That number seems to indicate why they've started to use all the dark patterns for people to create an account. You can no longer see comments other than at the top level. Some subreddits require registration to view. All these things are artifacts of the new design that do not exist on old.reddit.com.
I'm thankful HN is not designing for 'engagement' or MAUs at the UI level.
They have been auto-creating an account if you go to reddit.com on an android phone logged into a google account. Not sure if this is intentional or not.
It seems very much intentional and it happens on the desktop as well. It isnt entirely consistent when it happens but it can take as little as a few minutes until it triggers the notification of account creation.
It sees Google credentials and then auto creates an account that you can change the name on. I keep deleting them but reddit keeps making them. I just gave up and kept u/redditisastupidhead as my minor protest.
It was the final straw, I now just avoid the place altogether. It is like having a preappreoved credit card turn up in the mail, it is trying to suck you in. No thanks!
Every day that goes by, new users join the site and have never seen the old UI. Eventually the scales will tip so the vast majority of users use the new UI and the old one will be cut off.
Are there any communities where the new site is preferred?
I wonder if offering different experiences for what is the same site is actually working out better in practice than we'd expect. That contradicts what we seem to know about site design and would be considered uneconomical, but might it help Reddit keep a broader set of communities? I'm not sure how we'd know this externally, but perhaps someone here has some insights.
Someone mentioned in a previous post that it works well for /r/watches and I agree with them. It seems to be beneficial for image based subreddits where you're interested in seeing the majority of the images and only occasionally dive into the comments.
Great for mindlessly scrolling images, but less so for content that you pick and choose what to view, text based content, and commenting. I think it'll come back to hurt them in the long run.
Old reddit users are last I checked in the Reddit traffic stats I had access to around 1-2% of active posters, and mobile overall is thumping desktop reddit several times over.
By the time New Reddit was launched old reddit wasn't even the primary way to view the site anymore. Nowadays new reddit crushes old reddit. Reddit doesn't need it's old users, it doesn't need you, and it doesn't need me. It could kill off old reddit today and it would be fine.
I follow one of these communities, and the hard part is that the old Reddit is broken in it’s own way, and we’re guaranteed it will never be fixed. It’s basically a lose lose situation all around.
> I'm thankful HN is not designing for 'engagement' or MAUs at the UI level.
HN has an entirely different business model. Regardless of heady ideas by the creators, from a business perspective this site is little more than an advertisement for ycombinator's actual services. I'm not sure what model reddit could go with at this point in their growth outside of their ad platform (and their odd cult-like "token" awards).
Reddit now feels like newsgroups after they were infested with spam. Little good content , hidden in corners under piles of spam. Instead of spam, they have politics though.
Niche subreddits are informative and useful. You just have to unsubscribe from all the default reddits and find the niche stuff that interests you. Then your reddit front page becomes one of the most useful media pages on the internet.
I agree - if you take some time to really customize your subscriptions and interface options (read: ditch the new interface immediately for the classic one), reddit can be a very powerful 'dashboard for your interests' unlike most other sites.
I guess the questions is if they can keep it that way and also monetize.
Yeah. The niche communities are really what keep me coming back. For example, r/fermentation is a fantastic community of people who make all different kinds of fermented foods and is a great place to go for advice or recipes. But the main subreddits? Useless
Yea, but those niche subreddits are getting rarer and rarer. There's some kind of goldilocks zone where subs are popular enough to be active with interesting content, but not popular enough to devolve into no-effort meme spam. Or possibly terrible moderation ruins the sub completely. Or the official Reddit fun-police shuts you down.
I left that cess pool behind about a year ago, and I don't miss it.
I've seen no evidence niche subreddits in general are dying because Reddit's growth in general is so strong and a rising tide lifts all boats. I've seen niche subreddits climb in traffic steadily even as their overall ranking on reddit declines.
I just would have guessed new reddit would have started the decline years ago but the apex hasn't even been reached yet. Still I do think the apex is coming just because of the sheer user hostility of Reddit.
Same here. Reddit wouldn't be so bad if they literally didn't shut down every subreddit just because the psychotically loud minority said so. Plus it boggles my mind why they would do that. You are actively telling your users to go elsewhere. That's literally money and engagement walking out the door. And a lot of it. Now it's just memes, "The republicans are evil again...!", and "My mother who sold me to an african prince now wants a portion of the money he has, AITA?" The whole karma concept is garbage. The purpose for that was curating content and moderation. Not a "agree/disagree" button. Obviously it gets abused but slashdot and HN do it way better. Nobody can see your vote counts on HN and slashdot allows for more ways to mod something so that we can know it's not just the downvote train saying the comment is dumb but because of various other reason.
Can you point out some subreddits they've shut down that are "money and engagement walking out the door"? The only subreddits I've heard of being shut down are as objectively racist and derogatory as you can get (or NSFL gore). Advertisers and mainstream users generally don't want to be associated with sites promoting those types of content.
You can't tell me if you placed advertising on Pornhub, your brand is not going to get recognized by men all over. I realize it's not what a lot of prudish corporations care for, but is it really going to affect Pepsi or mcdonalds if they just have an ad for one of their products next to that? Not a single person would think of less of them and only the media would criticize them.
The marketing for those brands is all about getting you to passively think of them as wholesome enjoyment. Even allowing for the dubious discounting of media influence, do you really think a porn <-> McDonalds association is something they want to have in a dad’s mind when considering where to take his family for lunch?
I don't know if it would affect Pepsi's or McDonald's sales, but it would likely affect somebody's career at their marketing agency (not in a good way).
The Donald was a hotbed of whackjobs, but it was also the biggest Trump forum online. They should be allowed to talk freely so the rest of us can laugh, rather than persuing the censorship route so advertisers don't leave.
It also was brigading people and doing a lot of things that were against reddit's policies. The subreddit moderators were stickying posts that supported white supremacy and were not actively policing users who threatened violence. At what point should they act against the community?
> Reddit banned them anyway, clearly politically motivated.
It doesn't matter where "they" moved. What matters is what was published in that subreddit. They could just as easily have deleted the abhorrent racist posts and comments before they left. They didn't do that, so the subreddit continued to violate site policies.
Try this: create a subreddit, post child porn, and then never post again. What you'll find is that as soon as your post is reported/noticed, it will be deleted along with your account and your subreddit. It won't matter that you've moved on and now post your child porn elsewhere.
Racism and death threats have no place on Reddit as per the site policies that the mods agreed to so when the mods refused to comply, their sub was deleted. Nothing to do with politics.
Downvote is also used as disagree a lot on HN, it's just that with the minimum karma requirement there are fewer users that can downvote than those that can upvote so it's slightly less visible.
A lot of papers and clinical trial results are posted there. And given the technical nature of the content a lot of people in the medical field hang out there and comment. Much of it is a bit over my head, but it's a good for learning.
For a sample, here are a couple of posts there today:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-00835-2
Therapeutically administered ribonucleoside analogue MK-4482/EIDD-2801 blocks SARS-CoV-2 transmission in ferrets
That's the worst of it. If I wouldn't need ... site:reddit.com so often, and need some reddit-exclusive communities, I would cut this cancer at dns level for good. Reddit is way to addictive for me to only take the good bits. At some point i _will click 'all' and hate myself for it later.
The problem with this strategy is you can’t discover new content so easily. They should just let you filter subs from popular, not have you create some cultivated set of subs.
You can do this in the browser extension Reddit Enhancement Suite. It allows me to block the subs I want so that browsing All or Popular become good for sometimes finding new subs
There's a way to view "all," (I think it's built-in) and then write a blacklist. Looking at my list, I am mostly filtering out subreddits for specific video games and TV shows I don't watch.
Politics is fine. But in general Reddit has so little content actually worth anyone's time that it's crazy to me how people spend so much time on it. Not to mention YouTube channels that get millions of views where they just read AskReddit threads with the same jokes those people make literally every single thread.
I don't know what content you're looking for on Reddit, but my experience is the opposite. Reddit makes it very easy for me to find focused, high-quality conversations about specific topics. As others have said, the trick is to stick to small subreddits. AskReddit, like most of the big subreddits, is a cesspool.
Also, I find that searching Reddit with Google yields much more trustworthy information than just searching Google, which tends to return a bunch of sponsored results, ads, and SEO garbage. Folks on Reddit (especially focused subreddits) do a very good job of filtering all that stuff out already. It's not perfect, but it's often vastly better than Google alone.
Agreed — don’t use the default subreddits. They’re cancer. But I’ve had a great time at the Formula1 subreddit and people are crazy at MechanicalKeyboards. I’m sure you’ll love a knitting group if you enjoy that. Go by your specific interests and really just say no to the generic or huge ones like funny, pics, askreddit etc.
The problem is that subreddit is very prone to heterogeneous opinions and groupthink, even among niche subreddits, mostly around what's appealing to mid-20 year old white US males.
The discussion is often very shallow, mostly aimed at "advanced beginners" because that's what appeals to the widest audience and anything else doesn't get traction, unlike in a traditional forum. This is very obvious if you're into a technical hobby like climbing or mountaineering.
Basically, if you don't fit the demographic / skill level mold, even niche subreddits (that aren't the dumpster fire that the large ones are) quickly lose their value.
One thing that's very noticeable compared to traditional forums, and I think plays into this: Traditional forums for deep topics have year-long threads where people are figuring something out together or share project logs. As long as they are active, they get pushed to the top. Reddit does not have that, and suffers for it. (HN too in some ways). Linking back to old reddit threads when continuing a topic is tedious and excludes the discussion even more, so it happens in way more limited contexts.
In contrast, "I just bought X" typically is one megathread in a forum and not half the submissions.
I can agree with this. This is great if you have a soft interest in something.
However, I like trading (stocks and stuff) and the subs focusing on that are very... questionable at times. A ton of people that mistake pure luck for skill perhaps... every other day.
Its no use telling some of them that, yea you just made $1000 this week trading but if you don't test your strategies legitimately you could and will just as easily lose that $1000.
>anything else doesn't get traction, unlike in a traditional forum. This is very obvious if you're into a technical hobby like climbing or mountaineering.
That's interesting, can you think of other examples besides climbing or mountaineering?
Don't get me wrong, great group of people in surveying- lots of stories about field work, current instruments, current products, etc - near zero interest (for the most part) in the deep technical aspects other than a certain passing "that's interesting | cool".
I'm not sure that's a strong criticism though, it's a social group, you can meet many people and occasionally bump into the few that actually write|develop instruments an software and then have all the off channel conversations you want.
My interest has been implementing numerics in no particular field; cartography, remote sensing, medical imaging, engineering modelling, financials, weddings, parties, anything, etc. I wander through a range of application areas and usually go deep on very dull specifics.
It's a common story - pick a domain area, there'll be a social group interested in that domain, with students, veterans, casual pass throughs, etc ; stories, yarns, classic photos etc are all popular but for the most part getting into the weeds on fine details will bore the pants off the bulk of that group.
Lots of people like to flex at the local climbing wall, few will ever bolt their way to the summit of Cerro Torre or cable ascend the Sydney Tower- this limits the discussion pools on portable generators and|or designing custom ascenders for cables and window washing tracks.
I inferred from the comment that Reddit posters are mostly young men, not that groups predominately composed of young women don't exhibit group think.
I'm not a Reddit user but a quick Google search confirms the ratio of males to females on Reddit is at least 2:1 and possibly 3:1.
There are also various other phenomena that suggest Reddit users of any gender or interest might see a disproportionate number of male posters, but we needn't go near those treacherous waters given the above numbers.
>the trick is to stick to ~~small~~ niche subreddits.
I think generality is more of a problem than size. The more general a subreddit's topic, usually the more of a cesspool it is.
The more specific and niche, the more likely it is to be focused, informative, and useful. Also the better moderated it tends to be, as the moderators are intensely interested in the topic and doing it as a labor of love.
> Politics is fine. But in general Reddit has so little content actually worth anyone's time that it's crazy to me how people spend so much time on it.
I don't go to Reddit for content, I go for the community. That doesn't seem right because the perception is that Reddit is highly toxic, but it sustains a lot of life when you look closer.
There is a particular health-related sub-reddit that I discovered after a diagnosis and while it is highly imperfect it was a lifeline and something I spent a lot of time contributing back on. In about 20% of threads it spun off to PM threads and discussions continued over days. I see this pattern across the site, even though my bookmark goes to r/programming.
It's really not. The main political subreddit /r/politics has just become an echo chamber even though they claim to be unbiased. The way reddit is designed and built only results in these echo chambers. Politics on reddit, especially over the past 4 years, ends up seeping into even non-political subreddits.
I'd go so far as to say that politics is inherently destructive to online communities. It inevitably leads to people fighting over which team that they're on.
Here's what I do: multiple accounts. Switching accounts is easy. One for politics (news, politics, geopolitics, plus other variations), One for finance (options, investing, thetagang, no WSB for those who know), One for Relationships (Relationships, TIFU, AITA) because it is fun, One for bay area (and the only one where I am somewhat willing to disclose my identity), One for health, One for entertainment (all the TV shows that I am watching at the moment), and 2 for my country of origin (one with leftist leans and one with rightist leans since I got banned for somewhat innocuous comments in one of them so I said why not two). I could look up specific subreddits, but I find it easy for one account to focus on a single topic and subscribe to 5-10 related subs on that topic. Based on the need, the feed works perfectly.
You can say it is addiction but I would say it is focused addiction. When I am reading about options trading, I am reading about options, investments, dividends and what not - usually there is a purpose and maybe a perceived benefit, and when I am reading about entertainment, it is to track reviews and user comments - same perceived benefit - I could go to IMDB but it is not the same.
If you'd rather have your comments be on the same username, multireddits (old Reddit UI) or custom feeds (new Reddit UI) are an option for managing groups of subscriptions too.
it really isn't. it's bottom-quality content, everyone can have an opinion about politics, it's too easy. Every subreddit > 100000 has a politics problem because people have now been conditioned to see politics everywhere. It takes effort to keep things topical. And then, even the politics subreddits themselves are completely confused, e.g. r/libertarian is a mostly socialist sub now.
/r/libertarian becoming socialist is not confused at all. It's been made to welcome libertarian socialists for a long while now, explicitly, and libertarian socialism itself has a very long tradition.
I've been banned from a subreddit because I said Trump did some good things basically. Mod called me a nazi and silenced me after my appeal for 30 days.
Politics is fine if it's discussed like it is on HN†: level-headed arguments are debated, discussed, and, if a consensus isn't reached, we can agree to disagree. Reddit is polluted by absolute political drivel, except for a very small subset of subs. Low-effort "Trump is bad" posts that get massively upvoted just gets old after a while, especially when you see it every single day.
† HN has been historically center-libertarian (which is a bit of self-selection by entrepreneurial folks), but recently started leaning much more left, no doubt due to an influx of non-startup-founding users.
I'm personally not a fan of that kind of content either, but I like that politics is mainstream enough now that it exists. Politics discussion (however shallow) shouldn't be exclusive to certain demographics in my opinion.
I've mostly stopped using reddit because the quality has taken a nosedive. I love it when you could go there and see interesting things around the internet. It reminds me a bit like how HN is now, just more broad.
Recently though its like every other damn post is about politics, its so tiring.
I've mostly stopped using it after seeing back to back threads about how you're basically immoral and evil for pursuing a career in tech or if you want to create a startup or receive a six figure salary... just a bunch of nonsense like that.
I don't think that these "discussions" should be shut down but I'm just not interested in seeing what seems like propaganda mixed in with "funny stuff"
Or saying anything remotely positive about a republican. Instant downvotes. Doesn't matter who, where, or what it's about. Republican did something to better his constituency? NO HE WAS JUST DOING IT FOR KICKBACKS! Reddit effectively has trained their users to only reinforce liberal ideals, otherwise face the downvote machine.
Yep. It is incredibly polarized. I would say at this point the democrats only get a pass because they are "marginally better than republicans" according to reddit.
Should have seen some of the stuff they were saying about Biden before he won the primaries. Lot of racism, lot of hatred behind it. I was shocked.
And Kamala too. It's like reddit is the democratic platform of "no integrity." Why reddit democrats didn't actively vote against the democratic platform this election goes to show they kowtow to everything the party says because of what you said, "they're marginally better than republicans."
it's the downside of reddit still being a relatively federated, open platform. You have to dig yourself to find good content and niche subreddits, but I vastly prefer it to the centralised, 'overlord AI', algorithmic stuff on every other service.
You can't have it both, if you have decentralisation and pretty free expression you get a lot of garbage and responsibility is on you to find what's worth looking at. I also don't see politics as bad. Sure the level of discourse is abysmal, kind of the norm for politics anyway, but I'll take people at least talking about politics than cat videos and bikini pictures and 'pranking homeless people' videos.
I'd agree with this if Reddit didn't ban literally every single subreddit their vocal minority didn't like. Reddit used to be a fun hybrid of Fark and Slashdot. It was far better than both of those and had a niche audience just a little larger than the HN community. It was great. Now it just feels like a perpetual tumblr ready to silence the reason why their users are even on their platform.
Pornography can vile yet ISP's don't take them down even though they could. Why can't reddit do the same thing? 4chan exists as well yet they haven't been taken down.
This is why I disagree with the argument that reddit hasn't taken down any subreddits that "werent vile." If someone is on the internet, they're going to find something they're interested in. ISP's can't stop it for web traffic, why should reddit be treated any differently?
I agree that it seems like it's ripe for disruption. Time for another Digg (which was what reddit was supposed to be) -- maybe with a mobile-first user experience (reddit is trash on a phone).
Not the person you're replying to, but this happens to me on Chromium-based browsers and Firefox on Android 11. There are sometimes slightly different issues for each browser, but the UI is unusably slow on both. It at least helped starve my Reddit usage when that became a concern for me.
My karma on Reddit was about 5500 before I deleted my account and walked away. The thing I remember most about it is echo chambers. The insecurity was very real, kind of like programming in the corporate world, but heavily magnified.
I wonder if Reddit is hitting the same issue as Twitter did with regards to third-party apps. Like Twitter, Reddit has a robust API that allows for really full-featured apps to fetch/post content, which is great as a user, but horrible for monetization.
I wouldn't be surprised if at some point third party Reddit clients end up getting neutered much like Twitter apps have become. Given that the mobile site is turning more inaccessible without registering for an account, it certainly seems that way.
Reddit is also reliant on third party apps to get content and interaction since their own frontend and backend are terrible for everything but link and comment aggregation.
Holy fuck the new reddit is shitty.... If i just want to see the link, I click the link. If i scroll down on a post, i want to read the comments.... plural, as in many... not just one or two, and then a new, unrelated post, and having to click a button to show the rest of the comments... the only "thing" you have (commenting/discussions), you're destroying now.
How are engineers proud to work at reddit when their primary job is maintaining a worse version of the website full of ads, tracking, dark patterns everywhere and fake loading screens?
There are people who can do engineering done without feeling proud or particular care about ethics. I've seen those at uni. Looking at IT through the money lens and no personal projects, no dev work outside of study, no books that are not absolutely necessary etc.
I mean.... you have to eat... if reddit pays you enough to make shitty software... why not. I'm sure they have a gajillion teams doing A/B testing, and using only advertising metrics to decide how it looks and what it does, so it's not really the devs choice of what to do,... they just have to implement it.
I mean it goes deeper. i.reddit.com and v.reddit.com are terrible places to put content if you want someone else to see it on reddit, there are serious performance issues there... and I'm on a wired connection to gigabit fiber in the Bay Area, not on 3G up in the mountains.
It speaks volumes that the best way to browse their social media platform is through third party tools or the deprecated interface. Not only is it a superior way to create and engage with communities (the only good subs are the comment/text driven ones these days anyways, if I want stupid videos I'll go to TikTok and Instagram where all that content comes from anyway), it's more performant.
I don't know what's going on at Reddit HQ but I guess there's a reason I've never heard anyone brag about working there.
Yep, I've actually had to turn off the new site. Not sure what they are doing, but whenever I use the new skin my browser slows to a crawl and freezes after a few hours of leaving it up.
Even if they did, it'd be trivial for a developer to exclude the ads, and why wouldn't they? Obviously Reddit could try and enforce that via ToS, but even then they'd have to track offenders down and threaten them with revocation.
I wonder how advertisers would feel about their ad showing up in arbitrary unofficial applications. I'd guess ads sent via API to be shown on unofficial apps would be less desirable than ads on the official app (which has known behaviors that reddit can document). Maybe the price would be lower or they'd only pay per click?
Do any other APIs include ads to be shown to the end user? It's an interesting idea!
You can control for that... "[ ] show ads on reddit third-party apps" and you can also allow advertisers to blacklist or whitelist third-party apps. You can even push a link through to a 5 second ad first if it's a video for example. There's plenty of ways to monetize.
At some point advertisers will need to accept they cannot have their cake and eat it too as we fly forward in technology progression.
Plus, most of these objections are based on moralism which is bogus and misused in the first place.
I could see companies putting ad data in an API and saying, "If this block shows up, you must show it in order to continue using this API for free; or pay." Seems fair to me.
I can't understand this view. Particularly when advertiser objects having their ad shown next to a questionable content. I can print something ugly and tape it next to my laptop screen and now all ads are showing next to something ugly. What's the difference if it is in an app?
Like all social media / user generated platforms, paid promotion is constantly being passed as legitimate content in some shape or form - but there's not really any reason to believe that reddit capitalizes on that themselves.
To look at how reddit is monetizing their platform, it seems straight forward to look at their advertiser page, and see how they try to pitch their ad platform. Paid promotions - which have become somewhat of a first party feature on Youtube for example -aren't discussed.
Given that the US courts have definitively ruled web scraping legal, doesn't that present a risk that third-parties could create their own APIs to interface with Reddit, especially as it relates to fetching content? I think if Reddit tries to lock down its content, that becomes a losing battle, when there are probably much more creative ways to monetize.
I think the legal situation is more complicated than you’re suggesting. It’s one thing if you’re scraping without logging in, which is possible on Reddit but of course limits you to read-only access. If you want to participate in discussions, on the other hand, you need an account, which means you’re agreeing to a EULA, which means unauthorized clients can potentially be sued over either breach of contract or contractual interference. Maybe. I believe those legal aspects are still largely untested in this context.
I believe that whatever the user wants to do on their own device is allowed; this is why adblock is legal, regardless of what a website's EULA says, for example.
If I had a local software client that automated posting of content to Reddit, it would seem difficult to detect and stop. If detected, would Reddit ban my user account? Doesn't seem like the kind of relationship I would want with my power users. Why not out-compete the third-party providers (who are bubbling up CX research for free) which should be easy if the platform owner itself takes it seriously.
There is a huge difference between adblock and a scraper. The scraper is automated browsing and data harvesting. This can be quantified and creates extra load. Adblock works with local data after the server did it's part and sent all data to the device. It doesn't create additional load on the server.
A fair compromise would be a scraper that runs as a browser extension, so as to not create extra load (for example, RECAP [1], which scrapes PACER and ships the viewed case PDFs off for archiving and indexing).
Shipping post, link, and comment data somewhere globally accessible using a browser extension while logged in sidesteps Reddit’s walled garden efforts without any load beyond that which they would’ve expended serving typical user requests. Maybe IPFS as a target?
As a side note:I am pro-scraping as long as common sense has a say in it and it's not abused. I do scrape one in a blue moon when I want to research a topic in depth.It's great for gathering a lot of information to help learn about a topic fast(er).
It’s been one less since their app started spamming my phone with notifications a few months ago. I suspect those kinds of engagement hooks are part of the reason they have been pushing the app so hard, but I got so tired of it that I uninstalled it from my phone. Fortunately they’ve also made the mobile/web experience so horrible that I’m not even tempted to wade back in. I had been a daily user for more than 10 years until that point.
I don’t understand this mentality, I have 3 apps that can send notifications: phone, messages and WhatsApp. Everything else is blocked. I don’t want to see notifications for 99% of apps every once in a while I’ll be tempted into letting an app use notifications and immediately regret it and disable.
I don't even let Whatsapp send notifications, and I only allow messages because I hardly ever get them... Even then, I silence message alerts most people other than my wife
For me it's essentially my work e-mail (not personal), the WSJ, my credit card, my calendar and Accuweather. Everything else can forever hold its peace
One of the best comments I've ever read on HN said that they should be called interruptions not notifications. Interruptions are fine for certain things, but not the vast majority of them.
The biggest one I've switched off is email notifications and it's made me so much more organized. Instead of swiping away an interruption when I can't respond properly I'll pull the information when I do have time/ability to respond, bills now get paid on time for example.
Google is one of the biggest offenders at re-enabling it's own notification though. Youtube, an app I don't want and can't remove decided to start spamming me again last week.
Yup. This is one of the reasons that I don’t like android. Unfortunately now that apple is becoming a service provider also (Apple TV+, News+, etc) with apps that rely on engagement metrics I’m worried that I’ll start having this problem as well. The shortcuts app already doesn’t have a notifications setting but still can do notifications that buzz and make a sound.
If i.reddit.com (which actually has a usable mobile web interface) ever gets pulled down, my mobile usage will go away with it. The modern mobile web experience of reddit.com is garbage.
None, but the app had notifications enabled because they were previously using them reasonably (eg when someone replied to a comment). Then they started using them for all kinds of other things like “did you see the new post in /r/funny?”, and while I _could_ just turn off the notifications this was the last of many signals that their objectives and motivations no longer align with a positive user experience for me.
The overall quality of my experience on Reddit was slowly degrading for the past few years. I didn’t enjoy the culture of the subs I visited any more, or the apparent culture of the site overall—and Reddit itself seemed to be funneling me towards those people and places because that kind of mild controversy drives engagement. But it felt like it had become an unjustifiable waste of time because I wasn’t even being enriched or entertained anymore. They started pushing harder to share my location, watch live broadcasts, use their chat, started abusing app notifications, and the ads became surprisingly intrusive. Eventually I just decided to leave.
I don’t really begrudge them any of the changes if it helps them build a successful, sustainable business that their users enjoy—I’m just not interested in the new experiences and functionality they have prioritized.
I mean, that's not really the point though. It would be nice to be able to use the notifications that make sense without the spam. Way to many apps do this these days.
reddit may have been a good site a decade or so ago, but in its current state it's mostly a propaganda machine to manipulate clueless rubes. One look at the front page makes this glaringly obvious.
The only remotely productive way to use reddit is by being selective with what subs you check out. Avoid the larger subreddits at all cost.
The only useful thing to me is to append "Reddit" to some Google searches for certain niches. occasionally it brings up a post describing exactly what I'm looking for. It's always an old post though unless I'm searching for the latest in the US Democratic party's talking points, then I can just go to Reddit.
Yea, I'm a decade+ Reddit user, and it's honestly wild hitting the site in an incongito window because the default subs are so different than the smaller subreddits.
I think it's perfectly justified to call out manipulative content, especially if the manipulator is batting for your team. Either way, implying someone's a heretic because they reject the trough you eat from only makes it clear why the trough should be avoided.
The Apollo app has gotten so good that I'm starting to worry they'll purchase it and neuter it or shut it down, just like they did the Alien Blue app a few years ago.
Reddit is garbage now. Every remotely interesting discussion gets locked by moderators. Every interesting subreddit gets deleted. So you’re left with content that is diluted to appeal to the lowest common denominator. It’s sad, it used to be a great place to read intelligent discussions from a variety of perspectives, a lot like HN is today but with a broader scope. But today that’s gone.
Reddit is an ad/astroturf and politics infested cesspool. I would say it needs to die, but it's already pretty dead in terms of its utility to most people I know.
While this is true as the default experience you can very very very easily only subscribe to content relevant to you. The article attached to this post it literally telling you there are 52M daily users visiting the platform yet you claim "I would say it needs to die, but it's already pretty dead in terms of its utility to most people I know." Perhaps try visiting the platform again and spend some time customizing the platform to your needs and gauge your opinion of it from there.
On a side note, really hope reddit's engineering team doesn't kill off their 'old.reddit.com' domain though. That's probably the only thing keeping me from dumping reddit altogether (aside from their API-powered custom reddit apps made by indie devs for Android).
I know that Reddit admins read HN so please please do not kill off old.reddit.com. The redesign is absolute garbage.
Normally I don’t express such strong sentiment on HN but I’ve been a Reddit user for 10 years and I genuinely like the communities, but not enough to suffer through the new website.
I'm not sure how many of the current admins read HN. I just know some of us old guys hang around here.
And FWIW I agree with you. I've been a 15 year reddit user (and employee!) but if old.reddit goes away, I suspect my usage will go way down. The good news is that the current execs know this, because I have told them.
But at the end of the day they have to do what's best for the business, and I'm afraid those of us who like the old interface aren't large in number.
Edit to add: I don't think they'll kill off the old.reddit interface. I think they'll just stop updating and more and more things won't work there, like i.reddit.com.
> But at the end of the day they have to do what's best for the business, and I'm afraid those of us who like the old interface aren't large in number.
Do people actually prefer the new interface [on its merits], or do they just use it because it's the default?
One has to actively try to use Old. So, usage is being reduced by attrition (but attributed to design success). So, apathy looks like successful KPIs.
New UI sucks. Forgets settings, frequent load errors (which blank out an already loaded content) and hit-boxes for clickable items are small/overlap which increases page hits (cause you nav to the wrong page). It smacks of a hasty rewrite in $HOTFRAMEWORK.
I use reddit less because of it. And a result of that is I've also reduced spending to reddit.
Edit: reduced advertising spend, not award spend (which was already zero)
Reddit Management Read This!! If one needs an extension you get around the way you annoy your userbase be prepared for the userbase to leave. You are actively pushing them away. Thanks for coming to my TED talk
> Thankfully there are some browser extensions to redirect automatically, provided you're comfortable using them:
And if you're not, greasemonkey scripts that do that aren't hard to write. If you know how to code in any language and have a little knowledge of HTML, you can probably bash one together in an hour, even if you don't know Javascript.
I think it looks better. Better fonts, better element spacing. It just does not perform very well and seems to have a lot of "state" issues or inconsistent design elements. Reading comments and browsing is slower than it used to be, but I prefer the new look to the old one.
The main feature that makes me use the new interface is the ability to collapse a thread from anywhere. It makes reading through comments much faster.
The main drawback is that it's really too heavy for what it does.
I don't understand the complains about the new design being image-heavy, or in general so much different from the old one. Once you set it (once) in "classic view", it's basically the same.
The is a big generation of lots of pictures = good. I am sure it is better to those users. Think pinterest uses and Etsy shoppers.
Old reddit is more like BBS or old school message boards. People who grew up on this are a dying breed... probably also worth less to advertisers as we use adblock.
With any online community the group who consumes is far larger than the group who contributes, and I suspect with Reddit the people who are looking for community (especially those participating in mostly text-based subs) are few and far between compared to the huge number of users who browse big subs / the front page casually for memes, entertainment news, and cat pics.
The things which drive me nuts about the redesign are mostly things that drive me nuts because I comment far more than I post, and participate in a lot of discussion-heavy subs. Navigating comment trees is more difficult, lots more is hidden by default. Far fewer topics fit on a screen with the card-style layout that has huge previews. The old layout is information-dense, readable with minimal clicking to expand things, and fast.
But those are exactly the kind of changes that someone just browsing would be indifferent to, or even appreciate. The images/videos they're scrolling through are now big, front, and center. Many probably don't ever venture into the comments to begin with, of if they do, they're just seeing if the top comment is a good joke or not.
> But those are exactly the kind of changes that someone just browsing would be indifferent to, or even appreciate. The images/videos they're scrolling through are now big, front, and center. Many probably don't ever venture into the comments to begin with, of if they do, they're just seeing if the top comment is a good joke or not.
It really depends on the type of consumer. I don't post to reddit anymore, but I'm not looking to consume memes and videos. When I go there I'm almost always looking to consume a comment thread about something (say some weird feature of some motherboard), and the new UI is atrocious for that. I either switch to old or I don't bother with it.
old.reddit.com still have image thumbnails, and next to each thread you have an expand button allowing you to easily see the image in same size as the new reddit layout without leaving the page.
I definitely don’t think people preferring this layout are a dying breed, but I do agree that it’s easier for them to monetize the new layout.
Depends what you use reddit for. If you are just looking at news links then the thumbnails work best. On my ipad I only use reddit for searching for reference images/art so the big pictures work best for me.
I hate the new UI but I have to use it daily to get the WYSIWYG interface. Otherwise I have to convert my google doc to markdown before pasting it in. But I only use it for posting and then go back to 'old'. Most of my browsing happens from Apollo (iOS indie dev reddit client). That said I'd put effort into writing my own google->markdown->reddit-poster-script in a heartbeat if it meant killing off "new" and going back to "old".
I have a strong feeling that at some point Reddit is going to have internal struggles with this ala Tumblr. Their consistent amendments to what you can or can post, as well as culture policing in various subreddits is bound to create additional controversies.
Yes. My wife started browsing reddit only after the redesign. She had no interest the in the old interface. The new design really has a familiar look/feel for new users accustom to most common mainstream social media designs.
The only thing the new interface is better for is for scrolling through image-heavy subreddits. It's a lot better for that use case.
The old interface is a lot better for discussion.
Unfortunately, any subreddit that does not ban memes/low-effort media gets flooded in memes/low-effort media, so scrolling through images is how most people use reddit.
How much of this do you think is due to the redesign itself versus bad FE engineering decisions? Redesign aside, I find the new reddit often really broken from a FE architecture POV.
Facebook, for instance, has some similar design patterns, but generally the interface seems really well built. New reddit just breaks in all kinds of odd ways which kills the UX.
>Reddit Inc. said it averaged 52 million daily active users in October, up 44% from the same month a year earlier
The redesign launched in 2018, so I'd say yes, the general public greatly prefers the redesign if they had almost 50% growth last year. Could there be other factors? Sure. But Occam's razor is a solid argument in this context imo.
Is it? You've taken two facts (1. Interface redesign and 2. 50% growth last year) and assigned causation to the first. In my persepctive, reddit has been digging into the cultural psyche for a long time and has been growing steadily. The news uses it to replace local journalism now. Anecdotally, a lot of people I know are now talking about things they saw on reddit (I've been a user for ~10 years). I think the interface design is not relevant to growth. If anything, it probably decreases it, although I think the type of users they are attracting now don't care as much as people who post on HN do.
The simplest argument is that the default is usually... defaulted to. And the default is the redesign -- you have to actively go out of your way to revert to the old design; so the simplest takeaway is that the general public greatly prefers doing nothing, than reverting the redesign.
Doing nothing may be for the reason that they prefer the redesign, but also numerous other reasons apply (including that they don't dislike it enough, or some key new feature, etc).
Did you know that tax revenue almost always increases after a tax cut? Did you also know that tax revenue almost always increases after a tax increase? Aren’t statistics cool?
> Edit to add: I don't think they'll kill off the old.reddit interface. I think they'll just stop updating and more and more things won't work there, like i.reddit.com.
I've noticed this drift is already happening. It's like there are two reddits. It can be really confusing as a moderator when you are looking at a different website from your users. Eg new sidebar and the old sidebar.
Even just the direction and focus revealed by Reddit's constant pressuring toward the new design and behaviour, along with the failure to address long-standing architectural flaws in the site which render it useless for substantive discussion drove me off years ago:
Yes, I (very occasionally) post. But it's absolutely in the spirit of "this is a horrible experience and I would prefer any viable alternative". Other options, even if (or perhaps because they are) much smaller, are emerging and preferable.
old interface was just way more information dense. That's my main complaint with new UI. Even with "compact" mode on the new UI, it's not as dense as the old one.
I agree completely. We intentionally designed the old interface to be information dense. When we made it slightly less dense, there was such a strong pushback that we had to add an option to go back to the more dense mode.
But there are a lot of users who don't care. And maintaining two interfaces is double the work of maintaining one, because you have test everything twice. And it's actually geometric, not double, because you have to test every new option combination in both interfaces.
The difference in information density really isn't that large. Here's a comparison of the current top posts (and not even using the compact view): https://imgur.com/a/WsI3pBj
I disagree. At least, if I load www.reddit.com/r/programming and old.reddit.com/r/programming, it's immediately apparent that new UI is much less dense:
> But at the end of the day they have to do what's best for the business
Why? Why is this accepted in our society? Why do we have to overdo everything we do? To keep expanding in every way until we're met with opposition (of whatever form)? It is our nature as a dynamical system I guess.
But why can't we just relax and chill for a change? Why do we work our lives away for things that do not matter?
No they wouldn’t seek out the new interface. They just bounce.
When they first launched the new interface some new users got the new one and some new users got the old one. The bounce rate for the new one was lower and the signup rate was higher.
I think this thread should be an important lesson for HN devs:
You are not normal. Even the fact that you are likely consuming this website on a computer with its own keyboard, is not as common as it might seem if you surround yourself with other software developers. What you want, and what the majority wants are not the same thing.
How was this measured? Because with the new layout then it’s incredibly easy to accidentally exit a thread (without leaving the site) and you have various dark patterns to force users to sign-up. For instance, whenever I open a reddit link through from a google search then I’m unable to view all comments without signing up, and I accidentally close the thread all the time. I see the exact same thing happen when a twitch streamer I follow visit reddit at the start of every stream (despite visiting reddit every single day using the new layout then he keep accidentally closing threads and getting lost on the subreddit page).
I wouldn’t be surprised if me reading a thread with all its 200 comments on the old version and then leaving the site is considered bouncing, whereas me reading a thread (or rather the 20 comments on the thread you make available) and then accidentally closing the thread to return to the subreddit on the new version is considered successful retention.
I wouldn't say that, and my comment wasn't an accusation.
If you want to be guilty of something, I'd say it was approaching the conversation adversarially rather than charitably. "You were asked for a source" treats the other commenter as an inattentive schoolboy, and coming from a place of curiosity with a question like "But how do you know that's actually what happens?" might have done the job just as well.
As a devoted i.reddit.com user, it's by far my favorite way to enjoy the site, but it's getting harder to use every year as the main site adds more features and gates that don't work in the i. site. The most annoying part of the new site is the embedded video player and there's no way around it right now.
Not even just the redesign. It's the constant forcing you to download the app, the broken amp layout (which is really just being used to trick google into showing them first). The site is just extremely hostile now if you don't use the app or sign in.
The amp stuff is beyond annoying. I click on "view more comments" from an amp page and it redirects me to a non amp page and then i have to click on view more comments again.
Yesterday I tried to visit https://reddit.com/r/gaming and received an infinite loading indicator through multiple refreshes until I gave up. It felt like loadshedding where they were encountering an issue and decided to drop my traffic, which is not a good UX.
>I know that Reddit admins read HN so please please do not kill off old.reddit.com. The redesign is absolute garbage.
People have ben telling them this for years. They know and do not give a shit or at the very least they are powerless to do anything. The redesign is so bad I'll stop using reddit completely if they ever kill the old domain. Its almost like they intentionally tried to make the least functional website possible.
What is the worst trash in the world is their mobile web ui. Impossible to search in Google and quickly browse results especially if I want to do it in incognito.
I hate that they show so much contempt for their users they deliberately broke many basic features (as in they used to work, then they removed them) on mobile web, especially when logged out, to force you onto their app.
It only shows about 2 comments by default, and it's difficult to see them all (and often impossible to see them all at once), because you've got to keep clicking at the end of threads to see more, with each click triggering a full page reload.
And recently you can't even do that without logging in - as soon as you hit "More replies" a login prompt appears.
That’s my biggest gripe as well. When opening a reddit thread from google I have to replace ‘www’ with ‘old’ in order to see all the comments, it’s truly absurd.
The only explanation I can think of for this behavior is sheer incompetence.
Yeah I would be fine using the app, but it still disables possibility to quickly search site:reddit.com some topic I want to research and go through mostly comments. Then back to search, go on and so on. This is how I browse Reddit a lot of the time anyway.
Maybe I am using wrong app for that though. I am using Relay right now. And it doesn't allow me yo select comments properly coming from Google search. I think I tried Reddit's official app and it didn't work very well too + the context switch of going from chrome to an app.
I legit tried to use the new reddit the other day to see if I could "get with the times". It's horrific. It's noisy and gets in the way. I couldn't last more than a day or two.
Huh, there's no difference for me. How do you tell if you're using the redesigned UI or not?
[edit] If I open reddit in incognito then I can see the redesign, otherwise I can't. Maybe I opted out of the redesign at some point? Can't see anything about it in settings though
Funny thing. When you said this I wondered if it would be a good way to stop using Reddit. Then I remembered like generations ago I tried to stop using some website by making it hard to visit. Blocked it in the hosts file and everything.
One day I stopped what I was doing and looked at what it was. I was on the website I'd blocked. The way I'd done it was I'd forwarded the Xserver from a dedicated server I was running elsewhere and was browsing on a remote Konqueror or Epiphany or some shit.
It taught me something interesting about my Akrasia - the problem isn't a lack of focus on a specific task. It was a task choice problem and a long-term incentive awareness problem. I wasn't even aware I'd done all of these things to access the site I'd blocked. I'd auto-piloted through them. Fascinating.
Same, and I feel like it's inevitable at some point. Either some day someone will do the math and determine they can get a lot more ad revenue if they force everyone to use the new design, or they'll decide the cost of maintaining two versions of the site's frontend is too high.
The cost is probably relatively low (but not negligible). I could imagine a future though where they decide to make some big breaking changes to the API, and decide it's not worth updating the old site.
I started browsing the site on mobile without the extension on the new site because it makes Reddit's attempts to manipulate me more obvious and more annoying.
Yeah, the new Reddit design is such a step back in terms of both performance and user experience. It was probably optimized in some way to increase engagement, but it's just really bad.
Probably unpopular opinion on HN: but I really prefer the new design. finally something that doesn't scream "we have a sub-culture" but rather welcomes new users.
Trying to follow a link is now all but impossible - clicking a link takes me to the comments page. Not what I want. But on that page, the link that I expect to see at the top of the page doesn't load! So I shrug and go back to the index page, and now the link or image or whatever is attached to the post is gone from _that_ page too. Reloading the page doesn't fix it. So for that particular link or image, it's now impossible to even see it let alone have any hope of ever viewing the image or following the link...
And I've given up trying to write comments or upvote/downvote anything because usually tapping the arrows or whatever just redirects me to a page saying you've signed out, we'll sign you back in... followed by .... a reload where I'm back into the same state where I appear to be logged in but any interaction redirects me back to this page ....
The new design is complete garbage and I cannot understand how it has been allowed to get this bad.
I think you need to differentiate between the "design" and the "experience". The design itself is good e.g. the wireframes of the website. The actual engineering behind the design is not good.
sticking to a very old design, and refusing to update and adapt to current design patterns and styles while everything about technology/devices and how we use them changes daily: feels like a sub-culture
Well they tried to use "current design patterns and styles" for the redesign, and it led to a bloated, slow, bad user experience. That's either an indictment of modern web patterns or just a bad implementation of them. I think it's a bit of both.
I'm pretty sure people visit Reddit for the content, not because they particularly enjoy the hoops Reddit makes them jump through before finally getting to said content.
Reddit has a problem: they are a subculture. Or rather, they’re a network of subcultures. The day they try to force everyone to go mainstream is the day they die. Or at best, the day they become yet another Facebook.
The subculture will move on and find a new place to congregate. But it will forever be pursued by the mainstream. This is Eternal September.
I find the new design horrendous if you're not signed in to an account. There's so many dark-patterns, it makes the site completely unusable. I suppose there's some metrics they optimize for that drove those decisions.
When logged in, the new design is fine I think. There's a couple minor annoyances, but nothing that makes we want to go and use old.
> I suppose there's some metrics they optimize for that drove those decisions
It's just the work of bean counters optimising metrics that are visible to them. We're lucky an API exists and quality third-party clients can still be built but I assume they'll shut this off one day too.
I use old.reddit.com on mobile, after turning off automatic font scaling in my browser. My eyesight is good enough to read the small text and it's still a better experience than the mobile site.
Worth keeping an eye on Teddit development [1] [2], an alternative, open-source/self-hostable/JS-free interface similar to Invidious/YouTube, Bibliogram/Instagram, and Nitter/Twitter. Login functionality isn’t supported yet but apparently on the roadmap.
The problem is that the medium is the message, and while you might be using old.reddit.com, most of the other people posting are using the new site. That has lowered the quality of discourse.
I first noticed this when people on hobby reddits started asking FAQs that had already been answered in the sidebar – the new design now hid the sidebar from users. So, subreddits where newbies typically got answers before they had to post basic questions, have devolved into people asking the same basic questions over and over again.
I've also noticed more threads with a bunch of top level comments saying exactly the same thing-- eventually, it occurred to me that it's because users in the new interface can't easily see all the existing comments or search them to see if what they're about to post is already there. It was a jarring realization.
I keep looking and monitoring promising replacements but haven't found one yet. I do think the ultimate way forward is going to be some kind of federated system where each "subreddit" is hosted individually and there are aggregators which glue them together, either as a hosted portal or as individual apps.
One of the things that has been killing me is that small interesting subreddits keep getting either killed for not being actively moderated enough or invaded by people who have their own goals. It's very frustrating and it really hurts the longterm knowledge that gets generated in these subreddits.
If anyone is working in this space, please drop me a line.
I'm working on something that may interest you. It's still a work-in-progress, but we have communities (subreddits), publications/articles (medium), galleries, and normal user feeds. Emphasis on anonymity, custom domains, matrix integration, eventual federation.
I love RIF as well. It's so simple and straightforward but with all the features of the website. It seems be well down the list of Android app in popularity though, I don't know why.
People like overly fancy modern looking apps. RIF and other open source reddit apps like Diode (available on F-Droid) basically provide the same minimal and working experience old.reddit provides.
There is no replacement, the tight-knit community is just gone. When slashdot made beta permanent some users tried to spin off the old design (soylentnews is the only one I remember now) but it never caught on.
It's like when a favorite local family owned burger joint shuts down and is replaced by a McDonalds. It serves many more people but the core community and values are gone.
> I haven't accessed the desktop site in years, because it defaults to the new reddit
If you're logged in you can set it to always default to the old design. I do that, and disable all custom stylesheets, which is basically a necessity to make the site useable again.
I suppose they will slow-boil old.reddit.com until it's dead. Things like gradually adding unwanted changes from the redesign, removing or not supporting features (is there a way to upload images to i.redd.it from it?), or causing random delays or errors. Something like the dark patterns used to force visitors using mobile devices into installing the app.
We need a distributed or federated reddit, and give it power. Lemmy ( https://lemmy.ml/ ) seems to be going into the right path.
I was wondering why no one mentioned this. I've bookmarked it to play with more but it seems to address lots of the issues here, at least at first blush.
I've been trying to use the redesign several times, and still haven't figured out how to perform a search in the current subreddit. In old reddit there's just a checkbox for that.
Digg also touched the ranking algorithm and external submission rules at the same time, which ended up prioritising "partner" content over user content. This was much more controversial than the UI aspect of Digg's redesign.
If old.reddit.com goes, so will I. I've already stopped using Reddit altogether on mobile devices because of being tricked into loading the redesign, and because of the nagging. It's really no skin off my back to stop using a site that's slow and has a bad user experience.
I use Slide for Reddit [0]. Some things don't work in the app like Reddit videos, but I get around that by opening those links in a separate browser. Other than that, I've enjoyed how I've set it up [1]; it's got the link's domain name displayed before clicking the link, and if you're signed in, you can save and vote on posts with one click.
I agree that it's better than the new mobile web, but its design still feels super clunky and dated.
I remember a certain version of mobile web in 2017/2018 that worked GREAT. But then reddit decided to mess it all up by forcing mobile web users to use their (bloated and ad-filled) app and making it hard to access certain communities and read more than 2 layers of child comments.
I guess that's what relentless pursuit of advertising money/monetization targets over actually listening to the community (that made the product what it is now in the first place) does to a company.
As someone who has had a luxurious career based on adding full-bleed photography to the websites of companies with more money than sense, all I can say the look of i.reddit.com is just beautifully minimal. UX is about more than intuitive controls, it's about speed and comfort and I can use that site with so quickly and smoothly. The color palette doesn't even register in my head anymore. It's also a somewhat forgotten rule that designing for occasional is very different than for habitual use. Habitual users don't need training wheels, they need shortcuts.
I even use a browser extension to make sure that 100% of the time old.reddit.com is being shown, even when linked from another site or when I have deleted my cookies.
As others have said, it being called old.reddit means it will get killed. And it's already happening, new features either don't work at all or are broken, existing features are rotting apart, it's definitely not a priority.
The future is in communities operating their own site and running it the way they want. Politics aside, thedonald.win is a great example. The interface is way better and less buggy, and the community is cohesive.
If you look at reddit facebook twitter instagram, their design paradigm is not to facilitate discussion, but to break it apart into a bunch of ad-separated pieces and then stash it away, never to be findable again. Almost like what people say about qwerty layout.
I'm very thankful the user culture and the moderation policy here is geared towards productive discussion on focused topics. It's not a one size fits all social media site, its meant for tech and startup discussion. Plus, people don't seem to reward stupid puns, pithy comments, twitter style "hot takes", begging for upvotes, etc.. I would hope this keeps HN somewhat inoculated from becoming another Reddit.
You're giving HN too much credit. Reddit may be scraping the bottom of the barrel intellectually but humans pretty much all have decent skills at fitting in. Reddit users are perfectly capable of coming here and not cracking puns if that's what it takes to make the virtue points counter in the top right get bigger.
There's obscene amounts of in-group signaling here too. It just takes different forms. Forms other users can adapt to if they have motivation.
e.g. the whole "Paul Graham" thing. Wonderful guy, but I've inadvertently stumbled onto what appeared to be the HN equivalent of dog-whistling when it comes to him and Lisp. It was unexpected at first.
Friendly tip (in case that wasn't autocorrect in action) - "prey" is someone/something that is hunted, "pray" is what people do to talk to their favorite immortal deity or what-have-you.
When it comes to non-startup content, then hn is not the best choice. lobste.rs and lemmy.ml are more user friendly, and then there are plenty of other options, as can be seen in the subreddit for reddit alternatives.
Reddit has really been emphasizing its social aspect lately, so I wouldn't be surprised if it introduced a Friends/Followers section and shifted towards a more personalized front page.
It has had it from near the beginning, and has been trying to promote the feature more over the last few months. You now get notified when you get new followers, at least. It is still very rudimentary, I agree that this will be an area of focus for them in the upcoming months/years.
Reddit's whole philosophy with chat was just to shove it down everyone's throats, and see if it sticks. The spammers loved it right from the get-go, but nobody else is using it.
A year ago they reported monthly active users at 430M, a +30% YoY increase. Extrapolating that over one more year with the same growth rate would mean they now have 560M MAUs.
This would result in a DAU/MAU ratio of 9%, which is pretty low, and especially so for a social media company.
I virtually never go on reddit these days, but when I do it's often because I want to see peoples thoughts on a particular topic.
i.e. skiing in x place, buying x product, what's the general consensus on x movie, ect.
I imagine a lot of people are like that, especially since quora went nowhere.
Also DAU is everything to a social media company as it relates to revenue, so it's clear reddit isn't in an especially good spot. Their market cap would have to be no more than 1/5th of say Snapchat or twitter.
If found Reddit kinda unusable for something like that, at least compared to the old school IMDB forums.
The first results looking for any media are usually the official subs attached to the IP, and there you will rarely find anybody being critical of anything, it's often just a giant fandom circle-yerk.
Bigger things will sometimes have their own threads on r/movies, with more diverse takes, but that feels more like an exception than a rule.
Good for Reddit, but I'm becoming increasingly disillusioned with the entire site and how it's managed. The astroturfing isn't even subtle and the same few dozens of accounts dominate the front page day in and day out. The content on the frontpage, r/popular, r/all is starting to congeal into screenshots of tweets.
The mods of the biggest subreddits don't seem to care if the content that gets posted actually lives up to the title and purpose of the subreddit. At this point I'm convinced Reddit's platform is being used as a propaganda tool, with the goal of bombarding users with the same views in every major subreddit.
As a non-US citizen, the amount of US politics content is frankly way too much. It affects subs that should have been apolitical, like r/pics, r/science, r/coronavirus. I hoped things would calm down a bit after US elections- it did, but not nearly enough.
Truth is, I personally wouldn't mind political content, I regularly read NYT, obsessed over every update in last US election. My problem with Reddit is that there really isn't interesting political content, same old DT-bad-AOC-good over and over again.
Some niche subs are exception, but they won't ever make front page, and will be heavily brigaded if they ever do.
To be honest, I don't think the forced political content on Reddit is going to decline in any meaningful way going forward. I think the people who are constantly pushing the political content realize how powerful of a reach they have and there's no reason to slow down. You're already seeing new subreddits like "MurderedByAOC", despite the fact that AOC tweets always get posted to every major subreddit.
There's no way murderedbyAOC isn't run by her staff. It only costs about $50 to buy enough upvotes to get on the frontpage of reddit (less once people start subscribing and upvoting organically), that's probably some of the cheapest advertising-per-eyeball you can get.
r/science absolutely sickens me now. I hate how its now just cherry picking, p-hacking, statistics skewing data to fit some narrative that a persons political affiliation results them in being some "measurable" % worse than the opposite party.
Well you can thank some really well organize political action committees for that. Once reddit gained so much popularity it pretty much was co opted. Its not difficult to mount an organized attack on a particular subreddit including brigading from both directions; this includes reporting en mass
Think of it like talking points. You get your daily site and subject list and with reddit it means voting on specific postings.
> At this point I'm convinced Reddit's platform is being used as a propaganda tool, with the goal of bombarding users with the same views in every major subreddit.
+1
It's not even subtle anymore. You can predict with 99% accuracy the ideology of any political statements in content on the first 10 pages of r/all. It's a 52M daily user echo chamber.
I support free market with oversight. I believe shadow banning should be made illegal, but that companies should be free to decide if they want to block certain viewpoints. If a company blocks something like QAnon, then that is part of free market to create a new niche for people that are into fringe conspiracies that allows those viewpoints. Additionally, if a company wants to block liberal ideas then a market can exist for those who share similar ideas. The idea that these companies have to allow all speech is ridiculous, and I don't see people trying to enforce the same idea of free speech in other places of business like grocery stores, restaurants, etc where someone could start shouting some conspiracy about Democrats eating babies in the basements and not be asked to leave.
> At this point I'm convinced Reddit's platform is being used as a propaganda tool, with the goal of bombarding users with the same views in every major subreddit.
There's an entire cottage industry dedicated to doing reputation management for brands on platforms like Reddit. I don't think Reddit cares that they aren't using their ad platform directly, because the companies that manipulate Reddit buy awards for their posts and what not.
> because the companies that manipulate Reddit buy awards for their posts and what not.
that was a real stroke of brilliance but also of pure evil. When combined with the downvote button and aggressive moderation against 'undesired content' and 'misinformation', they've ensured themselves to be quite a powerful totalitarian bubble with a large army and outsized influence on internet culture.
The biggest subreddits have always been awful. The best way to use reddit is to subscribe to niche subreddits, unsubscribe to the big ones, and avoid the temptation to see the /popular or /all pages.
This is the internet of 2020s. It’s a lot of work to find good quality content. Everyone knows how to take advantage of everyone or every platform. Any new hot platform will be coopted once it gets traction. Recently made the conclusion so many other people realized is that google search is just searching through paid ads or paid seo. It just sucks frankly. DDG better but still painful.
There are no answers at Reddit, and even if there were, the interface would hide them under the fold of the post, and take several seconds to expose. If I stumble on some terms that have been SEO'd by them, and their posts are at the top of my search results, I add "-reddit -site:reddit.com" to my search, and carry on. I wish I could just block reddit from google results, like you could in the old days.
All internet communities will be overrun with new users (eternal September effect), tend toward popular/sensational posts, attract trolls, have people post illegal content, run the risk of bad moderators, be astroturfed or have paid posts, etc etc. It's a living ecosystem, so it'll keep changing.
I've been using reddit since the big Digg 2.0 migration. It is disappointing to see the popular/frontpage subreddits become such a bubble. In r/pics, for example, most of the top pics have a clear political slant. I'm not sure how much of that is intentional propaganda versus just what happens when content is based on how a majority of its users vote. I miss the days when it was mostly harmless advice animal memes.
Oh it's most certainly propaganda combined with karma farming. Ever notice how there is a steady steam of anti-trump content, contrasted with pleasant photos of Obama with a title harkening back to the good old days of his administration? You'll also notice that these posts get savaged in the comment section and yet still have 80% positive upvote ratings?
If you see something you suspect is propaganda on r/pics, just ask yourself, what is the user who submitted it trying to make me feel? What associations are they trying to form in my mind between the subject of the photo and the title?
The most noticeable switch happened in 2015 before the election; it was like night and day. Propaganda companies were hired and went to town and all the default subs were taken over. Elections are every 4 years so they are on permanent hire now.
It certainly is a propaganda tool. I don't have concrete proof just yet, but I suspect subs like /r/blackpeopletwitter are being heavily manipulated. Comments deleted en mass and rabid vote manipulation are a regular occurrence.
do you ever see how often “chinese harvesting organs” posts make it to the top? that’s pure Falun Gong propaganda. The only reputable evidence for forced organ donation is from legally executed prisoners, a practice which has been stopped. All other sources on the net lead back to Falun Gong propaganda sites.
Interesting tidbit is that the Falun Dafa believe their rituals improve their organs so they have the most desirable organs to have harvested.
As a counterpoint, almost every single news story about China, Taiwan or Hong Kong is flooded by users from r/sino and accounts with suspicious histories all using whataboutisms, ad-hominem attacks or just plain old disinformation to change the narrative into a China friendly one. As others have said, the astroturfing is not even subtle.
OP here. Yeah I don’t necessarily think that’s a counter though. Falun Gong propaganda has no place in CCP criticism as they are a cult with incoherent policies. Those who are criticizing the CCP which IMO it rightly deserves should be careful of the reach they have as bundling their sources and arguments is not the right path. They both deserve criticism.
As a counter-counterpoint, anti-China voices seems to have calmed dramatically right after the US election ended. Suggesting there was much more anti-China astroturfing around election season. Which is expected considering Trump's entire platform was anti-China, and there's much more anti-China shills than pro-China shills.
I too have noticed more pro-China voices on worldnews, but I've monitored and tagged via redditprotools and from my observation these pro-China regulars have been participating for a while, they just used to be more drowned out (suppressed by downvotes) by relatively more dominant anti-China voice. For example, the amount of anti-China users who also actively posted in /r/hongkong has dramatically reduced - hundreds of thousands of low effort HK virtue signallers lost interest. The conversation is balanced now or returned to pre HK drama / post tradewar balance, where pro-China views occasionally get positive reception, whereas before they'd be lucky to be downvoted but controversial.
There's still handful of anti-China HKers/TWers making substantive posts, but mostly indian nationalists or generic anti-China-lifers shitposting now. Bluntly, most anti-China voices are low-effort, ignorant haters with poor boilerplate China-bad rhetoric. Pro-China voices are typically Chinese national, or diaspora or adjacent, they have actual experience and knowledge on Chinese related issues from Chinese perspective. At the end of the day /r/50k sino users can't out astroturf 500k /r/hongkong, 200k /r/china and comparably numerous india nationalist. But they do have better rhetoric and are more invested in the debate compared to lol chinabad tier commentary turned persecution complexes because their debunked GFW banned words copypasta didn't cost 50c shills social credit points. Being anti-China isn't immunity from being unhinged.
>But they do have better rhetoric and are more invested in the debate
For anyone unfamiliar with r/sino:
They believe the Tienanmen Square massacre was justified
They believe the Uighur concentration camps are justified
They believe an invasion of Taiwan is righteous, and there is generally a lot of extreme vitriol directed at Taiwan and the Taiwanese
They believe in and spread a lot of misinformation concerning the HK protests, and there is generally a lot of vitriol aimed at Hong Kongers
You are banned if you question the CCP at all, with a most ridiculous ban message.
They are just as bad as r/t_d was.
Being anti-ccp is also not being an ignorant hater. Looking at their actions, it is a pretty reasonable stance.
Also, should be of note to other HN users, there is a reddit account with the name "dirtyid" which has a pro-CCP bias and a very strong anti HK democracy stance.
Well duh, that's me. I'm pro-CCP on policies I agree with and anti-CCP on policies I don't. You know... the kind of nuance reasonable people reserve for their own governments, but can't seem to generalize outside their tribe.
Sino's an unfortunate echochamber because 50k pro-China voices can't withstand brigading of vastly numerous anti-China voices. It's understandable to adopt siege mentality, plenty of other places soft/hard ban pro-China opinion. Also you list a bunch of pro China views that are consistent with pro-China interests like... that's a problem? Regardless, I don't care much for Sino, at minimum they do good counter-propaganda work. I'm more partial to china_irl which is gated by Chinese fluency.
I have no horse in this race, but generally speaking you should really refrain from teaching propaganda trolls how to be less obvious. Letting them out _themselves_ simplifies life for everyone else.
Not to mention censorship. I used to participate in a large community for a popular moba, and posted proof of the gaming company having lied to users to generate views/access. After 8h the post had thousands of upvotes and comments demanding explanations from the company. As soon as it gained traction, the mods deleted the post and banned me from the subreddit. They refused to give an explanation for doing so. That convinced me that big subreddits are just an advertisement platform for specific purposes, in this case, the moba’s products.
There are so many stories like that that I'm convinced that this is Reddit's actual business model: game the site in the interests of people who are paying them, but make it look like it's organic.
r/news used to have a r/The_Donald mod, and as a result, r/news would remove news articles that could make conservatives look bad even if they fit within r/news' posting guidelines.
Around the time of Cesar Sayoc's, the "MAGABomber"[1], mail bomb campaign, even Wikipedia articles like "Terrorism in the United States"[2] were banned in comments, and posts that contained it would have the AutoModerator shadowban the comment instantly.
Most of reddit's original userbase from the mid-2000s is gone, pushed out by changes in policy from corporate trying to make things palatable for advertisers. It's become another identity-centered (ie, posting on your own profile now) Facebook refugee settlement. I'm sure reddit corporate loves this state of affairs but it's pushed me to abandon content aggregators entirely and subsist on my own local RSS reader and email lists.
Correct. Reddit is ~75% (whatever) fake comments/astroturfing by hired companies and foreign operations to move policy and commercial goals. Its only going to get worse now that AI speech tools are so powerful. Entire articles with amazing context are written by computers now, they can obviously do the same with comments and probably are already in use.
One of the most weird examples of this: To this day they run a live-thread on the HK protests that's advertised in the "Announcements" part of r/worldnews
Yet there is no live-thread or advertisement like this for the BLM protests that escalated way more, not just in scale but also intensity, than anything that happened in Hong Kong.
Tbh I can't remember if that "Announcements" box ever had anything other that HK livethread in there.
As much as negative your comment sounds thats also my impression... in a bunch of /r/ that I follow i see the same accounts posting nothing else but pure propaganda the whole day and in more than on /r/ the same content. It generates an enormous hype just with a single "simple" post with an image and a "propaganda" title.
agreed, the main subs are cesspools in terms of content and discussion nowadays.
a few years ago i un-subbed everything and re-built my feed from the ground up, primarily subscribing to small interest-focused subs. the shilling and shitposting is close to zero and i'm much happier with my reddit experience.
I think the biggest existential risk to reddit is their mod structure. There is no effective mechanism for getting rid of bad mods, users just have to spin off into a new subreddit.
Or conservative mods, or greedy self-serving mods trying to profit from their position, or mods that stop moderating entirely until it gets filled with spam, or asshole mods who want to power trip over their crumb of authority.
There are many pathological flavors of bad mods, and reddit's mod system is poor at handling all of them.
It's not really propaganda, it's a demographic shift of who uses the site and especially the major subs. Reddit always had a monoculture of sorts in the major subs, it's just new users who have a new monoculture have started using the site while those with the old attitudes (and who are frankly older) have moved to smaller subs or given up entirely.
Not a particularly surprising turn of events to be honest, nothing stays the same forever.
It's been remarkable to again and again see redditors 'give up' on 'main' subreddits once they're taken over by hard right conservatives, then make new ones to try to maintain some semblance of reasonable discussion. I figure most people just quit the site though.
At this point the site is one step away 4chan as a grooming ground for the far right.
/r/vancouver for example has become unreadable garbage, with constant hate speech against the poor/addicted/homeless class left unquestioned and any counter opinion downvoted to oblivion.
As someone who still visits on desktop, "new" reddit is painfully slow. I'm on a gigabit connection. My internet is fast. "New" reddit pages take up to 5 seconds to load content, and just flipping over to old.reddit.com will improve load times. It's not instant like a lot of other websites, but it's still a fraction of "new" reddit's 5 seconds.
What are they using to measure performance? Do they not understand how much faster the old UI is?
Why publish this number now? Makes me think they're looking for buyers or to go public. Which would be the easiest way to make the owners, who have the only say about selling it, very rich indeed compared to trying to show nice ads to a critical audience.
Iunno, they’ve been on a censorship binge though. Dunno what it will accomplish as those users just go elsewhere, and then those communities will bolt on the regular subs as well.
<quote>Dunno what it will accomplish as those users just go elsewhere,</quote>
That's irrelevant. If they go somewhere else, then they're not Reddit's problem.
Consider that most "purges" happen to coincide with bad PR and you'll understand that's what their motive is.
Bots are a huge problem for advertisement industry and social media in general.
One good solution to this problem is as following:
* In order to post content, accounts must be purchased based on a spot fee. For example, if suddenly 10 fold more people want to open accounts then spot price will rise to 60 dollars from a base price of 6 dollars.
* This can be done through BTC payments instead of dollars to protect identity of account owners a bit.
* Users should be able to hand-select moderators and if wanted, review their actions transparently. This will eliminate all unfair moderation and provide huge value to users. An user still can get banned by a moderator but only people who subscribe to that moderator will assume user is banned.
* As accounts are bought to post content, there won’t be any advertisement. There might be some subscription fee though.
* All this can be done in a decentralised framework to increase resilience.
Do you think random internet users are more likely to purchase accounts than advertising departments? The fee seems like a good way to only get posts from professional CMs. This is how you get only advertisement.
And unless you put a similar fee to unlock voting, you don't prevent a whole class of issues with bots.
Random internet user would purchase an account if service provided value for them. For example, maybe they can create forums via this system for their gaming guild etc.
Yes, advertisers can purchase an account but there might be a popular moderator who bans these viral advertisements, based on popularity of ad-blocker I imagine such an moderator would get bunch of subscribers. Perhaps moderators can make some money through their subscribers as well, might be an interesting scheme.
Also spot price is pretty strong deterrent for advertisers especially if they keep getting banned through popular moderators.
Do you think random internet users would purchase accounts, when they get no value from it? They can still consume all the content for free, paying only gives them the right to put free labor into curation.
I can see some users pay the fee so they can downvote opponents, but otherwise why would they? And of course they can still pay a higher fee to downvote multiple times, if they are angry enough, which is exactly what you wanted to prevent in the first place...
The great thing about toxic subs is you don't have to subscribe to them! I don't see anything "toxic" on reddit. Just people having fun discussing the latest episode of "Below Deck" or sharing cat pictures, etc.
I think of Reddit as a 21st century forum, whereas Facebook is a true 'Social Media' website. Forums have different usage patterns and allegiances compared to social media websites. They can be roughly compared, but it's a poor comparison, like trying to say if Excel (reddit) or Powerpoint (facebook) is better.
Facebook has groups which sort of function as forums, but they're crudely spliced into your news feed, and rarely(!) sorted in chronological order. Forums on the other hand have dedicated threads about specific topics, are easily searchable and a two year old thread can still be relevant.
Social media sites tend to be more immediate, and comments on old posts may only continue for several days on average.
TL;DR Reddit and Facebook are very different products, with different usage patterns, and have different appeals to different segments of society.
It does not surprise me in the least that an internet forum would have a lower daily usage count compared to a social media service.
old.reddit is great, old.reddit admintools are still a shitshow and one of the largest reasons it's so hard to contain toxicity across the platform. Mods are trying to deal with 2020 user base in terms of scale and problems with 2010 tools, relying on third party tools because reddit devs are focused on user avatars.
I banned the reddit URL from my laptop so i cant go on it anymore. The extreme left wing bent is nuts, I had to go to 4chan unfortunately. Free speech used to be an ideal for the internet, now you can only get it on a few websites which is too bad. Also a lot of botting and astroturfing from foreign nations and those looking to curry support. On the business side, I can see reddit slowly becoming a new quora.
Reddit used to be a place where you could meet interesting people and talk freely about anything. This days it is dominated by censorship and an army of trolls downvoting anything that doesn't align with Marxist doctrine. There are still a couple of subreddits that fortunately don't get involved in politics, but still there are people trying to plant some Marxist drivel which then distracts from otherwise interesting topics. To be clear I like to read view points of all sides including Marxists, but I don't like the suppression of other views. Those people will surely find a different platform, but that erodes diversity and breeds extremism. We should avoid having people creating their own echo chambers and encourage diverse communication instead of censorship and forcing the only correct world view.
I used to love using Reddit after Digg's disastrous redesign many years ago, but it really has devolved in a number of key ways:
1. Site design. I can't help but think that the site redesign lends itself towards dark patterns, echo chambers, and the kind of "hot take" reactionary culture that makes most of social media so unhealthy. As a user, I am mad that Reddit uses so many annoying nudges to get me to use their mobile app instead of the browser. I am wary of "old.reddit.com" being killed. I am frustrated by the site being slower.
2. Censorship. Reddit used to be a bastion of free speech. The late Aaron Swartz was a staunch defender of it. I think users should be allowed to discuss whatever they want and view Reddit's role as a "dumb" forum hosting layer. If people don't like some content for any reason, they are free to block those posters, or leave those particular subs, but they shouldn't impose their censorship on others. Unfortunately, today Reddit heavily censors content across the board, particularly when it goes against San Francisco-centric progressive political culture. And ultimately, they even omitted Aaron Swartz from their "founders" page (https://reclaimthenet.org/aaron-swartz-reddit-founder/), which is disgusting but also sad. After all, pg noted that as a result of the early Reddit-Infogami merger, Aaron is legally a founder of the combined company (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20219).
3. Weaponization. It is very hard to escape Reddit's prevailing leftist political culture. Even if you leave r/news and r/politics, you will find politics injected into every other subreddit, including ones that have nothing to do with politics (like r/pics). This is in part because it has been targeted by activists as a way to get their word out and a location on which to squash opposing thought by any means necessary (banning subreddits, banning users, vote brigading, astroturfing, etc). Reddit users don't value civil discourse as much as vote wars to win for their side, which is a key way in which it is different from Hacker News. It's also telling that 92 of the top 500 subreddits are controlled by just 4 people (https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/fko21a/9...).
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I really hope one of the many Reddit competitors (https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/hi97fz/...) grows into a platform of its own. I have my eye on Ruqqus (http://www.ruqqus.com/) and Saidit (https://saidit.net/). I'm also looking at Parler (https://parler.com) as a Twitter alternative and MeWe (https://mewe.com/) as a Facebook alternative. Unfortunately with network effects being what they are, the big issue is that these alternatives may attract mostly those who are victims of censorship from Reddit, leading to two separate echo chambers - one for liberals and one for conservatives. It's better than one echo chamber with a "tyranny of the majority" but I'd rather we just get back to the old open Internet days where free speech reigns supreme.
Yea, it's a terrible network. I stopped using is as much after the warrant canary went away, and the new design pushed me away more. For a while I only used city subreddits for local stuff, but even those have gone full on hard-core-left and full-establishment. It's frightening.
The recent banning of thousands of communities should scare everyone.
I say this without a throwaway. I agree with you. Not only do I agree with you, but the fact that so many people don't see these very basic things you're pointed out greatly troubles me about the future of our society.
As far as alternatives, don't go for new monolithic platforms like Parler or Ruqqus. Go distributed. Join some Mastodon/Pleroma servers, follow random people, post you videos to a PeerTube instance. The Internet wasn't originally just 40 big top-tier websites. It was tons of cool independent stuff.
oh and one last thing, look up Glassine Maxwell and the reddit controversy. There's an account with her name that was very active, one of the most active account, up until her arrest. After that, Reddit started deleting TONS and TONS of of that comments. That is the world we live in. Stay safe citizen.
1. I agree that old.reddit.com is the only way to use Reddit. Let's hope it lasts.
2. They have made some high-profile mistakes, like banning /r/gendercritial. However, they are legally allowed to remove subreddits that they find don't align with their values (or their advertisers' values).
3. I don't think that routine opposition to extremism viewpoints is "leftist". The defining qualities of the post-Trump Republican are gullibility, anti-intellectualism, and immorality; these are not really political viewpoints. Outside of the Trump bubble, who respects these values? If there were a political party that housed all the rapists, it would not be a political statement to deny their voice on your internet forum.
Again, it is important to understand the lack of symmetry between so-called "conservative" and "liberal" viewpoints. Trumpists are 20-30% of the country and are largely insular. People opposed to Trump and his takeover the party are a clear majority of the country, even if a huge number of those are moderates or even right-leaning.
In other words, mainstream platforms that discriminate against extremist/immoral views are not echo chambers. Echo chambers are echo chambers.
I take some of your points and think you are right to call out that platforms that have a wide center but are hostile to extreme views are not echo chambers.
However, I think the qualities that you are saying define post-Trump Republicans are a caricature that is convenient to believe in but not fair. Trump's unexpectedly broad support has to do more with the fact that he's willing to stand up against a far-left influence that has been spiraling out of control and taking the near-left and center with it, all the while facing little critique or checks from other politicians. This is a deeper topic than I can articulate in a single HN comment, but my point is that the quick takes that portray Trump voters in such negative terms feel good to us but are not fair because people have deeper, and often legitimate reasons to support him despite all of his drawbacks.
I also think we should remember that progressive activists are only 8% of the country (https://hiddentribes.us/profiles/#progressive-activists) but they are forcing their views on everyone else, through aggressive/uncivil/authoritarian tactics and due to the physical location of influential media/tech companies. These mainstream platforms are marching to the tune of this 8% (an extreme) rather than the broad center in my opinion.
Many on the "left" are fed up with progressive identity politics too, but they do not pivot to extremist ideology in the way that Republicans have.
Trump's own failings are too many and self-evident that bother enumerating here. But you claim Trump's followers should not be subject to an unfair caricature. Why not? Trump came out as a racist in 2011, and the last five years have been a horror show. They've had years to self-correct. There are no positive ways left to be a Trump supporter.
Rural America used to be honest, hard-working, and moral. Now it's dishonest, lazy, and immoral. This is Trump's base. It's not their fault, but we should view them in mostly negative terms, just as we do with Islamic extremists in Europe (the only analog I can think of).
Yes, I agree that progressive activists have too much influence given their small numbers. But it doesn't make sense for Republicans to complain about progressive activists because they have opted out of mainstream society. First alt news, then alt morality, and now alt reality.
I'm thankful HN is not designing for 'engagement' or MAUs at the UI level.