I genuinely wonder if the people in charge of Reddit ever come around to places like this to read these sentiments. Hell, they actually only need to read actual Reddit posts to understand that many people are utterly disgusted by their tactics to try and force you onto their mobile app, they're upset at how slow the (default) site is, etc.
Maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe people will keep using it forever. But I doubt it. They've turned Reddit from something that had potential to exist for a long time into something closer to TikTok (which, even without the current drama, was never going to be more than a fad IMO). There are more efficient ways to get low-effort shitposts and memes than Reddit. Those who want that will move on, and the people who were interested in more than that are leaving now.
I have come to the conclusion that reddit is 2 apps/websites.
The first is a tiktok-esque waste of time, instant gratification meme machine. Everyone on this app uses the reddit native app and doesn't care about dark patterns. They would never know that reddit's app is shit, because they literally don't care enough.
The 2nd is a Hackernews-esque collection of hobbyist sub-forums. These people are invested in their hobbies and sub-reddits. They use reddit to interact and discuss, but also a source of niche-news for their hobby. Every one here has a 3rd party reddit app or uses RES. (if you don't, please do). Unlike twitter, reddit lets 3rd parties offer feature complete wrappers for reddit. This group has ad-block, but will occasionally give someone gold. This group hates reddit, but also has no where to go.
If a person tries to make reddit both, then it is an annoying experience. I use reddit entirely as the latter. The front-page and r/all are garbage to me. Every super popular (barring sports) subreddit is trash. But, my niche subreddits are literally the best places on the internet to gain niche information.
Examples where the subreddit is the best source of open discussion on the internet for that niche: dota2, manga, soccer, metal, prog, civilized discourse, history, male fashion (kinda), calisthenics, small cities, fantasy fiction, niche YT channels, super authentic cooking....and that's just for me.
PSA : Use a 3rd party reddit app (SYNC is my preferred. Pay up the 2$ dollars. It is worth it). Use RES, and enforce filters strongly. Use RedditProTools to detect trolls, bias and top contributors. Use Imagus (hoverzoom has malware) for pop-image/video viewer. These will greatly enhance your reddit experience.
And I think this is why Reddit won't try to cater their main app to "our crowd" (Powerusers, HN readers, etc). In a way they already have an app just for us: their API.
Reddit knows it's going to be impossible to design a single app to cater to all types of users. They know there is always going to be a group of people that complain about one feature or another so they in-turn expose the API that we can build out own. Now if a group of users has a specific workflow they like, they can build an app that will specifically cater to them.
This would be fine if they just plain and simple catered to a group. What Reddit does though is they are actively hostile to one group.
I'm somewhat in the boat the parent is. I see the incredible value in something like Reddit - or maybe the Reddit of old. Where niche communities can self police and create a space for information and content that isn't found anywhere else.
Unfortunately everything has to be monetized. The people who own Reddit want to make money and therefore they try to toe the line of using just enough dark patterns to force the tiktok group to use the Reddit app and not to terminally piss off the nice groups.
What irks me is they're selling out their business to a userbase that is just as quick to ditch them when someone makes something that gives them a faster/strong hit of dopamine.
Not everything has to be monetized. Reddit is a data store of links, text posts (EDIT: as well as images and video per FalconSensei), comments, user identities, and associated meta data. Let's Encrypt runs on a budget of $3MM-$4MM/year. OpenStreetMap's budget is a few hundred thousand dollars a year. The Free Law Project could store and serve all of PACER for a similar amount. HackerNews is hosted on a single server. You could run a clone of Reddit off of the Internet Archive if built properly.
Funding is needed, monetization at all costs is not.
I feel like your argument is making the case for "Nothing has to be monetized", rather than "Not everything has to be monetized".
Not everyone is going to share this altruistic approach to running a business. The majority of monetization probably does, plain and simply, come down to greed. But outside of that, you have ambitious people who envision so much more than what they currently offer—which may require large scale growth.
Regardless, I'm sure the majority of people's morality will be skewed when the service you offer grows to 430+ million active monthly users [0].
Each user goes from being an individual to just a single part of this mass-collective, where the difference between making $1 and $2 off each user is so mind-boggling high that it's hard to keep morals in check.
I guess there's a reason sociopaths do so well in business.
You're not wrong. I think there's a certain flavor of Trotsky's "Eternal Revolution" at play when you have an industry based off of zero marginal cost economics, with the battle always raging between those who can deliver on a shoestring (and are satisfied staying small) versus those who are attempting to capture the entire TAM (or the appearance of attempting to capture the TAM to pay themselves well from investor funds) and milk it for all it's worth.
The defense against sociopaths is eternal vigilence.
Unfortunately >"our crowd" doesn't make money for social networks as consumers, we sink the ads into the Pi Hole, we don't buy the virtual emoji currency, even Twitter struggled to make any money when it was just a platform for wordsmiths and that's issue with social networks targeting niche crowds. Pushing non-contextual ads on Reddit is extraordinarily hard as every subreddit is a platform of its own, so if the >"tiktok-esque" part of Reddit makes them money to sustain, I don't mind as long as they stop degrading the experience for those who are not into it.
I get your general breakdown but my issue is somewhere in between.
I never use the tiktok meme machine part of reddit anymore. As you mentioned I do have a bunch of smaller hobby subreddits that I only visit on my locked down oldreddit RES configured personal devices.
My problem comes when I'm not on my own machine/device and I'm trying to troubleshoot with "xyz question site:reddit.com" through google and get bogged down in new reddit or app reddit. It's really infuriating the way new reddit compresses threads to only a handful of magically prepicked comments out of possibly hundreds. You have to remember everytime to click to load the entire comment section just to browse the UX abomination they created.
> Examples where the subreddit is the best source of open discussion on the internet for that niche: dota2, manga, soccer, metal, prog, civilized discourse, history, male fashion (kinda), calisthenics, small cities, fantasy fiction, niche YT channels, super authentic cooking....and that's just for me.
With the risk of sounding elitist, for some of those topics the main subreddit is overran with pointless and repetitive memes. You'd have to go to the r/true* subreddit to get the serious, in depth discussions.
The subs I often frequent are exhausting in their claims of being overrun by alt-right types. While I'm in no way saying that there aren't politically obnoxious people (even specific users whose damn job seems to be shitposting political content), in subs like /r/seattle, just being not 100% aligned with the popular hot takes gets you labeled as alt-right. Hell even disagreeing with part of something gets you in trouble. Are you for police reform but against the rioting? You probably didn't know this about you, but you're an alt-right troll.
It's funny how I've been labelled an alt-right troll and was banned from the UK subreddit for a while, because I stated that Gandhi's statue should not have been toppled, that he wasn't a racist, that Sadiq Khan and the London mayoralty is partly responsible for high rents, etc etc. Incidentally, at the time, I was a Labour member, with a whole ton of MPs in my phone book, including the current leader, and some of whom I was so close that we invited each other to our homes. It was laughable.
But that experience and the constant name-calling against people not expressing a far-left opinion kind of soured the whole reddit experience for me. I barely look at country subs or any of the major subs now, and focus instead on niche subs, only because reddit is also a good way to get some questions answered. Especially when stackoverflow comes up short and I get downvoted to oblivion for asking supposedly noob questions, I get much more help from the respective reddit sub.
There are plenty of both extremes, what's mostly missing are moderate "political" subreddits that aren't full of SJW and cancel culture. That's why I only bother on the hobby/computer subs. They're generally fairly well behaved and neutral as long as politics doesn't come up and the better mods are good at shutting such nonsense down. I don't care if you're a biden or trump support if I'm in r/diy
That one confuses me because I've only ever heard the label used as a slur so I expect the posts to be like /r/EnlightenedCentrism but it's actually a boring pro-Democrat sub. Certainly not evidence-based policy, unless you consider "removing Trump" as a policy..
. which apparently is Biden's platform, so yeah it fits.
The name is a joke. Moderate democrats get labeled as neoliberals by reddit leftists so they embraced it, the sub isn't actually neoliberal. Right now there are a lot of memes, but once the election happens it'll go back to normal. You can still look at the effortposts which are pretty high quality.
I'll admit most of those topics are those I don't browse reddit for, so it may be different for them, but in my experience most "true"/"real"/"uncensored" versions of subs are just full of bigots who got banned from the main one.
I can't speak for the others but in the case of Dota 2 the "true" subreddit just discusses the strategy of the game itself while the main one posts memes and fan art and talks about meta topics like eSports and the microtransactions.
There are so many examples where a niche subreddit got filled with drama, and then a significant chunk split off and created another subreddit that now fights with the original occasionally. Gaming subreddits appear to be particularly bad at this.
I unironically miss forums. It was a completely different experience from post/comment based sites because everything was one thread, but the biggest thing I miss is that forums were usually pretty well moderated, smaller, and devoted to one topic.
Reddit is the de facto site for making a community on, but there's something to be said for the focused insular forums of just a few years ago.
The issue with voting based forums is they tend to cater to low quality mass appeal comments.
More often than not an informative comment, while maybe not being downvoted, won't be the top comment. Instead, you'll see really low effort "zingers" which make it to the top. Those are further piled on with a flood of comments trying to one up each other.
So, you end up often needing really strict moderation to curtail this problem.
Chrono ordering suffers the same issue, somewhat, though it doesn't have the pile on problem (not to the same extent).
The Reddit/HN format makes everything time sensitive. If the post falls off the front-page, nobody will even see your comment, the discussion immediately dies. It's completely unfit for longer form discussion over time.
Sometimes you want a forum for discussion, not just a comments section of highlight reel one-liners.
Disagree entirely. Trading chronological sort for whatever drives the most ad impressions and engagements is responsible for the destruction of otherwise decent services.
This boils down to the community you are a part of.
One of the games I like to play has its own forums and they are still the best source of info compared to reddit. Discussions are surprisingly readable, though that may have something to do with the older target audience.
I agree, I can't stand them. That's why I won't use arstechnica comment section. I might look at the first few. I much prefer reddit and hackernews style
But that allows for discussion bubbles to form in this case. Contrarian views are downvoted to oblivion. Not much of an issue in HN, as it is in reddit.
Originally I was more in favor of phpbb style forums and anti likes/favorites/upvotes but I've abandoned that attitude.
I really think it's the same as it ever was. If you want to find quality you need to start with your interests and then find a community from there. Discovering a huge community and being frustrated or upset that it's not catered to your preferences is a mistake. The lower the barrier to entry, the lower the quality of the forum will be.
And it's important to remember barrier to entry isn't just technical knowledge. Barrier to entry could be something as obvious but unspoken as writing style. Even as I'm typing this comment I'm aware that using my "hacker news voice" with all of the attendant style rules that make it fit with the community.
*edit: also I'm sorry to see that you are being downvoted because I get your sentiment
It's pretty wild that the largest discussion site on the internet with untold numbers of young kids on it regularly has NSFW posts hit the top or second page.
It makes me wonder if Reddit will try to push down or altogether ban NSFW content a la Tumblr because of the site's popularity.
I think you may still have to flip a switch in settings saying you're OK with seeing that–but really you don't have to go very far to find content like that anyways, just click on the comments for any post and you'll find something questionable quite quickly.
I use it as both. Not everyone fits in whatever category you've designated there is a lot of middle ground on reddit. It's far better as a platform than facebook that force your identity. If reddit ever isn't mostly anonymous I'll head out.
> Every one here has a 3rd party reddit app or uses RES. (if you don't, please do).
I sometimes go long stretches without using Reddit, but I'm 100% in the second column when I use it. I've never used a 3rd party reddit app and I don't use RES. The reason is that I only ever browse Reddit on the computer (logged in, in "old" Reddit mode). If you don't browse Reddit on your phone, these aren't really necessary. (This isn't just a Reddit thing, I also don't browse Twitter, Facebook, or any other social platform on my phone. Mainly, this is because I want to avoid the dark patterns and unblockable ads of mobile apps.)
For me I use it for boardgames, boardgamedeals, BoardGameNews, 18xx, digitaltabletop, some other even more niche board gaming subreddits, woodworking, artisanbread, breadit, bodyweightfitness, stormlight_archive, gardening, etc.
For me, Reddit is a single place to go for all of my niche hobbies.
there are three 'main' tabs on the app --- News, Home, Popular.. When I'm done reading News,and Home... i say to myself, "time to stupid!" and click "Popular" lol
My time at Etsy (2012-2015) taught me that people will rationalize anything to avoid dealing with the fact that they made a fundamentally bad decision.
A big reason Etsy has lost a lot of trust with consumers is their inconsistently applied policies and their allowance of cheap knock off crap. When I was there a few years ago, there were all sorts of forum posts, reddit posts and tweets about the problem all the time. The leadership (and more importantly) the people in the company, absolutely refused to believe it was a problem. We came up with any excuse and rationalization we could for not addressing it. The most common one was, "they (the people complaining) don't have access to our data, they don't know what we know, therefore their points are irrelevant." Another was, "they're just mad, let them vent, it's no big deal." Pure denial, the simplest reaction to bad news.
By continuously shoving their heads in the sand and not addressing the perception (whether it was real or not) the company allowed the perception to become reality. I'd be pretty surprised if reddit leadership doesn't do the same thing when they see messages on HN talking about how shit reddit is. They'll rationalize how we're a bunch of pedantic, angry nerds who don't represent the average user. They'll ignore the growing negative trends in favor of looking at the positive ones. They'll do anything they can to not change the strategy they've committed to. It smacks of a company that doesn't plan, doesn't think about the consequences of their decisions, and goes with the first idea that pops into their head.
> It smacks of a company that doesn't plan, doesn't think about the consequences of their decisions, and goes with the first idea that pops into their head.
I imagine the new design is a huge success in terms of revenue. Users now endlessly scroll through countless promotions and advertisements that seamlessly blend with the content and most likely have much higher engagement rates.
They can kill all the serious subreddits and focus on meme, porn, drama, influencer content and still be far more financially successful than the old Reddit. They'll have no shortage of users.
We might hate it and leave the site, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's sustainable in the long term for them and the right financial move.
I think most people that use reddit are using it for specific sub-reddits, not for memes or 'shitposting'.
Apollo app makes reddit a really nice experience for me on iOS, but I'm not sure what Android has on that front. Problem is that 3rd party apps that provide a front-end to Reddit need to be in active development. Once the dev steps back for a couple months, everything is going to go to shit.
> I think most people that use reddit are using it for specific sub-reddits, not for memes or 'shitposting'.
Perhaps. But the shear size of r/pic or r/jokes makes me doubt that most people are there for "serious business". Yes, I understand that you can subscribe to many subreddits and that you can sub to r/jokes AND r/serious-topic-with-serious-people. I'm just skeptical. Reddit is trying to be for the masses. Most of the time people spend on their phone is to look at cat pictures. I'm not passing judgement necessarily. It's just what everyone I know does. They read news, check Facebook, and then pull up TikTok/Snapchat/Instagram and look at funny pictures.
I still visit particular subreddits. I never visit the front page- not even "my" front page. I go to exactly whichever subreddit I want to read from at the moment. Maybe lots of people are using that way, but it's not what I see in my bubble. Again, I could be totally wrong.
Aren't those subreddits default? Which would explain why so many people joined.
I don't generally "join" any subreddits anymore. I create a multireddit and add subs to the multireddit. My joined subs is really small and are the subs I monitor regularly so I see them from the main page. Multireddits let me "subscribe" to less frequently visited subs without actually joining or being forced to see them.
For instance, I have one for books, one for music, one for finance related subs, one for programming subs, one for humor, etc. Almost none of those contain subs that I'm subscribed to.
If you curate your home page there it works pretty well. Turn off the popular subreddits that are the "default" and it works well enough. I mean it -is- free. I'm not sure why anyone would expect academic level journal topic curation from something as anarchic as reddit.
> I'm not passing judgement necessarily. It's just what everyone I know does.
I like funny pictures, too. My point is that there are better sites than Reddit for it. So if that's who they're trying to retain, they're screwing it up.
You also need to take into account that Reddit and Imgur had a symbiotic relationship for this type of stuff for many years. Reddit has always had meme posts, but it was through imgur for the longest time. Those posts were often the start of our most enduring memes. More recently that whole scene has been dumbed down to the lowest common denominator set by Facebook and others.
Imgur has become a surprisingly good source of curated twitter and news content lately. It’s where I first learned of the Beirut explosion for instance.
Only the most salient news/tweet/insta screenshots make it to the top of usersub. It’s great
Seconded - love sync's offline capabilities. Especially on long flights. I commented above that android seems to have better options than IOS when it comes to third-party reddit apps. (I use devices from both platforms).
>I think most people that use reddit are using it for specific sub-reddits, not for memes or 'shitposting'.
Reddit is #17 on Alexa topsites, surrounding by search engines like google and yahoo and video content providers like Netflix and Youtube. I can't imagine reddit being the bastion for intellectual discussions on specific topic as much as any of those other sites are.
I use reddit as a google fix. Essentially I search for what I want + reddit then click the links in the posts. This has become harder due to the pile of shit that is google Amp but if it still works
In particular Searx[1], which is a search engine aggregator with dozens of backends, including one for Reddit. You can self-host it or use one of the public instances[2].
If you self host your searches likely won't be as anonymous as going through somethinglike duckduckgo or startpage unless you have a dedicated VPN 24/7
Once you get big you change your priorities. There is no reason the same can't happen to hacker news either. If they start allowing low quality shitpost. Right now I assume with the amount of traffic here, it doesn't cost lot of money to maintain this site. But the same for Reddit is different.
Reddit on its barely makes any profit and had made losses for a number of years. Right now they are too big to pull Digg and not suffer any major consequences.
many people are utterly disgusted by their tactics to try and force you onto their mobile app, they're upset at how slow the (default) site is, etc.
The problem is that not enough people are so disgusted that they stop using Reddit. As long as the managers can navigate that line between annoying people and turning people away, they will continue to make money.
I was never a Reddit person, and the few times I've gone there through HN links convinced me not to make visiting a habit.
I find that the images in galleries are hidden in old, until you click the Play or Plus button (or whatever the subreddit css defines for that) that's under the title on the comments page, just to the right of the up/down vote buttons and the score. Single images seem to show up just fine for me.
I'm chalking it up to my preferences; I have "Show Thumbnails" disabled, and I suspect that's it, but I haven't experimented to verify.
There are still interesting communities and multi reddit are cool.
But you're right, reddit is being poisoned. Maybe they will remove the front page and /r/all one day. They should. All of this might be caused by elections.
I wish somebody would write a repertoire of subreddit by tags or categories. I still love to read comments on science and other constructive debates. Curated posts should also be more visible, not like digg did though. Subreddit of the day is nice too.
The shit posts are annoying, but it's part of how reddit want to attract as many types of users as possible, like tumblr.
If you don't explore reddit your using it wrong. I should search for a repertoire though.
The airline example is even crazier. Even on a platform like Google Flights that shows you the legroom for each flight right next to the price, people still in large majorities select the lowest cost ticket with usually the least legroom. And then go on and complain about the legroom.
It's like buying a car with a 150 hp engine and then complain it's slower than the more expensive 250 hp model.
> Google Flights that shows you the legroom for each flight right next to the price
I've never seen this before on a flight booking site. How widespread and discoverable is this feature across the major booking sites, outside of Google Flights?
Why would they care if a small number of people hate that they aggressively push you to their mobile app when can achieve 50 million downloads? Follow the money. It will answer a lot of questions for you.
The people who want more non-meme content? I'm not sure. I'm not saying they've all moved on yet, but I bet they will.
For example, I preferred some of the more tech-related subreddits. Then I discovered HackerNews and Lobste.rs. That can't be the only demographic of content that has forums out there. And I imagine more will pop up.
Again, it's just my prediction/guess. I've certainly been wrong before. Perhaps I have it totally backwards. Maybe those people will stay because they're more tolerant of Reddit's bullshit to get to the good content. I don't think that's a smart bet for Reddit to make, though.
EDIT: Also, a lot of people are apparently moving to Discord chats.
My anecdata: I'm a long time reddit user, hate their new UI/UX, avoid their App and now visit less. I'm also still looking for what's next. Im thinking to go back to finding good RSS.
The closest service I've found to old-school RSS is Feedly[0], which allows me to subscribe to various news or social media pipelines and group them as I like.
Discord is great when you want real time conversation, but it exists parallel to a subreddit, not as a replacement.
To look forwards, you must look backwards, at new forum software such as NodeBB or Flarum. Specialist niche communities are already shifting in that direction, or have never left their old BBSes behind, but are due to welcome a resurgence of new members.
I still don't like it even for real time conversations. As they don't have threads, or any way to reply to a specific message, sometimes it's confusing to have 3 different conversations going on in the same channel
I've moved on, and come here. I always loved reddit for the news articles and conversation. I feel that both of those things have spread out to the margins. Some subs still have the quality text-based content that I like, but most have been snuffed out by power-hungry mods, or transformed by an influx of users who don't understand the older reddit culture.
When a friend referred me to hackernews, I found that it has the type of content and users that I miss from reddit. I also visit Tildes on occasion, but the user base is so small that the content is much more limited than it is here.
Management? Probably never. We are probably 0.5% or less of the reddit audience. Even on reddit commenters are only like 5% of the people visiting make comments so they don't mean much to reddit management. They will only know if there is a geurilla movement in social media to criticize some part of reddit and then reddit and twitter blow up. That's when management notices.
Adding to this reddit is centralizing themselves. Classically they were a link aggregator, a place pointing to other content. Now if you upload something there reddit is the place its pointing to. A video on reddit is hard to download, and a link to a video is always opened with a full reddit view with comments and everything.
I dont like the way they are going and have sought alternatives 2 years ago. Thats where i found hackernews and tildes.net which are pretty good. However not a good alternative to the niche subreddits we all love.
Meh, I know it's popular to hate but I don't mind the app and I don't mind the website redesign either, it works great for me. I'm not saying it does for everyone else but it's largely possible that people aren't as annoyed as you think.
Possibly. But have you seen the "this subreddit is only available on the app" page you get when you visit certain subreddits while on a mobile browser? Simply changing the url to old.reddit.com "reveals" that it's certainly not "only available on the app". Or the periodic nagging to "continue with the app" when browsing the mobile site?
I've not met anyone who thinks that's okay.
And I will never use their app because of that. I'm actually quite upset that their campaign appears to be "working", as seen by the OP.
I get so frustrated using reddit on mobile browsers because the reddit app popups or dark patterns that stop me from reading a complete post or the comments in the post are so antagonistic.
I don't know how much time I've wasted trying to get "Read more" to take me to the right spot just to find out I'd read the entire thing or there was one asinine comment in the entire thread it was hiding from me.
The new reddit ux is so bad but I don't use the site enough anymore to dedicate myself to a full app, and those have all of their own frustrations. It'd be nice if the default browser experience was the native and "clean" one, not the worst one.
I deleted the app because it was too much of a skinners box for me, but it worked well. The mobile site on iOS works well, and I literally never get popup prompts or blockers guiding me towards the app. Perhaps those people aren’t logged in? On desktop I use the redesign happily - the biggest complaint I’ve heard from power users is that it’s not as information dense, but that’s super easily fixed by changing the default layout from ‘card’ to ‘classic’ or ‘compact’. I suspect those people skipped the popup walkthrough that explained this when the transition happened, because I’ve run across many bitter people who used the old site a lot and didn’t know you could change the new one away from the massive cards. IMO that’s pretty ironic.
Reddit’s current UIs get a lot of hate, but I’ve been using the site at least weekly for the last 11 years and I really don’t get the complaints. The old site was ugly (albeit familiar), and the new skin doesn’t subtract from the functionality in any way besides a few obscure subreddits with wild styling. If that has helped bring people to my niche interest subs, that’s a huge win in my book.
I'm sorry I haven't seen that because I just use the app. It's really not a big deal. I'm pretty careful with picking my battles and I get quite a bit of value from reddit.
That's what I said about SNAP. It seems platform stickiness is stronger than some of us might have judged. Especially considering today's tech illiterate youth. They have no idea what the implications of installing an 'app' are.
I use old reddit redirect. If old.reddit ever went away I would stop going to reddit completely, similar to what happened with the digg bar.
I don't use reddit on mobile specifically because I don't download apps on my phone (outside of a few small games such as bejeweled), and I think surfing the internet on the phone is miserable regardless. The only thing I ever crack my browser open for is to look something up while at the grocery store, etc.
There is a phenomenon when older and older groups enter a social platform, the quality of that platform deteriorates for the younger generation, and perhaps maybe even overall.
We saw this with facebook, We saw this with twitter, and we're now seeing this with Reddit.
(yes, there is twitter outside of tech, and it's content quality is extremely poor and juvenile)
Reddit, at one point, was just science, memes, an occasional atheist post, and and A list Celebrity AMA every other day - a platform that provided niche content mostly for age 18-30 year old Americans.
Now with the flood of all sorts of ideas from all fronts, It has become way too overwhelming to really digest what everyone has to offer - Diving deep into reddit will eventually and inevitably get anyone upset and bothered.
As Reddit builds its foundation upon favoring ad populum, it is starting to become evident that not every voice should be heard, especially when the average american individual is as uneducated as he or she is.
“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
― Isaac Asimov
I'd like to one up Asimov - that it is not a false notion, but literally the core tenet of what democracy is.
I've been using Reddit since 2009 (after the Digg exodus for ironically - a bad redesign.), and the biggest change I've noticed (aside from the terrible single page app they switched over to) is how massively popular schadenfreude content is now. Subreddits like "Justice Served" and "Public Freakout", "Malicious Compliance" "Entitled Parents", the list goes on and on.
It's all "This person/people/group did something bad and now are getting their comeuppance." and the site has become like a nerdy version of World Star Hip Hop.
You really can't browse the regular Reddit front page without encountering a lot of content that is designed to upset you. I've started to actually hate using Reddit. Niche subreddits are still useful in limited ways, but it's a shame to see things go this way. Reddit had a good run.
Agreed. It seems mostly a tool to enrage people now. I cant stomach it anymore, the tin foil hat wearing part of me would say there are larger forces at work here. The flipside of these subreddits(public freakout, etc) is that a non-trivial percentage of these things are/could be fake.
To the main point of the article- Reddit must really get a lot of dough monetizing user data because its as bad or worse than ad/malware...
There definitely are larger forces at work, plenty of times I see what is pretty clearly political propoganda on the front page. Iran had a lot of success in r/worldnews [0]. I actually noticed a lot of pro-iran propoganda on Reddit when the US killed their general, the post would be pro-Iran and all the comments would be against it, mostly stopped after they shot down the plane though.
It's a shame that Reddit relies so heavily on their "default" front page experience.
99.9% of people looking at Reddit will never see how good and useful it can be. My front page is just the stuff I'm into - a couple dozen niche subreddits with good cultures. It is nice. It is my favorite place on the internet.
Most people will never take the time to make an account and curate their subreddit subscriptions.
Could that process be improved and streamlined? Absolutely yes. When you make an account -- or perhaps even before -- it should probably hold your hand and walk you through a preferences discovery process.
As it stands now, customizing Reddit is effectively a collection of "power user" features and we all know how that goes: only a tiny fraction of users will ever bother.
Agreed. Also, with the redesign UI there is no way to manage your multireddits, making it a chore to curate content. I have to go to the old reddit version of the sub to add or subtract it from a multireddit.
With the old reddit design, you can create your own Multireddits. If you switch to old reddit (click username dropdown > "Visit Old Reddit"), and hover over the "Join" button on a subreddit, you should get a menu to check and add that sub to a multireddit (or create a new one). Some subs with custom CSS break this functionality, but this is a way to curate and categorize your subs. So you can read posts from all of you favorite programming-related subs together in one multi and all your favorite cooking ones in another, etc. Once you have them set up you can use them in the new redesign, but to manage them you need to go back to Old Reddit.
You’re right. I’ve been on Reddit since 2012. But over the last 2-3 years, the front page seems to feature more controversial or upsetting content. I wonder if Reddit promotes that to increase engagement metrics.
There's also tons of "memes but named differently" subs. Cursed images, blessed images, blursed images, etc. images. They're all picking from the same pool of reposted content.
Some of the best stuff has actually been long form comedy writing from the sports subreddits during the lockdown. It's good banter, unlike the twitter screenshot repost subs like murderedbywords, kamikazebywords, etc.bywords.
Reddit is not quite dead yet, but if I had to pick a specific point when Reddit began its downfall it quality, it was definitely when r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu exploded in popularity, and Reddit shifted to primarily a place to get terrible 4chan memes.
And this was the reason I finally deleted my account and stopped browsing Reddit. It was hard to find any sub that didn't turn in to a left vs right argument. I intentionally avoided political subs and anything news related but unfortunately most discussions some how turned political.
I used to visit /r/amitheasshole for a bit until I realized that subreddit was just porn for a certain type of personality. I found it super distasteful and left.
I don't even understand why people would live their life with that much anger and hatred. I would literally see what was obviously just a miscommunication or bad actions with good intentions that could be resolved by communication and people would just vilify the person.
Interesting that you feel older demographics degrade a platform. For me, it’s the opposite: I am really starting to appreciate hobby forums that are dominated by people a couple of decades older than myself. This tends to happen to independent website forums when now the younger generation eschews them for walled gardens like Reddit.
The reason for that is that older people are less likely to be using mobile, and they are more likely to create long-form text content. You can actually have substantial discussions with them and share detailed tips and reports. Compare this to the relevant Reddit subreddits, where each day’s new posts have largely devolved to vacuous uploaded photos or memes, and the discussion thread is often a lot of vacuous one-sentence replies.
> Interesting that you feel older demographics degrade a platform. For me, it’s the opposite
Agree. More mature users means less bullshit. A corrected statement would probably be something like: if a platform is used mostly by younger demographics, then an influx of older people degrades that platform for the younger people.
More mature users means different bullshit. The flight sim community is an example of one I'm involved in which has many forums with older users that grew out of 90s forums or even older BBSes and have a large older audience.
I wouldn't call those forums as having less bullshit than say the Reddit, which has the younger parts of the community.
Interesting that you feel older demographics
degrade a platform. For me, it’s the opposite:
I am really starting to appreciate hobby forums
that are dominated by people a couple of decades
older than myself.
Yeah, it's funny. Older demographics "ruin" some platforms and really excel at others.
This is all 100% subjective, but I think many people would agree that older demographics are.... not always much fun on "general purpose" social networking platforms like Facebook.
Leaving Facebook's substantial ethical concerns aside for a moment, Facebook and Instagram stopped being fun real fast once everybody's parents and aunts and uncles showed up. It's simply too easy for Uncle Bob to repost anti-vax stuff or whatever he's into, and most people would prefer to keep some of the fun/exciting parts of their lives private from their families.
But, like you, I've gotten into some hobbies where the older folks have just a freaking amazing online presence - just super generous and talented people; absolute superstars of the community.
There are a lot of older people who are intelligent and uneducated but have a really tough time distinguishing "fake news" from "real news."
My sister is in her 50s, is intelligent and kind-hearted, and winds up linking to fake news sites alllllll the time.
A lot of those sites are absolutely insidious. They look like reputable news sites: your same basic layout as any mainstream news site. Frequently updated with multiple news articles per day. Many even sprinkle in a lot of innocuous syndicated stories from the Associated Press or some other press service.
But... look a little closer and all of their original content pushes some particular agenda.
For example, my sister linked to one that looked pretty legit. Had a bunch of soft news stories. But, look a little closer.... and there were thousands of disturbing articles about how it was harmful to have abortions or be LGBT.
If a publisher has an agenda, okay. That's fine. We all have viewpoints and agendas. But masquerading as a neutral mainstream news site, so that you grasp for some unearned credibility from folks who aren't tech-savvy enough to know the difference? Yiiiiiikes.
Some folks will point out that this criticism could be applied to Fox News or MSNBC as well. I wouldn't totally disagree, but what I'm saying is that there are fake news sites out that that are waaaaay more extreme and insidious.
I think it's clear that it is harmful to be LGBT (especially T). This is obvious in the clearly higher rates of suicide of these demographics.
I'm not arguing that we shouldn't be inclusive, but lets also make sure we're not pretending that there aren't problems there. You can't try to fix a problem you won't acknowledge.
Now, perhaps you meant something else when you said harmful, I just interpreted it that way because I would have expected you to say 'bad' if it was the case that the articles were judging the people themselves (much like a religious person might).
In short, you appear to be mixing cause and effect; i.e., correlation is not causation.
A higher suicide rate among the LGBT population can mean two things:
1. Being LGBT causes a higher suicide rate
2. Being LGBT is correlated with a higher suicide rate
The first conclusion postulates that the mere state of being LGBT, independent of environmental, social, circumstantial, or other factors, increases suicide risk; in other words, no matter how accepted or ostracized LGBT people are, no matter their upbringing, no matter any other factor, they will always have a higher suicide rate.
The second conclusion, on the other hand, allows for the possibility that some external factor can come into the picture to produce the observed result, and that being LGBT does not innately mean a higher risk for suicide. For example, perhaps LGBT people are relegated to a second-class place in society, with reduced opportunity to find love and having to constantly act in an “unnatural” way in order to be treated fairly. These additional stresses can add up to an increased suicide risk, without which an LGBT person would have a “normal” suicide risk.
By saying “ I think it's clear that it is harmful to be LGBT”, then bringing up suicide rates without mentioning possible confounding factors, it seems you’re drawing conclusion number 1 from above, which, strictly speaking, is too strong of a conclusion to draw given the stated data.
In principle, I agree. Theoretically older users should be more emotionally stable, and produce less drama.
In practice though we’ve seen FB become basically the conspiracy theory fever swamps during a demographic change. Maybe there is some other factor beyond the age of the user at play here, but I certainly have no idea what that might be.
My reddit account is over 10 years old, and I think we have different views of why Reddit is on a slow decline.
Every single sub-reddit will, at some point after its first few users, need to decide if it will be a meme/image macro sub, or not. Every sub that implicitly allows memes, will eventually become a meme sub if the mods choose to do nothing. It seems there are large numbers of users on Reddit that feel entitled to let "upvotes and downvotes" be the ultimate and only modding that should happen on a sub-reddit. These users will balk at any notion of getting rid of memes because "what else is there to discuss"? For them, the worst thing to happen to their feed is for there not to be a huge dearth of mindless content to consume which is heavily remixed and re-used all over the site every single time they login.
They will also deny that any sub that allows memes will somehow then "become a meme sub". They seem willfully ignorant of what happens to meme subs, and seem to think "if people upvote it, then that means they want it", ignoring how the people who upvote most frequently and the lowest quality content are those that rapidly consume meme content.
Reddit is ruined by these super passive consumers of memes. Not anti-intellectualism, but just those that want to go to reddit, see funny shit, upvote it all, and then get on with their day. And they demand to see that EVERYWHERE.
I left /r/patientgamers after the mods came out and declared they were going to be LGTBQ friendly, which meant any discussion about those issues, even if they were related to a game (for example the remake of Baldurs Gate) would result in a ban. The argument made by a lot of people is that the community should get to decide if that's something they want to discuss, not the moderators (and I agree).
I also left /r/fitness when they decided what they needed was a female moderator. They specifically decided they wanted a new moderator and that moderator had to be female. As if male moderators are unable to identify sexual harassment.
I don't want to be moderated by people who have a political agenda. Fullstop.
I didn't go to /r/fitness because it had a 'diverse' moderation team, I wanted to go there to discuss with fellow fitness enthusiasts. I didn't want to go to /r/patientgamers because it was a "safe space", I went there to discuss with others who also mostly refused to buy games for $60+ USD.
Too often moderators forget why they're there, and think that just because they have the power to means they should. There is absolutely a time and place to let upvotes make the decision of what stays and what goes. Not always, but very often it's true.
If someone who identifies as LGBT wants to discuss fitness or patient gaming, great. lets do it.
But this can happen without moderators banning anyone who brings up LGBTQ. The idea that you must ban those discussions in order to have LGBTQ participate is doing that demographic a disservice.
To contrast that, I'm Native American. Imagine if dang felt the need to ban any discussion involving Native Americans because he felt it was necessary to allow me, and those like me, to participate in discussions.
That's not how that works. It's how misguided people work.
edit: Also, to answer your question. It turns out the world doesn't revolve around reddit and I'm able to find communities without reddit (or simply leave it behind).
Reddit skews consistently young though. Too young for many people's tastes (including mine). There is just too much meme-noise in subreddits that are not well moderated. Shallow thinking and childish antics derail any deep conversation.
You are correct that reddit confuses truth with popularity though. That meme needs to die
>Reddit, at one point, was just science, memes, an occasional atheist post, and and A list Celebrity AMA every other day - a platform that provided niche content mostly for age 18-30 year old Americans.
This seems to mostly outright ignore some of the more controversial subreddits that existed/flourished in the past. There was a significant amount of content, including entire subreddits, dedicated to sexualizing minors.
It feels revisionist to think reddit has only recently become flooded with controversial content.
I never really got the outrage for that subreddit. Minors are sexualized in society all the time, especially by various magazines, and it's completely, 100% legal and accepted.
IIRC there were accusations of CP being put up and not taken down in a timely manner. For that reason I'm ok with the subreddit not being there, but the whole "sexualization of a minor" thing is a red herring.
just imagine if someone got up in arms about a magazine putting a picture of a 16 y/o with big tits on their cover. No one does unless she's explicitly in a sexual position.
Excepting of course that just as you and many here do, you assume your opinion in the group of having higher value. Yes it is easy to pick out the obvious bad opinions but it becomes far less easy to do so when the issues are divisive because both sides can be correct but you can guarantee both sides can have proponents who think the other one is an idiot.
Reddit's issue for me is that many supposedly good subs are so completely toxic to any opposing view they may as well not exist.
Let's not forget the Eternal September that ruined newsgroups.
I don't think it's really an age issue per se. The problem that a group/demographic/tribe/whatever makes a place hot, then a bunch of people that don't fit their description show up wanting to get in on the fun. The result is the original group packing up and moving on. You see this everywhere from Facebook to gentrifying neighborhoods.
I presume the change in tone and content on reddit is due to mobile users moving to the site. It is probably good for their click rates actually, but discussions were a lot more relaxed 5 years ago. I still use it, but only for niche subs.
I always rolled my eyes at people denouncing the quality of default subs. They weren't good but also not that terrible. Now it isn't necessarily terrible, but just extremely stupid. Nearly every comment.
Well over the last 5 years or so it's just got more commercially focussed - mainstream, populist, more tracking through app use = more advertising dollars. It's just the shift towards full commercial focus.
Things get popular : someone decides to use it to increase their wealth.
I think you are incorrect in blaming older people for this issue. I would argue it's simply the increased user base regardless of age. When things are niche and communities small conversations tend to flourish and surprisingly I think echo chambers are a bit less of a problem since dissenting views can often be voiced without down vote floods etc.
As the user base increases you get further from the group of people who were passionate enough about subject X to be early adopters and into a more generalized audience. That general audience is often not interested or not equipped for indepth discussion of X. That mentality also leads to down vote parties I think.
I have seen it in a number of subs that I used to really enjoy. After reaching a critical mass of users they have become meme and low content post factories.
I suppose part of that is an increase in users who specifically care about generating up votes so they generate as much content as possible which inevitably leads to low quality stuff.
Opinions are of equal value [...] this is dangerous.
I disagree that it is dangerous. Of course not every opinion is worthwhile, but since opinions got labeled as too dangerous, they got much more appeal for others. Otherwise it would just be another stupid opinion.
I think this had a large negative effect on many subs since people somehow lost the ability to just ignore something or write their own opinion as a response. Everyone was screaming for mommy moderator.
Today people get a heart attack if someone writes that the earth is flat.
I think all opinions have value, but that value is not necessarily intrinsic.
So 'the earth is flat' has value in indicating a person's ignorance (or trollishness), possibly associating them with a group (good for them; useful for others).
I find this perspective fascinating, because I totally disagree. I started using reddit in... 2007? (I remember a lot of content about the economic crisis and Occupy Wall Street.) I feel that the change in reddit has come from an influx of younger users, not older ones.
When I joined reddit, I had the sense that most users were 25-45. If you revealed you were 20, you were a baby by reddit standards. There was a sort of unspoken (and sometimes, outright) filter preventing younger users from enjoying the experience. The community of users wouldn't tolerate poor grammar and misspellings. Users were torn apart if they posted a news article about a study without posting a link to the actual study. Users ignored onions from other users if they were unable to cite sources.
The site was ugly. Before the redesign, it looked like it was built in '98 and never updated. I remember a friend of mine being completely turned off by the site because of the visual design, without paying any attention to the quality of the content. There was much more of a learning curve to using the site than there is now. That served as a deterrent, whether intentionally or not. People who genuinely were interested in the content and the conversation stayed, and users who were more interested in a spoon-fed lazy entertainment website stayed away.
Now, it's not uncommon to see posts from 13 and 14 year-olds. I've even seen content from people as young as 7. I think this has had a significant impact on the decrease in quality of content. The redesign has certainly made the site more inviting to the average user. I think this is a chicken-or-the-egg situation, in that I can't say whether the influx of new users was a result of the redesign, or the cause, but it doesn't really matter. The point is that the content has shifted from more slow-burn, idea-challenging content, to entertainment designed for instant gratification. There's nothing wrong with that kind of entertainment in itself, I just prefer the former.
I agree. I shouldn't have led with that sentiment.
The reason why I did so was because I was recently browsing an AskReddit post asking "What Movie Will you always Recommend". (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/ij0ha8/what_movi...)
And as I viewed the top answers I remember thinking to myself that reddit is older than I perceived it to be, although it may just be appreciation for classics as I, too, have many 80-90s movies that i would highly recommend.
That being said, I do believe that the older demographic ruined Facebook.
Since writing the comment, I don't think it's correct to label an age demographic as the culprit but rather the rise in popularity in general, and the overwhelming effect it can have.
If you have enough money you can buy the influencing of a lot of less analytical people.
In the UK we combat that by strict regulations on money spent influencing voters. Sadly, despite proving Brexit campaigns were backed by an excessive amount of money routed through a Russian oligarch the result remains (unintended ironic use of 'remain'!).
Democracy can only work with probity. If the people don't know the truth they can't vote for their choice.
Benevolent dictatorship seems likely the better option, just choose your dictator carefully!
I suspect you may have overlooked who shows up between the kids and the older users: internet marketers. Marketers want clicks, eyeballs and engagement and they do that by sharing viral content, most often outrage porn.
As long as a given platform is also a vehicle for building an off-platform audience, marketers will inevitably show up and shit all over everything.
(yes, there is twitter outside of tech, and it's
content quality is extremely poor and juvenile)
This is not my experience at all. It's extremely dependent on whom you follow, obviously, but there are a lot of people posting funny and smart things on Twitter.
The extremely casual / shitposting crowd is more drawn to Instagram, Tiktok, etc.
Like any medium, 99.9% of stuff on Twitter is garbage, but it's still primarily a text - based medium and I think that requires juuuuuuust enough effort to drive away the most casual of casual posters.
The character limit of Twitter also imposes a certain clarity of thought and composition. It's like being forced to fit your thoughts into a haiku: it's restrictive and frustrating, but you can sometimes wind up with concise little gems you wouldn't have come up with otherwise.
> especially when the average american individual is as uneducated as he or she is.
I find this generalisation tired, offensive and without merit. If they're so uneducated why are they still sending craft into space, producing wonderful poetry and creating innovative ways to leverage the Internet?
The people who are developing spacecraft, writing poetry, or reshaping the internet are not "average Americans."
Neverthess, I agree that the statement is without merit. I think this stereotype comes from Europeans, who tend to be more worldly than Americans (for example, nearly everyone in Europe speaks both their native language and English).
What Europeans tend to forget is that in Europe, you can hop on a train, airplane, hell, even a car, and within an hour be in another country, for less than the price of a fancy dinner.
America, by contrast, is huge. As a result, travel is more expensive, more time-consuming, and much harder when it comes to finding diversity.
Insightful comment. This falls in line with conspiracy theories: while on the whole its good to be critical or skeptic, when you use all kinds of extraneous data points to make it fit your pre-chosen theory, it no longer is science.
Part of it could also be that older people are more economically and politically interesting -> more interesting to target for ads, tracking and political persuasion.
Or just the fact that older people are the decision makers deciding on these (deteriorating) things and they are more likely to target platforms they're aware of and that they recognize.
How do you determine what is "intelligent" and thus worth listening to and what is not? How can you rely on your inherently very flawed human genetic machine to not fool you into various thought patterns that have no rational basis at all, but just serve your tribe, your family, or your short term self interest?
From my perspective there are only two ways to browse Reddit nowadays: visiting the old.reddit.com site and through a third-party mobile app.
I’m not one to speak either about the changing dynamics on the site since it’s launch, but my experience there as a whole has shifted hard into the direction of carefully curated subreddits. Avoiding anything I don’t want to see is just as easy as never visiting All or Popular.
Adding ".rss" to a subreddit's URL turns it into an RSS feed. I use this to avoid the homepage and ranking by hot/popular, and consume reddit like a normal news feed.
It's always interesting to see how the value of communities gets concentrated and captured.
1. Communities for around disparate forums
2. Those communities migrate to centralized service because of more eyeballs in one place, less work to maintain infrastructure, etc.
3. Centralized service captures increasing amount of value by running more ads, closing off more open channels, etc.
This is clearly the lifecycle for Facebook, Reddit, and arguably Google. My question is: what's step 4? Are communities going to start unbundling, or does this trend just continue?
Well over half of all web traffic is from cell phones, and the mobile-first web is hostile to long text content. It is also incredibly hostile to user-created long text content.
With the exception of people who need keyboards for work (tech workers, academics, journalists, writers, etc) there's no one left online to make community content anymore. Hence, HN (a community for tech workers and similarly minded people) and Twitter (where most organic, non-public-relations major players are journalists, academics, or writers).
What passes for web communities have almost entirely become playgrounds for intellectual lightweights to spew memes at each other combined with a platform for entities posting inorganic content that pretends to be genuine.
> With the exception of people who need keyboards for work there's no one left online to make community content anymore
I was about to agree with you, then I thought about Instagram. It is truly a passive consumption platform. Getting 10 comments on a post by a user with 500K followers is pretty normal.
I can't trust those numbers after my recent experience. I made a fake account on facebook to check it out and then logged into all the other services. I got 50 followers on instagram within a day by following < 5 accounts on the recommended list. Nothing posted, a weird fake name.
Lots of people from all kinds of backgrounds, journalists and academics among those for sure, but also influencers, celebrities, politicians, artists, bloggers, even just more or less regular people, etc.
How it seems to you just depends on whether you go to Twitter for the latest tech news or fashion trends. And there's probably bigger interest in the latter. It's just like the internet in general.
Genuine, unrelated, question: What is an "influencer"?
I've only recently started seeing people refer to others or themselves as "influencers" (I'm not on Snapchat/Tiktok/Instagram/Twitter).
The distopian cynic in me only understands it as "person with a bunch of followers on social media who occasionally peddles products" a.k.a a human ad. Is this about right?
You’re factually correct but yes that is a cynical way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is that they’re entertainers of large audiences that make money through advertising. You know, just like TV/radio/newspapers do.
Thank you for the level-headed view of it. I'm not level-headed when it comes to advertising and I'm not very apologetic about it.
Somehow it feels more gross than a radio commercial. On the radio I can tell the difference between a song and an advertisement for the local law firm. When these people build a rapport with viewers and then peddle a product, it feels more manipulative to me.
I generally share your view, but I imagine influencers can also add value for the consumers, because they put their name behind the products they advertise. While there probably are more than enough influencers that just advertise anything, I'd expect there are some who actually use and like whatever they advertise. So they kind of provide a product vetting service to consumers. As long as you can tell their ads from their regular content, that is.
Total speculation though as I'm also not really active on that kind of social media.
99% of the content is made by 1% of the users, so I don't think this logic applies. Most reddit users do not participate in discussions, they only consume content.
Maybe if people who post any kind of self-promotion for content they create weren’t so aggressively punished on Reddit so often, maybe it’d get more people sharing on it.
As an example, I was once shadowbanned on the entire Reddit site by an admin for posting two links in gaming subreddits to show off a game I had spent almost six months developing full-time as part of a small team. I didn’t submit too many other links because Reddit was my main source of discovering content, but I commented a ton on the site, easily had hundreds of comments.
I was proud of what I had accomplished and I wanted to share with what I thought was my community at the time. I didn’t even realize I was shadowbanned and was commenting for months after until a moderator informed me and said they were manually approving my comments on a particular subreddit.
I tried their appeals “process” and never got a response, which is apparently is how 99% of appeals works on that site.
Harsh lesson I learned there. I never submitted any link for anything there ever again and didn’t read or comment again for a couple of years afterwards, in which I created a new account to do so.
I got into board games in a big way and started reading /r/boardgames, and that lured me back eventually, although since then I discovered all the people who work in the industry are using Facebook groups so that's where I talk board games now. It's also nice to see actual names associated with their comments when it's a bunch of people you know, instead of just usernames you have to mentally translate.
Apparently my shadowbanned account was unblocked eventually and I can post normally from it again, but I know it was banned for at least 4 years, because I checked periodically (If you're not logged in, the user page looks blank. I thought it was some weird glitch but no, it's because I was shadowbanned).
I've been mostly posting in /r/coronavirus lately since I don't want to get into fights with friends on Facebook about my thoughts on it.
Step 5 is then that an open, federated and/or decentralized protocol gets developed, and it either gets traction or dies.
Unfortunately, for many such communication channels, we are still only in the middle of this step 5, and we have no idea how it ends. E.g. Matrix for chat, ForgeFed for source hosting services, PeerTube for videos, or various other (mostly ActivityPub-based) efforts.
I wish this where true, but protocols aren't products. The normals want polished products. Only weirdos like us on HN care about protocols, or even know they exist for that matter.
For a protocol to matter to a normal person, it has to enable killer features that aren't currently possible.
The unbundling concept is making the rounds through the 'indie hacker' community. I've heard it mentioned a few podcasts recently. It'll be interesting to see what business spring up in the next couple of years that chip pieces off of Facebook and Reddit.
I wonder if in a century we'll understand the economy of the Internet as constantly oscillating between concentration and decentralization.
There is definitely space for unbundling reddit. The key is, you have to give something of value to that specific community to lure them over. Solely copying a subreddit won't do
Too late for Reddit now but free services should consider and publish their sustainability plans from the start, if they want to avoid this trap anyway
I don't know but I'm pissed. That's why I started working on my own social platform as a replacement that has some core values that are aligned with the needs of the community:
- UX is paramount on any device.
- Your data is your own. This is especially important for community administrators who have literally no control over how the content is organized (true for Reddit, Facebook, etc) or where the content goes
- Communities define their own rules
- There is an easy way to organize meetups as well
It works with a simple subscription model where we host the service. No ads, tracking or other shady shit involved. If you're interested I'm gonna post it here once the MVP is complete.
There is already high friction for existing communities to switch over to a new platform before you factor in the dealkiller that is a subscription cost.
This is a generally trending idea: make your users' experience miserable, improve short-term numbers, lose in the longer term.
We're seeing the same pattern with ad-loaded sites, "Your ad choices" popups with those terrible "Manage My Preferences" dialogs — I'm sure all those result in quarterly bonuses for a bunch of managers. But they are not the Right Thing to Do, and will come to bite back in the long term.
Eating the future seed corn in the hopes of higher profits now has been the business model of choice for most companies for the past 40 years, ever since compensation for senior management became directly linked to stock prices.
Allowing executives to walk away with short-term gains but stick shareholders (and/or the public) with long-term losses broke many, many things in corporate governance and society in general. It's no coincidence that quality of life measures began to stagnate when this became the normal way to do business.
Shareholders are happy on it, considering that for public shares the horizon of future thought is "next quarter". Short term share price gains are utilised in trading.
It's only the long term shareholders that get burned on this, whether they own actual shares or just share the consequences
In one sense it’s sort of a moot point, as companies that hire this type of executive will in the long term be driven out of business by those who don’t.
But I don’t think you can properly incentivize people to avoid this class of mistake (short-term thinking) unless top leadership are themselves long-term owners.
Long-term owners would be very interested in avoiding this mistake, though. But it does present a bit of a tax on e.g. public companies with fragmented ownership.
I echo the complains about the default interface becoming worse with every update (especially on mobile, where it's borderline unusable) but I think it's interesting to see where this trend is headed.
It seems obvious to me that Reddit is trying very hard to transition from link aggregator to full blown social network. It's pretty wild when you remember that the original reddit didn't even have comments!
But now they self-host photos, videos, galleries, chatrooms, custom user pages etc... They're not a link aggregator anymore, they're trying to be Instagram for people who think they're too cool for Instagram.
But if you want to become Instagram you need to be an app first and a website 2nd, so they're working very hard to kill the web.
I sorta sort of look forward for the day they kill old.reddit.com and i.reddit.com, this way I won't have any excuse to browse the website anymore which will free some time for more interesting things.
I want to thank the admins that made the app and the web one of the worst. You helped cure my reddit addiction. I now open it only once or twice a month.
You cannot view comment replies on the web. You cannot view any sub on the web. You cannot even read full comments.
Seriously. Thanks. I even started studying for my exams!
Add me to the list, though I'd say it was 40% due to the web experience and 60% due to the content. Not only is it designed to make you feel like you accomplished something in life just by reading the headline, but much of them are just blatent falsehoods or outright lies. As in, the events didn't happen, or the image isn't from that day, or the event and the image are from years ago but used to stoke outrage in the present about something unrelated.
Edit: 50-60% on the web UI. I forgot about AMP pages.
Reddit front page is deliberately designed to keep you agitated on one hand and then keep coming back for some soothing oxytocin rush as the antidote on the same page.
Not all relationship/interactions with social media will be positive or neutral. Everybody knows about social media addiction already, for example. The analogy of abusive relationship IRL with various web dark patterns seems new.
Its interesting to contemplate if entirely new mental illnesses will eventually be discovered via toxic social media sites. I mean entirely new modes of dysfunction not merely "it used to be rare".
I think content is fine there is ton of subreddits that are very similar to old school bbs. As long as you don't browse front page or big generic subreddits reddit is fine.
I moved to using inoreader recently from an OSS one. I really like it. I have my own instance of rsshub for hostile sites.
Consistent UI/UX, no toxic comments (train a filter), automatically archived, easier to share, can send to kindle, full text search of everything I read, no more ads/tracking/email subscription spam, keyboard navigation, works good on my terminal, etc.
The old school BBs didn't have a steady stream of internet riff-raff wandering through and defecating on the lawn. Every single "everything" platform that has user comments has this problem. Reddit and Twitter both make this problem particularly insidious by facilitating cross communication (cross posts and retweets) between the sub groups. It is impossible for subject or niche specific communities to have a high quality existence in this environment. For all their ills at least the chans make a good faith attempt to run "containment boards" to mitigate this problem on their own site.
Okay so sure BreadStapledToTrees contains images of bread stapled to trees. But why? I mean, why do people go around stapling bread to trees, photographing it and posting it on r/BreadStapledToTrees and enjoying it, and enjoying others posting the same? I am confused.
There is only one way to truly understand. Take a slice of bread, bring a stapler, staple the slice of bread to a tree somewhere, snap a good picture of it and upload the picture to the subreddit. Then you will understand. It is the only way. It cannot be explained, it needs to be experienced in order to be understood.
Every highly curated subreddit seems to have a regression toward some sort of lowest common denominator and any sort of deviance gets crushed even if it's good correct content that shouldn't be. I'm no historian but seeing this behavior in every subreddit where I have the experience to recognize BS makes me very skeptical of the idea that other subreddits are not doing the same.
r/AskHistorians has some very good posts, but it also has a good deal of misinformation, even coming from flaired users. The big problem with it is that the user base and the mods tend to believe that it's accuracy is better than it actually is (and comments from the mods seem to encourage this overestimation). I've seen many people who believe that if a flaired user on r/AskHistorians says something, then it's true (there seems to be a lot of people like that on the aptly named r/badhistory sub, for example).
In addition, their yearly April Fools' events (a bad idea in my view) as well the generally poor quality of posts during the first few years makes searching for past answers a pain. You get a ton of information that's flat out wrong, and in the case of April Fools' events the wrong information was actually encouraged (or written) by mods.
It's indeed goldmine for anyone who's into history. I'm debating myself if this sub is good enough to keep Reddit around or am I better off to just stay completely away.
/r/homelab is great, but you'll probably end up with a rack in your living room at some point. /r/mechanicalkeyboards was great at least, but due to my inactivity I can't talk about the last few months.
I used to browse and post a lot on reddit. Mostly in the subreddits relevant to my interests and hobbies, but sometimes I'd open /r/all and drown in the algorithm-generated feed. It was so easy to waste time on reddit.
I'm thankful for the user-hostile experience they've implemented. Made it so much easier to stop using it altogether.
Then sometimes you click a link and it takes you out of old and into the hellscape that is modern reddit.
Can't wait until some manager decides old needs to go. They'll end up losing a bunch of long time users and some other site will finally gain traction.
In my discussions with Reddit admins, they've said that old.reddit.com will be around forever. However, it won't get new features (or a very watered down version of new features).
After all, .compact links [0] still work, and those are super old.
This has some serious Eternal September vibes, like when we reached the tipping point of more normies than nerds using the web. It makes me unreasonably angry that average users are being led down this path and are blithely accepting it, with those who object seemingly a shrinking minority.
I was practically shouting at my screen the first couple times I got thrown into the new design (before I figured out how to avoid it). If reddit really does shut down the old interface, I will absolutely be gone.
> This has some serious Eternal September vibes, like when we reached the tipping point of more normies than nerds using the web.
Sure, but there's something positive about this. Usenet's external September happend with maybe a million users, Reddit's with hundreds of millions. Which means that bigger communities are possible without the problems happening :)
On the other hand, Reddit surely changed during its growth, so there were probably multiple similar events. After all, HN was created as PG felt that was not a good place to discuss startup ideas.
There is a plugin for chrome which forces old.reddit.com, can't remember the name but should be easy enough to find. And for mobile I use the Apollo app, which is fantastic. I've actually switched from using reddit mostly on desktop to using it almost exclusively on mobile because Apollo is so good
Even if that’s possible I personally feel that if those who run Reddit don’t want to web experience to be user-focused then I feel that I don’t want to spend my time there. I rather use HN or Lobsters instead.
Edit: As a number of others have mentioned below. I too have reduced reddit intake due to the poor UI amongst a realisation of its not a good use of my time.
If the company decided to make the UI not friendly, they will likely continue to make user hostile decisions in the name of maximising growth and profits.
In this case using addons seems like playing catch up with low chance of a long term win.
On mobile and non-mobile, I use Firefox' Redirector addon to redirect all reddit links to https://ns.reddit.com/* which might be the same as old.reddit.com
They could but seeing how good Reddit's UI is, how good do you think their log scraping is? And do they have the budget for keeping all access logs of anonymous users so they can try to line up all the ChainLinkFence enthusiasts with the people who also frequent r/MarijuanaEnthusiasts and r/WhiteMenGoneWild.
Yup web experience is horrible... went to checking on reddit a few times a day to maybe once a week. Much like medium when I see "that popup" - I just close and move on.
Same here but mostly because the content quality goes downhill after a critical mass of subscribers is reached and every subreddit I like suffered that fate sooner or later. At some point you might as well browse 9gag.
Dito, I visited reddit many times per day a few years ago. That all changed with the new web app. Yes, old.reddit.com exists, but the old web app acted as a kind of gatekeeper the same way the ancient design of HN acts as a gatekeeper. With the new shiny web UI, different people came to reddit. From a marketing perspective, this was a great short-term success. From a quality perspective, a long-term decline began.
The problem with blocking it is that reddit is not just for time wasting. It's also currently the most popular forum host for all sorts of experts, from audiophiles to network engineers. Whenever I have a technical query and Google is returning a whole load of SEO spam I append 'reddit' or a stack exchange site to the query and can fairly reliably expect to discover a technical subreddit which answers my question and where the best answers are the most visible, thanks to voting.
True for me as well I’m not good at all with managing this addiction and being banned from commenting here helps as well reddit has been making it easy as has Facebook with instagram and onlyfans has no discovery it’s a good time I only wish reaspike would do something as well
Yes, I probably never got into pointlessly wasting time on Reddit because I refuse to be conned by the dark patterns they use to send you to the App. It's a forum website and I really do not see why it's so popular when they treat their users like idiots.
To be fair they aren't the only company that does this, Twitter and YouTube both have horrible web apps that have horrendous bugs and needlessly missing features vs the native app.
Hacker news is basically the opposite site which is why I like it so much.
I don’t recognise your issue - I can go to reddit.com on iPhone Safari, access the mobile-optimised version of their new site, and the comments for every post are one tap away?
There are other issues, and it’s not great to use, but it is generally fully functional.
Without an account, I can't open hidden replies on Mobile. I see the first levels in a posting, but when I tap on "x more replies" I get a dialog demanding me to login and no way to avoid it and going directly to the replies. On desktop this still works fine.
I've been using the mobile website for 2 years now on iOS and I've always been able to view comments and replies to comments, browse other sub reddits, etc.
I'm really confused what OP is talking about...
The only annoying thing is having to press continue all the time to use safari.
For the last few years, I've only used reddit through Relay for Reddit (Android app). The web experience is so awful that reddit has basically become a mobile only thing for me.
Same for me, as soon as I deleted Apollo ( to cure my addiction too) I use it less and less because the web UI makes me want to stop using it as soon as I open it.
I can view most one the web but it does require multiple refreshes, new sessions, etc on my iOS device. I only sign in to throwaway accounts ( to infrequently post) via desktop.
I also had this experience. I was a regular on a particular subreddit but the combination of awful website + censorship coming from above has made me stop using Reddit entirely.
Same here. Messing up the website and forcing users to install an app was the best thing that could happen to me: my days just went two hours longer and I started reading books.
I never had an account on reddit, and I never had problems with browsing/expanding the comments too. I am not from either US/EU so by the looks of it and the input of others it might be more of a regional thing rather than a universal one thus the conflict of information in discussions.
Same for me. I realized that reddit is yet another huge media corporation who just wants your sweet sweet data so they can resell it. If the blatant racist policies and heavy handed moderation of opinions wasn't enough.
As much as people sing praises of Apollo, it's very unhelpful that it's an iOS-only app. I don't understand why platform-exclusive apps are a thing in this day and age.
It sorta worked for twitter, but not for me and others like me. I use Tweetbot on iOS and a heavily customized (adblock, custom css, "suggest_"-filters) version of the web site on Windows. If those were not options for me I'd exit the platform just like I did Facebook.
I just opened reddit.com for the first time in I don't know how long. Amazing. The actual content starts 2/3rds of the way down the screen. All the media is unfurled so I can see all of one headline on the home page.
I have seen my enthusiast desktop rig rev up and slow to a crawl just by scrolling down reddit. I have seen a collection of ~10 reddit tabs work on 6 (!!!) gigs of ram. Reddit has become a condensed form of all that is so awful about modern web design.
I used to love using reddit to find interesting niche communities, it was my primary way of engaging with the internet. These days I just hope it dies faster so that those communities can migrate to a better platform.
It's just their official app is _so_ bad one is either required to use the web interface (which nags you to download their app) or download a 3rd party (cr)app just to read the damn thing.
The funny thing about this tactic is that it's put me right off the idea of using the app. If this is what their engineering is like, why would I want their app installed on my phone? My assumption is that it's a dumpster-fire of trackers, dark UX patterns and be just poor quality.
I wonder what I'd do if someone from Reddit applied for a job on my team. I'd certainly be _very_ interested in their thoughts on the Reddit approach.
I actually got used to the mobile web, it's okay IMO. Certainly better than the new web layout.
What's terrible is the beta tests they constantly run on small variations of the populace, without your knowledge and without any way of giving feedback. They honestly don't give a crap.
They also actively hide the ways to give feedback and ignore it when it's given.
That said, it's someone's day job to clock in, fiddle with the mobile web UI according to manager and C-level concerns and clock out, with the occasional "So what is it that you actually do here?" meeting. I'd probably stop giving two shits after a month or so.
Reddit has some of the most obnoxious and shameless dark patterns I've ever seen.
Even if you download the app, it constantly tries to lure you into logging in by displaying a fake notification count. The good old "Hey you've got a message, login to see it" technique. If you still refuse to login, the notification count becomes 2, as if now you have 2 messages. It's quite disgusting and makes me dislike reddit. Unfortunately, I'm guessing these tactics work on the average user.
They all seem to be copied from Chinese apps though their implementations suck more. Virtual currency, awards, and gacha style encouragement is very popular in Asian countries for communication apps. That's how they extract value because there are too many competitors and free apps.
Reddit might add shopping experience or real world items for purchase through coins soon. It's too obvious to not do that.
Thinking about it I'm a bit surprised that Reddit never built a marketplace product for subreddits. Looking back a few years I could see that actually being a pretty good product for them which would have been cool. You're definitely right that if they added it now it'd use their coins or do something utterly insane to make it terrible.
I feel like once you are on mobile you only have access to this aberration of the internet called "The consumer web" where you're treated like a dawdling toddler who taps on shiny colorful things and the service is trying to put on a circus for you in order to get ad revenue.
This is essentially the experience across the board on all major web properties. I have no idea why I use my cell phone to access websites so frequently. It's a really terrible experience.
In fact, most of these sites are the candy and chips aisle for the mind - an unhealthy diet of emptiness. It's such a waste of time.
Recently I noticed that using ad blockers on iPhone will break the reddit mobile website - it will not allow you to scroll unless the annoying "use our app" popup shows from the bottom and you must click no. Some blockers like 1BlockerX or maybe Wipr block these annoyances and will lead to a broken un-scrollable reddit website. This started happening only recently and I wonder if this was a deliberate decision to also annoy users of ad blockers.
I understand Apples logic for trying to build their own AdBlocker ecosystem but honestly browsing with Safari feels so unsafe now without uBlock Origin. Keep seeing ads slip through and it's not just standard banners it's the sort of ads that look like they'll give you malware if you mis-clicked them.
Oh, so thats what it is. I honestly thought that they somehow implemented scroll in js, and it doesn't work in safari, because reddit engineers didn't test it :)
I find the new reddit UI to be terrible, and still use old.reddit.com. I just hope they continue to host it. If they shut it down at some point, I will probably stop using reddit. And that will be a sad day.
Every now an then I try the new UI, I haven't in a while though. Every time the experience was the same, horribly slow and confusing.
I think the Reddit plan was to switch the users to an eternal scrolling, sort of like Facebook, to keep users on the site longer, but that really ruins the experience for pretty much everything but pure entertainment.
If anything I'm all little pissed at both Facebook and Reddit for killing forums, than the changing their platforms that aren't really suited for forum like discussions when they discovered that it's not actually profitable to run forums. The communities on both have devolved over time, so it's perhaps not a big loss. Reddit in particular have grown to have what I would call "accepted opinions", they may differ slightly in different sub-reddits. The Reddit community is, in general, stubborn, narrow minded and intolerant for different opinions and world views, but disguises it as left leaning politics, anti-racism, feminism and inclusiveness while behaving exactly like the people they claim to be against.
There's still a few positive and supportive sub-reddits, but the main ones are lost.
I assume that's total, including apps? Or are you saying that between old, mobile web and new, 75% of hits are from new? If so that's quite different from my traffic stats, copying a comment from older thread:
According to my traffic stats (moderating ~400k subscribers), old + mobile web frontends make up about twice the traffic of new frontend. Apps are by far the most popular, about ~3x of all web frontends combined.
I would expect people that contribute to have a higher old.r percentage, and smaller subreddits as well. (Frankly I expect this to go with age, everybody above 17 must ude old.r in my Imagination). Do you have any insight on this?
Reddit keeps throwing me to the new website even though i have 1000 times selected that i want the old, desktop site on my phone. Are there any reddit developers in here? For shame, stop doing it.
It's like how Twitter switches you back to the algorithmic timeline every so often, "You're back home" is the extremely sneaky wording they use in the banner when they do it.
They hope that eventually you wont care or wont notice.
I don't notice... for a few minutes, then i go WTF why do i see those random things that other people liked in my timeline. Twitter devs ... you can't fool us, stop it
Yeah same reaction here, I scroll for a bit and the content is awful then I realise. It's crazy how clear the distinction is just from looking at the tweet content alone.
That's something I constantly wrote a few years ago, but since then they pretty much banned most subs I was subscribed to and made it very clear and they censor pretty much anything they want so that was ultimately what made me stop using the site.
I actually like the new UI set to compact, it’s even cleaner and more compact than old. But at least on my desktop (I assume it’s not fast on any kind of device) it’s super slow, and old is not much worse.
I agree. The only real problem I have with the new UI is that it is slow. However it is so painfully show, even on a fast device that it dwarfs and of the minor benefits of the new UI for me.
I end up using the new UI for mobile, because the old UI is basically unusable. Luckily I generally only open one tab on mobile and the old UI on desktop.
If the new UI was fast I would actually consider it good.
It's optimized for reading forums, i.e. walls of text, it's great for that. Maybe reddit should start monetizing that (with text ads or sth) instead of trying to become an instagram wannabe
Sounds like good old corporate to me, the boss says you won’t get your bonus unless there are x app installs, the product manager replies “hold my beer and watch this”.
This is a serious issue for users though and should highlight the risks with handing off control over important communication platforms.
Lots of justified criticism here about the mobile web Reddit, which is horrible.
But the desktop web Reddit has become unusable for me as well. My laptop heats up, the fans go into overdrive, and my browser slows to a crawl. It’s the anti-HN.
Either Reddit has hired developers and designers who aren't very good at what they do or what we want from Reddit is different than what the management and investors want to deliver.
It's almost certainly the latter, right? Is this a case of Reddit chasing some specific metrics and quality, being hard to measure, just gets left behind?
Well users want a web-based forum. Reddit want money and influencing power.
I mean it's all a system (now, not necessarily at it's inception) to manipulate us either to get our vote or our money and offer just enough utility to entice us in.
Would really like to see a public interest company run a major forum; even HN has an element of bias to serve YCombinators interests.
I'd like 'reddit but purely serving the interests of the users as closely as possible', as much as anything just to see what is possible.
Isn't all of that orthogonal to my point about quality though? I don't see any reason why you can't build an ad-supported service, even one that is manipulative, that's of high quality.
yes I have this, with some curation of the content, it's can be reasonably pleasant. If they get rid of the old UI, reddit becomes digg.com and dies a quick death.
If old.reddit.com ever does go away, I'll stop using it. Even on a modern computer, with a decent internet connection, the "improved" one is sluggish and slow to load, almost as bad as Facebook. It's effectively the opposite of Hacker News.
Same. This is especially bad on Apple laptops, which heat up like crazy before fans kick in. For my 2015 MBP, it's almost unusable. I'm using reddit less and less.
I feel bad for the engineers because surely they knew the new site was incredibly slow and poorly optimised, so it must have been pushed through by management. It looks alright, but dear god the performance.
> ... because surely they knew the new site was incredibly slow and poorly optimised...
I wouldn't be so sure. It really depends on the quality of the engineers. And if they're quality why are they working for Reddit pushing out crappy software? Could be a case of resume driven development.
That is true as well. I feel that espacially when I switch between computers - on some I have "old reddit" turned on and it works fine. On the new one I have no idea what's going on.
Web interface transitions on sites we love are always harsh but I'm supposed to get used to new one by now. I can't.
[ ] Autoplay Reddit videos on the desktop comments page
[ ] allow subreddits to show me custom themes
[x] show legacy search page
[ ] Use new Reddit as my default experience
similarly disable all under "personalization options"
add umatrix rule for "USE THE NEW REDDIT" nag and then it's actually sane, at least for me in ff.
For months I thought there was no way to collapse a comment thread using the mobile site. Then one day I accidentally clicked on a comment timestamp and the thread collapsed. Which makes sense, because nothing say “hide these comments” like the text “17 minutes ago” :P
And lost at least one user. I mostly stopped going to Reddit because of the miserable mobile experience, which is how I would normally consume the content there.
The Reddit experience overall is incredibly subpar. I can't remember the last time I opened the site without using the unofficial Reddit Is Fun app or the RES extension on desktop. They make the experience so much better and keep me wondering why Reddit doesn't implement some of the features provided in those extensions into the official version.
Let's be real: the performance of Reddit's mobile app is quite good. And when I compare it to any other similar mobile site feed, the sites are always slow and janky, because browsers aren't great with handling infinite scrolling full of hundreds of videos and tens of thousands of nested comments.
I know everybody here think's it's a "dark pattern" to get people to use Reddit's app instead of site on mobile... but to me it looks like it could also be legitimate performance concerns.
I'm using a Moto X4, so it is a few years old, but the official Reddit app runs terribly on my phone. Reddit Is Fun (RIF) is my preferred app since it doesn't try anything fancy and my phone handles it great.
To be fair, Reddit's mobile app looks very good and modern, but for a news feed, I'll take outdated design and speed over the opposite.
I'm not happy with it. I was reading reddit on my iPad in safari which worked really well. I could open linked articles in a new tab and go from there. About three weeks ago they made a site upgrade that broke that. Was reading via old.reddit.com but that became way too painful.
Currently using Apollo, it will let me open linked to articles, but I can't grab a link, paste it, scrape all the URL tracking nonsense off and go to the site.
Am presuming this is distinct from the problems with the main website (i.e. they aren't trying to push people off of that too), but maybe related in the sense that it seems the strategy is to turn the website into an app instead of keeping it as a website. IMHO, this isn't a good fit for what I use reddit for, which is a collection of linked documents - where 'normal' server-rendered documents worked really well. It doesn't really need to be an app, and building it as an app bloats it for my use-case.
I'm not sure if it's due to odd FE architecture choices or if this specifically helps increase bottom-line KPIs, but there are some bizarre things like the fact that clicking on the background of a post takes you back to the subreddit via replacing history (?), which kind of breaks the idea of how you expect a website to work.
What confuses me from an architecture POV is there are glaring high-value things they could fix - like subreddit search, image hosting etc. - that get left.
Reddit app on Android is one of the worst apps that I've ever used.
1. It doesn't refresh content. A lot of times you need to manually swipe down to force it to refresh,and sometimes even kill the app to get it to refresh. Even if Reddit is using cheaper http 1.1 servers , they can use background data notifications to force the app to do an update.
2. Videos randomly switch to the lowest quality and stay there. I have a 300mbps fiber connection which can play YouTube and Netflix on 4k. But Reddit gives me 240p at best sometimes.
3. Worst messaging experience period. Not only is the chat pretty bare bones, it doesn't even have support for images or GIFs. So usually once I find someone to chat with on Reddit , I ask for their discord id.
For example, on the javascript heavy new version 'my profile' link only loads about 50% of the time for me, and when it does work, it's far less usable than the old site.
Those maintaining the web app must have a miserable existence. It's never fun having your work undermined like this, especially when so much care has gone into it.
It is ironic that reddit achieved much of its success on the back of the complete failure of digg.com to recognise that the people who use your site don't want a bunch of radical changes shoved down their throat. We will probably see the whole thing happen again. Long live the new king.
AIR: Slashdot redesigned, people moved to Digg, Digg redesigned, people moved to Reddit (was MySpace in there too?), Reddit ... let's redesign (actually they've partially reinvented themselves a couple of times to my recollection).
Reddit is the poster child of single page applications. It is slow, consumes more resources, and is visually overloading. I'm not surprised that it has difficulty with mobile browsers. It doesn't even do well with desktop ones.
I think it's funny how on iOS (at least for me) whenever I come across a reddit link it'll ask me whether I want to continue to view in whatever webView it's using or switch to the app. I usually prefer the app, so I click on it and 9 times out of 10 it'll take me to the app store for the default reddit app WHICH I ALREADY HAVE INSTALLED AND REGULARLY USE and it won't open in the app no mater what I try. Like this should be pretty basic functionality, especially if they're trying to drive users to their app, but nope.
Idk if this is necessarily Reddits fault because we've had tons of problems implementing universal links on iOS both via 3rd party and natively ourselves so I lean towards blaming the ios platform than the developer.
I like reddit for the niche groups that center around some topic. I haven't really found another source of this type of niche content. Maybe Facebook has groups or whatever but I have never used Facebook so can't comment.
On Android, I like Redreader which, to my mind, is simple, open and free. It was the my first experience using a mobile Reddit app and I really thought it stayed out of the way and let me read and comment in various reddits. I started using an iPhone and decided to give the official reddit app a whirl. This app is clunky and confusing and doesn't feel simple in any way. I have tried a few other apps (everyone seems to like Apollo?) but I haven't really found my home yet. I still really appreciate RedReader for its simple uncluttered ability to read and comment.
In the browser, I like using old.reddit.com. Their default version of the site is horrible. I can't stand it. On a computer, my preferred way of browsing reddit is using ttrv. It is the latest incarnation of rtv. It is command line, which might turn some people off, but is simple and easy to setup. I use feh to view pictures and mpv to view videos. I can comment using vim which makes it very cozy.
I guess it is good that reddit provides an api that allows hackers to develop alternative ways to access their site depending on their own personal preference. For now, their mobile official app seems to comprimise in too many areas to make it work for me. The new site (not the old.reddit.com) is pain to use.
No one mentioning Facebook? Them forcing you to use the messenger app to be able to communicate on the mobile is using the same strategy. I have to use a different browser and use desktop mode to see messages. Writing then becomes horrible too. Not using fb messenger at all anymore an complain to people who text me on there.
Just fyi, you can use mbasic.facebook.com ... Still horrible, but at least you can communicate to some degree without any app, I used it for a month while being stuck with an old phone.
My preferred way of consuming Reddit content is now finding a mirror of the sub on Telegram. [1]
This greatly refined my experience by distilling the endless pun chain comments and dramas away.
If, unfortunately, the OP content made me want to read the comments, I change the URL from https://reddit.com to https://i.reddit.com as soon as possible. Even though I clicked it 5 seconds too late, the new smartphone site is so slow that it was still a blank page.
There are many better third-party reddit apps out there than the official reddit app. Although seems like Android has more options than on the IOS side. Apollo is the only one I found so far on IOS that is fairly decent and feature rich matching the ones on android. Any other recommendations?
I still use reddit but less and less than I did, and the main reason for this is that the ui is getting worse and worse. I won't be installing the app as it's pointless.
I probably won't choose to stop using it, but as I use it less and less the gap will eventually reach "forever".
Am I crazy when I say I don't see these popups on the mobile web version of reddit anymore? I don't see what the fuss is about. It's pretty much the same as what the gif in TFA is showing, except no blinking 'use app'/'open in reddit app' buttons. No 'open in reddit app/continue with mobile site' popup -unless- I end up on the AMP version of the reddit (by following a link from Google search). And even then once I do anything on the AMP page (click on a reply, navigate to the main page) I get redirected away to the normal web version, which is less cancerous.
Someone please back me up or refute me.
Also I am logged in to the site, might make a difference.
that's cause they push it like a crack dealer pushing crack.
wanna play a video, open it in the app.
wanna look at risky content, open it in the app.
and btw, their app IS THE WORST. my biggest gripe is that i CANNOT COLLAPSE CONVERSATIONS grrrrrrrrrrrrr. i'm not gonna waste my time listing all the other annoyances and bugs that are riddled through out the thing.
fact of the matter is that the reddit app is the poster child that just because something has that many downloads doesn't mean it's a good product. i would be willing to bet that 75% of those download are people uninstall and reinstalling it because it LOCKS UP EVERY 5 MINUTES grrrrrrrrrrrr.
Surprisingly, its when I'm logged in to the mobile website that I wish the 'Open in app' button was there (to make commenting easier), but I'm only harassed to open the app when I'm logged out.
While not exactly a fix for your case, Firefox on android has a prompt for opening sites in their apps if it's installed on your device. Match that with its extension support and it makes most of the mobile web far less obnoxious.
Well, to be fair, if the button would be there, there would be another HN user complaining about the nagging to install the app even when I'm logged in!.
Imgur, the Reddit image hosting offshoot, did precisely the same thing. They slowly began stripping features from the site starting with direct messaging and eventually prevented mobile users from logging in at all.
What is Imgur’s business model these days? The app doesn’t have any (obvious) ads. There’s a small banner on the bottom, but for me it’s always just advertising Imgur’s own features. There was a time when they were pushing ads heavily on the app (like full screen ads you had to swipe away), but that apparently didn’t work out.
"Growth and engagement" is the "business" model. I'm assuming they're pushing their own features to inflate their subscriber numbers so they can try and sell out to a bigger fish.
This is exactly why I started working on 20-things.com with a firm stand on not doing what Reddit has been doing - pushing people to mobile app in order to be able to track and show them ads (adblockers won't work in the app of course). How can I achieve this? By limiting the community size to a certain number of people so that it can stay self-sustainable. This could be a few thousand users, and then the door gets closed to new registrations.
Apollo is fantastic and the only reason I still read reddit. If they try to shutdown the API or try to acquire it and kill it (alien blue) I think I'd lose interest.
I haven’t used the Facebook app either and now they are going out of their way to make the mobile experience miserable. Facebook now looks like reddit and the marketplace is now pushing unblock able ads mixed in with the listings. Also marketplace took away the ability to sort items from lowest price to highest so you have to search through many listings to find what you want. The experience is worse every day.
Sorry didn't see this. I don't really see it as time spent being a mod, it's time spent "being on reddit". Instead of just looking at the latest posts, I get to act on the ones that break the rules. When reading comments, I do the same with comments. It's just a parallel cycle to consuming it, I think. And we're talking of one click to remove things here, not a complicated workflow.
Sometimes I wonder what the Reddit dev team even does.
Their search is crap, their app is crap, their new design is crap, their home page algorithm is crap that keeps showing stale content, their video player is utter crap that shows you 144p videos even on 100 Mbps connections. It's like they stopped giving a shit a long time ago.
(I use Reddit for 2-3 hours every day, despite all that. But of course I use RES and the RIF app, and stay away from politics subs. There's a lot of interesting communities that I learn from.)
Not only are the obvious things miserable, but they also introduced a memory leak to their post/comment creation interface (I did report, ironically using the same interface). Today I discovered that the website will crash in Firefox if you try to find in page—presumably after a certain point it triggers a conflict with their infinite scroll implementation.
Yes, it's the adblocker. I had the issue with 1BlockerX - I had to turn it off for reddit on iOS :-(. Other adblockers either have the same issue or the developers added specific code to battle this (e.g. AdGuard https://forum.adguard.com/index.php?threads/resolved-reddit-...). This must be a deliberate tactic from Reddit.
tbh, I never understood the hate for the infinite scrolling in a domain of natural stopping point..
I have this problem with pages too.. "Just one more page..."
My main issue is when I accidentaly dont open link in new tab, and pressing back makes the page reload and I loose my scrolling progress..
“Here is another point that helps put the problem of proprietary information in a social perspective. Think about the liability insurance crisis. In order to get any compensation from society, an injured person has to hire a lawyer and split the money with that lawyer. This is a stupid and inefficient way of helping out people who are victims of accidents. And consider all the time that people put into hustling to take business away from their competition. Think of the pens that are packaged in large cardboard packages that cost more than the pen—just to make sure that the pen isn't stolen. Wouldn't it be better if we just put free pens on every street corner? And think of all the toll booths that impede the flow of traffic. It's a gigantic social phenomenon. People find ways of getting money by impeding society. Once they can impede society, they can be paid to leave people alone. The waste inherent in owning information will become more and more important […]” (emphasis mine)
I don't like the new reddit I always use old.reddit and I see no reason to use the app. I hate now that all link load in new reddit. It's a hundred cuts of annoyance.
As a longtime user (13 years) I get the feeling reddit is being Digg-ified.
I actually like the Reddit app, but its search engine is so awful that I almost always start on Google/DDG and refine my results through there. If they could improve their search experience I would be all in on the app.
My worry is that some exec will think of this as a success story, that making the web experience miserable is a totally fine way to drive engagement to their mobile app and will push other sites to do the same.
They absolutely will. They will also look at the interaction and engagement rates on those awful popups and nag messages and consider them a huge success too.
People clicking on those garbage dialogs either by accident or to try to make them go away = Number Go Up = Users must like this UI element.
The mobile web experience is so intentionally bad. Yet I refuse to switch to the app and play their game. When needed I request the desktop version mobile to fill the missing features and that's it.
I mean I have a 3rd party reddit app so it should bounce me to that app, but the UI pops up still it wants me to use their app only. So that’s a move that made me use it less.
The worst thing is that the official app isn't even that great, at least on Android. Every time I try it, I quickly go back to a 3rd party (Boost at the moment).
In my opinion Reddit UX is miserable even on desktop. Whenever I see a Reddit link in search, I try to avoid it. It is in a way similar to Pinterest experience.
Firefox on android had a plugin that would remove the nags and redirects which made reading Reddit acceptable, until Firefox removed all (but 6) plugins.
Am I right to assume that the reason developers prefer users to use apps vs websites is because there is no adblocker there and no way to flush cookies?
Yes, part of it. Web is more constrained environment than native. Many seemingly normal APIs and features aren't available. Apple is hostile to web as well so you don't even have features from the standards such as push notifications.
I would think those who create the content reddit is living off are less likely to get bullied into downloading an app. Long term, the content becomes garbage and the regular users leave too.
I wonder when the reckoning for poorly built single page javascript apps will come. Or are we already seeing it with users switching to native apps for social media?
I did some digging into the WYSIWYG editoe and found a memory leak they introduced. This was quite a while ago, but there's a good chance it's still there.
I think a moderator was probably trying to rein in the sensationalism. Obviously "mostly by making the mobile web experience miserable" is highly baity in two ways: the use of the word miserable, and the insinuation that this is a deliberate strategy. Reducing the inflammation in such titles is standard HN moderation.
But I think there's a good point here that the shortened title ("Reddit gets its app to 50m Play Store downloads") was kind of lede-burying. Unfortunately I can't think of an accurate, neutral way to restore the main point, so I guess we'll just put back the sensational title. Maybe someone will suggest a better one.
I think it's more likely that it's an attempt to steer the conversation away from the usual reaction (which was discussed to death two weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24208958).
The reality is people including on Reddit itself (https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/ilxihw/reddit_g...) have a lot of legit complaints about how the website now loads on mobile and is deliberately annoying to force people to download their app.
Nah, Reddit is such a classic and sensational HN topic that we don't even remember that it was a YC company when we moderate these threads. (At least I don't.) Reddit is a planet that used to be a YC company. In some ways HN is one of its moons.
I understand mods edit titles and have said so to “de-editorialize/sensationalize” them but I’m seeing a lot of purely style changes; capitalization removal. Some are changes entirely from perfectly fine and comprehensible titles that aren’t even sensationalized headlines
Others still add or remove a word that don’t really do anything for the title except change the inflection slightly to one the author may not even want perceived from their writing.
Whom does that sort of edit serve? Merely curious.
It serves the will of HN according to justifications I’ve seen. It’s debatable if it is always is helpful in any individual instance, but it’s usually well-intentioned from what I can tell. Yet it also seems to turn the volume down on topics that are of outsize influence or import on society, to my reading. It second-guesses the intent of the author, and second-guesses the reading comprehension of the reader. It treats us all like clickbait vote bots.
21:40
Gertrude Elion, a woman who gave the world antiviral drugs
↓
22:40
The woman who gave the world antiviral drugs
Like, at what point is well enough alone for a headline that was already succinct, descriptive and well formed and why keep coming back an hour later-after presumably more people have seen the article and may want to come back later-to change the title again?
@dang (if you come across this): is HN remotely interested, for the curiosity satiating edification of the community-if no other reason-in sharing the decision calculus for these kinds of title edits?
But you've omitted the last title in that sequence, which is the one we ended up with (Gertrude Elion's “antiviral odyssey”). There's a partial explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24359017
What you're seeing in that sequence is trial and error. Sometimes it takes a few tries before we find a solution that feels like it balances the different concerns. That's not particularly common, though, plus most of those exploratory edits are quickly overwritten by later edits, so Peter's app doesn't pick them up.
I'm happy in principle to satiate anyone's curiosity about this kind of thing—the only trouble is that it takes a surprising amount of time to write out such explanations in details, and unfortunately that time is just not often not available. What I can tell you is that (1) there is nearly always a specific reason for every title edit we do, and there are probably at least a hundred different considerations that come into it, based on 10+ years of experience at this point—this is a surprisingly complex subdomain!, and (2) we're highly responsive to user complaints about titles (or mod edits) in specific cases. Not just because we want users to be happy, but also because this has proven to be the only way to minimize the dreaded title fever (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...) —which, btw, has had an outbreak in this very thread.
I've written longer explanations in the past about how we approach title editing in general. One is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20429573. If there are questions I'd be happy to answer them—but again, the more general the question, the more time/energy it takes to answer, so I may not be able to.
Actually I enjoy engaging with users about HN title edits because, of all the things we do, it's by far the best worked out. It's far more consistent than people think it is. Why does something consistent appear so inconsistent? Because it's more complicated than it seems. Why is title editing so complicated? Because titles are the biggest single influence on the site, and users are astonishingly passionate about them.
Taking all of that in-and thank you for offering what you’ve been able to this far-will HN moderation team consider making time to the community for a “town hall”/“AMA” going over some of the more opaque or otherwise commonly misunderstood elements of what informs the moderation strategies and tactics deployed in the community?
Given that you’ve stated doing so presently would be an unwieldy and rather involved affair, opening the opportunity for such a transparent display of community engagement at a later date seems like a charitable ask of you?
Such meta threads tend to be rather blah. Also, when dealing with large internet audiences you eventually come to realize that everything is "commonly misunderstood", because no matter how often or how thoroughly you explain things, the vast majority of users don't see it, and the percentage that did see it shrinks over time as new users flow in. So the idea of explaining things to the bulk of the community is sort of a fantasy. The sum of all explanations has measure zero. I'm not happy about that but it is as it is.
I'm happy to answer questions and do it every day, but it's better to stick closer to where actual examples come up. What else do you still want to know?
Yeah it's the mods. Easily the most annoying thing about HN these days. I really wonder if they consider the original author at all, and how they are editing their piece for them without permission.
I get that there are a lot of shitty 'click-bait' titles but that's just how it goes. Once you start changing those you're down the path of changing any title submission for who knows what reason(s). I've seen it over-and-over and I really don't get it. HN is so hands-off generally this behavior is truly puzzling.
There's a character limit on title, which could have been editorialized as: "Reddit gets its app to 50m downloads by making the web mobile UX miserable"
Because it overly primes everyone to come in with their kneejerk "DAE reddit suxxx?" reaction. If they have to click the link first and see the actual title, then only 10% of commenters will see that priming bit and the comments will be slightly better because of it.
I don't want an app for Reddit. I don't care which one it is. It's a simple website, let me use it in my fucking browser.
Lightweight! Easy to block ads and tracking! Multiple tabs! You can leave pages open in your browser and read them later! Bookmarkable! No proprietary app! No app updates! No spammy notifications! No use of Google Play Services! No taking up of dozens of GBs on my phone! RES!
Yeah I meant MB, that was a typo. My bad. Point still stands. The Reddit app on Android is 36 MB. Why does a simple message board app need to be so big?
Thanks for the recommendation. Just installed and liking it so far, nice simple experience and tablet optimized. F-Droid is one of the reasons I love Android.
Before you comment on technicalities, remember that reddit's management consciously caters to the emotional people, and managing such a platform is very different than HN. I'd even admit the possibility that the plain and dry UI of HN would look unappealing to the reddit folks.
Well, it does. If we make a random sample of 1 million people that are interested in tech and startups, then another million of those that aren't, measure the average "emotional charge" of both groups, we'll notice a huge statistically significant difference between the two averages.
Can you back that up with some research or are you just basing that assumption on your emotions? What even is "emotional charge"? I bet that emotional capability of people isn't tied to their interest in startups and tech
It is incredibly weird that you're an elitist about emotions, that you think "emotional people" is not just "people", and that you believe a UI designer can create interfaces for those two separate audiences.
Is craigslist also a UI for unemotional people? It's pretty dry.
What about MDN docs? They have a great, friendly, usable UI. Surely that must be designed for emotional people, right?
I agree with every point you've made here except the last one: the MDN docs are very dry, precisely because they are designed for knowledge-first people.
I'm pretty hostile to that site since it's a major alt-right hub. A quick glance of today's headlines including hints at a Jewish global conspiracy and "women who don't have children go crazy"
Oh wow, "much less hostile than reddit"? I already regret visiting that site after a minute.
Almost all of the current front page posts are either covid denial or bashing black people.
Voat is where people who were banned from reddit for being too racist, believing in and promoting insane conspiracies like pizzagate and QAnon, members of the incel commnunity and other such fun stuff went. Not sure its a place you want to promote.
I believe the creators of voat were just setting out to make a site that competes with reddit. I've always wondered how they feel about the fact that the alt-right completely took it over. On the one hand, pretty successful site, on the other hand...
Pizzagate is a debunked alt-right conspiracy theory [1]. Epstein ran a child prostitution ring for himself and his inner circle [2]. Pizzagate conspiracy theorists have attempted to graft their theory onto the Epstein case in ways that are largely internally inconsistent. From what I can tell, it's been more successful in tethering itself to the Qanon movement.
There have been many cases of the wealthy and powerful abusing children (Jared Fogle comes to mind,) but to connect it to Pizzagate really commits you to believe some pretty wild things (like the Clintons and celebs like Katy Perry are Satanists who ritualistically abuse children in service to Satan and do so out of a NY pizza joint called Comet Ping-Pong) [3].
