[HN Gopher] Reddit's disrespectful design
___________________________________________________________________
Reddit's disrespectful design
Author : rognjen
Score : 1012 points
Date : 2021-06-26 12:43 UTC (10 hours ago)
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| blntechie wrote:
| Nail on the head about marketplace feature. Reddit doesn't want
| to build hard products, they want to build easy dark features
| which aims for more profiling and resultant ad dollars.
| raspyberr wrote:
| I don't have a reddit account but some small subreddits are quite
| good. I use https://teddit.net/ on the desktop and RedReader from
| F-Droid. Teddit doesn't have infinte scroll and RedReader can be
| limited to how many are loaded each time and you have to press to
| load more. This way it's much easier to not doomscroll, there are
| far fewer dark patterns, it's lighter, less tracking. You can
| bookmark subreddits on a browser and pin them in RedReader.
| Subreddits also have RSS feeds although I wouldn't advise it for
| popular ones because of the amount of hits you'll get.
| rognjen wrote:
| > small subreddits are quite good
|
| Sure, there is lots of decent content on it.
| mhasbini wrote:
| I forked old reddit redirect plugin to redirect to teddit.net:
| https://github.com/0xbsec/teddit-redirect
| spinax wrote:
| RedReader is a fantastic reddit mobile client for Android -
| they are rolling out a new version right now with a ton of
| community contributions (both bugfixes and new features).
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/RedReader/comments/o7oxdu/version_1...
| e3bc54b2 wrote:
| There is also Slide for Reddit:
| https://github.com/ccrama/Slide
|
| Available under GPLv3 ever since I remember, and always had
| fantastic UX (assuming RedReader has reached parity with
| latest update)
| SSLy wrote:
| Android and iOS have a lot of fantastic reddit clients -
| those mentioned above, but also Apollo, Boost, Sync...
| sebow wrote:
| Reddit is bad (not to say completely garbage after the "new UI")
| since about 2015.It become even more prevalent when Tencent(known
| destroyer of online communities, especially in gaming) throwed
| some money into it about 2 years ago.
|
| Everything from usability, moderation, non-transparency in
| decision-making continues to make it a bubble that completely
| defies the what it used to be when it first took off.
|
| It's not worth even going into details, and sadly alternatives
| like mastodon or something are not yet there (for again, a
| multitude of reasons).
| j56no wrote:
| I was expecting something about user accessibility, eg like how
| impossible it is to tap the Upvote button in HN on smartphone and
| tablet. If UI is indicative of culture HN hates people not using
| a mouse.
| shawnz wrote:
| Some may claim that laypeople like the new UI better, but
| anecdotally, among my social circle of non-techy people, that's
| not the case. In fact it is becoming something of a meme that
| Reddit is now impractical to use on mobile if you're not
| registered.
| rognjen wrote:
| So non-techy non-privacy conscious people do which is what
| they're looking to accomplish.
|
| That's it'd be interesting in looking at their data.
| [deleted]
| twirlock wrote:
| Reddit deserves to die. It's like their entire goal was to
| consolidate forum culture and then astroturf it to shit. Every
| single powermod glows like the sun. The political content is a
| joke, just a full on non-stop campaign to indoctrinate kids into
| the worldview of the neoliberal intelligentsia. Reddit is spooks
| dancing on the grave of the pre 10's internet. They deserve to
| fail.
| jerrygoyal wrote:
| Reddit app is not that good either. Only good thing left from old
| era of reddit is access to reddit api so that third party devs
| can build a better frontend on top of it. I don't think new
| reddit management is in favour of that decision anymore. An
| anecdote is Reddit chat (which came much later) is not part of
| the 3rd party api access so that users would stick to the
| official Reddit app. I wouldn't be too surprised if reddit decide
| one day to kill the api switch.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| This whole rant post is about reddit requiring users to register
| to use their (free) service. I don't find it a problem at all. If
| you wish to use it, register. If you don't, don't.
| diydsp wrote:
| They keep burying the link to old.reddit.com deeper.
|
| I don't understand why they submarine their ads. Just put them
| out front like everyone else. It's reasonable. Sometimes they're
| even worth it.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| I mostly read reddit on a desktop. Lots of people complain about
| the new UI, but I don't mind it. What I don't understand is how
| after all this time basic functionality of the site still doesn't
| work. Like, at least once a week you get logged out and can't log
| in or you click on a subreddit or a post and it won't load the
| content. I just don't understand how this is still going on and
| they are putting resources into avatar microtransactions and the
| live streaming. Does anyone use the live streaming stuff on
| reddit?
| thomashabets2 wrote:
| Hey, I just tweeted today about how reddit hates it's users:
|
| https://twitter.com/thomashabets/status/1408454355380998145
|
| tl;dc: they try every dark pattern trick to make you switch to
| their shitty new UI.
| habibur wrote:
| > you set your status to "Hiding". An obvious attempt to
| effectively shame people into using it.
|
| Or maybe it's just a humorous take. Remember "Anonymous Coward"
| from Slashdot?
|
| Not against the main take of the article though. But that has
| more to do with economy. On economic down turn years free sites
| like this start to crumble. And they take pro-monetizing user
| hostile steps like this.
| orangegreen wrote:
| You can get around all of this by using old.reddit.com
| grouphugs wrote:
| reddit zuxxx
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| Reddit is free to squeeze every last dark pattern in order to
| monetize, just like we are free to stop browsing Reddit. The past
| few weeks have been frustrating, enough that I've almost stopped
| Reddit altogether. Funny though... I feel like I haven't lost
| anything.
|
| As a startup community, we often talk about services being
| painkiller vs vitamin, or on a scale between 0 and 10 how sad
| would we feel if we no longer had access to a service. I've been
| thinking this the past few weeks, and losing Reddit has made me
| feel kind of meh.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Now on desktop the oldreddit option is hidden in another UI
| element.
| ajharrison wrote:
| I love how much we've come to expect from services we're not
| willing to pay a dime for.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| While not disclosing that e-mail is optional is a dark pattern,
| it's still better than what almost every other site does, which
| is making it a hard requirement.
|
| Another dark pattern on Reddit is that the web version only
| allows you to open content in _their_ app. If you already have a
| compatible third party reddit app installed, "open in app" just
| sends you to the Play store. (Normal behavior is that if you have
| an app that can open those links, that app opens).
|
| I think Reddit has realized that they have more savvy users who
| would flee if forced the official app, risking the same fate as
| Digg, but they're trying to push every other user into their ad-
| infested app.
|
| Ironically, the harder a company tries to push their app, the
| more obvious it is to me that I cannot under any circumstance
| allow it to be installed on my phone. They're clearly trying to
| do something (almost certainly against my interest) that they
| can't do without the app.
| PossiblyKyle wrote:
| From what I know, reddit is not entirely to blame on its own on
| this. Apple's policy only lets the first party app open certain
| domains, like YouTube (please correct me if I'm mistaken) and
| Twitter. Overall, a decent workaround is an app called Opener
| (link to follow) which lets you switch to specific apps from
| the share sheet. Apollo also has this feature for reddit links
| specifically.
|
| However, I do agree that reddit's behavior beyond that is
| obnoxious.
|
| Opener link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/opener-open-links-
| in-apps/id98...
| soneil wrote:
| That's a tough cookie to solve. So here's the hypothetical. I
| create a trashware game app. Typical low-hanging fruit. I set
| it as a handler for amazon.com links. Then in my app I handle
| these links in a convincing web container.
|
| And obvious, mangle the links with my referrer URL in the
| process.
|
| I call this a hypothetical, but the only reason it is, is
| that apple wouldn't allow me to register as a handler for
| amazon.com.
| chovybizzass wrote:
| Checkout upvotocracy.com -- its open source and built with svelte
| and node.js
| kgarten wrote:
| Any recommendations for alternatives? I mostly shifted to discord
| matrix and irc ...
| BusTrainBus wrote:
| Reddit is an absolutely grotesque website, both for these UI
| issues and the toxic hate it engenders on all the subreddits.
| It's magnitudes worse than any other social network. I have a
| genuine question: do people openly say they work for this company
| or is it workplace where people have to hide that they are part
| of it?
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > the toxic hate it engenders on all the subreddits.
|
| I always see people saying this and I have to wonder what
| subreddits they're subscribed to. My experience is basically
| fine, sure there's some shitty discussions or a few hostile
| idiots lurking about, but it's no worse than message boards
| generally, and most conversations seem rather good.
|
| Part of me wonders whether some posters are just
| extraordinarily sensitive, and intentionally dive into the most
| downvoted top level comments so they can get their daily dose
| of outrage at the things trollS say.
| iratewizard wrote:
| I sometimes wonder if reddit was designed to spread
| groupthink, or if it was just a happy accident.
| tralarpa wrote:
| I guess the specialized subreddits are okayish, but I am
| always shocked when looking at the frontpage. The amount of
| hate and misery that appears in the most liked posts (posts
| and comments) is disconcerting. Just checked: Cringetopia,
| IdiotsInCars, MurderedByWords, JusticeServed, facepalm,
| PublicFreakout, iamverysmart, ChoosingBeggars...
|
| I know that most reddit visitors are teenagers or young
| adults and that controversal topics get more clicks etc. etc.
| That's what people want to see? It's so...how should I say
| it?...sad.
| PhillyG wrote:
| Specialised subs with good moderation, dedicated to topics
| that are positive things, are pretty much always fun
| experiences. Those subreddits you mention though - I think
| I've filtered every single one of them from my feed because
| they are just inherently negative
| denimnerd42 wrote:
| I filtered every one of those subs and even darker ones
| appear behind it. It's like a never ending mole hunt.
| jasonladuke0311 wrote:
| Every local subreddit I have ever visited is a radioactive
| dumpster fire. I would like to single out r/Denver in
| particular, because I live there.
|
| I genuinely cannot believe the comments people post there
| sometimes. It's like some sort of misanthropic, one-upmanship
| circle-jerk.
| makotech222 wrote:
| Check any main mildly political post on a main subreddit and
| find the top comments to be in support of genocide of chinese
| people for the crime of challenging us supremacy.
| meowster wrote:
| > I have to wonder what subreddits they're subscribed to.
|
| Just look at r/all
| eaceaser wrote:
| I openly say I work for Reddit. I even actively try to convince
| people to work here as well!
| Finbarr wrote:
| All of these things used to annoy me as well. Then I downloaded
| the app and subscribed monthly to get rid of the ads. Now my
| reddit experience is awesome.
|
| Reddit isn't a public service. It's a private company trying to
| increase their profits. The native app experience is way better
| than the website. Undoubtedly they see higher engagement from
| folks using the app, so want as many people as possible to use
| it.
|
| Ads looking like posts? Sounds like they are trying to monetize
| their traffic. If you don't want to see the ads, pay for the
| service.
| tfsh wrote:
| It constantly amazes me how bad Reddit's interface is, videos
| either don't play or randomly start playing despite them not
| being in the viewport. They run random A|B experiments which add
| unnecessary components such as avatars next to peoples comments.
| Random acts of monetization are shoved down my throat at every
| turn. I honestly think the Reddit team are on a purpose built
| mission to design the most user hostile forum.
|
| I've tried browsing Reddit in incognito on my phone before and it
| wouldn't let me without installing their app, thankfully
| old.reddit.com exists. From clicking on a search result to
| viewing an image post took ~8 clicks. The flow was analogous to:
| -> Click on search result -> ending on an AMP page
| and clicking the bottom sheet exit button to view the post in the
| browser rather than the app -> clicking on the title
| to view the actual post in the non AMP format ->
| ending up on the actual post and being told I need to view it in
| the app (which completely removes the point of using incognito)
| -> changing the URL to old.reddit.com which is tedious with a
| phone keyboard -> finally load the page and click
| on the image
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| Seconded. The old.reddit.com UI is still pretty bad on mobile,
| but it's the only remotely usable one.
|
| The default mobile site goes out of its way to make it
| difficult to read the thread, while also confusingly merging
| other threads into the page.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Both old. and i.reddit.com are slowly being left behind by
| new features and such things. It breaks conversation when new
| reddit can use one syntax for code blocks and old reddit
| can't see it like it's supposed to look.
| tazjin wrote:
| old. now has a new EU cookie banner which, to accept or
| configure cookies, takes you to the new version. I blocked
| the banner in my adblocker.
|
| If they're turning off the old reddit anytime soon I'll
| probably just leave.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| There are unofficial front-ends available, such as
| _Teddit_ :
|
| * https://teddit.net/
|
| * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25310206
| ehsankia wrote:
| > I blocked the banner in my adblocker.
|
| Hah I did the exact same thing. Their stupid redirect
| didn't even work.
| afterburner wrote:
| Try i.reddit.com
| ehsankia wrote:
| on mobile just use a custom app, all the web interfaces are
| utter shit, and the google links take you to AMP all the
| time. I just use rif, has worked flawlessly for a decade
| and has all the features, even mod stuff.
| thanatos519 wrote:
| i.reddit.com FTW!
|
| I would give you gold for this comment if this was reddit.
| SilasX wrote:
| Yes (about old version on mobile). It has annoyances like
| how, on iOS, double-tap-to-zoom only occasionally works.
|
| And as for videos, if you scroll down, it will hog precious
| real estate at the top to keep showing the video with only a
| tiny X at the corner that's hard to click (because iOS will
| misinterpret it as asking to show the URL bar and options).
|
| And I really don't think any UX designer has even looked at
| _any_ of the mobile versions in landscape mode (haven 't
| checked if the app even allows it). I suspect they haven't
| looked at the torrent of modals assaulting you either.
|
| Oh and I was opted out of the old design like three times
| yesterday.
|
| Edit: For an example of something even worse, Quora (on iOS
| safari) has been stuck on a permanent "something went wrong"
| for months. I have to view it on desktop.
|
| Edit2: Sorry, one more update. Even on the old design, when
| you try to report a comment, it's somehow inserted a new
| style for picking the reason for reporting ... which breaks
| my extention's (Tridacty's) ability to pick it up as a
| clickable link from the keyboard. Why??? You just had to
| leave it alone!
| Spivak wrote:
| The best solution I've found is buying Apollo and Opener so
| then the flow is.
|
| Long press link, tap share, tap open in Apollo.
| 0x00000000 wrote:
| If it is an Imgur link there are additional steps. It shows you
| a microscopic image that is compressed to hell and refuses to
| respect "show desktop site". The only way to see the full size
| image is to manually edit the url to
| "i.imgur.com/<id>.<extension>" where <extension> is one of jpg,
| jpeg, or webp but you have to guess. It's astounding just how
| hostile the entire experience is.
| batiste wrote:
| I still use the old design to this day...
| arcturus17 wrote:
| Yea, fuck all this noise.
|
| I've been meaning to quit any and all digital activity that's a
| bottomless well (ie, you can get more content ad infinitum). This
| includes social networks, Youtube, Netflix, etc.
|
| Of these, Reddit was probably my worst vice, as I could just pop
| up my phone and endlessly read mind-numbing crap, no matter the
| place and time. My monkey brain has been completely addicted to
| this motion for well over a decade now, and I always made excuses
| for myself because I thought it actually had some intellectual
| value (when I was really mostly browsing r/games and r/soccer,
| not r/programming or other communities from which to derive some
| enlightenment).
|
| Now I can't do that even if I wanted to, b/c their new site is a
| UX abomination. They're very close to hiding everything behind
| login, and they place all kinds of crap to herd you to the mobile
| app (no thanks!)
|
| So a big thank you to Reddit management, I guess?
|
| To anyone who may have even a mild digital addiction or bad
| habit, call it what you will, which you're suspecting is making
| you unhappy or limiting your potential: JUST QUIT.
|
| You won't miss it and you'll observe amazing results.
|
| In my case, I've seen the following in the last weeks (and other
| times I've done this in the past):
|
| a. Increased focus
|
| b. Longer, deeper sleep
|
| c. Better relationships
|
| d. Increased productivity at work and hobbies
|
| e. Improved mood
|
| f. Greatly increased control over my time
|
| g. Much more time spent reading
|
| This was at virtually zero cost, since I wasn't getting any value
| from about 98% of my browsing - maybe an enlightening Reddit post
| or Youtube vid here and there, but I think I can easily make it
| up with reading.
|
| Your results may vary of course, but there are good chances you
| will experience some or all of the above.
|
| I know full well it's not as easy as it sounds but give it a shot
| - you won't regret it.
| MandieD wrote:
| "...quit any and all digital activity that's a bottomless
| well..."
|
| Thank you for that. The past few weeks, I've started asking
| myself, "am I watching people I don't know arguing about
| something, assigning points (likes) and considering jumping
| in?" to break myself out of the worst time-wasting and
| pointlessly agitating stuff, but you've given me an even better
| target.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| In all seriousness, this is what made me finally quit Facebook
| a decade ago.
|
| They made it annoying enough to use the product I wanted that
| the barrier to quiting was drastically decreased.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Yeah I stopped using Reddit a couple of months ago and I'm way
| less stressed out and I've just went back to finding forums to
| post at for discussion the way I did before Reddit. There was a
| time when I think I did get some intellectual discussion from
| Reddit and this is why it overtook my forum use and replaced
| it. Those days are gone, it's now just a shitty Facebook clone
| with extra steps and every sub, even r/programming, is a bunch
| of people who are just memeing 90% of the time.
| jeedomer wrote:
| I only begrudgingly got a smartphone last year - after watching
| everyone else get addicted to them "from the outside" and I've
| fallen right into the trap with them. Finally made an account
| to ask, can you be more specific about what qualifies as a
| bottomless well? I have Messenger for talking to my family but
| never use the rest of Facebook. Does that disqualify it? What
| about only using Youtube for channels like Techmoan or Mark
| Felton?
| peanutbutter_ wrote:
| For someone who has completely quit the endless "dopamine drip"
| of digital content, what have you replaced it with?
| arcturus17 wrote:
| * Reading
|
| * More and better work (I work for myself, so this is
| actually great)
|
| * Movies (I don't consider these to be part of the bottomless
| well. I would very rarely watch more than one in one
| sitting).
|
| * Actively listening to music and singing (used to sing in a
| metal band, if I'm bored, instead of going on Youtube, I'll
| just growl Metallica or Megadeth around the house like back
| in the day)
|
| * Hanging out with friends
|
| I've done significantly more of all of the above since I
| quit.
|
| I'm also feeling more creative and entrepreneurial thanks to
| the feeling of mastery over my time, and the frequent boredom
| that comes with not having a quick digital fix that ends up
| turning into hours of infinite scrolling.
|
| My biggest drains were Youtube, Reddit, and news media. I've
| easily reclaimed anywhere between 10-15h just from quitting
| those.
| Terretta wrote:
| > _not r /programming or other communities from which to derive
| some enlightenment_
|
| Some obscure subreddits remain a source of emerging thinking on
| esoteric areas of focus.
|
| The trick is an app that lets you exclude everything else,
| fully under your editorial control, with no dark patterns.
|
| On iOS, I use Apollo (RIP Alien Blue).
|
| > _quit any and all digital activity that 's a bottomless well_
|
| I'd add "short form 'content'" to that.
|
| At least once a quarter try to not pick up or browse any short
| form content until you've read 1 - 5 books, however many it
| takes to get past any agitation pulling you out of the reading
| flow, till you can again read for hours at a go.
|
| It may be easier to start with one or two fiction, then switch
| to two or three non-fiction. Something like: -
| airport novel - philosophical fiction / literature
| - pop non-fiction - topical non-fiction - textbook
| or research book
|
| You can pick back up short form once your brain is willing to
| absorb an entire research book.
| wdr1 wrote:
| The closing off subreddits is particularly annoying.
|
| The Reddit mobile has a longstanding bug in how handle it handles
| GIFs. I have a bot (u/CalvinBot) that posts the official Calvin &
| Hobbes strip to /r/calvinandhobbes each day. GoComics, the
| copyright holder, only publishes it as a GIF, so that's how it's
| submitted to Reddit.
|
| However, because of the bug in the app, people can view the GIF
| properly. The advice used to be just switch to your browser, but
| because of Reddit now breaking that, even that workaround doesn't
| work now.
| wdr1 wrote:
| > However, because of the bug in the app, people can view the
| GIF properly
|
| *can't
| jsilence wrote:
| I'm simply not using reddit at all. Never had a problem with
| their dark design pattern.
| JimmaDaRustla wrote:
| some things are just glaringly bad, like the chat box...it has no
| close button...you have to click the chat icon in the top nav bar
| to close it
| jopsen wrote:
| I never really got started with reddit when it was hot..
|
| And every time I've tried to use the site, it just feels like a
| hot mess...
| omega3 wrote:
| They make it very difficult to be a contributor as well, a lot of
| subreddits focus on showcasing/bragging rather than discussions
| now. I've had a DIY question I've posted to the three biggest
| home improvement/diy subreddits and it was deleted from one,
| downvoted to oblivion in another one without replies and
| downvoted to 0 in the last one with the only comment proposing a
| solution so overkill grotesque that I didn't bother to reply.
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| Reddit wants pictures to make a bottomless well of content.
| Your question is a speed bump causes people to stop scrolling.
| cunthorpe wrote:
| Downvotes would be fine if I ever managed to post anything.
| Most subs have automated post removal when the post doesn't
| follow whatever requirement they have but you only know this
| requirement after you're done making your post. Thanks a lot
| for letting me talk to a wall, Reddit.
| sreeramb93 wrote:
| I deleted my reddit app and switched to old design recently.
|
| Reddit was becoming very addictive in the morning.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Tildes.net (https://tildes.net) has been a refreshingly sane,
| well-designed, and well-administered alternative.
|
| I all but completely gave up on Reddit for my own posting a
| couple of years ago, following an early set of "features" that
| I'd categorise more as "contemptuous" than "disprespectful". More
| deeply, _Reddit simply isn 't very good at fostering
| conversations_. It _does_ have depth, and there are communities
| which I 'll still visit, very occasionally.
|
| That said, it's been a slow death for most of the past decade, no
| matter what the KPI stats are claiming.
| tygrak wrote:
| Yes, Tildes is great, it is also a non-profit. The creator of
| Tildes, Deimos, also used to work at reddit and modded some of
| the better subreddits.
|
| As an aside, the site is currently down for some updates for
| the first time in at least two years. Virtually 100% uptime,
| incredible.
| WORMS_EAT_WORMS wrote:
| There was a time when Google search would punish sites like
| this... enable competition... reward smaller sites...
|
| I really wish Google would start de-ranking behavior like this.
| ahtihn wrote:
| Does anyone end up on reddit through google searches?
| system16 wrote:
| Absolutely. Aside from programming problems, "product/service
| reddit" is probably my most commonly used Google search
| query.
|
| Whenever I'm looking for information about a product,
| service, restaurant, etc. one of the first things I look for
| is a discussion on Reddit. As much as I hate what Reddit has
| become, it still is the best place I've found for discussion
| from locals or enthusiasts that provide a much more accurate
| description of a product/restaurant/etc. than user reviews or
| ad filled blogs.
|
| I use Google for this since Reddit's search is garbage.
| jlokier wrote:
| Yes, I only end up on Reddit via Google searches, looking for
| the answer to a question.
|
| Then when looking at the discussion from the search result,
| I'll sometimes see other topics that look interesting.
|
| Unfortunately the web experience is so offputting, and so
| weirdly discontinuous, that it's hard to stick around and
| enjoy it. It's high friction and reminds me how much time I'm
| wasting by it being so clunky. Other interesting places are
| easier to get into without the same feeling.
|
| The way the other topics shown (that aren't the answer to my
| question) are the most recent ones is offputting as well. It
| means no context around the time of the discussion I was
| looking at, no chance of seeing related discussions from the
| tine, and if I land in the same subreddit from multiple
| searches, no variety to show me why the subreddit is
| interesting.
|
| So I've never felt interested enough to stick around and
| create a Reddit account, and my only visits are from Google
| searches that occasionally land on Reddit.
| detaro wrote:
| yes. especially on various technical topics.
| alkonaut wrote:
| There is just zero chance I'll use the current web version of
| Reddit in its current form. I use Apollo on mobile (And Tweetbot
| for Twitter) and I'm happy.
| prestigious wrote:
| Twitter is like this also. I want to reduce my Twitter usage so I
| delete the app and sometimes I just want to see what Elon or
| somebody like that has been up to. Can I go use their website
| without logging in? Hell no I can't. Just sucks
| PhillyG wrote:
| Imho twitter is a far bigger problem for hiding things. A)
| tweets often get embedded in news articles - meaning sometimes
| context is left out of an article and you can't even tell if
| it's click bait or maybe the article is being harsh /vicious B)
| reddit is supposedly about community discussion so it would
| actually make sense if individual subs had the power to only
| show content to logged in permitted accounts only - that way
| banned accounts can't snoop on users?
| lalaland1125 wrote:
| Reddit has taken the approach of making their website worse
| instead of trying to make their app better.
| PenguinCoder wrote:
| And the official app still sucks.
| raydev wrote:
| Works great for reading and commenting, what else do you want
| it to do?
| lalaland1125 wrote:
| Yeah, their app is incredibly buggy and doesn't support
| useful features like comment hyperlinks.
| [deleted]
| GordonS wrote:
| Fully agree with everything in TFA. I'm an occasional Reddit
| user, and almost exclusively a lurker. But over the past few
| years they have been making it more and more intolerable to use,
| especially on mobile.
|
| The most recent things have been blocking you completely from
| subreddits, and blocking you completely from threads below the
| second level (you hit "read more", and get a popup).
|
| And beside the many dark patterns, there are also "stupid
| patterns" - for example, in a thread of only 20 comments or so,
| it only load about 4 by default. And if you want to load more
| from below a thread, it does a _full page reload_ , now showing
| you _only_ that subthread!
|
| It really is an absolutely _maddening_ experience, that must
| surely serve to drive users away and make them hate it?! For one
| of the biggest sites in the world, I just can 't fathom how
| unbelievably bad the whole design is - _every_ part of it!
|
| And as only an occasional user, I don't want to install their
| shitty app (which _requires_ a Reddit account).
|
| Years back I used to actually like Reddit - now, I fucking hate
| it :-/
| trainsplanes wrote:
| It truly is incredible how a site that was perfectly usable
| over a decade ago has been massively updated to become unusable
| and with zero desirable features.
|
| I guess now there's video embedding, but it's the worst
| embedded video I've come across on a major site by far.
| TMWNN wrote:
| >I guess now there's video embedding, but it's the worst
| embedded video I've come across on a major site by far.
|
| No way to get a URL for the video only, so there's no way to
| embed it elsewhere.
| specialist wrote:
| Yes and:
|
| I just don't understand reddit's UI. I'd probably use the
| subreddit's I join a lot more if their forum features were more
| like HN & lobsters.
|
| > _...it does a full page reload, now showing you only that
| subthread!_
|
| Some times expands in place, some times link to new page. Since
| I can't predict what will happen, I rarely drill down into
| threads.
|
| I lurk on r/awww and the like. (Mental therapy during the
| apocolypse.) I have no idea why OC is shown or not. Further,
| the UI for submitting posts is turrible. I legit have no idea
| what will happen. So I've stopped trying.
|
| I wouldn't mind using a native or 3rd party client. Shit, I cut
| my teeth on CompuServe, BIX, FidoNet, etc. They had thriving
| ecosystem of offline clients. But the reddit clients I've tried
| just haven't gelled with me. (Didn't care enough to think about
| it too much.)
|
| Now that I'm using Firefox regularly again, I may try Reddit
| Enhancement Suite again.
| GordonS wrote:
| > Some times expands in place, some times link to new page
|
| Yes, you're right actually, and in a way it's worse than
| always loading a new page, simply because it's so
| unpredictable. I mean... who the hell thinks this stuff up?
|
| Hadn't heard of the Reddit Enhancement Suite - if it drops
| some of the bullshit, I'll happily give it a try.
|
| As an aside, I also started out on CompuServe, towards the
| late 90s! I was on dialup of course, but I actually used to
| love the CompuServe UI! When Netscape Navigator showed up and
| the World Wide Web was just starting to become a thing, I
| remember thinking it was a bit shit: "wtf is going to want
| this when CompuServe is available?!". Didn't I turn out to be
| so, so wrong!
| specialist wrote:
| One gray beard to another:
|
| If it's any consolation, I have always hated HTML and
| adjacent. Initially, it was such a huge leap backwards,
| like giving yourself a lobotomy. I just didn't get the
| appeal. As a better gopher, absolutely, sign me up. But the
| next hypertext & multimedia platform? HA! We already had
| awesome multimedia and hypertext. I expected the Next
| Thing, not some punk's brain dead IMG tag, blink, and
| marque scroll.
|
| Shows what I know.
|
| My very first "web" project, in 1998, was dual publishing
| product catalogs to CD-ROM and online. What the kids today
| call "static site generators." (Wrestling with Netscape App
| Server and JRunner cemented my hatred of the web.) I
| treated URLs as just another UNC; pathnames are pathnames,
| right? I just didn't grasp the impact domain names would
| have.
|
| I eventually concluded that the magic sauce was URLs, built
| on top of DNS, begating "the web".
|
| That took me a really long time to appreciate. Its failings
| -- broken links, one-way links, link rot -- were also its
| strengths.
|
| I've been run over time and again by "worse is better." So
| many times, that I can't help but conclude I'm impaired
| somehow. Like I really thought Jini, JXTA, tuplespaces,
| grid computing were going to transform everything. Instead
| we got REST, serverless, and JavaScript. Like going to a
| fancy restaurant, ordering a medium rare porterhouse steak,
| and being served whatever they scrapped off the rat
| infested dirt floor. And then when you protest, even so
| much as raise an eyebrow, you're the idiot.
|
| HTTP isn't so bad. I really wish I had thought about HTML
| and HTTP separately, from the beginning. I actually kinda
| like HTTP 1.1 & 2.0. (The successors continue to befuddle
| me.)
|
| Thanks for listening. I'll be out front, yelling at kids
| and dogs.
|
| PS- I was totally right about Java. Too bad Sun let Captain
| IMG Tag sabotage it on the client.
| techrat wrote:
| change the url from www to old.reddit.com and you can bypass
| most of the bullshit.
|
| Question is how long it'll last.
| GordonS wrote:
| Thanks, this does seem to work! It's a PITA to change the URL
| every time I click a Google search result that hits Reddit,
| but it's better than dealing with all the bullshit Reddit
| throws at me.
| sjagoe wrote:
| I use a firefox extension called Redirector to regex-
| rewrite some URLs like this.
| Causality1 wrote:
| Don't forget about open hostility toward mobile browser users. If
| you don't want to use their app they treat you like the scum of
| the earth. That goes for Reddit-originating sites like Imgur as
| well.
| woah wrote:
| It works fine when you're logged in on the app.
| 23B1 wrote:
| reddit is the most dangerous bubble-building tool on the web,
| next to twitter.
| raydev wrote:
| I feel like one of the few people on HN who prefers apps over
| websites. Websites always flicker/drop frames, too easy to
| accidentally mistap links on phone, etc.
|
| This is certainly disrespectful design, but I experience none of
| it.
| phren0logy wrote:
| For iOS, Apollo is worlds better than either the web or iOS app:
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/apollo-for-reddit/id979274575
| randallsquared wrote:
| The most disrespectful pattern I encounter regularly on reddit is
| that it forgets that I want the nicer, more compact interface.
| There will come a day when they remove it entirely, clearly, and
| that will be the end of my reddit usage, more or less.
| jffry wrote:
| If you access Reddit via https://old.reddit.com it's always the
| better UI. Bonus is that this works even if you're not signed
| in.
|
| There's a handy browser extension for automatically redirecting
| you if you click a link to Reddit's other domains:
| https://github.com/tom-james-watson/old-reddit-redirect
|
| If you'd like to disable custom subreddit styles even if you're
| not signed in, you can add these custom filters to uBlock
| Origin:
| old.reddit.com##^link[ref="applied_subreddit_stylesheet"]
| old.reddit.com##^#header-img-a
| old.reddit.com##^.infobar.listingsignupbar
| e3bc54b2 wrote:
| Instead of a full extension, I recommend a simple userscript,
| serving faithfully for 2 years now:
|
| https://pastebin.com/raw/niGCX6AH
|
| Then Mozilla had to go and fuck up extensions on mobile
| firefox, so now I simply avoid Reddit from phone. On totally
| unrelated note, I suddenly find myself with extra free time!
| jffry wrote:
| The "full extension" I linked is 800 bytes of JS, and
| thanks to being an extension it can redirect network
| requests before the page even loads (useful because
| sometimes Reddit can be quite sluggish to respond, and also
| because it's good nettiquette to not make spurious
| requests).
|
| Besides which, applying a UserScript requires a much larger
| "full extension". I'd much rather have a small purpose-
| built extension which is, via browser-enforced policy, only
| allowed to run on the specific domains for which it is
| required.
|
| I audited the code, installed it, turned off updates, and
| it has faithfully served me for a while now.
|
| To each their own, I suppose.
| throwaway64643 wrote:
| > If you access Reddit via https://old.reddit.com it's always
| the better UI
|
| This is an assumption that I'd had until I read feedback from
| users who joined reddit after introduction of the new reddit
| design, that old reddit web interface is ugly. Well, I think
| reddit knows better than us. They have the data!
| ehsankia wrote:
| That's the whole plan, keep the old interface around (along
| with power users) until the new user population (who only
| knows the new interface) grows large enough to be able to
| get rid of the old interface without getting a full Digg-
| like exodus.
| thrwyoilarticle wrote:
| Well the old interface _is_ ugly. But the new interface is
| ugly and less ergonomic.
| peakaboo wrote:
| Sounds more like you have cookies being cleaned.
| randallsquared wrote:
| As others mentioned happens for them, I'm still logged in,
| and can get to the settings page to fix it without logging in
| again.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| How does it keep forgetting? I just change that in settings and
| it's never forgotten or reverted for me.
| jostmey wrote:
| It always forgets for me even when I'm logged in
| bogwog wrote:
| By 'compact', do you mean i.reddit.com, or old.reddit.com?
|
| I've found that the former does sometimes redirect me to
| the garbage mobile version when I click on a thread (even
| while logged in), but the latter persists as long as the
| setting is enabled in my account.
| ra7 wrote:
| This started happening to me only a few weeks ago. I've
| noticed it happens every Monday for me, so presumably some
| setting is being erased weekly to get users to move to the
| new design.
| ishiz wrote:
| It keeps forgetting for me too. That is to say, in my mobile
| browser and desktop browser I opt out of the redesign in
| favor of the old.reddit.com design, but about once per month
| it'll just revert back to the redesign. I don't think my
| cookies are being cleared because I'll stay logged in and
| I've never found any other setting that flips in the same
| way, it is only the Redesign opt-out that does this.
|
| I don't know how to explain why many people say "this never
| happens to me" and other people say "this happens
| frequently."
|
| While I'm on the subject, another grey pattern the article
| missed is the button to opt out of the redesign on mobile.
| When clicking the hamburger menu there used to be a button at
| the bottom called (iirc) "Opt out of Redesign." The same
| option exists today except they've moved it into a Settings
| submenu and renamed it "Request desktop site" which implies
| it's a temporary change.
|
| Lastly, if you search you'll find threads where people say
| the web pages are sometimes rendered without any opt out
| button. I just opened an incognito window to test this and I
| simply cannot find a button to revert to the old design, even
| when using my mobile browser's Desktop Mode. So unless a
| visitor knows about old.reddit.com they are forced to use the
| new design.
| marcinzm wrote:
| Facebook makes $32 per user per year. That is across all billion+
| users worldwide. They make around $170 per user in the US And
| Canada. No non-advertising monetization strategy will come close
| to that number. Assuming 10% of users pay (which is a very
| generous assumption) you'd need to have each user in the US pay
| $1700 per year!!!!
| realce wrote:
| If I don't have to spend money on advertising engineers, PR to
| keep my company nice for advertisers, ect, then I don't really
| need 1700 per user.
|
| Facebook is a database and a UI with ten billion dollars worth
| of ad exec salaries glued on.
| egypturnash wrote:
| _Why aren't they pivoting into a marketplace instead?_
|
| I'm just gonna guess this is because "supporting and policing a
| marketplace" is its own special kind of hell; supporting and
| policing a discussion forum is bad enough without adding on all
| the way monetary transactions can go awry.
| throwaway64643 wrote:
| Honestly, all suggestions from the original post is the epitome
| of "If everyone is stupid, then why aren't you rich". The
| moment he suggested OnlyFans model on Reddit, all of his
| suggestions lost value. Do you know that OnlyFans even doesn't
| want to be OnlyFans anymore?
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| What do they want to be?
| sunstone wrote:
| Following in the footsteps of Digg and Slashdot.
| tbrake wrote:
| I've long thought about making a thread like this so I'm happy to
| see it. Fed up with this actively user-hostile web experience to
| try and drive people to the app.
|
| My main gripe is definitely expanding comments -
|
| > First of all, only the top comment will be shown. Then you can
| tap view more which will load another two. But you cannot open
| all the comments.
|
| Because the "create an account to continue" toast pictured is
| unclosable on my phone. Meaning not only can I not expand any
| more comments, but I can't even go back see other un-expanded
| comments. I need to refresh.
|
| Just an absolute rancid experience all around.
| diminish wrote:
| Reddit has become another VC invested company where crippling
| features, dark patterns on forced "adoption" and dark "growth"
| hacks du jours are the norms.
|
| I'm a very early and long term user, and I slowly moved away
| after "the" investment.
|
| HN on the other hand is still safe, as the huge success of YC
| and their aim of gathering talent and readers gives more
| financial freedom. What if some investor now invests in HN,
| gathers a board, assigns a CEO with the profitability and
| "growth" target? I'm afraid to ask this, but the same could
| happen.
| insulanus wrote:
| The value of HN to YCombinator is keeping a large community
| of plugged-in and knowledgeable people on-tap. If there were
| any hint of commercializing HN, it would be clear as day that
| Ycombinator was now run by idiots. Everyone would flee faster
| than a jackrabbit from a pack of wolves.
| sedatk wrote:
| > has become VC infested company
|
| FTFY.
| Santosh83 wrote:
| HN is too niche to milk for profitability like Reddit. Only
| relatively technical people hang out here and will probably
| move to, or setup, an alternative if HN gets sold out.
| Atlas-Marbles wrote:
| "too niche...Only relatively technical people hang out
| here"
|
| Sounds like early reddit.
| RocketOne wrote:
| As long as HN doesnt focus on pics, gifs and TikTok
| garbage, it's probably safe from those who have a 1
| millisecond attention span.
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| If I could buy equity in HN I would do it in a heartbeat.
| [deleted]
| rgovostes wrote:
| > Meaning not only can I not expand any more comments, but I
| can't even go back see other un-expanded comments.
|
| I'm pretty certain it used to work and they intentionally broke
| it so that you cannot close the modal popup.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| It's atrocious that their main interface is like this, but have
| you tried i.reddit.com?
| PenguinCoder wrote:
| old.reddit.com is usable too. But for some reason it keeps
| logging me out, recently.
| paol wrote:
| I use old.reddit.com exclusively (automatically enforced by
| a browser extension[1]) and haven't experienced unexpected
| logouts.
|
| [1] https://github.com/tom-james-watson/old-reddit-redirect
| dvtrn wrote:
| you're not alone and it's a common complaint. along with
| the complaint that toggling "opt out of redesign" is
| constantly coming untoggled randomly and without warning.
| This doesn't even happen between browser sessions where one
| would think a cookie got dropped, it can happen simply
| between pages. one moment you're using old reddit, click a
| comment link, boom..you're back on the redesign and having
| to change the setting again.
| alex_c wrote:
| Not grandparent commenter, but I don't. I switched to the
| logged out, default experience recently. It's so user hostile
| it's been pretty effective at curbing my Reddit addiction and
| making me waste less time on that site.
| jeltz wrote:
| Haha, I did the same on my phone to reduve my Reddot
| useage.
| code_duck wrote:
| If I couldn't use the old reddit interface I would have stopped
| using reddit entirely a year or two ago. Not only because the new
| interface is even worse than the old one, but also using the old
| one allows you to dodge most of the issues listed in the article.
| I could list another 1/2 a dozen annoying changes or limitations,
| including massive functionality downgrades on mobile web. Once
| old reddit isn't usable, I suppose I'll be entirely done with the
| site which is a shame after 13 years.
|
| Reddit went from being simple, bare-bones and friendly to
| overwrought, baffling and user hostile.
| throwaway284534 wrote:
| Does anyone else want to rant about Reddit's AMP pages that show
| up on Google? Oh I could go on about it...
|
| The managers at Reddit, in their infinite wisdom, decided that
| the preferred experience of a Google user searching for content
| on reddit should redirected to their wonky app. And if they don't
| have the app, they should be punished with modals upon modals.
| "Reddit looks better in the app!" Oh, you disagree? Well press
| this tiny button to indicate your unsaved preference and we will
| allow you to view a preview of the thread you came for. But...if
| you can find the illusive button which shows the whole thread, we
| will grant you full access -- after asking you to install the app
| again!
|
| It's enough to make the designers of the Get Smart door scene
| collapse in embarrassment knowing that their parody has become
| the reality of every unsuspecting person who just wants to browse
| Reddit.
|
| And while I have you here, please tell me what's going on with
| the Reddit's scroll positioning when navigating out of the site.
| Just by clicking a external link in a thread, you've not only
| lost your position, navigating back to Reddit will tease you with
| the last version of the page before everything refreshes back to
| the top.
|
| And God forbid if you keep a tab open up for too long,
| encountering the most obnoxious error screen imaginable. "Ouch!
| Something went wrong. Refresh!" Yeah, something did go wrong. You
| broke your site. You killed the golden goose. You were the Chosen
| One! It was said that you would destroy Digg, not join them.
| Bring balance to the force, not leave it in darkness.
| ishiz wrote:
| There is also a bug with the AMP pages such that the submission
| dates for the threads are often wrong. For example you're
| searching for threads that have been posted in the last month,
| some of the results will say something like "7 days ago" until
| you click and see it is actually 5 years old.
| xmprt wrote:
| Reddit has a MASSIVE security vulnerability with their AMP
| pages and I really hope they get in trouble for it because of
| how much they shove it down people's throats.
|
| It's possible to visible quarantined or even banned
| subreddits through their AMP pages. From there you can still
| view deleted videos and other content through the autoplay
| "previews".
| edgyquant wrote:
| Yes this is so annoying. Looking for a thread within the last
| year doesn't work and I always end up with 7-10 years ago
| CamelCaseName wrote:
| Are you talking about a Reddit issue?
|
| Google is notoriously bad at indexing the correct time a
| Reddit thread is posted.
|
| I have no clue why this is, I assume perhaps it is seeing a
| different date somewhere on the page (e.g. the "recently
| viewed threads" box).
|
| It doesn't seem to be directional either. That is, it's not
| just old threads pretending to be newer, but new threads also
| sometimes appear older.
|
| This is why I don't attribute any malice to the issue.
| ishiz wrote:
| I don't attribute any malice either. I can't remember where
| I read it but I heard somewhere earlier this year that
| Reddit was trying to fix it.
| dole wrote:
| Just recently they changed the submission date display format
| from "7 months" to "7m", not like that's ambiguous at all.
|
| One of my favorites is how it'll load a basic profile with
| just your name, 0 karma and no subs when the site seems to be
| overloaded.
| shusaku wrote:
| Every time I get annoyed by something like this, I go to the
| front page if Reddit, see that 90% of the posts are political
| advertisements disguised as viral content, and realize it's a
| minor problem in the grand scheme. I just wish communities
| would make their own message boards again instead of coalescing
| on subreddits that they have zero control of.
| pkamb wrote:
| The AMP page is mostly the same as the normal "new." Reddit
| mobile page... except worse in the AMP-specific ways.
|
| So why does Reddit use AMP at all? I can only understand AMP
| being good for some news site where it gives you them a mobile
| site design "for free".
| ehsankia wrote:
| Reddit is literally the worst use of AMP I've ever seen, and
| honestly probably plays a great part in why a lot of people
| dislike AMP. It honestly has no place using AMP in the first
| place since it isn't really a static page.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| You can avoid this by using old.Reddit.com, which doesn't nag
| about an app and avoids all the real offensive UI design
| decisions.
| swiley wrote:
| I should write a thank you email to the guy who did the
| redesign, I know he's on HN somewhere. Nothing worked for my
| reddit addiction like that did.
| rdiddly wrote:
| I hate the fake folksy conversational tics like "Ouch!" Oh are
| you hurt? And who is the "you"?
| afterburner wrote:
| I've tried alternatives, and I keep going back to i.reddit.com
| for mobile. I've also installed extensions to deal with the
| bullshit on desktop.
|
| My number one gripe right now is when using Google to search
| for stuff on reddit and use the time filter ("last week"),
| Reddit does not accurately report dates, and you get 4 year old
| threads showing up as "last week".
| joecool1029 wrote:
| Regarding desktop, and even mobile. old.reddit.com still
| points to the previous version of the site. It's less than
| ideal for mobile but you can set this as the default site in
| your account settings. It's under beta section, need to
| uncheck box for using the new reddit site.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| fyi you can also append '.compact' to a reddit page to view
| the same mobile view as i.reddit.com
| m-p-3 wrote:
| What annoys me even more is that they kinda block the ability
| to read more /all comments when you're not logged in, at least
| this has been my experience so far.
| [deleted]
| 00jimbo wrote:
| speaking of their google results, let's also draw attention to
| the fact that they lie about post dates in google results to
| get you to click on a result from this week, only to click
| through and find that it's a post 7 years old
| lazyweb wrote:
| Yes! I've noticed that as well lately. So incredibly
| dishonest.
| LeftHandPath wrote:
| Reddit's design is what actively pushed me to Hacker News, the
| Risks Digest, and a healthy mix of paid news (WSJ, FT,
| Bloomberg, etc). The site is really being redesigned to enable
| astroturfing and user manipulation on a commercial level. Ads
| are made to look like posts, and sometimes the posts themselves
| are just ads.
|
| I've come to the opinion that it's impossible for any free
| social media platform to avoid this unless the people running
| it are doing it as an act of charity. If you want to make
| money, you either make users pay or you sell access to /
| information from the userbase itself.
| bserge wrote:
| Not defending Reddit, but it's the same with Facebook, and
| have you seen the Google Search results in a "developed
| country"? First full screen on mobile is ads that look like
| search results. Thankfully there's a small "ad" in the corner
| that no one can see.
| PostThisTooFast wrote:
| Really? Hacker News is even worse. This POS site lets you
| type out an answer to something or a comment, only to reject
| it with "YOU'RE POSTING TOO FAST." Really? Anything beyond
| two comments an hour is "too fast?" Then why do you let us
| even bring up the commenting window and waste our time?
|
| FUCK YOU, HACKER NEWS.
| dorfsmay wrote:
| Have you tried https://old.reddit.com ?
| the_snooze wrote:
| Shhh! Keep it quiet, or else reddit might remember that
| exists and kill it.
| davidivadavid wrote:
| Kinda afraid of this at this point. I honestly have no idea
| how they can get away with the non-old version of the
| website which is one of the most unstable pieces of shit
| I've ever seen.
| Sunspark wrote:
| There is probably a special floor in hell where middle-
| managers roll around grating "in-no-vate!".
| ehsankia wrote:
| old.reddit.com is great, but it has nothing to do with what's
| described above, which is google results. At least on mobile
| I think you're automatically sent to the stupid AMP page
| regardless.
| tmh88j wrote:
| The day old reddit dies is the day I stop using reddit
| entirely. The desktop version is every bit as awful as the
| mobile version. For some reason they seem to think that
| seeing a few more posts or comments on the screen at page
| load is too much information to process, but taking up 1/4 of
| my screen with some pictures or videos is a better use of the
| space. Everything is so obfuscated and difficult to find. I
| can't stand it.
| philjohn wrote:
| Oh - it's even better than that - I've never got the "open in
| app" to work, it just opens the app store, despite having the
| reddit app installed.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| The Reddit mobile web experience is so obviously bad that I can
| only assume it's intentional.
|
| There must be some huge incentive for Reddit to push users
| toward the mobile app. Most likely, the app allows for higher
| or more accurate monthly active user counts and enables more
| targeted advertising, both of which are critical to increasing
| advertising revenues.
|
| Reddit is in a difficult spot because they're mostly an ad-
| supported business but their users are vehemently opposed to
| advertising and any forms of tracking. They have to tip-toe
| around all of the advertising and user tracking that they do.
| Strangely, their users mostly seem to give them a pass on the
| tracking. Their users are relatively trustworth, viewing Reddit
| as far more trustworthy of a company than Facbeook, despite the
| two companies having largely similar business models.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| I'd phrase it as "Reddit, the product" is fine.
|
| "Reddit, the investors who bought the product" are in a
| difficult spot. And certainly haven't shown an overabundance
| of creativity in monetization approaches.
|
| Suffice to say, you probably don't deserve a "front page of
| the Internet" tagline if your first display is a redirect
| request to your app.
| erhk wrote:
| Owning reddit allows ypu to own public opinion through
| censorship,thats a pretty important bit of value and im
| sure tencent would agree
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| Reddit moderation is not unlike what China does only it's
| not considered onerous because it's self-censorhip.
| freebuju wrote:
| Hate to break it to ya but the court of public opinion is
| strongly held by other platforms, most notably Twitter.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Reddit is a potential B Corp or non profit masquerading as
| a VC backed tech startup with exit or ad revenue potential.
| Bag holders get tired eventually.
| dehrmann wrote:
| This was my take at one point, but a lot of actions made
| it clear that's no longer the case, and it's now more of
| a social media site/app that also has porn.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Maybe more like porn ads, its like all attention seeking
| to direct people to only fans.
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| What bothers me about OF is that it has turned authentic
| communities into billboards. "Why are you entitled to
| free porn?" OFs defenders will ask as they completely
| miss the point of the communities they have hijacked.
|
| As the saying goes: "It is difficult to get a man to
| understand something, when his salary depends on his not
| understanding it."
| intended wrote:
| Reddit is building the best content moderation tools for
| humans - by blundering in every possible direction, often
| in direct opposition to potential progress.
|
| Mod tools and the data on what works is the untapped
| resource.
|
| Every other major data or tool set for moderation is
| behind an NDA.
| valparaiso wrote:
| Yeah and you can't appeal if some crazy mod got offended
| and permanently banned your on every sub he's mod because
| he didn't like your comment about China or you mentioned
| that BLM riots killed people, left burned and looted
| shops or that George Floyd got killed by drugs and was
| holding a gun on pregnant woman's stomach.
| mirko22 wrote:
| It's much easier to track user and adds they see on mobile
| apps then mobile web... So more money from advertising and
| selling people usage patterns and info would be my guess...
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| Precisely. Reddit's customers are not the users but the
| advertisers.
| webmobdev wrote:
| There must be some huge incentive for Reddit to push users
| toward the mobile app.
|
| - Data-mining: a mobile phone is a major repository of
| personal information that every advertising platform wants
| access to.
|
| - Ad-Targeting: a mobile app has a lot of data points to
| create a unique "finger print" for each user.
|
| - Conserving resources: a well designed mobile app can really
| save a lot of bandwidth and server resources for an online
| platform like Reddit.
| ss2f wrote:
| Which is why I think alternatives like Lemmy[0] ought to up
| their UX/UI and mobile applications because on the backend,
| they offer much respectful design and since they are not
| after money, operate under less duress. Such alternatives
| offer real possibilities to challenge Reddit but they have a
| long way to go on user interface.
|
| [0] https://join-lemmy.org/instances
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > There must be some huge incentive for Reddit to push users
| toward the mobile app.
|
| From what we hear, the app isn't even that well designed. It
| seems that many users are still using unofficial clients
| because the app can feel heavy and sluggish, with only a
| barely acceptable UX.
| Qwertious wrote:
| RedReader user here, can confirm. I don't even know what
| half of the complaints in the link are talking about, as
| they're largely problems with the "official" mobile
| experience.
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| RIF is fun user myself. Like others have said, I haven't
| experienced these issues. If reddit shuts of the API I'm
| probably out.
| maest wrote:
| If the changes are driven by their investor's desire to
| somehow monetise it, then this must be part of a longer term
| plan. So two questions:
|
| 1. How well is this working for them 2. If the answer to 1.
| is "not very", how long will they stick to this strategy.
|
| They've been going at it for a couple of years now, so I
| imagine they're approaching the moment when they have to
| reassess how well things are going.
|
| I wonder if we'll see a change of direction any time soon.
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| I downloaded the app alright. Just not theirs. Apollo for
| iOS is such a pleasure to use compared to the Reddit app.
| They can't even get the app experience right.
| farisjarrah wrote:
| Apollo is probably one of the highest quality iOS and
| iPadOS apps around, Reddit or otherwise. The developer is
| super responsive to requests or criticism, and the app
| just works insanely well. It doesn't have quite the same
| feature set as some of the other 3rd party android Reddit
| apps, like Sync, but everything on the app is
| exceptionally well designed and thought out.
| cranekam wrote:
| Honestly I'm pretty glad that Reddit's UI is so terrible. I
| don't need more places to waste time on the internet.
| yewenjie wrote:
| There is https://libredd.it/ which is a privacy friendly frontend
| to reddit written in Rust.
|
| Source - https://github.com/spikecodes/libreddit
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > Reddit has lots of competent people. So, surely they have the
| data to back up their decisions. And the data must be saying that
| these changes are working.
|
| Sadly this is not as much of a truism as one might expect. Even
| competent people tend to design experiments that are biased
| towards the desired results, and even competent people tend to
| interpret their experimental results in a favourable light. And
| even competent people get in a feedback loop where their metrics
| are chasing a local minima, and they don't have the political
| capital within the organisation to convince management to take a
| short-term hit to the metrics for a prospective global
| improvement in the future...
|
| The ads team at Amazon who thinks the #1 performing ad strategy
| is to show you ads for the blender you just purchased - they have
| data too, after all.
| lukewrites wrote:
| I only use Reddit via third party apps because the website is so
| awful. First it was Narwhal now it's Apollo, both for iOS. Apollo
| is fantastic and has a desktop client in the works...well worth
| the money.
| anotherhue wrote:
| Old Reddit Redirect Extension:
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...
|
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...
| thinkingemote wrote:
| I once encountered an online streaming employee who was told by
| their manager to post organic submissions to a movie related
| subreddit. They were open to their activity when challenged.
|
| I think Reddit knows that it's basically a huge marketing
| platform . To them they are the real users, even if these users
| are not paying them.
|
| The stealth marketing is good enough that other users don't mind
| or actually like them, creating the content for paid
| advertisements. Indeed when challenged about this activity with
| clear proof, most users still see nothing wrong.
|
| Way back in the 1990s i worked in a company that did the same
| thing in the early web so it's clear the industry is bigger than
| ever.
| rm445 wrote:
| I can't be alone in just pretending Reddit doesn't exist on
| mobile. It's weird, I like Reddit a lot, on desktop I post and
| comment, but on mobile it is so shabby that I just ignore it
| instead of seeing if it can be made bearable by being logged in
| to an app.
| archon810 wrote:
| Why do all this complaining and ignoring instead of just
| downloading an app like "rif is fun", logging in once, and then
| having great reddit experience on mobile?
|
| Everyone here is aware of the dark patterns on reddit. We know
| they're not going anywhere. We continue to read reddit posts
| every day, so why not make it easy on yourself instead of
| endless misery and complaining about things that you know won't
| change?
| rm445 wrote:
| That's a fair comment. I don't think my comment reflects a
| fully rational decision and I could just use an app and log
| in. I don't _need_ to have Reddit on my phone, it 's
| entertainment I could take or leave.
|
| However I do have sympathy for people who don't have any
| interest in becoming engaged users, and just want to see a
| useful comment thread for some particular info without all
| the hassle. The web is full of gates, walls and popups, and
| we don't all want to download the app and create an account
| for every site.
| cphoover wrote:
| I'm so glad someone wrote this article... It summarizes my
| frustrations with the website over the last few years.
| seaorg wrote:
| It baffles me that nobody eats Reddit's lunch. Their user
| experience is abysmal.
| troydavis wrote:
| Imagine you're Steve Huffman, Reddit's CEO and co-founder (https:
| //www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3cxedn/i_am_steve_huf...). What
| strategy would you propose to your board?
|
| For the sake of argument, assume that:
|
| - You would prefer not to make your creation frustrating to use.
| (Of course, the team may think that their changes are better, but
| let's assume that's not the case)
|
| - The board cares about ARPU and ARPU growth
|
| - You're stuck in the middle, and believe that you're
| implementing it less terribly than your replacement would. So
| far, your biggest win here has been preserving old.reddit.com and
| API access, which consumed most of your political capital.
|
| So, if you were Steve, what strategy would you propose and why?
| lowkey wrote:
| As a product manager, here is what I would do if I was in
| Steve's shoes. Instead of employing dark patterns that take
| advantage of casual user's trust, I would actually listen to
| users and evolve the site in the direction users are asking
| for.
|
| Reddit just killed their Santa Program, this year will be it's
| last. The Secret Santa program was amazingly popular but
| perhaps complicated to manage so instead of improving it, they
| killed it - favoring dark patters to drive mobile adoption,
| lol.
|
| Why not double down on the things the community has already
| indicated it wants. My analysis says they should evolve into a
| marketplace to drive more peer-to-peer activity between users
| while enabling monetization that could scale significantly.
|
| Reddit seems to be mentally stuck in the Advertising model and
| lacks vision. Encourage more peer-to-peer interaction, make it
| a marketplace, drive real economic activity between users,
| adopt cryptocurrencies as well as conventional payment
| mechanisms to enable commerce between users. Think different.
| dillondoyle wrote:
| What's worse with Secret Santa is they didn't have to take it
| over in the first place. Community / active users ran it.
| Which is what (feeling like used to) makes Reddit special.
| AND they aren't giving the keys to the exchange back to the
| original creator...
|
| Now starting over in a new user run sub but it is super sh*ty
| behavior.
|
| They tried the marketplace idea too with reddit gold etc.
| wasn't that also originally a co-opted user created joke like
| silver? and they seem to be changing that too? though I can't
| find the mod post so maybe I'm not remembering correct?
| SSLy wrote:
| >gold - wasn't that also originally a co-opted user created
| joke like silver?
|
| From my recollection gold came first, silver was a image
| macro meme to be pasted as a poor man's gold, and then the
| expanded rewards system came.
| shitlord wrote:
| It started on 4chan with the 4chan Gold meme. Users would
| joke about a non-existent premium subscription that
| unlocked exclusive content. Reddit went ahead and
| actually implemented that idea, complete with the
| /r/lounge subreddit (available only to users with Reddit
| Gold).
|
| Reddit users created Reddit Silver as another meme,
| indicating that a post was valuable (but not worth
| spending real money for Reddit Gold). Then reddit
| implemented that later on.
| minsc__and__boo wrote:
| >Why not double down on the things the community has already
| indicated it wants.
|
| Diminishing returns and a huge variety of communities with
| diverse wants.
|
| Steve Huffman's approach has been to not touch it as much as
| possible (except with engagement it seems), which leads to
| it's own issues.
| rblatz wrote:
| What? More peer to peer activity and make it a marketplace?
| Then you add in crypto for good measure...
|
| They added chat, and everyone hated it. People aren't on
| there to build up yet another social network. What would this
| marketplace even sell? Is it like a less localized
| Craigslist?
| lowkey wrote:
| Peer to peer exchange of goods and services backed by
| reputations established in Subreddits sounds like it has
| potential worth exploring to me. A similar model has worked
| out very well for Facebook.
|
| Also, please note Reddit is already another social network
| so that train has left the station.
|
| As for crypto, well I am a big fan of crypto currencies and
| I see a compelling use case here. Perhaps you disagree?
| Fine, ignore the crypto suggestion and comment on my
| others.
|
| Their Secret Santa program is a great example of a
| successful peer to peer marketplace already. Reddit Gold's
| success is a good indicator of the potential for virtual
| currencies, stable coins, traditional payment systems, or
| yes even crypto.
|
| Their desperation to monetize through Ads alone is a
| dangerous strategy. It leaves the site vulnerable because
| it separates the needs of the Advertiser (Reddit's real
| customer) from the community (Reddit's users) when ever a
| company decouples users from customers it makes it easy to
| compromise the user in favor of the business model and
| customer.
|
| In the short run the metrics go up. In the long run you end
| up with another Digg.
| ufmace wrote:
| Come up with some innovative ways to monetize, beyond just the
| usual ads and tracking and dirty tricks to boost engagement.
| The article has a few decent directions.
|
| I'd start with adding an option to set up paid private
| subreddits. Like, the creator specifies that you have to
| subscribe to that sub for some monthly cost in order to see /
| interact with the content, with a percentage skimmed off the
| top. It seems like it'd be really easy to implement the most
| basic version of it and see what users do.
|
| There's already a ton of stuff kind of like that. Tons of
| people pay for a creator's content on Patreon and various
| special-purpose copycats, and many of them include access to a
| private Discord in that. No reason why Reddit couldn't take
| over a chunk of that, since it's convenient to have all of the
| content and all of the community discussion features on the
| same platform.
|
| Lots of ways to expand if it catches on, like multiple
| subscription levels, different levels of permissions for
| different subscription levels, etc.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Really, I wouldn't be using it without RIF and the old style
|
| The new layout reminds me of a mix of 9Gag and Facebook (this is
| not a compliment)
|
| At the same time the non-mainstream subreddits are insightful and
| informative (and of course there's a bit of dopamine rush as
| well).
| sedatk wrote:
| There's a decentralized alternative called Aether. Try it here:
| https://aether.app
| tored wrote:
| Hostile design either makes the user login (a user reddit can
| monetize) or makes the user to close the site (a user reddit
| can't monetize, thus no need to waste resources), both scenarios
| is a win for reddit.
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| But an anonymous user can still click on ads.
| rognjen wrote:
| That's a very good characterization.
| tux3 wrote:
| Third scenario: People keep using it in anger until something
| better shows up, and by that time there will be enough unhappy
| people to spark a growing community in the New Place.
| ArkanExplorer wrote:
| Big Tech has Reddit's back: they just ban new platforms for
| being insufficiently censorious (or at least, not censoring
| non-Leftists).
| [deleted]
| bogwog wrote:
| If that were true, it would've happened long ago. Say what
| you will about reddit's questionably/shitty policies, but
| they do a pretty decent job of keeping the
| extremists/racists/crazies/etc contained.
|
| Nearly every attempt at a reddit alternative over the years
| has been flooded by those types of people. Even if you ignore
| the fact that advertisers will avoid that community like a
| plague, the average person will want to avoid it too.
| raverbashing wrote:
| > Nearly every attempt at a reddit alternative over the
| years has been flooded by those types of people
|
| Yes, most of the time because they have advertised
| themselves as a "free-speech place". Of course the people
| these places attract are the "5G is a Jewish conspiracy to
| vaccinate everybody" kinda people
| 34679 wrote:
| It would be interesting if it turns out reddit has a team
| to flood new competitors with unsavory accounts. It's
| exactly what they did when they started reddit, just with
| positive fake accounts instead of negative.
|
| "Huffman said one other strategy proved crucial to
| Reddit's early success, which most people are unaware of:
| The team submitted a ridiculous amount of content under
| fake user accounts to give the appearance of popularity."
|
| ...
|
| "The first thing it did was it set the tone," by the
| activity it displayed to visitors, Huffman said. "We were
| submitting content that we would have been interested in
| seeing. That meant the content on Reddit ... was good.
| And when you show up , you know exactly what the site is
| about."
|
| https://venturebeat.com/2012/06/22/reddit-fake-users/
|
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/z4444w/how-reddit-got-
| huge-t...
|
| https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2012/06/reddi...
| Fnoord wrote:
| Correct, and as addendum:
|
| > How can this be good for them?
|
| > This is the question that keeps bothering me.
|
| Only thinking of short-term benefits aka typical behavior of
| publicly owned companies and VC.
| thepete2 wrote:
| The non-monetized user would still give content and attention
| to reddit. It seems to me that reddit moved from growth to
| monetization / exploitation.
| heliodor wrote:
| If I can't access it, I can't share the posts nor will I click
| on ads. So it's not a clear easy win for them.
| gruez wrote:
| ...assuming you don't cave and log in anyways.
| rognjen wrote:
| They seem to banking on that.
| rognjen wrote:
| That's the thing. That's exactly me. BUT they still keep
| doing it.
|
| Which means that they've data to back up what they are doing.
| Probably "exploiting" less savvy and/or privacy conscious
| users.
| lamontcg wrote:
| We need a delete reddit meme just like delete facebook.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| To paraphrase Bjarne Stroustrup, there are two kinds of social
| network platforms, the ones people complain about and the ones no
| one uses.
|
| I bet you can go back 10 years and find Redditors bitching about
| the state of the site back then.
| meisel wrote:
| On top of these design issues, I'm surprised by how buggy the
| core experience can be. The home page repeatedly failing to load
| on many different occasions. The site suddenly acting like you're
| logged out and needing a refresh. It's very surprising.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| Over time my reddit usage has switched to entirely on my phone,
| and apollo is a fine interface. I don't know about 2/3 of these
| patterns!
| shash7 wrote:
| Apollo is the best.
| cecilpl2 wrote:
| My solution for good reddit browsing:
|
| * Use the Reddit Enhancement Suite browser extension, and
| customize to your liking.
|
| * Set it to permanent old.reddit.com mode, so all reddit links
| immediately go there.
|
| * Only browse reddit on mobile using one of several third-party
| apps, like Relay (my preference), Boost, or Apollo.
|
| * Extensively tailor your subreddit selection to weed out the
| garbage. Most if not all of the default subreddits are terrible,
| but anything devoted to a niche interest is likely to be a
| welcoming and respectful community.
|
| I don't have avatars, autoplay videos, or inline "promoted"
| threads. I see 10 levels of nested comments with 1000 comments
| loaded by default. Additional levels of nesting are tap to open.
| I have keyboard navigation on desktop and swipe navigation (from
| link to comments back to home page) on mobile.
|
| Pretty much all of the complaints that folks have in here are
| solved problems.
| pixelpoet wrote:
| They've recently (1-2 weeks) changed it so that you can't
| reject non-essential cookies from the new (non-old) reddit. So
| you go there, you say no I don't want your damn tracking crap,
| and then 2 days later you mysteriously get the prompt again;
| every 2 days.
|
| Been on reddit for over 11 years, but I'm reaching the end of
| my patience for this shit too.
| ozcanberkciftci wrote:
| redreader is awesome as an android reddit client
| ehsankia wrote:
| rif and baconreader too.
| throwaway64643 wrote:
| I think this is the way Reddit supposes their power users to
| have the old reddit experience. If they didn't care about power
| users, they'd completely decimate old.reddit.com months after
| deployment of the new design, just shove it all 'em mouth. They
| always leave ways for power users to have the most authentic
| reddit experience.
|
| Recently, Reddit has changed their algorithm to filter out
| contents of pornographic subreddits from the front page r/all.
| They didn't touch the communities. But they made it much harder
| for average users and new users to accidentally discover porn
| contents on Reddit. They didn't want to do another 'tumblr'.
| But this, consequently, has impact on promotion and expansion
| of those subreddits. This is a smart move (that other platforms
| have the same trouble should learn). Change hurts, but it is
| barely felt.
| ajdude wrote:
| I found myself several times this morning to reach a search
| result on Reddit (from ddg, mind you), only to immediately change
| the address to reddit.net after being unable to view nested
| comments at best (get the app or log in to view!) or be unable to
| browse the page outright at worst ("please browse anonymously
| with the app to view this page!)
| krm01 wrote:
| I still revert back to the old UI when using Reddit. It's an
| option you can find in the top right dropdown menu.
| rognjen wrote:
| I used to do that as well, but I really don't want to use them
| at all.
| golemotron wrote:
| I have to laugh at the use of the word "disrespectful." As if one
| could expect a corporate entity in a market economy to respect
| you, personally.
| fastball wrote:
| Everything about Reddit's (visible) engineering is terrible these
| days.
|
| The new React app UI is probably one of the least performant
| React apps I've ever seen / experienced. Turn on the re-render
| track in React DevTools and watch as simply upvoting a single
| post on your page causes every component to re-render.
|
| However they're delivering video/images to clients is the worst
| I've seen in a long time. Videos _constantly_ buffer in
| ridiculous ways, you can barely scrobble, and images load in more
| slowly than anywhere else on the web. Honestly browsing Reddit in
| 2021 makes me feel like I 'm back on dial-up.
|
| Sorry anyone here that's a Reddit engineer but something is going
| terribly wrong over there.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > Sorry anyone here that's a Reddit engineer but something is
| going terribly wrong over there.
|
| You shouldn't need to apologize to the Reddit engineers. They
| are the ones building it this way! I wish a Reddit engineer
| would respond here to help people understand why on earth the
| site's quality is so poor, but we know they can't/won't due to
| confidentiality. Whenever I browse the non-old Reddit, I can't
| help but think it's impossible to have such bad quality
| accidentally. They must be deliberately making it this bad. It
| would be fascinating to get a glimpse at their bug tracker, to
| see what tickets they prioritize and which ones they ignore.
| petepete wrote:
| The only way I can stomach using Reddit is via Reddit Sync.
|
| I firmly believe that soon Reddit will prevent third party
| clients from using their API. Perhaps there'll be a subscription
| service where paid accounts can still use it with their client of
| choice, or maybe they'll just kill the ecosystem in an attempt to
| get people on the official app. Either way, that's me done with
| it.
|
| The hostility makes it somewhere I'm just unenthusiastic about
| visiting. It's a Facebook-style manouvre.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| The fact that their new features (RPAN and chat) aren't
| available via the API is telling enough in my eyes.
| rognjen wrote:
| Honestly, paying for API might be a better monetization
| strategy then just actively shitting on their users.
| dageshi wrote:
| The percentage of people who would pay for it, probably
| wouldn't make up for the dev time to implement it.
|
| Once upon a time the HN userbase and the reddit user base
| weren't a million miles apart, those days are long gone,
| reddit is mainstream and mainstream consumers don't care that
| much about ads, the new UI or everything else this thread is
| up in arms about, it's still the defacto internet forum and
| nothing I've seen looks likely to replace it.
| 542458 wrote:
| _Edit: apparently I'm misreading the traffic page and third
| party apps are not included. So disregard this paragraph._ I
| really doubt they'll kill API access. From the stats on my
| (medium sized) sub a full third of uniques (desktop and mobile
| combined) are from unofficial clients.
|
| And that's not to mention the number of near-essential bots
| used by many subs for community management.
|
| Now, what they are doing is not putting new non-core features
| into the API, like chat and RPAN. But while that's still
| irritating, it is a bit different than killing API access.
| syntheticnature wrote:
| My understanding is that third-party apps aren't shown at
| all, per https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/6pxyvy/tra
| ffic_pag... ; "Reddit apps" only lists the official ones in
| subreddit stats.
| rognjen wrote:
| > full third of uniques
|
| That tells you what their own experience is like. Thanks for
| sharing that.
| Macha wrote:
| At one point, Tweets showed which client you used and most
| came from third party clients.
| n4bz0r wrote:
| Not a power Reddit user here. I only stumble upon random posts
| that search engines throw my way when I'm looking things up so I
| might very well be missing something.
|
| The main questions: Considering all the bad practices, why people
| keep using Reddit and what makes it so great? Why people make
| custom clients instead of looking for a full-fledged alternative?
|
| The questions are genuine, not a sarcasm. The following is just a
| rant and emotions, feel free to ignore.
|
| My questions mostly come from these thoughts:
|
| - As far as I'm concerned, it's people that bring value to online
| forums, not the other way around. Established communities must
| have no issues moving wherever.
|
| - Creating a huge online forum (even from scratch) has it's
| challenges, but ultimately isn't the most complex engineering
| task.
|
| As we live we learn to accept the fact that everything we love
| eventually dies. Not being an active user I might see it
| differently, but to me it looks like the forum (the technical
| part of it!) that people knew and loved is dead.
|
| Why workarounds? Isn't it the time to move on to creating/finding
| something new instead of feeding the corpse-milkers and digesting
| whatever they spit back? It's a glorified database client, not a
| secret non-replicable alien technology.
|
| Edit: reading the other comments I came to realization that
| Reddit must mostly serve community leaders (who most likely use
| alternative clients) as a discovery mechanism. And content-
| consumers would do whatever it takes to consume however
| inconvenient. I can see how that keeps people there, but don't
| clearly see why there is no popular alternatives. I guess it's
| really hard to gain the critical mass in the online-forum market.
| cunthorpe wrote:
| They have good content and good comments. Funny junk is
| interspersed with news and occasional trivia and life stories.
| The thoughtful comments really are great and have helped me
| understand some POVs and hear about other people's lives.
|
| This just does not happen on Facebook for example. Most groups
| and posts are run into the ground by junk comments that make
| discussion impossible because there's no downvote that
| eventually hides them. In a way Facebook is more equal but
| unfortunately not every commenter is equally decent.
| realce wrote:
| Ever notice the difference is that people on FB have
| identities to defend but reddit users are just anon usernames
| with no identity tied to it?
|
| I think this is a serious aspect of why they produce
| different conversations.
| mynameishere wrote:
| It just has the most users of all link aggregators. If you want
| to discuss subject A, or news story B, or product C, it's the
| best place--because of the users, and despite the increasingly
| trash design. It got those users by being best-in-class a long
| time ago when things like Digg were futzing and fumbling around
| the same way Reddit is now.
|
| As soon as some non-user-hostile site gets enough people Reddit
| will go away.
| rognjen wrote:
| > Considering all the bad practices, why people keep using
| Reddit and what makes it so great?
|
| I think it's the sheer amount of content they have and the fact
| that the average user is much less tech and privacy savvy so
| they just register.
| PhillyG wrote:
| I'd assume that savvy people determined to set up a user
| account, and not aware they can avoid providing an email
| address, would just set up a throwaway email account on some
| free service
| GordonS wrote:
| > The main questions: Considering all the bad practices, why
| people keep using Reddit and what makes it so great? Why people
| make custom clients instead of looking for a full-fledged
| alternative?
|
| Critical mass, and inertia. Reddit has already captured by far
| the largest share of foum users, and that isn't going to change
| any time soon.
|
| I'm only an occasional user, generally arriving via a Google
| search, and it's the sheer quantity of posts that keep my
| searches hitting Reddit. Doesn't mean I like the UI/UX or their
| dark patterns tho - I can't bloody stand them!
| johnnysinns wrote:
| Nothing more disrespectful than complaint about things you're not
| willing to pay for.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Old Reddit and RES were the only things that kept Reddit
| tolerable. Even then, I still got bored of the community in the
| subreddits I was subscribed to and left. Perhaps I ought to spend
| the rest of my Gold credits I bought in 2014 before actually
| deleting my account.
| dgellow wrote:
| I almost exclusively use teddit.net, and only switch to
| reddit.com to write comments. I highly recommend, that fixes all
| the UI issues!
| jonplackett wrote:
| Surely the most annoying thing is the endless requests to
| download the app. So irritating! I refuse to download it just
| because they insist so hard. Reddit is the most basic site ever,
| there is absolutely no need for me to have an app.
| wongarsu wrote:
| old.reddit.com is not mobile optimized at all, but still
| infinitely better than reddit.com. Alternatively, get one of
| the non-official apps (on Android I use rif).
| OminousWeapons wrote:
| old.reddit.com with javascript turned off is largely fine if
| you just lurk and don't want to go 20 layers deep into the
| comments.
| intrasight wrote:
| Just this week they changed "visit old reddit" to be under
| a "more" item in the menu. I am concerned that this is the
| first step to removing it for good. I don't know how to get
| my interaction data except on old reddit.
| smnrchrds wrote:
| If you are just a lurker, try http://teddit.net
|
| It works well on mobile and desktop.
| afterburner wrote:
| Unfortunately, I really rely on my particular subreddit
| subscriptions to deliver the frontpage experience I want.
| smnrchrds wrote:
| Teddit supports multisub URLs. I am not sure if the
| effect is the exact same as the front page, but it looks
| similar enough. Just create a multisub and save it in
| your bookmarks. Like this:
|
| https://teddit.net/r/programming+python+haskell/
| BoorishBears wrote:
| Is reddit.com mobile optimized?
|
| There's a bug where opening a post from a subreddit's main
| page always results in a weird border, like it's opening the
| post as a floating dialog.
|
| (Just to confirm tried it logged and out, same result:
| https://imgur.com/a/6yK9D8V)
|
| That results in comments being squished down to a few
| characters wide and many many lines long
|
| I used to think it was a "me" bug, but it's followed me
| across 4 iPhones over the years!
|
| How can they have such an experience breaking bug on one of
| the most homogeneous major platforms out there? iOS only has
| one browser engine!
| RajBhai wrote:
| Looks like the desktop site, but somehow being responsive
| to the mobile screen.
|
| Try m.reddit.com
| BoorishBears wrote:
| m.reddit.com redirects to www.reddit.com
| rblatz wrote:
| I prefer old Reddit because it isn't mobile optimized. Most
| mobile optimized experiences are ugly, waste space, neutered
| experiences. My phone does a great job of rendering a desktop
| page. We don't have shitty toy browsers anymore on mobile.
| Stop giving me the shitty toy experience.
| the-smug-one wrote:
| i.reddit.com
| GordonS wrote:
| Do you need a Reddit account to use the unofficial apps?
| Also, I prefer to search Reddit content from Google - will
| Reddit links open in one of those apps, instead of giving me
| the usual shitty Reddit Web UX?
| DangitBobby wrote:
| I'm surprised that there isn't a version of the Reddit
| Enhancement Suite extension for old.reddit.com. Especially
| now that they had to trim features to support the redesign.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| A friend just recommended this extension to me, but I'm
| hesitant to add new extensions. Good ol greasemonkey now
| redirects me to old reddit
| orthoxerox wrote:
| I have RES and it works with the old design.
| unangst wrote:
| Try https://reddit.com/.compact
| sneak wrote:
| Even that has an upsell dickbar stuck to the top. It's a
| fractal of user hostility.
| rognjen wrote:
| And it doesn't even show content on first load.
| brandmeyer wrote:
| Once upon a time, links from .compact would always refer to
| other .compact links. That has slowly been going away,
| however. I think they are trying to slowly kill it off.
| meowster wrote:
| > is not mobile optimized
|
| Good! I do not want any mobile-optimized webpages on my
| mobile phone. That's what double-tap-to-zoom was invented
| for, and now pinch-to-zoom.
| lagolinguini wrote:
| rif made it so much more bearable to use reddit on mobile.
| But since I switched to ios I have not found an app that can
| compare to rif.
| [deleted]
| agumonkey wrote:
| Not Reddit per se but I find it hard to wrap my head around the
| app thing for Reddit or similar. HTML5/CSS3 is so sufficient
| for this... The web gave birth to an economy going away from
| itself. And. Ow everything is there twice or thrice.
|
| Surely there's some good economical or political reason it.
| Maybe systemic (any large market will create redundancies.. I
| don't know)
|
| Yay to old.reddit.com
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| > Surely there's some good economical or political reason it.
|
| Location tracking
| dredmorbius wrote:
| And Android Advertising ID.
|
| Probably other tracking capabilities as well.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| I just found that there is setting checked in the menu (for
| anonymous and authenticated users) called "Ask to Open in App."
| I find it kind of curious that they would offer an option. Who
| would actually want this setting to be enabled? Maybe some
| developers snuck it in so they could use their own site without
| contracting cancer.
| ehsankia wrote:
| I did download the app:
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andrewshu....
|
| Worked flawlessly and never had to see those crappy dark
| patterns again :)
|
| Been using it for a decade and it does everything, even mod
| stuff. Simple and clean interface.
| dmix wrote:
| Their UX is as incompetent as their modding censorship policies
| which makes me think this rot goes to the top. It's not just a
| bad marketing division, it's the whole company.
|
| I remember Reddit being a whimsical fun place, now I see it as a
| corporation run by a robot lawyer without a sense of humour where
| raw mobile user impression numbers as the only valuable metric.
| wting wrote:
| I was the EM for Reddit's Growth team around this time. I am
| responsible for / contributed to a few features like the current
| signup flow, AMP pages, push notifications, email digests, app
| download interstitials, etc.
|
| There was a new product lead who joined with many good ideas, but
| some of them were dark patterns that I heavily protested. After a
| few months of this, it was obvious that I was going to be reigned
| in or let go[0]; I immediately transferred to a different org.
|
| Now let me explain the other side of the story. 4 years later,
| Reddit's DAU, MAU, and revenue have all grown at ridiculous
| rates[1]. Yes, power users complain--and still continue using the
| site--but the casual user does not. These dark patterns have been
| normalized on other websites.
|
| These practices are done because _it works_.
|
| _____
|
| 0: They changed it so I would report to the product lead, which
| is odd for an EM to report into a product chain and the only
| instance within the company ever.
|
| 1: Many friends are startup founders and I've been at a few
| startups myself--a byproduct of being in the Bay Area--and
| Reddit's growth numbers are impressive. As a former employee, I
| am quite happy about my equity growth.
| grishka wrote:
| > These practices are done because it works.
|
| It works for metrics. It works for making more money than you
| know what to do with. It absolutely doesn't work for keeping
| your user base loyal. The moment you implement the dark
| patterns, the users immediately start looking for alternatives
| to your platform that respect them.
|
| That said, I still use reddit. Except I use the old design and
| RES. And a third-party app on my phone.
| c2h5oh wrote:
| > That said, I still use reddit. Except I use the old design
| and RES. And a third-party app on my phone.
|
| Same. And should that no longer be an option I'm fairly
| confident I'd stop using reddit.
| letitbeirie wrote:
| I haven't been using old.reddit.com for years because I'm
| resistant to change. I've been using it because the new
| reddit design has sucked for as long as it's existed.
| moistly wrote:
| Likewise. I'll probably end up writing an aggregation tool,
| a Bayesian filter, and a summary-bot, and just skip caring
| about what the chattering mobs say about the news of the
| day. Except for a very few tightly-moderated groups, most
| threads are nasty muck and rarely a pearl. I'll be better
| off without reading them.
| denimnerd42 wrote:
| I just use tiktok now for "front page of the internet" some
| random sub reddits still otherwise. If I'm going to be
| subjected to tracking and ads I might as well go with the
| superior option. Half of the front page is tiktok videos
| anyway.
| demux wrote:
| You say power users complain but the casual user does not (as a
| result of these features) - this sort of position ruins
| reddit's community as it suggests that reddit doesn't really
| care about the members who have contributed all kinds of
| content over the years and instead favors trying to get new
| members who are just marginally interested, or worse, just like
| endlessly scrolling through a timeline. This thread has
| mentions of several users that don't use reddit anymore (me
| included) and as reddit continues shoving monetization down the
| user's throat you'll see that those members will continue
| leaving until the platform is indistinguishable from the likes
| of Facebook, Digg, etc.
| asddubs wrote:
| I think reddit did a rather clever thing in keeping around
| old.reddit.com. So power users got mad but they had a
| fallback, meanwhile the default experience is SPA dark
| pattern hell
| tmh88j wrote:
| For desktop, sure. I've tried a few mobile apps but the UI
| was worse than the mobile site in my opinion. I can deal
| with the UI of their mobile site, but all of the UX issues
| that OP mentioned keeps me away from it, so I never browse
| reddit on mobile devices.
|
| I just noticed a few users below mentioning that
| i.reddit.com exists, which seems to be a similar UI to
| old.reddit, but for mobile. From the couple minutes I've
| spent browsing it seems to be a massive upgrade from the
| current mobile site.
| lutoma wrote:
| If you're on iOS, try https://apolloapp.io/. Using it on
| an iPad has become my main way of accessing reddit. Super
| customizable, has keyboard shortcuts and supports pretty
| much all reddit features. The developer is also very
| active and quick to respond to bugs.
|
| (I know this is starting to sound like an advertisement
| which was not my intention, I just really enjoy using
| that app).
| mlindner wrote:
| The power users were always desktop users anyway. I've
| only used reddit a couple times from mobile.
| hhjinks wrote:
| > and instead favors trying to get new members who are just
| marginally interested, or worse, just like endlessly
| scrolling through a timeline
|
| You can literally see communities go to shit because of this.
| Actual content is pushed away as low effort content, easy-to-
| view-in-a-timeline content, claims the frontpage, because of
| what you said. It infuriates me to no end when communities
| I've frequented for years literally get supplanted by
| faceless non-contributing vagrants who never contribute,
| comment, or post. They just see funny picture, blow air out
| their nose, and upvote, not knowing that they're
| incentivizing behaviour that's killing the community that
| built the space in the first place.
| RocketOne wrote:
| I thought I was overthinking it when I saw all this
| happening. I SO miss the reddit of 8 yrs ago.
| mioasndo wrote:
| The purpose of reddit at this point is to keep as many naive
| and docile users as possible, and keep them clicking.
| Anything that could cause cognitive dissonance is bannable,
| while advertising and astroturfing are essentially
| encouraged. Any interesting comment or opinion that's
| actually worth reading will be hidden near the bottom or
| middle of any popular thread. If you try to engage in any
| potentially controversial conversation, you are at risk of
| getting banned, or having several comments in the convo
| deleted. The only thing left worth anything in on reddit are
| relatively small, niche subreddits.
| raunak wrote:
| This happens with any social media. The great Digg exodus
| happened, and Reddit boomed. Reddit's content and community
| grew healthily, then Reddit blew up exponentially, and now
| the content and community have grown sure, but very
| unhealthily.
|
| Actually, unhealthily for what Reddit used to be (long form
| content and discussion), healthily for what it's becoming
| (social media a la infinite scroll, chat, and notifications
| galore).
|
| The point I'm trying to make is I don't think this sort of
| effect is preventable - any community which encounters growth
| will see an influx of shitty content, unless you keep the
| community exclusive purposefully. Reddit just decided to roll
| with the punches so they could make some stacks on a nice IPO
| I imagine in the future.
| rightbyte wrote:
| > notifications galore
|
| This is so annoying. The bell has a number on it and you
| think "Oh, somebody answered me or sent a DM" ... but no.
| Some post is trending on XY sub.
|
| I think Reddit doesn't realize how much they lose in the
| longterm from hollow 'engagement'.
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| ditto from Twitter. and then they ignore your "do not
| notify me about anything ever" setting. Now I never use
| Twitter anymore. The short-term boost is not worth the
| long-term loss of trust.
| RocketOne wrote:
| I wonder if the _next_ successor to reddit could possibly
| become successful by limiting its user base. Once it
| reaches a certain size, you can only join when someone else
| leaves. Or be put on a waiting list while you scroll and
| lurk.
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| And apart from being a user, you (and others on this thread)
| could be a potential person Reddit could try to hire in the
| future... But with these patterns, I'm assuming they don't
| stand a chance.
| hitekker wrote:
| > They changed it so I would report to the product lead, which
| is odd for an EM to report into a product chain and the only
| instance within the company ever.
|
| This screams of power play. Good on you for moving your neck
| before the axe came down.
|
| The fact your engineering higher-ups didn't push back or failed
| to push back is really scary.
| donmcronald wrote:
| I always think that by building products that treat the
| consumer like an enemy to be conquered will eventually result
| in someone building a better product and stealing the market.
| It never happens though.
|
| I wonder if some of the tech like Cloudflare Workers will
| eventually allow someone to build competing products that crush
| the existing platforms. IMO it's dangerous (business wise) to
| get addicted to revenue that comes from treating your users
| very badly. I think we'll eventually see companies like
| Facebook and Reddit get conquered. At least I hope so.
| baby wrote:
| How are cloudflare workers relevant? The tech of reddit has
| always been pretty simple to replicate. I think the code was
| open sourced at some point? I remember creating a reddit-
| clone for France a long time ago but bringing users in didn't
| work. It was not a tech problem.
| donmcronald wrote:
| > How are cloudflare workers relevant?
|
| $5 / month gets me the same scaling capabilities as someone
| paying $50000 / month. I can build stuff with a low cost of
| operating since most stuff is never going to get massively
| popular, but if I get lucky and win the popularity lotto I
| can scale with a credit card instead of an architectural
| change.
|
| AWS, Azure, etc. are similar, but they get expensive really
| fast. The traditional cloud platforms have a "hump" in the
| pricing where you're too small to get discounts, but too
| big to afford it.
|
| So basically what I'm saying is that as compute / scaling
| improve to the point where you don't have to sell your soul
| to venture capitalists to pay for everything, we might see
| a lot more "fair value" minded entrepreneurs start to
| succeed.
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| This is an important point. It isn't the tech that makes
| reddit successful, it is the user base.
| tyre wrote:
| "I made it worse for users but it is making me rich" is peak
| Silicon Valley.
| ehsankia wrote:
| "dark patterns work" _surprised pikachu face_
|
| Did they think people use dark patterns for the fun of it...?
| sergiomattei wrote:
| Yeah, it's a business, not a charity.
|
| People don't start businesses because it's cute and fun.
| Reddit needs to turn a profit or demonstrate ridiculous
| growth, and it seems to be working.
| Dreako wrote:
| makes sense.
|
| Also if anyone doesnt like the new mobile redesign they should
| probably try using "i.reddit.com"
|
| (which is a light mobile client)
| donmcronald wrote:
| I simply quit using it on my phone. No big loss IMO.
| pkamb wrote:
| > I am responsible for ... AMP pages
|
| Why does Reddit use AMP pages and a mobile site that look
| _exactly the same_? For speed /SEO benefits? Disabling AMP
| would still look mostly the same for normal Reddit users but
| would make "old." users much happier.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > These practices are done because it works.
|
| _Which_ practices, though? A number of the practices you note
| (e.g. streamlined signup flow) are not user hostile at all, and
| others are a mixed bag. (E.g. one could argue that AMP + a
| properly featured mobile site and 'official' app were
| necessary steps with a subpar implementation). But when looking
| specifically at the dark patterns that power users are most
| likely to complain about, it's unclear that they would help
| DAU/MAU much, if at all. Casual users might not complain
| overtly all that much, but they're almost certainly discouraged
| by many such practices.
| wting wrote:
| Features are only launched after running a successful
| experiment.
|
| We try to appeal to power users when possible. For example
| with the current signup flow has optional emails, though
| intentionally non-obvious.
|
| This means new users sign up with an email which means we can
| reduce churn through digests and also reset passwords /
| prevent account takeovers, a large burden for Reddit's anti
| spam teams.
| [deleted]
| gentleman11 wrote:
| Non obvious? It's deliberately hidden. Its utterly
| dishonest. Thanks for mentioning it I'm just annoyed by
| user interfaces copying human choice and manipulating
| people. It goes way beyond "disrespectful" and should be
| illegal
| ghosty141 wrote:
| Sorry but I have to side with reddit here. He said it's
| aimed at power users for whom it doesn't matter that it's
| hidden because they know how to use this feature.
|
| It's advantageous for Reddit to have accounts with
| emails, why shouldn't they incentivise users to supply
| them during the registration process? It's their website
| nonetheless.
| asddubs wrote:
| yeah that particular one seems a bit weird to complain
| about when basically every other website has mandatory
| emails
| jackson1442 wrote:
| Yep. People, even power users, are generally surprised when
| I say you don't need an email after making a comment like
| "reddit went downhill when they started requiring an email
| address."
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| > _streamlined signup flow_
|
| It was more streamlined before. You literally only had to
| input a username and any password, no policies, email or
| anything else you had to adhere to/provide.
|
| I stopped using reddit back then after using it several hours
| daily for years, so not every power user ignored these
| changes
| minsc__and__boo wrote:
| Sign up flows serve more purposes than just a funnel for
| new users (which IMO is part of a problem with how we build
| websites in general, but I digress).
|
| Anti-scam/fraud account identification can rely heavily on
| inputs up front. I'm honestly surprised reddit went so long
| without requiring other inputs, despite their rising
| popularity.
| x0x0 wrote:
| And account recovery.
|
| People get real sad when you have to tell them that if
| they forgot a password, their account is simply gone.
| Email fixes that.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > But when looking specifically at the dark patterns that
| power users are most likely to complain about, it's unclear
| that they would help DAU/MAU much, if at all. Casual users
| might not complain overtly all that much, but they're almost
| certainly discouraged by many such practices.
|
| Power users of sites like Reddit are already hooked. They're
| already logged in, already have an app installed, and they
| don't see all of the nags and pop-ups that appear to users
| who aren't logged in.
|
| It's the unregistered users and those who aren't logged in
| who have to suffer the nags and pop-ups and limitations. And
| as the site constantly reminds them, they can fix the problem
| by downloading the app and joining the ranks of trackable
| users.
|
| When a website makes their money from advertising, user
| metrics are king. The more app installs, DAUs, and unique
| registered users you can show, the more money you can collect
| from advertisers. Advertisers would rather show their ad once
| to 1000 people than 100 times to 10 people. They want to use
| unique user counts, not just guesses based on volatile IP
| address, to support that.
|
| As a result, it's more beneficial for a company to alienate 1
| user who won't register (and therefore won't contribute to
| metrics) in exchange for gaining 1 other user who will
| register. If I had to guess, I suspect Reddit is gaining more
| like 10 or more users for every 1 user who is alienated.
|
| The unfortunate reality is that when it comes to free sites
| and services, power users (who generally install ad blockers
| or have been trained to ignore ads) can cost more than they
| bring in revenue. It's the casual users who don't have ad
| blockers and don't have any aversion to ads that ultimately
| bring the revenue.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > It's the unregistered users and those who aren't logged
| in who have to suffer the nags and pop-ups and limitations.
|
| The problem with this strategy is that it's easy to add so
| many nags that many more users will bounce away from the
| site than will install the app, or otherwise engage at all.
| Given what we know about user behavior on the Internet,
| Reddit is almost certainly on the downward slope of this
| weird Laffer curve, well beyond the point of "optimally
| effective" nagging. Add even more, and you become just
| another Experts-Exchange that no one cares about all that
| much.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > Given what we know about user behavior on the Internet,
| Reddit is almost certainly on the downward slope of this
| weird Laffer curve, well beyond the point of "optimally
| effective" nagging.
|
| If your internet bubble is largely composed of power
| users who have such a deep disdain for pop-ups that they
| will refuse to engage with this sites, you might think
| that.
|
| But looking at Reddit's growth numbers lately, it appears
| their gamble has clearly paid off.
|
| The key to understanding this is this: Mass-market,
| advertising-supported websites don't cater to picky power
| users. They cater to whoever they can get to sign up. If
| someone refuses to use a site because they refuse to sign
| up or install the app, then that's a positive, not a
| negative, for their numbers. They only want the users who
| will accept the conditions of the website.
| raverbashing wrote:
| True
|
| Except it's the power users are the ones that "make
| Reddit". They share the links and add comments
|
| I think even the lurker/commenter ratio is something like
| 10x (can't remember where I saw this so I can be wrong)
|
| But sure, the number of users go up. Until it doesn't.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| There is an artificial delay on mobile page loads to steer
| you into using the app. You are bombarded with deceptive
| popups to install the app. They supposedly run a website.
| They should focus on that and stop acting like it's 2010.
| irateswami wrote:
| It's about pumping up engagement metrics, pure and simple,
| regardless of the quality of the user experience.
|
| Any and all social media is poison.
| srik wrote:
| > power users complain--and still continue using the site--but
| the casual user does not.
|
| This was the exact situation digg just before the mass
| migration to reddit happened.
| ehsankia wrote:
| They've been fairly clever having their cake and eating it
| too with old/new reddit UI. They're basically cultivating a
| whole new userbase that only knows the new UI, while still
| keeping the old userbase around. I can imagine that once the
| new one because large enough to be self-sustainable, they'll
| kill the old interface and the mass exodus won't fully kill
| reddit since they still have the other half who won't care.
| Sunspark wrote:
| It's a dangerous game they're playing. They don't create
| original content, so if someone clones or creates a site
| with the old user-friendly interface then the switch might
| flip on them as abruptly as it did for digg.
| wting wrote:
| Edit: "reined in" and not "reigned in".
|
| I apologize for the Freudian slip as my edit window has passed.
| baby wrote:
| True. And reddit is now a much worse place than most people
| remember. I remember r/atheism being in the defaults and not a
| FP full of pictures and brainless memes :(
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| I ran Product Engineering at a competing startup (hundreds of
| millions of MAUs) that tested/employed similar flows. And yes,
| they work in the short-term, and unless you are very
| principled, it's hard to avoid them. I'm glad you heavily
| protested them. But I'd like to further the argument for why
| they should be avoided.
|
| First, yes they do work in the short-term. You run an A/B test
| with some adversarial flow that blocks mobile web traffic users
| from doing certain things. Most of them get pissed, but enough
| of them download the mobile app (which allows you to build up
| their engagement via phone presence and notifications) that the
| A/B test is positive. Rinse and repeat. A few dozen experiments
| later, and now these patterns are pervasive across your
| product.
|
| Apart from whether they work (in the short-term), there are
| three other questions readers of this thread should think about
| because I'd hate for people to walk away thinking "these
| patterns are normalized and they work so, _sigh_ , i should
| just do them too".
|
| One is whether they work in the long-term. Yes, you can juice
| your metrics in the short-term, and sometimes that translates
| to long-term growth, but it's harder to measure secondary
| effects. Can you accurately measure product brand damage and
| quantify the long-term impact?
|
| Second, and as an EM you should appreciate this, can you
| measure secondary brand damage like _recruiting brand_ damage?
| Dark patterns (and threads like this with hundreds of
| passionate engineers talking about how much they hate those
| dark patterns) _will_ damage your ability to hire the type of
| engineers you want to help you build your product.
|
| Finally, there's some subjective ethical question in here. Even
| if these patterns work in the short and long term, do you
| _want_ to spend your life, your intellectual energy, your time
| turning the internet into this? Do you want to go out and hire
| smart, passionate people and get _them_ to spend their time and
| intellectual energy turning the internet into this?
|
| (side note: I have no affiliation with the author of this post,
| but I wrote the original Disrespectful Design post he links to
| in his first paragraph)
| wting wrote:
| One of the ways to measure long term impact is through the
| use of a golden cohort that is never opted into experiments.
| Unsurprisingly, I could not get this work prioritized on the
| roadmap.
|
| We also worked with growth consultants (read: Bay Area B2C
| product leads) in scoping out some of these ideas. We accrued
| what I call "product debt" where we launch the MVP but never
| followed up to polish the feature[0] as they don't improve
| KPIs.
|
| I assume this is the same with Growth teams everywhere but am
| happy to be corrected.
|
| Regarding long term impact, we measured this through various
| dimensions in marketing, recruiting, and user research. The
| outcomes are largely positive.
|
| ______
|
| 0: One feature I argued for was an opt out of the mobile app
| interstitial. It makes sense to show it once or twice, but
| users aren't going to download the app just because they saw
| it 50x.
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| Yeah, golden cohorts can work, but they are really hard to
| pull off, especially for logged out traffic (which is where
| you'd use most of these patterns anyway). Good luck
| tracking me over 6-24 months across different devices and
| locations. And cross-contamination is hard to prevent (for
| instance, the golden cohort might suffer from global
| effects like worse content due to loss of power users or
| even from stumbling across brand-damaging threads like
| this). It also just adds a lot of product complexity to
| keep behavior around that long.
|
| That said, they can work. Twitter famously did something
| like that for their time-based vs algorithmic feed and I
| think YouTube does it pretty regularly.
|
| The biggest issue, though, is that by the time you get
| results from any long-term experiments, most of the
| decision-makers (PMs, EMs, etc) have probably moved on away
| having taken credit for the short-term wins they delivered.
| wting wrote:
| The person who created Twitter's experimentation platform
| is also at Reddit, and heavily influenced Reddit's
| experiment design and review process.
|
| But yes, a revolving door of product leaders and
| decisions is going to bias towards short term
| optimization.
| brailsafe wrote:
| So some of his ideas were dark patterns that you protested, and
| others were dark patterns that you supported, and in retrospect
| are happy that you implemented, due to revenue growth? Did you
| receive any pushback from engineers, and if so, how did you
| handle that?
| saiojd wrote:
| You've created value for shareholders, at the detriment of
| society. "Congrats".
| bostik wrote:
| Douglas Rushkoff calls this "extracting wealth by destroying
| value".
|
| Apt.
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| There's a sucker born every minute.
|
| When I was 10 I bought Pokemon cards, which looking back on,
| was a huge waste of money, but at least it wasn't all that much
| money in the end. I was a newbie to the scene, and I got taken
| advantage of. Lesson learned.
|
| 10 years later when phones were just coming into everyone's
| pockets, a whole new wave of gamers emerged. Game companies
| could either develop for the previous wave, by building games
| like Starcraft II, or they could build for the current wave,
| and build games like Candy Crush.
|
| Gamers who prefer games like Starcraft want to pay once for a
| game that lasts years and expect perfection. Candy Crush, like
| the Pokemon cards before it, expected nothing and were willing
| to spend a bunch of money for ultimately nothing. The business
| should clearly move to making Candy Crushes. The ROI is insane.
|
| But the more you bleed the users, the more they get fleeced,
| the more they start to learn, the more they regret. Yesterday's
| Pokemon cards buyers were todays Starcraft gamers, and today's
| Candy Crush players are tomorrows expert gamers. You want to
| build your platform to grow with them. Build a Candy Crush,
| then build it slightly more complex. In 10 years, they will be
| ready for Starcraft.
|
| You can continue to seek the bottom of the skill zone, but we
| had that one wave where adults of all ages were getting new
| phones and experiencing things that they had never done before.
| We had that one time where kids were able to ask their parents
| and their parents were not skilled and did not regret so they
| did not say no. Using a peak oil metaphor, we've reach peak
| sucker. We'll never have this opportunity again.
|
| So cutting back to Reddit - Reddit, like Digg and Slashdot and
| Usenet before it, released to the Starcraft level of the social
| commentors. They are hard to deal with, they expect everything
| for nothing, but the quality of their content brought along
| with it the slightly less expert commentators. Eventually that
| filtered down and the entire internet was on Reddit. The entire
| internet was incredible for their ROI.
|
| Digg was ruined because they abandoned the Starcraft
| commentors. When they left, everyone left with them. Reddit has
| been smart in this regard, as the old features and the old API
| still exists, the power users can use power user tools and keep
| the same experience. But understand, that if given the
| opportunity to move elsewhere, even somewhere that has less
| features like say... Hacker News, they will do so. They have
| done so. If Reddit keeps chasing the bottom of the market, when
| someone does show up with actual innovations like what Reddit
| had over Digg, you need to be afraid because just like Digg the
| site will be dead over-night.
|
| When you should be looking at bringing those casual users into
| moderate users, you keep trying the dark patterns. But each
| time you go back to the dark patterns they get weaker and
| weaker. That strong dark pattern that used to get you millions
| of dollars now only get you hundreds of thousands. Next week it
| will be tens of thousands. Your users are developing dark
| pattern tolerance. You don't yet have a valid competitor, this
| is exactly when you should be experimenting to disrupt
| yourself.
| baby wrote:
| Pokemon cards were pretty awesome. What are you talking
| about.
| nightski wrote:
| Meh Reddit brings me a lot of value still. I enjoy it a lot.
| On the other hand I've never bothered with mobile games and
| have never paid for a microtransaction.
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| It was an analogy. You don't need to have played mobile
| games to see the connection OP is trying to make between
| "junk food" mobile games and "junk food" social media.
| ergot_vacation wrote:
| Reddit is the perfect case example of what happened to the 07-08
| web as time went on. Initially, the Internet was a big exciting
| place and people just built stuff to see if they could, and maybe
| they could sell it later (a lot of communities never even
| considered huge commercial success, it was just about mucking
| around in a space that was cheap and exciting.)
|
| As time went on, everything rotted. The chill sites struggled to
| keep the lights on, and many eventually shuttered. The "we'll
| sell it off some day" ones sold it off, and the buyers ALWAYS ran
| the site into the ground.
|
| So now we get an Internet that resembles a b-movie graveyard.
| There are a lot of corpses, and a lot of shambling zombies. The
| few souls still alive are holed up somewhere with a shotgun,
| awaiting the end.
| streamofdigits wrote:
| the reddit experience is unbelievably crappy.
|
| yet its huge popularity seems to suggest that it has gotten
| something right. the other social media and privacy sinkholes
| (facebook, twitter, linkedin etc) and in particular their
| uncontrollable "timeline" concept seem to have some design (as
| opposed to execution) issue.
|
| btw there is an open source fediverse version called lemmy. Build
| the future you want to live in and all that...
|
| [0] https://join-lemmy.org/
|
| [1] https://github.com/LemmyNet
| cloudking wrote:
| I run into a problem on Reddit all the time with Chrome on
| Android: the videos won't load and just stay frozen or black. The
| only fix seems to be restarting Chrome.
|
| Do any hackers here know a permanent solution? Please don't say
| use another browser, I like Chrome :)
| codingclaws wrote:
| One thing I've found is that when I bookmark an old.reddit.com
| page on my phone it somehow bookmarks www.reddit.com - super
| annoying.
|
| Anyway, try my Reddit clone (no pop-ups, no smartphone app, no
| JavaScript, no AMP, no up or down voting, no content algorithm,
| no images or videos, open source):
|
| https://www.peachesnstink.com
| RosanaAnaDana wrote:
| Reddit has completely jumped the shark in its UI design, the
| 'direction' its taken, and its basically complete capitulation to
| censorship at a corporate level. Its interesting to that they
| haven't IPO'd yet, because in my view, its a zombie carcass
| waiting for its replacement to find its way onto the net.
|
| There has always been a place, a need, and a demand for
| anonymous, free form discussions on the internet. Craigslist
| community posts (those are still a thing too), Fark,
| SomethingAwful, Digg, Reddit, and yes, Hackernews. I get that
| there are difficulties in managing an anonymous community,
| especially in a world where things can go so toxic. But reddit is
| a walking corpse waiting to be taken over by a better product.
| Everything about the site, the community, the company is hot
| garbage, but there is no better alternative, so it walks on.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| >Reddit has completely jumped the shark in its UI design, the
| 'direction' its taken, and its basically complete capitulation
| to censorship at a corporate level. Its interesting to that
| they haven't IPO'd yet, because in my view, its a zombie
| carcass waiting for its replacement to find its way onto the
| net.
|
| They're never going to IPO, because they're owned by Advance
| Publications. Reddit hasn't been a startup for like a decade.
| ergot_vacation wrote:
| A lot has been written about the social and legal difficulties
| of running such a site (how much do you enjoy looking at child
| porn all day so you can ban the people posting it? How many
| mass-shooters would you like to have post their manifesto on
| your site?) But I think the real issue is just money. Even if
| you keep things pretty stripped down, as 4chan or the original
| reddit did, hosting still costs money. And if you ever catch
| on, it's going to cost a LOT of money. Where is that money
| going to come from? Your users? You don't have a commercial
| product people are willing to pay for. Advertisers? Not in a
| post ad-pocalypse era; they don't want to be anywhere near a
| free, anonymous platform. And keep in mind that eventually
| you'll have to pay for ddoss protection, a security and
| moderation team, and probably legal as well. So unless you're
| wealthy enough to just pay for the site out of pocket
| indefinitely, any reddit or image board clone is doomed to
| failure from the beginning. It has a ticking death clock that
| will expire when the owners finally realize they can no longer
| afford it.
| mustacheemperor wrote:
| There was in fact a time where Reddit's front page included a
| progress bar showing how much Gold needed to be bought/gifted
| that day to pay off that day's server time, and shortly after
| it was introduced the bar was overfilled every single day and
| eventually set to a more arbitrary goal than actual server
| bills. I'm assuming that didn't include salaries and other
| overhead, but it does indicate the userbase could basically
| sponsor the hosting fees. That was also before Reddit
| directly hosted images and videos, so those bills have
| presumably gone up quite a bit.
| intricatedetail wrote:
| It will be difficult if not impossible to find a payment
| platform to service donations. If you accept crypto,
| exchanges may block you if user pays with stolen coins.
| realce wrote:
| This is actually one of the more troubling aspects of
| Reddit's decline IMO. The user-funded model WORKED but so
| much tracking data was getting left behind that someone
| chose to make the switch.
| fullshark wrote:
| All those things suck at reddit, but to me the fundamental
| issue with reddit is upvoting/downvoting + a massive user base.
| Subreddits get too large and are dominated by lowest common
| denominator quips and memes to the point that the content is
| junk food for echo chambers. Every so often some bit of insight
| can rise, but by and large that's the problem and it's
| fundamental to reddit's DNA and no UX fixes would solve that.
| uDontKnowMe wrote:
| I disagree that UX can't play a role in this aspect of
| Reddit. Old reddit was a lot more insightful and had higher
| quality content and discussions, because the UX was geared
| towards that. Now the UX is heavily geared towards mindless
| scrolling of a feed on your phone, and so that is the kind of
| content you get.
|
| Just look at Hacker News, it is upvote/downvote-based, but it
| has way better quality discussion than anywhere on (new)
| Reddit. Maybe comparable to some of the best subs 10 years
| ago, and that's because Hacker News has the same UI reddit
| had 10 years ago.
| akiselev wrote:
| _> Just look at Hacker News, it is upvote /downvote-based,
| but it has way better quality discussion than anywhere on
| (new) Reddit. Maybe comparable to some of the best subs 10
| years ago, and that's because Hacker News has the same UI
| reddit had 10 years ago._
|
| HN has paid moderators, which is unheard of for a community
| this small (~12k comments per day last time dang shared
| stats)
| neither_color wrote:
| >complete capitulation to censorship at a corporate level.
|
| _sigh_
|
| I would still use Reddit and put up with all the bad UI design
| and dark patterns if it wasn't for the censorship. I miss the
| pre-2016 election reddit when it was still full of pedantic
| types who would have long debates in comment threads where they
| would break each other's arguments down line by line. I wasn't
| strongly in favor of one belief or another, but it taught me a
| lot about forming arguments and persuasive writing that English
| classes never taught me. Back in those days you would still see
| productive debates between left-wing and libertarian types. Now
| with all the gold and comment badges discussion has devolved
| down to who can make the wittiest, snarkiest one liner that
| will get them rewarded.
| steelframe wrote:
| I once spent an entire weekend collecting and aggregating
| data to create a bunch of charts that revealed some really
| interesting statistics for a subreddit and earned about 100
| karma.
|
| I made a one-line "zinger" comment on some random thread in
| r/pics and pulled in 1,800 karma.
|
| That's when I realized I was casting pearl before swine by
| spending real effort on Reddit, and I should instead be
| directing my efforts on real quality content elsewhere.
| corin_ wrote:
| The concept of lowest common denominator isn't really
| exclusive to Reddit, communicating through any medium there
| will always be more people able / willing to understand (or
| just to spend the time getting through) something short and
| simple than something long and complex.
| intricatedetail wrote:
| > There has always been a place, a need, and a demand for
| anonymous, free form discussions on the internet.
|
| With the EU terreg and other countries like UK's online safety
| bill, owners will have to censor content on request or become
| liable. Free speech internet is going to be a pipe dream in a
| year or so. There is never going to be alternative to Reddit
| and remaining free speech sites will have to close or become
| compliant.
| [deleted]
| blocked_again wrote:
| Reddit should just launch a coin, buy back the shares from
| investors and stop doing these shady things. 90% of the coins on
| the 100 marketcap are shitcoins and are still worth billions.
| Reddit with its massive userbase can easily make it to the top
| 100.
| darthrupert wrote:
| Teddit.net or Apollo are the only ways to use Reddit without
| goong crazy.
| [deleted]
| YottaBun wrote:
| This post is saying exactly what I think every time I try to use
| reddit through a browser on my phone. Horrible!
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Meh, I don't disagree, but I also don't experience these problems
| on old.reddit.com. Now, when they take that away...
| ObsolescentMonk wrote:
| I find myself using `old.reddit.com` more than is needed. Reddit
| sometimes requires Javascript to read a post properly, and I hate
| that.
| bluescrn wrote:
| Their app nags are the worst.
|
| Phones have very capable web browsers these days. Please let us
| use them!
|
| Has anybody written an app-nag-blocker yet?...
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| I'm confused how many people don't seem to realize this has
| nothing to do with experiencing the site.
|
| The App gets a ton of personal data they can't get on a
| website.
|
| That's all this is. Data collection. They need you to install
| the App so they can access your advertising ID, better link
| your IP and location to your account, get you to click
| permission allowance, etc.
|
| Shooting their own experience in the foot is an acceptable
| sacrifice.
| thih9 wrote:
| I wonder how to look at Apple's decision to tighten privacy
| rules in this light. I guess companies will be less motivated
| to force their users to use an iOS app. So, a potential loss
| for Apple; then again, a potential win for Apple users... so
| overall a win for Apple?
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| As an Apple user, I can zero percent complain about their
| actions even if they're 1/2 real and 1/2 marketing. At
| least Apple is saying the right things and even that is a
| win right now.
| rognjen wrote:
| I forgot about the app nags because I've entirely stopped
| browsing it on my phone.
| KrishnaShripad wrote:
| I just stay away from Reddit links as much as possible. The user
| experience is atrocious and I agree with everything the article
| says. There is another point that the article missed (or perhaps
| never encountered because the author primarily focuses on the
| mobile experience).
|
| In desktop Reddit posts are actually modal dialogs (don't believe
| me? Open a Reddit post in your desktop browser). I have this bad
| habit of clicking my mouse on the whitespace of any web page I
| visit (I guess I am the only one). The Reddit devs, for whatever
| reason best known to them, have added a click listener on the
| backdrop of the Reddit post (like I said, the post is a modal
| dialog). The moment you click it, the post closes to reveal the
| subreddit homepage that you were on. This has tripped me so many
| times I have rewired my brain to use my mouse carefully while
| navigating Reddit. This sort of design anti-pattern is also
| visible in USA Today. I don't know who first came up with this
| pattern but it sucks.
|
| Use modal dialogs for what they have to be used for. Don't try to
| fool the user into thinking it is a page when it is actually a
| modal dialog.
| sickmartian wrote:
| > I have this bad habit of clicking my mouse on the whitespace
| of any web page I visit (I guess I am the only one).
|
| That makes two of us. I agree but don't stay away, I use
| old.reddit w/reddit enhancement suite, doesn't fix incognito
| for me as I don't let addons run there, but using containers on
| firefox instead helps.
| j56no wrote:
| Three. I've stumbled on that too, Internet has become so
| unfriendly.
| Havoc wrote:
| Disrespectful is putting it mildly.
|
| Worse than the bad UI is how obviously calculated it is. It's not
| like they just built something bad, no they're actively worsening
| it to force the app on the user. Each month or three they cripple
| the web interface a bit more.
|
| Says a lot about the company culture when the entire UI design
| process is a giant dark pattern
| jcfrei wrote:
| Here's how reddit's business model probably works: you have power
| users which create or submit the content and write the witty
| comments and then you have the lurkers which just browse. what
| reddit is trying to monetize is the interaction with the latter
| user group: comments provide little space to promote ads, so most
| of them are hidden by default. instead they promote lots of posts
| with images interspersed with ads. the power users on the other
| hand use dedicated apps and have a custom interface anyway. they
| are (so far) not really bothered by the changes and continue to
| create and submit content.
| rognjen wrote:
| Exactly. The lurkers are where their growth is because they
| likely outnumber posters 10:1.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Lurkers will always outnumber posters on any forum I think,
| but I have to believe Reddit has a worse ratio than most
| because the echo chambers are so strong and anything outside
| of them is downvoted to oblivion.
|
| And it's easy to feel engaged by just reading threads
| mindlessly upvoting or downvoting endlessly.
| Firebrand wrote:
| Reddit bought Dubsmash last year, too. I imagine the app will
| eventually operate almost similar to TikTok: funny picture,
| advertisement, cat video, person live-streaming. Whether or not
| they can attract more of these power users to use the official
| app to upload short videos and livestream remains to be seen. I
| don't think they're able to on third-party apps. I'm not able
| to on Apollo, at least.
| [deleted]
| dehrmann wrote:
| You left out the moderators. Some of what they do is useful
| tending of communities, but some of what they do is provide
| free labor that addresses a hard problem.
| ehsankia wrote:
| Indeed, content moderation is the single hardest problem on
| the internet right now, and every big tech company is
| struggling with it. From Youtube to Twitch to Twitter to
| Facebook, etc. Reddit, while not perfect, has done relatively
| well, but as you mention it's all on the back of volunteer
| unpaid moderators. I'm surprised they haven't yet setup any
| sort of revenue sharing with large popular subs.
| newsclues wrote:
| They sell ads and DATA, and probably pull in major dollars from
| a tiny group of whales that spend on digital stickers.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > Why aren't they pivoting into a marketplace instead?
|
| I laughed a bit at this because they had previously bet hard on
| Reddit Gifts. No idea what happened, and the timing just might
| not have been right.
| aero-glide2 wrote:
| I simply use Slide For Reddit. Its open source, and available
| both on Play Store and Fdroid.
| fastball wrote:
| For anyone that wants a good iOS client, Apollo is the one to
| beat (and the spiritual successor to Alien Blue, the OG best
| Reddit app which was acquired by Reddit).
|
| That being said, I stopped using Reddit consistently (go on a
| few times a week now, used to browse daily / on my phone / etc)
| a few years ago, and I feel that decision has been a major
| contributing factor in improving my mental health.
|
| So if you're finding the Reddit experience garbage, maybe
| just... stop using Reddit. No amount of UX fixes provided by a
| 3rd party app can compensate for how toxic interactions on
| Reddit trend.
| cunthorpe wrote:
| Yep, Reddit is basically a junk site at the moment and it gets
| worse by the day. Just this month they started restricting
| "potentially NSFW" posts from being opened unless you login.
|
| This is their direction now, soon enough we'll have popunders
| like TripAdvisor, other successful junk site.
| makecheck wrote:
| What's interesting to me is that "old.reddit.com" continues to
| work on mobile in these cases. They must have found that users
| _really_ don't know about the original site, or that not enough
| care.
|
| Still, if "old.reddit.com" ever goes away I will be 100% cured of
| Reddit. It is literally unusable in any other way and it would
| not be worth the frustration.
| surround wrote:
| Try https://libredd.it/
|
| Or https://teddit.net/
| dempsey wrote:
| Not sure I agree with the Marketplace angle. Ads are fine but
| forcing everyone into the app is odd. Will ios14 change any of
| that?
| IgorPartola wrote:
| I really hate that Reddit insists on you using an app. I tried
| to share a Reddit post with some friends recently who aren't on
| that platform. To my dismay they reported that they couldn't
| see the post at all because of the GET THE REDDIT APP in your
| face bull feathers they were presented with. Reddit, you are a
| website. I want to use my normal browser tabs to use you, not
| your app. Please make it web-first.
| marcinzm wrote:
| Reddit has pathetic ad revenue per user versus every other
| social media platform. Part of this is likely due to anonymous
| users that they lack data on for proper targeting. This is
| their attempt to "fix" that.
| l72 wrote:
| I would think that Reddit would have an advantage here in
| some ways. As an advertiser, instead of trying to pick
| interests of a general population, you can just pick specific
| subreddits.
|
| If a store sells geeky/sci-fi clothing and gifts then I found
| it is way better to just target anyone that visits
| /r/startrek and some other relevant subreddits. No need to
| build profiles on users.
|
| I found Facebook to be a lot harder to accurately target
| users as you are relying on Facebook's profile of a user. I
| got a lot more reach, but much less conversion.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| Anyone feel like this is their Digg pivot?
| gruez wrote:
| What advantages does a user account have over anonymous
| session ids? User accounts survive users clearing cookies,
| but I doubt users clear their cookies often enough for that
| to be a problem.
| marcinzm wrote:
| Mobile browsers wipe cookies, users switch devices,
| multiple computers, etc.
|
| Facebook has over a decade of data on its users, no session
| id will match that.
|
| edit: Also knowing users emails will allows advertisers to
| match the reddit accounts to their own data stores on
| users.
| baylor121 wrote:
| It makes sense - there will be greater revenue for a few
| years maybe, in which time the team/product VP responsible
| would have been promoted. By the time the site
| culture/userbase dies (maybe in 5 years) these people would
| be long gone. Maybe even the higher management don't care
| about a timeline longer than 5 years tbh.
| marcinzm wrote:
| The true management (ie: stock holders) wants to exist at
| some point. There's talk of an IPO this year in which case
| they just want to pump up the numbers and hold things
| stable for another year before they can sell their stock.
| rognjen wrote:
| Why must every app monetize through ads? Why can't they provide
| features worth paying for?
| nowherebeen wrote:
| I think you kind of answer your own question. Social media is
| just a gossip page on steroids. None of their features are
| worth paying for; at least, not enough people are willing to
| pay for it. They realized given showing ads and charging
| customers, showing ads probably generates 10x revenue for
| them. Plus, what's to stop another person to offer a free
| reddit clone?
| rognjen wrote:
| They've never tried generating revenue from other
| meaningful features.
|
| A marketplace would have a very real value for users.
|
| And it would create a much better moat.
| adolph wrote:
| Ring, ring. Revenue team, call for you from Cambridge
| Analytica on line one!
| gonzo41 wrote:
| People pay for junk food all the time. Maybe internet
| companies are being too greedy and they are pricing
| themselves incorrectly.
|
| Would you pay $2 USD for all of reddit for a year? How many
| users does reddit have? It'd probably be a lot of money,
| but not super profitable. Hence they use adds because they
| won't shift on price.
| huseyinkeles wrote:
| Because no one pays?
| rognjen wrote:
| Users pay for marketplace features for anything from
| handmade bird houses to used underwear.
| joegahona wrote:
| Because coming up with features worth paying for is very,
| very hard. Which ad-free apps do you currently pay for?
| rognjen wrote:
| I pay for several things that make me money. If Reddit
| added features that let their users make money they'd be
| able to charge for them.
| PhoenixReborn wrote:
| The alternative monetization model is usually subscriptions /
| freemium features. These don't usually work out for social
| media sites as people are not willing to pay for user
| generated content, and the main draw is the content itself so
| freemium features are usually not high-value enough. Thus,
| the only remaining viable model is ads.
| rognjen wrote:
| That's one of the things I suggest. Copy Patreon. They've
| shown that users are willing to pay for "user generated
| content"
| marcinzm wrote:
| Isn't that basically Medium?
| rognjen wrote:
| And Substack. And Reddit has 10x their traffic.
| marcinzm wrote:
| Reddit has 10x the traffic because it's free.
| rognjen wrote:
| > moderators
|
| I suggest to compensate creators not moderators.
| marcinzm wrote:
| If you think moderators won't take advantage of their
| position to get a cut of that money then you're living in
| fantasy land. Or just sell their accounts to others who
| will do that.
| rognjen wrote:
| (Can't reply to the other comment)
|
| > Reddit has 10x the traffic because it's free.
|
| Reddit acquired more traffic because it's free, true. But
| now, they aren't looking to acquire more traffic. They're
| looking for more revenue.
|
| One way to get that revenue is to allow already existing
| content creators to charge for a part of the content.
|
| I think that would not only encourage better content but
| would bring in other users and generate good revenue.
| marcinzm wrote:
| Reddit's model is based on unpaid moderators managing
| most of the site. There's already controversy around a
| few moderators controlling all the large communities,
| karma farming and behind the scenes deals. Introducing
| money into the mix will just result in even more abuse as
| moderators try to take their own cut. It's a very messy
| eco-system that money will just make even messier.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| Friendly reminder that the entire site is a bait & switch scam:
|
| >We want to democratize the traditional model by giving editorial
| control to the people who use the site, not those who run it.
|
| >-- Reddit FAQ 2005
|
| >We've always benefited from a policy of not censoring content
|
| >-- u/kn0thing 2008
|
| >A bastion of free speech on the World Wide Web? I bet they would
| like it," he replies. [reddit]'s the digital form of political
| pamplets.
|
| >-- u/kn0thing 2012
|
| >We will tirelessly defend the right to freely share information
| on reddit in any way we can, even if it is offensive or discusses
| something that may be illegal.
|
| >-- u/reddit 2012
|
| >We stand for free speech. This means we are not going to ban
| distasteful subreddits. We will not ban legal content even if we
| find it odious or if we personally condemn it. Not because that's
| the law in the United States - because as many people have
| pointed out, privately-owned forums are under no obligation to
| uphold it - but because we believe in that ideal independently,
| and that's what we want to promote on our platform. We are
| clarifying that now because in the past it wasn't clear, and (to
| be honest) in the past we were not completely independent and
| there were other pressures acting on reddit. Now it's just
| reddit, and we serve the community, we serve the ideals of free
| speech, and we hope to ultimately be a universal platform for
| human discourse (cat pictures are a form of discourse).
|
| >-- u/yishan 2012
|
| >Neither Alexis [u/kn0thing] nor I created Reddit to be a bastion
| of free speech
|
| >-- u/spez 2015
|
| And I currently have this gem of a notification sitting in my
| inbox:
|
| >Important notification about your account
|
| >Your account has been suspended from Reddit for breaking the
| rules. The suspension will last 3 day(s).
|
| >You recently upvoted a post or comment that was determined to be
| against our policies. Abusive content is not acceptable on
| reddit, nor is engaging with it. Please be thoughtful about the
| content you interact with.
|
| >This is an automated message; responses will not be received by
| Reddit admins.
|
| Note that they _don 't_ tell you what the content was. They
| clearly want you to become fearful about expressing yourself, or
| even using the site, and engage in self censorship. They're one
| of the most dishonest and awful companies in America. Who the
| fuck knows what the content even was. Probably some edgy meme
| from PoliticalCompassMemes, which thankfully has a backup here:
| https://ruqqus.com/+PoliticalCompassMemes
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