on the page but that line of text: “Sorry, we couldn't find any results for
'Celiac'”
It doesn’t indicate that it restricted the search that sub, or that you can search the entire site.
However, if you get results? “25+ matches in r/Perfectfit Search all of reddit”. This is starting at one result, so it’s puzzling that it is not there for 0 results.
The behavior of automatically restricting the search to one sub is also the opposite of the behavior on the old the desktop version.
As a web programmer and designer, I also recognize these as the mistakes of lazy people or amateurs which could be rectified without delay. I have reported several bugs like this months ago, and there has been no change.
I wanted to add that the way that this is the mistake of an amateur is how they released the search like that without noticing. The people coding it should’ve noticed immediately, and someone else on the staff should’ve noticed within a week, and fixed it. But then, not fixing it several months later even after receiving many user reports is qualitatively even worse. I can only imagine how many new users have been turned off by this.
old.reddit.com still works but I dont know how long for, they have basically done a digg however right now there is no reasonable alternative for users to flock too.
> I can only see two ads for the 2-hour series premiere event of Marvel's Cloak and Dagger, and I have to scroll down to see the third
That is a bald faced lie. I don't want to downplay the placement of the ads on that screen, but to say that they are the _only_ thing you can see is a lie.
What I don't get, is why lie about it when the evidence is literally the picture that is being captioned. Color me confused.
Ahhhhh after reading and re-reading this a few times I'm finally getting it. They're sarcastically saying that you should be able to see all 3 ads without having to scroll. LOL okay that's actually funny, even after having the joke explained to me.
That's what a new visitor to reddit.com would see, as of about a month ago.