The curious thing is that Reddit is as valuable as it is because of what it gets from its users (free moderation, free user-submitted content.)
There's always been a sort of implicit agreement that it's a symbiotic relationship -- reddit provides the house/utilities, users provide the stuff, and mods do the clean up. Third-party devs were an extension of that -- making it easier to connect the parties.
Yeah but that symbiosis community stuff is for when you're still growing. Once you're big, it's time to pull up that ladder, put on the corporate mask, and start cranking that ad revenue at all costs. You've got a million rubes doomscrolling past your homogenous r/funny - i mean, r/all - slurry who don't know the difference between an ad and a real post. People who care about things like UX and quality posts are a minority who you are free to exploit for as long as you're useful, and then crush once you're done with them.
I seriously think this is just reddit finally thinking "yup - we've won - time to start acting with impunity for anything that cuts costs (like not maintaining a public API) or increases even the smallest bit of revenue (like managing to convert 1% of apollo users to first-party-app users while alienating (no pun intended) the rest).
I don't understand why they don't either mandate ad display on third-party apps, or waive API fees for third-party apps that show ads in an approved manner. I'm sure there's a reason, but I'd rather be able to use Apollo even if it shows ads as well than to use the official app.
Control of the narrative is worth more than just money. So instead of just removing it, they just set the price to be laughable high so few, if any actually pay.
Reddit is also betting that the 'sticky' users who contribute won't leave. And I think they grossly underestimated just how fast content creators can abandon your platform for a more friendly one.
I also surmise that the API charging is to claw money back from aggregators and those YT shorts and Tiktoks that badly read a post and some comments along with an unrelated video. And also killing 3rd party API clients also helps adblocking efforts and control of the 'narrative'.
That’s not really true. I am on a number of subs (boardgames, woodworking, baking, etc.) that have people posting their own content all the time. The following are the very first posts at the top of the front page of each of these subs right now:
It also depends on how you define content. While the initial thread may be a “repost”, the ensuing discussion is original and leads to different inputs.
Or just charge a reasonable price for API access that offsets the lost ad revenue. I think Reddit's ad revenue is something like $0.12/mo for an average user. If their API pricing averaged out to $0.15/month/user they would still be coming out ahead.
This would still hurt free third party apps, but I'm sure power users wouldn't mind paying $1/month to keep their favorite third party app going.
Instead, Reddit went for insane API pricing that app developers can't realistically afford at the subscription rates people are willing to pay.
Indeed; as Cory Doctorow calls it, the Enshittification stage. The point at which the platform begins to extract all the value it can from its users and its advertisers.
Every social network goes through this. You used to be able to access Facebook via other front-ends as well, same with Twitter.
This will cut down drastically on my reddit usage, and for that I am thankful. I don't have the Facebook or Twitter apps on my phone, and only use them from Firefox in Private mode when I do get the urge to check them.
Reddit is sprawling. There are thousands of non-political subreddits. Yeah, if you are following the default feed and reading r/politics, or any of the drama subreddits, you are going to have a bad time.
Are you curious about what information is being sent through your house between 10KHz and 6GHz? Curious what your water meter is broadcasting to the neighborhood? https://www.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR/
I see this response every time somebody criticizes reddit, and I think it matters little. Even when you get off the defaults, many of the niche interests are segmented into multiple subreddits due to infighting and conflicts. And beyond that, even if you find a peaceful sub, the whole site is overflowing in bot-driven karma farming that reposts the same things every few months, and of course, my least favorite: armchair experts. I participated in many subreddits on subjects that I'm a professional in and saw repeatedly how often speaking confidently was heralded more than speaking factually.
Don't even mention that, a small (<100k subs) youtube channel I follow has three different subreddits covering it, because of infighting and moderation issues.
and in some modicum it’ll always have these communities but like was mentioned above: watching cat gifs, some drunk girl smashing a wine bottle, or the random police videos - those non-niche areas are at jeopardy… and good. It’s time they do their little IPO and we all move on to whatever emerges after the dust settles.
Seems like that is because politics itself has reached intractable enshittification, not necessarily Reddit. Reddit is more or less reflective of the internet writ large.
> I don't have the Facebook or Twitter apps on my phone, and only use them from Firefox in Private mode when I do get the urge to check them.
How do you open your messages with Facebook on mobile? Everytime I try it wants to redirect me to the app that of course I don't have. The desktop mode is just horrible to use on my Pixel 6 (I find the screen too small).
Reddit is past its expiration date anyway and I'm surprised no one has created a challenger site. Perhaps this was due to Reddit's friendliness toward programmatic access but it seems they are taking that away.
This is a good opportunity to create a new community, and essentially take back messaging from the corporations (let's be real about what reddit is) and put it back into the hands of the people.
I think the problem is really that we need platforms such as reddit on the internet, they are kind of part of its essential infrastructure. But running any infrastructure under the profit maximization scheme will always end up in self destruction. They are making enough money, they can easily go on keeping the API open, but there is no such thing as a sustainable business, they are forced to make more profit than they made more last year.
But I think in truth they can do a lot before really destroying themselves, closing 3rd party apps is going to be barely noticable. In theory we could have some sort of decentralized dApp alternative, but since everyone working on that sort of stuff is a borderline criminal scam artist I don't see anything real will ever come out of this grift.
>But running any infrastructure under the profit maximization scheme will always end up in self destruction.
That's why the parts of the internet that are "essential infrastructure" would serve us all better if they were non-profit (or a Benefit Corporation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation).
Watching the promise of the Internet get flushed down the drain, I have developed a healthy appetite for paying cash to eliminate surveillance, ads and general enshitification. I'd much rather donate that cash to an organization that is actively trying to provide a public benefit.
I still maintain that Usenet was the original 'reddit/digg'. And the webapps competitors have tried to cater, and fail.
I'd rather see a newer Usenet protocol... Say something that also integrates with the Fediverse. But there's no "money" for open protocols, even though companies again and again try to emulate "Usenet, but profitized".
This feels like a longer tail of the image hosting problem, btw.
I don’t think you need to go full Reddit to replace it, just an interest in a niche and a desire to host a website.
The struggle is that it takes more than love of a subject to bootstrap a community. I could see someone broadly succeeding by building modern forum software alongside an optional discovery platform that links forums together. I know there are federated platforms out there, but I think a large portion of them have lost the thread of the user journey in attempts to meet the technical challenges of federation.
Reddit's charm is that you can easily discover brand new communities and it's zero friction to get involved, you find a new subreddit and start interacting. No need to remember the new site or set up new credentials. A bunch of different communities adds all that friction back in.
I agree with your first statement. For years, I have been working on a website/app/community platform to support learning and debate about the productive uses of nuclear energy.
My vision is more of a combination of the best of Reddit, online courses, blogging, photos, video, learning games, and simulations. More of a slice across many different types of app, tuned to the topic at hand that interests me. It's fun to work on, even if my progress is slow.
Reproducing r/nuclear seems like a nightmare scenario. Lots of arguing. Tough to control the tone and screen out-dated information. It's the classic problem with social media, discerning the difference between reality and myth. Plus, reading through screaming matches is not a fun way to learn.
Aggregating these smaller nightmarish sites, who wants to do that?
Yeah so OPs point about "making plenty of money" isn't really true. Now, I'm sure they could pull a twitter and layoff 75% of the company and reach profitability.
No this is the entire point I'm making, they are not interested in creating a sustainable infrastructure for the internet, they want investors they want to IPO they want to grow and grow and grow. If they destroy themselves in the process it's a bet everyone invested along the way is perfectly fine with, demanding even. The entire structure of this is cancerous.
Yeah I get your point now, I agree the entire grow at all costs is not good for building a sustainable company. Investors are never happy with normal growth rates, they want exponential growth which isn't possible after a certain point without ruining your product.
Let's be clear though: this is exactly what happened.
Digg was the place to go, and then they fucked it up and everyone migrated to Reddit. Now Reddit is fucking it up, and even if everyone migrates somewhere else, that new somewhere else is going to fuck it up too once they get to the point of "we need to be profitable at all costs".
What we actually need is some way to convince users to pay for the services they use so that they don't start mining us for ad clicks as soon as they think they can get away with it, because as long as users are going to insist on everything being free companies are going to need to do shit like this to us at every opportunity.
Everyone says "users need to pay" but there's a second alternative that is, imo, much better: technical folk run servers for their friends and families.
This is how the fediverse works, and it's _vastly_ better than any subscription service (not least because it means that anyone, regardless of financial situation, can find a server to be a part of.)
There's a fedi version of Reddit (lemmy) but it seems to have been a bit of a half-cooked design, rather than something that could truly take over for Reddit anytime soon.
I agree that we should be better off in a world where people paid for things with money and not their privacy. But paying with privacy happens even for paid-for products, e.g. "smart TVs" and phones, Windows, internet connections, driving your car in public, digital cable.
First they said no one had to pay, and they subjected us to ads... Then, they said, well, you'll have to pay, if you don't want to see our increasingly annoying ads... Then, they got our money. Then, they decided to subject us to ads, again...
No, what we need is someone who is just happy with a business that pays for itself and gives a healthy profit for the owner, not "omfg, shitloads of money". Reddit is - as far as I know - profitable. All employees are paid, all costs are paid, and the owners get their share. That's a stable arrangement. Greed is what's unbalancing it. And despite what some people think: Greed is not good. And Gordon Gecko was the villain.
My recollection of the great migration to reddit was because Digg was crashing. That's probably the only reason Reddit has stayed up as long as it has, it's back end eng has held up. I'm open to being schooled here.
>What we actually need is some way to convince users to pay for the services they use
Yes and that will most likely work great the same day that communism will. If users pay X the corporation wants X + Y. It is an age-old problem from way before the internet. Can you name one company that is okay with a healthy profit that doesn't get better over time? For example if they take costs and have X profit, will anyone still say X is fine with 100 times more users? After all it should become cheaper per user and theres zero reason the profit should go up. In my opinion the only way that will happen is with governments doing this - and not a government like in the US but more like Norway.
Folding ideas has a video on vidme that goes into this. A competitor that can't sell itself on features will inevitably gain traction most with those banned from the original platform. Currently that means a new platform will have very angry, very extreme voices. That is a terrible way to start a platform.
A quote that ringed in my mind for years after wondering why this keeps happening.
>The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
For the most part, people are fine as long as the boat does rock TOO much, and for the most part Reddit's boat hasn't rocked to the extent Digg did back in the day. It may not even be possible for that to happen with the current population of users. Digg's exodus happened in 2005-6 right before the big boom of social media in 2008-10. The users were generally pretty saavy back then.
These days? Everyone uses social media, and inevitably with any mainstream, most people will only use it very casually, perhaps amongst a small friend group or for very casual browsing. They never comment,they may never even check comments. As long as the content comes, they won't even be aware of the sausage underneat from power users. But they are also the real lifeblood of the site.
These sorts of sites may be too big to fail now. You can't promote a site based on "hey we're not X". It just needs to have the right content at the right time a la TikTok. Sadly, one big incentive of that may include monetizing people for making posts and participating, and that sort of goes against the whole premise of the classic internet forums of the 90's/00's
I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily past it’s expiration date. It’s ranked 6th most trafficked sites in the US.
I do think that Reddit could do with a massive overhaul.
If I was ceo tomorrow I would;
- Install a bunch of new teams to focus on solving real problems for users
- understand user pain points with the UX. why were people using third party apps? And fix the experience. Invest in better mobile apps
- invest in some PR or similar to change peoples view of what Reddit is. Most people think it’s just a place for memes
- (random wild idea) try to understand why users like Twitter how Reddit could attract those users over to Reddit to post content
I think with some targeted investment Reddit could do so much better for itself
> Mostly ads, are you going to remove that? How are you going to explain the revenue loss to the board?
Since launch "new reddit" has been broken to the point where the page crashes if you copy and paste text in the comment textarea. You need a hard reload of the page to restore it, and then you lose your comment.
It's been what, 5 years now? I think it's safe to assume that nobody working on reddit's UX actually uses new reddit, and also most likely nobody else either.
The ability to edit text isn't a weird niche feature for powerusers. It's fairly central to using the service. Anyone who does more than passively scroll down the front page will run into this.
The SerenityOS guy will soon have built a fully functional web browser rendering engine in less time it's taken Reddit to restore the default functionality of a textarea tag. It's unbelievable.
> The SerenityOS guy will soon have built a fully functional web browser rendering engine in less time it's taken Reddit to restore the default functionality of a textarea tag. It's unbelievable.
A text area box that they could get for free from the browser. It's not like a text entry box is fucking rocket surgery. HTML forms have existed for almost three decades.
I've definitely gotten it with chrome (and chrome-based browsers), Safari's apparently affected as well, although it seems worst on firefox. Depends on what you paste. Seems to be some unicode in Chrome, vs anything in FF.
3rd-party apps, including RIF, do display ads already - I have a vague recollection of it becoming compulsory at one point. The difference is that they tend to be less intrusive than on the Reddit app.
Apart from that, I agree that it's a hard act - but it's also true that trying to be something they're not (i.e. Twitter) will inevitably produce a damp squid which loses what made Reddit unique (and it's happening a bit more every day) while not quite managing to be the other thing.
The social space is obsessed with "competition by copycat", instead of focusing on their core strenghts. Maybe because they all fear to be destroyed by this or that novelty feature, they all end up looking the same, regardless of whether it makes sense.
The app I use is "Now for Reddit", and their ads (Google Ads) were very unobtrusive, a tiny strip of pixels at the bottom of the viewport. Reddit's ads are right there in the feed as you scroll, like Twitter or Instagram.
> understand user pain points with the UX. why were people using third party apps?
Would actually act on this info if you found out that people using third party apps were a single digit percentage of total users and decreasing over time?
Not the OP, but yeah. If something is so bad that >1% of users go through the pain of changing it, then it's probably annoying many more users. Do those <99
% users do something else about the problem, i.e., use the app less often.
People are using third-party apps because they're not trying to be all things to all people, while also constantly pivoting to handle whatever it is that management thinks the business should try out next.
I think the toothpaste is out of the tube on creating good communities like the Reddit of yesteryear.
Between lowering the barrier to entry (and average age) with phones, astroturfing and bots, and the overall impossibility of moderation, I just don't see it happening anymore.
We need to go back to purposely small communities.
I don’t think the lowering of the average age is necessary one of the problems, but the fact that some of the new users are posing this problem is a symptom of a bigger one. They tend to comprise of many of the armchair-experts because a good deal of them learned very early to value engagement and good messaging over accuracy.
Part of this has to do with the gauges of success. Other first generation of this appeared on older forums, basic info like join date and post count served as an indicator of engagement and implied trustworthiness by the content creator.
The next big innovation was “karma” or “likes” which required very little effort on the part if the viewer but was a strong signal of audience engagement.
Both of these indicators of engagement are inherently flawed because they incentivize quantity over quality. The only thing I can think of that’s different is something like the famously meritocratic GitHub, which is it’s own dystopian ecosystem.
I don’t know how to solve this exactly, but as long as incentives to create reward those with pure eyeball counts and not material quality, we will constantly run into this problem of low-quality, high production value content that serves as useless trash to sift through. I think GPT programs will be created to make a greater and faster tsunami of shit that will grace the internet and we will eventually be totally and completely overrun with shallow pieces masquerading as quality.
I'd agree that age by itself isn't a problem. It's the correlates. Younger people are more likely to be using the mobile app, where the engagement is lower quality. They are less likely to have completed their formal education, let alone to have attended college. They are more likely to practice an intolerant form of politics and activism, which makes discussion on certain subjects nearly impossible outside of niche subs.
> Both of these indicators of engagement are inherently flawed because they incentivize quantity over quality.
The karma system has other arguably worse side effects. It incentivizes people to downvote things they disagree with and upvote things they agree with. I'd wager many of Reddit's longtime users think this is the point of karma, rather than a signifier of a post's effort and/or quality.
I agree that the incentive structure needs to change if Reddit or any competitor can remain viable places for discussion.
Moderation isn't impossible. FREE Moderation probably is, yes. I wouldn't call myself a power user here on HN, but from my understanding the moderation here is done by one admin who is part of YCombinator.
I think that's really the only way for this to work going forward if you want a reasonable volume of quality discussion. It's a job so mods need to get paid.
>We need to go back to purposely small communities.
I'm not against it. But I haven't seen an example of a modern (~last 10 years) small community that just ends up having a dearth of discussion. I'm talking less than one post and 5 comments a day kinds of discussions. It's really hard to find that sweet spot, and arguably harder to maintain it without ballooning out of control or stagnating and losing users.
Discord seems closest to this, but it has the same problems from server to server. either you are part of some small guild server and discussion only ramps up for large events or you have a larger general server and it's just a hose of random quips, barely different from a chat stream.
Communities used to be on specialised forums and blogs. I've watched my favourite specialised blogs turn off comments because of bot spam, and I've watched forums raise the sign up bar and browsing restrictions for similar reasons. Reddit's anti-spam measures plus moderation makes it a much more decent experience.
> Communities used to be on specialised forums and blogs.
Now these communities are on Discord, which is not the friendliest to look for archived knowledge. If Discord can solve the UX for knowledge share, I can see it as the product with the better chance of replacing Reddit.
There was a little website called ruqqus that emerged for a while. It was mostly people fleeing reddit so it quickly filled with "far right" and "far left" extremes, but that kinda made it interesting. However after only a few months of having to moderate the creator noped out because no human should have to see the things a moderator of a public web forum would have to see.
Its going to be a tough road for anyone who wants to create a public web forum at any scale especially if they get brigaded.
Coding a reddit-like website must not be too difficult, even if you need mobile apps, but if you're expected to host images and videos while combating GPT bots the infrastructure needs and cost are at a high level right from the start.
Coding it is easy, getting traction with users is the hard part. I'm honestly tempted to build one but I dread building it and having it be a ghost town because getting people to adopt sites like this is tough.
The trick seems to be keeping it targeted towards one unique and tight nit community. Then opening the doors for those users to branch out. Like if you had a "subreddit" for an MMORPG where community is already a key attribute.
It is a similar problem to YT. Coding the site would not be that hard, but running it at scale is. Moreover, it's expensive. That is what reddit has struggled with itself, because the platform doesn't monetise their users as heavily as Google or Meta, and has always had more open and laissez-faire approach.
The only way to launch a competitor that is profitable is by going the Google/Meta way, but then users will just stay on reddit. Otherwise you need deep pockets or lots of VC money, but why would they invest in reddit clone that will just end up in the same place that the original finds itself in?
As for the corporations, you need them and their ad money, unless you want to run a subscription model. But that doesn't work either, because the majority of users will just stick to the free sites if you try.
There has been alternatives sites even some working with ActivityPub as Lemmy or some in development in Nostr, there is a sub r/redditalternatives which was created since the Ellen Pao fiasco.
It would be good for users - not sure it would make sense for a company though. The third party apps stripped ads. You have to be able to make money. I think the actual mistake was having it open in the first place. You can't give away things for free from the start and then take it away.
A better model might be to start out with a small cost from the outset. Manage expectations.
Ironically, I think Google has by far the most to gain from spinning up a non-profit-seeking Reddit clone in house, as it implicitly benefits search advertising by increasing the value of search.
Why should the apps have to pay? Why can't reddit provide a paid version that allows you to access the APIs, which the external apps can then use? You already have to log in to them anyhow so it's not like you'd need an extra API key or anything. $20/year is probably an order of magnitude more then they make on ads served to me.
The weirdest thing about the ad economy to me isn't that it exists, but as I've banged on before, that the companies will cling to it even when people are begging to pay money to get rid of them. These companies make virtually nothing per year in ads and make up for it in scale.
Latest easy stat I can find [1] is $350 million of ad revenue in 2021. Certainly this is less than $2/year from most active users. I'm willing to outbid them by an order of magnitude easily. If even 1% of the user base follows along that's a lot of money.
I don't understand why these companies are so insistent on bending their entire platforms around ad revenue to the exclusion of all else, when "all else" is so much money for someone already scraping pennies from people. Besides, a lot of ad spend was tied to ZIRP; I would think that while the ad business as a whole is certainly in no danger of disappearing, now is a great time for any ad-focused business to be diversifying because spends are very likely to go down in the medium-term, if not the short term. A lot of economic signals are flashing "recession" and ad spend tends to get hit pretty hard in that context. A solid base of subscribers paying real money for your service is a better foundation to go into that sort of economic environment than being solely dependent on ads. (Obviously, a recession will hit your subscriber base too, but that's stickier than ad spend I expect.)
(And an obligatory observation that they are shoving ads in your face, tracking your every move, crafting something you spend hours a week on to increase your advertiser profile value in your every interaction, deploying every addictive psychological trick they can think of to keep you active, and fundamentally polluting at a deep and profound level the entire social sphere of damned near the entire species... for pennies a month. That's all. Pennies a month. They're not even making the money you think they are. They're doing all this to you and the collective social sphere for a few pennies a month.)
> I'm willing to outbid them by an order of magnitude easily. If even 1% of the user base follows along that's a lot of money.
They already have monetization in the form of Reddit Gold and awards. You can pay for premium right now. Also, people are _really_ reluctant to pay for services they get for free; take a look at the recent thread about YouTube ads [0] and the lengths some people go to in order to justify watching the content for free (while blocking ads, no less).
I don't necessarily disagree with your take, but I'm pretty sure you're overestimating how much people are willing to pay Reddit directly.
That idea came up in the massive thread created by the author of the iOS app Apollo. A compelling reason it wouldn't work is it creates confusion and tension between Reddit, Apollo and the user when things don't work, as well as with regards to who's paying for what. If I have to pay Reddit $10/mo to use it, why do I also have to pay this app developer $1 to use their app? When it fails, is it Reddit who owes me support or Apollo? What about outages? Just a lot of moving parts. Not that I don't think it's worth it, but it does get confusing for average users.
But are average users the ones who are paying extra to use a third-party client?
I think we've seen with Twitter that third-party clients are not the majority of users, but rather a vanishingly small yet more technical and more enthusiastic group of posters.
That might be different for Reddit, since Reddit's app is broken and stupid in many ways that the official Twitter app was not (though it, too, was garbage), but I think it's still relevant.
Reddit likely needs ads to justify its VC valuation. That means no apps that can bypass ads or change the display and (likely) more heavily redacted brand unsafe content (esp porn). Hoping they learned from Tumbr and others though. There are some niche subreddits I really enjoy and don’t want to go back to a world of disparate vBulletin sites.
I think it's too risky for them. The people with the disposable income to pay say $20-50 per year for Reddit are also the most interesting to advertisers. So, if you move to an ad-free subscription model, you'd better be sure that the fees can replace a substantial chunk of the ad revenue.
It was much easier for Google to try this with YouTube because they had plenty of revenue outside YouTube.
The problem is that their app is awful. Why would a power user pay Reddit to remove ads when Apollo can remove ads and provide a user experience that doesn't make you want to rip off your own fingernails?
I'm just dividing revenue by number of users, and honestly trying to be a bit generous as a ballpark estimate. Most users are probably even less per year.
I’m a bit hesitant to admit that I use the official app for Reddit and have used for years. I’ve used the browser extensions before and have tried Apollo app but I never got hooked.
I don’t understand all the hate the official app gets. I understand there is telemetry but i have pi hole to block most of that.
It has ads sure but I don’t really see them anymore, your adjust adjust around them.
One thing that annoys me is that notifications can be buggy. Sometimes you have to reload to see the activity in your inbox.
I've certainly used worse apps over the years. My biggest issue is there's just too much shit that Reddit's tacked on over the years that I don't care about. Chats, live streams, live threads, etc. They also harass you with notifications to "check out new post in x sub" and "maybe you should check out this community" and "your post got 5 upvotes!"
I open the app right now and scroll a few posts down, I have a big post-sized box in the feed asking me "What do you want to see more of?" and then a bunch of topics with emojis as options to seemingly mess with my feed. Scroll a few more, and past an ad I see a post from that's "popular in my country" from a subreddit I'm not subscribed to. You click into a thread and it tells you how many people are "here" (I guess viewing the thread? Why would I care?) I've got 6 notifications that Apollo didn't show me which turn out to just be suggested posts from random communities, suggested subreddits to subscribe to, and notifications that my comment got X number of upvotes.
Also the UI/UX on video threads is unintuitive and annoying. As soon as you click into the comments it starts playing the video at the top of the screen, only allowing comments to take up the bottom portion of the screen. And if you click into the video it makes the comments disappear into the bottom of the screen which is fine, but then you think "swipe up to get the comments back" but no, that just swipes you into a random other video like TikTok.
Using the reddit app makes it feel like you're not using reddit.
Here is a very illustrative post/thread showing a comparison of the official Reddit app and one of several alternatives, in this case RiF. The contrast is striking. You be the judge.
Reddit isn't providing free content, the users (or whoever the users got the content from) are the ones providing the content. None of them are paid. Reddit is only a host and would ideally be replaced by a public utility or community-run alternative.
People miss the forest from the trees when it comes to social media claiming the users make the community. While it is completely true, it's not the complete picture. The communities have to be fostered. I'd be willing to make a bet that any alternative websites and/or communities will not rise up to replace Reddit because it's hard to foster a social network. Way harder than the individual parts of moderation per subreddit. The people who think otherwise are most likely living in a fantasy Utopia
Apollo is and hopefully remains still a thing. I don’t see a promotion of the shit Reddit app here as acceptable because if it’s mobile we’re talking about - unless you have something like Tailscale running on a NAS at home - the pi-hole and ad blocking point is also moot.
The reason Apollo is so successful is because it gives users all the fuss without the noise and Reddit is pushing down noise more and more.
The only app I use to browse Reddit is old.reddit.com. It's still great on mobile if you have a browser with proper text reflow (ie. Opera on Android, since all others can't be bothered). But everytime I end up seeing the "new" design it's instantly repelling, I can't browse it even once. This is Digg all over again!
> a browser with proper text reflow (ie. Opera on Android, since all others can't be bothered)
The sad thing is all browsers can reflow text, they just demand websites add a meta tag and will otherwise emulate a larger desktop-sized viewport. This is even more ridiculous now that these browsers also hava a separate desktop mode that also enforces this behavior even with the tag but still couldn't be bothered to fix the default.
Soon as they do, I'm out. I actually like a lot of Reddit but it's literally unusable for me without a clean UI, just like Twitter. Every time I get a Twitter link I brace for a million requests before even getting to the short Tweet. It's enough to not even bother most of the time, I can't even imagine being a user.
I'm right there with you. Twitter is almost as bad as TikTok and I don't have an account for either.
My solution was to spin up Nitter and Proxitok on my docker host and set the appropriate redirects on my laptop browsers and Kiwi browser on Android devices. A total of 15mins of work and now I can look at all the links my friends send like browsing in 2006 again.
Back to USENET (which Reddit is a weird copy of) again, I suppose. The best part about Reddit are the small, topically-focused communities — those are going to have a hard time finding new homes, given how anti-community, anti-user-generated-content, & resistant to discovery (and much of that is on the search engines) most sites are these days.
I never really got in to USENET, being a child trapped in the Prodigy and AOL and CompuServe Internet a little too long, but as an adult who is planning for Reddit to hit the fan, I am unsure of the best way of discovering newsgroups that would interest me. I have a handful of subs that I follow, but I wouldn't know how to find the equivalent of r/homelab.
I would add quickly that I am aware of the ability one would have to discover other kinds of content on USENET, but rule one forbids talking about it. So barring that, what is the best way to discover interesting newsgroups and participate in them?
You can just download the list of newsgroups. If you find one that looks interesting you can just post to it.
The main issue is most unmoderated groups are overrun with spam. Most news readers don't do a great job filtering that spam so for every ham post in a thread there can be dozens of spam messages. There's also effectively no enforcement of any group's etiquette so even ham messages tend to be pretty low quality.
Usenet is just a message distribution mechanism. There's just a lot of small world culture around its management. It started in the era of small world Internet so that's understandable but it's definitely a quirk of the whole structure. You have to know or get to know the right people to start groups or get them carried or manage their moderation.
Usenet isn't really a thing anymore, sadly. Don't get me wrong, it's going strong for file sharing, but most ISPs don't provide access anymore, so it's not really a place you find discussions.
Serious question, possibly naive: how many of Reddit’s UX decisions come back to pressure from investors to make good on the $1.3B they’ve raised? Is every web product with users and influence obligated to raise as much as possible and grow to a size where they start chasing ad revenue no matter what it does to their product and its users? I’m sure that running a product at Reddit’s scale requires serious money, money must come from somewhere, investment capital gets you there… But was this really the only path?
It’s not the only path it’s just the easiest in the short term.
One concept that tech companies seem to have completely forgotten is brand equity. They will squander long-term reputation for short term gains due to, as you said, downward pressure from investors - which in itself isn’t a bad thing, but they’re sacrificing long term gains for short term ones.
The solution here would be to have mature/smarter/more savvy CXOs/founders who know how to manage expectations for growth. There’s plenty of organizations who are capable of setting multi-year growth plans in place and getting their investors in line.
This is probably nigh on impossible if you’re venture-backed because most of these guys are looking for sugar, not complex carbs.
Unfortunately the companies who take VC money have a huge advantage over the ones that don't. After they capture their users and market, they have to make good on their promises to turn a profit and make the money back for those investors.
It's a trend you see across most internet companies. We've seen it with Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, and Discord has been going down that path now for the past year or two. That's why we're seeing so many ads for Nitro and features gated behind Nitro.
Yes. Reddit's only goal is to make money. If you think they care about the users you are a fool. The only really question is will they aim to make long-term sustainable money by creating a great product or will they try to cash out now by wringing every cent they can from users? It looks like they are going full-tilt towards option 2.
I hope the Reddit IPO fails or otherwise never makes good on the $1.3B fundraising. It would be fun to make fun of everyone ruined in the financial fallout.
So, basically any kind of customization to the Reddit experience is now limited to browser extensions and userscripts that scrape and modify the website itself. On Android, this means using Firefox. On iOS, I don’t think there’s much choice. Unless someone creates a Reddit app that is actually just a web view wrapper bundled with the necessary client-side scripts.
The app is complete garbage, and the dark patterns on their mobile webpage are insidious.
If I have to wait to go to my desktop to see something on reddit, most likely I’ll forget about it and not visit at all. Or I’ll go through the old.reddit on mobile which isn’t great.
But it’s only a matter of time until they remove old.reddit.
Perhaps web scrapers can come to the rescue in some way? Maybe a self-hosted instance of a scraper that pulls the data for each page you’d like to see, kind of like a proxy between your client and reddit? Would be a fun project to try out.
Site-specific browser extensions are the classic way to do this, but most mobile browsers don't support them. Even Firefox severely sabotaged extensions in the Android version.
You can append .rss to any sub e.g. https://old.reddit.com/r/popular.rss you’ll never need to reskim over headlines to find things you haven’t seen and by using the “old” subdomain every item will open it a useable UI. I’m sure they’ll kill this too eventually but I don’t think I’ll miss Reddit much once it goes full Digg.
The Apollo app lets me use Reddit while signed out. I can favorite some subreddits and browse through them with no fuss. The official Reddit app won't do anything until you sign in. Apollo also has a bunch of life improvement features that the Reddit app will never see such as auto collapsing pinned / auto mod comments, icons that identify newer accounts, and showing who deleted posts.
It is so disheartening that Musk's callous and destructive management of Twitter is becoming a template/excuse for shitty choices at other companies. We exist in a culture and Twitter has lurched the Overton window in a direction that makes everything worse for all of us.
I don't think it is Twitter's fault at all. Twitter and Reddit are simply responding to companies like OpenAI scraping their data and building big models off of it without giving anything back to the websites (or their users).
Facebook and Instagram started the enshittification process long before Twitter did. And Reddit even hired Ellen Pao as a scapegoat to push through unpopular decisions.
Reddit was heading in this direction long before Musk was involved.
Twitter is a better experience than ever for the users, and leaner than ever which is better for the company. There was a short learning curve for all involved (those who were left and those who were brought on), but they've ironed out those kinks long ago.
Every time I see a blue check mark on a contentious topic it’s never good. Good writers have left the platform or participate far less. Things break all the time. The only good thing is it’s helped me drastically reduce the time I spend mindlessly scrolling.
Hm I have quite the opposite experience. I've never had so many bugs with Twitter as I do right now.
The feed random refresh bug never went away and somehow managed to get worse. Right as I'm reading something it'll vanish without a trace. I probably see this five times per day.
Sometimes I'll find my app on the "Following" feed even though I never actually switched to it (I'm weird, I actually enjoy the For You feed a lot).
Sometimes the content clearly hasn't refreshed because I see new things on my desktop that aren't on my mobile app.
The quality of the content has taken a sharp nose dive too. Almost everything is useless threads from "thought influencers", memes, or completely random posts that I have never interacted with ever in my life (anime memes? a thousand posts about the barbie movie)
The quality of the replies is awful now that blue check users are all at the top. It essentially made it "pay to be seen" rather than having the more interesting replies at the top. This makes me the most sad I think :(
Aside from that though, it feels like roughly the same app but with some small tweaks here and there.
> It’s being brought in to crush third-party alternatives, driving every mobile user to the official app where they’ll either have to watch ads or pay for Reddit Premium.
Given how aggressively they push you to use the app when you visit the site, this is likely accurate. However, I have Firefox (and therefore proper ad-blocking) on my phone, so nah, I'm still good, thanks.
When you are at a computer yes. But sometimes I am on my phone and neither the old UI or the new UI are acceptable. I slightly prefer the new UI on mobile but it definitely sucks.
Well, I generally don't read anything on mobile unless I need a piece of info right now.
Besides the screen having either too much or too little info, depending on if it's designed for the desktop or for mobile, it's usually unsafe since you can't run uBlock Origin on the Apple browser...
Well, Android has uBlock Origin. I admit that I read almost everything on mobile these days, including 100% of my Reddit and HN usage. I sit in front of the computer all day for work, so I have little appetite to continue sitting for leisure reading.
Despite my doubts about Mastodon being able to become popular Twitter alternative, I wish there was the same wave of migrating to the Fediverse-based open source Reddit alternative. So far I don't see them very popular.
It never ceases to amaze me how much people actually like using these godawful passive consumption / walled garden devices, to say nothing of all the apps over simply using a browser. I truly hate the direction all this is going (electron apps, mobile first/only, vertical videos, TikTok, social media, ...) and seemingly everyone else just can't get enough of it :(
Unsurprising, but as with twitter, the idea of a corporation running these kinds of sites always eventually fails.
People "don't want to deal with" the messy world of open standards, of different web forums for different things, federation... I mean, I get it, but that just ends up meaning they fall for the same twitter/myspace/facebook/walmart.com trick again, over and over and over.
Somebody else posted the enshittification link — that's what is happening here. Like it always does.
The AI thing is an obvious red herring anyway. Plenty of ways they could address that without harming third party clients for human readers, but they want to strangle those clients. As twitter did before them, as they all do eventually.
They tend to do it as soon as they feel they've tricked enough people to investing enough of their attention in them that the users won't just leave. Which in reddit's case they probably have, considering how often search engines propose adding "reddit" to whatever my search string is.
Agreed on AI being a red herring. Social apps have been cutting off third parties for years. As it is on most things, Reddit is just very slow to get on board.
> but that Reddit is also implementing a change where third-party apps would lose access to NSFW subreddits, while the official site would not
What's the official public rationale for that move?
And what's the corporate-internal rationale, if anyone who knows can say?
(I can imagine a few reasons other than simply to take away more user base of third-party apps, but I'm curious what the truth is.)
(Aside: Both openness and NSFW seemed to be significant parts of Reddit from early on. I recall very early on, briefly looking at Reddit, and I noted with amusement that they seemed to be slying using NSFW to help boost adoption. That might've even been before subreddits, or maybe it was an early subreddit.)
So I've recently gotten super interested in the idea of building a webapp that can seamlessly interact with social network/link aggregator protocols through bridging, and I'm working one that does that with a focus more on following topics vs following people.
It's technically a nostr client, but it allows you to search for and follow posts about topics from Twitter (through Nitter RSS feeds), Mastodon (through the native Mastodon RSS feeds), Reddit (through subreddit RSS feeds), and Bluesky (through a bridged RSS feed).
This way, you can focus on following the topics you're interested in, and not have to think about what platform/protocol holds those posts.
The solution is only allowing 3rd party access to Reddit subscribers, to avoid the need to monetize through ads.
If Reddit is asking 12000$ for 50M requests, then a regular Reddit user (344 reqs/day) would be paying around 2,5$/month, which seems more reasonable than putting the burden on the 3rd party developer.
It never works like that in practice. It is cheaper and easier to deal with one customer paying $10,000 than 1000 customers paying $10.
In any case, Reddit has no interest in pivoting their business model away from ads to paid subscriptions. This is a dog and pony show they're holding prior to "making the difficult decision" to eliminate 3rd party competitors.
Reddit already has an infrastructure dealing with 1000s of customers paying small amounts. It seems absurd to outsource part of that to very small 3rd party businesses, especially since that then would be two routes where payment processors and presumably mobile app store vendors get additional cuts from the money streams.
I used to pay for Reddit, but they kept getting more and more user-hostile to the point that the use I got out of it was accidental.
To give just the most recent example: They PMd everyone in Germany about their great new subreddits (Big US subs with the names translated to German), filled with bots posting successful posts and comments from those big subs, auto-translated.
Yeah, that’s a quirky anecdote when Reddit started 17 years ago, it’s a lot less quirky when you do it now.
I could almost stomach paying for reddit premium IF they allowed unfettered API access (within reason I guess) AND if they actually supported their API for all new features. As it stands the API is woefully behind what their site/apps allows and I trust them about as much as I trust Twitter's whole "now that you are paying it's going to get better".
The shitty thing here is iOS/Android devs that do find a way to pass through to cost might price themselves out of the 15% tier even when 90%+ of the money they collect (after the Apple/Google tax) is going to just be handed to Reddit. That might screw up the economics of any other IAP they have (to unlock features or what not).
They can raise prices to account for the extra 15% loss but still sucks. Apollo alone would hit Apple/Google's 15% rate limit in less than a month and even if it lost 19/20th of it's users it'd still hit it for the year given his estimates.
All the moderators are unpaid 'workers'. And their quality can be abhorrent to the extreme.
Basically reddit is the perfect example of getting people to contribute content and work for free. And when people are run off, so does your content and your moderators.
Yeah I don't do the whole "boo hoo unpaid worker" nonsense.
I moderate several subs, some of them rather sizable. I do it because I want a quality community, not because I want a payday, I probably average 8-10 hours a week moderating which often overlaps with my active participation in the communities. No one is forcing me to do it, I do it because I value the communities.
I similarly give many hours a week to my church, I don't roll up "yo, pay me!" because that's not the point. I show up and teach a class, my wife shows up and leads young women's, we both go and clean the building, when someone needs help and we're free we're there, it's something we care about not a means of earning income. Same goes for moderating Reddit - anyone that thinks it should be a paid gig has no business moderating.
You gave anecdotes about volunteering at non-profit, like your church. I don't attend church myself, but doing non-profit things to help a community is definitely laudable. And I think the more we all do activities like that, we'd have a better community and eventually a better country.
But there is definitely a difference between non-profit volunteering labor (where the sum of your labor is enjoyed by everyone attending), and being a subreddit moderator.
Reddit is a for-profit company, where they derive their profit from 2 different areas: people contributing their personal content, and people moderating for free the areas of a topic. And real paid moderators get real money on other platforms. Why doesn't reddit? Cause they were able to get users to "make-believe" that their subreddit was theirs.
You're there to make the admins profit. And when your subreddit no longer does that, "ownership" is transferred rather quickly. Or your mod accounts will be mass-reported and banned. Or a whole host of other issues. Earlier on, seeing banned subreddits wasn't a thing. Now, I can stumble in from a Google search and hit a banned sub. And we're talking technical subreddits, not porn or violence.
And just how long have bigger subreddits been requesting better automod tooling, and never materializes?
Reddit sucks the oxygen out of the "community" to feed its profit, and provides scraps to make people think they're getting a good deal.
We're now seeing the furtherance of this with this laughable API bill. And it's not targeted at Apollo, btw. Head over to Youtube shorts or Tiktok and witness just how many "bot reads a reddit post with top 2 comments, with unrelated minecraft video". "Scrape-add video-upload" is the big thing I would bet that reddit's trying to stop without paying a pound of flesh.
But still, I'd start looking for other platforms to move your userbase to. Just casually set up offsite operations along with your subreddit, and steer users to all non-reddit areas. (Discord, Mastodon, Twitter, even Facebook) Cause when Reddit finally goes Digg v4, it's going to be crazy.
Many people don't want to associate their opinions with their real world identities. This is why I don't want to give social networks my payment info or my work/school/isp email. Especially social networks that are as politically charged as reddit.
People are paying 5x that much for Spotify, and they have never made a cent of profit.
If companies can be profitable with just subscriptions, they wouldn't need to sell ads. And yet the NYT, FT and WSJ blanket their subscribers with just as many ads as they do for non-subs.
API clients would be able to identify ads in the feed and just not show them. "High-profile" apps will be required to show them at risk of Reddit terminating their access, but the long tail will just ignore them.
Reddit and advertisers won't get the same "audience measurement" analytics data, and third parties I imagine would be pretty reluctant to dump some privacy-invading third party sdk blob in their app, especially when they don't really benefit from it.
Also, one of the attractions of third party clients is lack of ads. This'll turn users away from them.
Or skip the ads problem on third-party apps altogether by requiring the use of Reddit Premium to use third-party apps.
That way reddit gets paid, you avoid having to deal with ads and the developers don't have to absorb an astronomical and unreasonable invoice for API access.
> Reddit and advertisers won't get the same "audience measurement" analytics data
It's pretty crazy that a site like Reddit needs this to target ads effectively. You often have your interest groups already self-sorted thanks to subreddits.
> API clients would be able to identify ads in the feed and just not show them.
Meh. Serve ads as JS chunks, measure views; if things don't tally up between api requests and ad hits, you have a word with the developer. There aren't that many Reddit apps with significant amounts of users.
Or sell influence? Pick brands or politics and curate what people see by manipulating the rankings.
However this is worse than regular ads.
Honestly, I wish those platforms(all the social media) were transparent and pay for use. When it's free the experience sucks for everyone, can you imagine if we had the tech in the telephone era to inject ads in phone calls or reduce connectivity to those who talks stuff not kosher in the current political environment.
As a thought experiment: how big would the network have to be for you to start considering paying for access?
The Fediverse (Mastodon, Misskey, Pixelfed, etc) is already clocking in at around ~10M users. How much do you think it would be a "reasonable" amount for a service provider to charge for an account?
If they're actually providing a service beyond what's available everywhere else, such as actively removing bigoted garbage or more powerful tools to discover high quality content relevant to me, I'd toss them a few bucks a month. Especially now in 2023. I don't think I would have paid even that much in 2010. And certainly not $50 for a newer and smaller network.
I get what you're saying. I acknowledge I am an anomaly in being willing to pay at all. I just wonder if maybe it was the wrong time ($50 was certainly and still the wrong price IMO) for a paid social network to be successful. Perhaps it could work today with a small subscription.
See, that is the problem right there: the things that are "beyond what's available everywhere else" are financed with ads, data mining, or both. I am talking about how much you would pay to have basic access to service. The reason that people don't pay is that everyone wants to add conditions to justify their financial support, and this is why we all end up in the mess we are all in.
Now, let me try again: go to https://communick.com/packages and tell me if you think that what I am charging for the basic access packages is unreasonable.
Ah, you're irritable because it's personal to you. Yes, people place conditions on what they are willing to purchase, that's... how it works?
Why do I even want to be on Mastodon, let alone pay to be on it, let alone pay someone who is rent-seeking on top of a platform and content they aren't responsible for? Can't I get access to the social network direct from the source, for free?
> Can't I get access to the social network direct from the source, for free?
For free? No, you can't.
- You (or someone else) will have to develop the software. The source code doesn't just show up magically on github.
- You (or someone else) will have to test the software, triage bugs, help with documentation, etc.
- You (or someone else) will have to pay for the servers.
- You (or someone else) will have to do content moderation
None of these things are free. TANSTAAFL. If you are using it, it will cost you something, it's up to you if you want to pay with your money, your time, or your data.
It's funny that you include content moderation in there when that was one of my requests. Are you moderating content beyond your legal minimum requirements?
Come to think of it, did you write all of the Fediverse software you are using? Are you paying those developers monthly? Or did it... appear for free on GitHub? The sense of entitlement here is something else.
I think you would do better if you spend you time thinking of a value proposition instead of being irate at people and demand they pay you. I have no proof you would not be using my data, and I would be linking that (with a credit card) to a real identity. Promising me you won't do that is not a value prop I care about.
Unfortunately, this shows how much the people that keep complaining about Elon Musk or Zuckerberg really should not be listened to. People suddenly do not care that much about privacy if it costs them anything or brings some inconvenience.
I keep running https://communick.com because I am stubborn and because I can afford to, but honestly I've pretty much have given up hope that the basic services (Mastodon, Matrix) will ever reach enough users to be able to pay for themselves.
> I keep running https://communick.com because I am stubborn and because I can afford to, but honestly I've pretty much have given up hope that the basic services (Mastodon, Matrix) will ever reach enough users to be able to pay for themselves.
I have a faint hope that mobile hardware, software, and networking may eventually improve enough that federated communication nodes could run directly off the clients themselves.
The technical requirements are far from impossible - without even going for a Linux phone, you can run a nginx web server on Android via termux, and use dynamic DNS and/or IPv6 to stay discoverable as you move through cell networks. And hardware-wise, the power is plentiful, although I don't know how bad the battery drain would be.
But of course the experience has to be as easy as click link -> install Mastodon app -> have your own instance running off your device, with nothing but a subdomain in the cloud. Anything less and it's a non-starter.
We can do that since the late 90's. Skype was p2p and worked very well.
The problem is social, not technical. A p2p network will have problem with reputation and moderation. Only the super technical people will bother to deal with trying fighting scammers and trolls. The only alternative would be something pay-to-play to make it costly, but then those people paying will also want the conveniences and benefits provided by a system with some central authority.
I would not be willing to pay reddit for the opposite reason. They are not doing an adequate job giving moderators proper tools or removing bigoted commenters who are participating in bad faith.
I reported multiple comments calling black people "subhuman" in various ways, or the "clever" variations of "stop noticing things" that Nazis write. It's lucky if reddit gives them even a time out for publicly posting their racist delusions, let alone the permanent ban they deserve.
The last I was on reddit, I was moderating a small subreddit. I had to maintain a regular expression for all the various ways people would write slurs so the poor-quality automated tool would remove comments. There wasn't anything at the administrator level that would remove that or any of the people when they are writing it to be racist.
There was a bot you could use to check a user's comment history for hard-Rs. Useful for trying to determine if someone is unintentionally ignorant and might be open to an explanation, or deliberately ignorant and putting on a temporary facade to waste everyone's time and energy. That tool is something that did get banned, for reasons.
I don't use the new experience or the app intentionally. It's just clunkier and feels slow. Been an Apollo user for years now. If this means the end of Apollo, I just wont use reddit on my phone. It's that bad.
Come on, it's web we're talking about here. How difficult is it going to be to scrape the data and present it in a nice format to the user? I bet apps will show up that do just that very quickly.
There’s documentation usually with an API and you have changelogs. If you scrape the website, if there is a change in the UI, it will break your product. So it is feasible, but it will make all products worse and harder to maintain.
this feels like a fair middle ground. Reddit doesn't loose out on ad revenue and the App developer doesn't have to pay anything directly. I assume they calculated their current price at least somewhat on how many Gold members they loose to these Apps that don't show any adds...
Ads are dynamically served via client-side scripts (on the web). An API endpoint contains static data (post text, image URLs, etc) that's the same for everyone, so it cannot serve individual ads to users in that way.
As much as I hate the new design on web and never use it, I don't really have a problem with the app and I found the alternatives I tried to be sub-par.
What's everyone's deal with the app? Beside the removal of ads of course, which is understandable but undefendable.
what apps did you try? I use RIF (reddit is fun) and it's much better than the official app. The UI is much cleaner (looks like a proper mobile version of the 'old' reddit) with much better information density.
I tried Apollo for a few days before going back and probably tried one or two others but only for a couple of hours (I'm on iOS btw).
Overall what I disliked was that they didn't have the same polish in the navigation.
On the official app I feel like everything that is going from a list of thread to the comments, to collapsing a comment, to going back to the subreddit, etc. is super natural and polished and I didn't feel the same on the others.
I use the Offline Reader app. It downloads a few subreddits on wifi and I can read them on my commute without using expensive cell data and underground where there is none. I suppose that app will be killed too :(
This is a deliberate move by Reddit to force the use of their failed acquisition. I believe this pushback combined with slashing of valuation will make them rethink their decision.
Is a credible Reddit alternative (that operates on the same extremely broad scope and large scale) even possible without eventually going down the same road?
I don’t mind Reddit committing suicide because the volunteer moderation system is absolute, total, complete garbage. There are subreddits where mods have programmed any DMs to be reported to Reddit, that’s how unpopular they are, yet they continue to own subreddits representing companies who should care more about such things. One example is CardinalMember on the Robinhood subreddit.
Then there’s the issue of getting permanent “zero tolerance” bans for comments less than racism or other discrimination or hate speech. Honestly I kind of appreciate where Elon Musk is coming from lifting bans on people like Donald Trump… of course in typical human fashion, he bans people on Twitter for MUCH less than hate speech- like tracking his private jet or being critical of his thoughts or actions. Unfortunately, I have yet to observe anyone with authority who A) advocates for free speech and B) doesn’t restrict it when it’s content they don’t like.
I don't understand how a popular product like Reddit has so atrociously bad UI. The site itself is just garbage and the difference between the redesign and old.reddit is just so jarring, and the Android client is also garbage.
Are there people who even thinks these designs are good? How do you even end up with something like this? Is it just garbage requirements thrown out by clueless managers? There must be some force here, because Twitter's UI is also garbage.
Some part of me hope that Reddit will kill all third-party apps and remove old.reddit, so I'll stop using the site.
It's on purpose. The new UI places each post inside a "card". The intent is having you scroll past cards. This makes even text-only posts be similar to image ads posts, and while you scroll you are not aware if the next card is an ad or not.
Layouts with heavy information density (as old.reddit.com) are more user friendly, as you they allow you to just scan the list and be done with it. But are bad for ads.
The problem isn’t really the cards. It’s the implementation.
If you just reshape shape old.Reddit.com it wouldn’t be a horrible UI/UX. Maybe not great either.
Back button is effectively broken with constant reload of front page. 2 links you wanna read? You need to click around carefully especially on mobile if you don’t want the page to reload and show you a different set of stuff.
On mobile you can hardly even scroll down a thread without the page crashing and dumping you right back at the top. 75% of the time it’ll be an error page and you have to refresh again to get past it.
I can’t imagine people will tolerate this when they’re forced to use this UI and not their favourite app.
There is a mobile-only client called troddit.com that is really good. It shows what could have been possible with pure browser client on mobile. Not only is it waaaaaay faster, the UI is better too.
If you are looking for a threaded forum where posts contain dense information with code segments, quotes and decorated text, the cards are definitely a core problem. The implementation is very bad, too.
The problem is they don't care about the mobile web and want you to use their native app where you're more likely to enable notifications and then increase engagement (everything is for ad views obviously)
Old reddit was designed for a larger monitor (laptop/desktop) and mimics the best design practices on that device over the past couple decades of bulletin board/forum software; makes sense why people like it so much
Design decisions aside, the site performance is horrible. I don't understand why serving content is so difficult. I get they have large scale, but they've also had that for quite a while and employ enough people to solve it if they actually cared enough
There is a compact mode on the new design since day one, even the classic mode doesn't have the "card" design. This is never mentioned by people who complain (you included).
In compact mode, they (new/old) have a similar number of posts on the screen (old: 11, new: 9). It has less because the "promoted" has a larger button, one could even argue this makes them stand out more than on old reddit.
I would agree that the lack of link colors make it slightly more annoying to read compact mode on the new one though, compared directly.
Around 2007-08 I read in a(physical) Brazilian web design magazine that you can have two types of design:
- for short, ephemeral experience, your design should be striking - the user will just look at the thing once anyway, so you should capture the attention in spite of how ease of navigation. Eg. a website for a rock band tour.
- for experiences that will need to be repeated lots of times (eg. using a corporate system, reading the news), you want the design to be boring and predictable.
I think that minimalism has been used to push interfaces that reduce information density - regardless of how the density would be useful in that context!
After the original Material Design video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrT6v5sOwJg the writing was on the wall: if you want to build a google-grade portfolio, create designs that resemble this. After some time users got used to that kind of look and now sites with high density of information look alien.
I know the person who was in charge of the redesign. This may sound unbelievable, but she was not a reddit user prior to working at reddit or being put in charge of the redesign. Really nice person, but they did a terrible job.
Everyone here is shitting on it, but to me it looks like it accomplished exactly what reddit wanted, and was wildly successful at doing so.
Reddit very successfully moved away from being the techy nerd basement dweller site to becoming a trendy young "normie" people site. Dumb everything down to shoot for the lowest common denominator, maximizing the size of your target demographic.
So hiring someone who probably loved instagram, facebook, pinterest, tumblr, but never used reddit (but had likely been to the site perhaps a few times before) is exactly who they wanted to redesign the site.
IIRC something like 95% of users are using the official app and/or the new website. And reddit has exploded in popularity in recent years.
I think it does what Reddit wants, doom-scrolling. Long interactions with a single post isn't good for revenue.
Personally I don't understand how people can use the new design. My opinion that it's terrible is one thing, but it doesn't even work. For the first few years I repeatably made bug reports, then I just gave up. The "new" design is slow as all hell, the video player doesn't work and if you want to read more than a few comments... well to bad, because 80% of them are buried and you don't get to read them. The redesign is five years old, it has been worked on for longer, and it still doesn't work.
Maybe it has attracted more people, if so, it's the wrong kind, because Reddit has developed into a cesspit of negativity. Everyone appears to have be depressed, poor, angry, hostile towards people not who thinks differently and most seems to be medicated. It not a good place to visit, if you want to keep your sanity. I'd rather debate politics on /b/ on 4chan.
I'm not convinced, but that's anecdotal from being a millennial and frequent Reddit user myself, and seeing lots of "As a 40/50/60/70 some year old" comments.
> Reddit very successfully moved away from being the techy nerd basement dweller site to becoming a trendy young "normie" people site.
Didn't that transition happen in the early 2010s? When I was in grad school a decade ago basically everyone I knew (which included many "normies") was scrolling through reddit when they were bored. I don't think the dumbing down really started until new reddit was introduced, which was 5-6 years ago IIRC.
I don't like the phrase normie but that makes sense.
I feel the topics on their have gotten less interesting. Especially in stuff like travel and cooking. I used to really like the travel content on their but it feels useless lately. It just seems to basic and low effort.
That goes for practically any low-barrier-to-entry common interest topic.
Reddit lives and dies by the moderation. Communities with very strict moderation often get a lot of flack for not allowing the low effort drivel. Communities that "let the votes decide" are overrun with low effort memes, waves of "DAE <super common opinion>?" and repost after repost. Often times to have a truly unique and useful experience with the site you need to manage your own content moderation with blocks/filters/etc. This is why there's a lot of inertia to the 3rd party apps and plugins we use, because seeing those as on the chopping block means we're going back to a wild forest of low effort dredge.
If Reddit Is Fun, RES, or old. gets killed off I'm going to leave the site. It will absolutely be difficult, but it will be for the best. I avoid certain subs that are massively popular because they mostly play on the ragebait engagement or outright ignore core issues solved by the moderation. Having that put back to the forefront of my experience will feel like re-opening Facebook or signing up for Twitter. No thanks.
At work a newly hired (and newly graduated) developer got the responsibility to completely redesign some core functionality in our application. Of course he had no experience with the system or how it was being used, but he was still rewriting it and designing future use-cases.
This was also done with as far as I can tell no code reviews, tests or supervision, only vague directions of "this sounds good, do it!".
It's been years since he left for greener pastures, and we're still reeling from the consequences.
This happened to me. Uber-qualified graduate came in as a decision maker, fucked a load of stuff up, then left. Then the tenured devs gradually started leaving in revolt. Then the product died.
Sounds familiar. I worked at a bank once that had the brilliant idea of swapping out Angular with Polymer, because an early 30s guy with Google in his CV became the new CTO and Decided that it should be Polymer / web components.
They were just about finished with making their Polymer 1.x components ready for Polymer 2 when the Polymer project once again did an overhaul and split off to lit-html or whatever.
I mean they picked an experimental / in development project that was best known for running McDonalds menu displays. We had to fix basics like memory leaks because it didn't have proper routing - it wasn't a web application framework, but they tried to use it as such.
Oof, my condolences. As someone who was a junior somewhat recently I narrowly avoided a couple of projects like that. The desire to push off important work to cheap labor blows my mind.
Ha! I’m a staff engineer now, but many many years ago when I was a junior I got the same type of project. It was the CTOs pet project to reimagine the core processing framework. I still feel bad for the folks maintaining it now. I was an expert in the kind of thing that the CTO wanted so it was a good project for me, but I should have had a senior to guide the process and tests and things like that.
I briefly worked at a web dev shop that was stuck building a project that a mid level PHP developer started in 2014 using a framework he built himself. I thank god often I wasn’t the one tasked with learning this spaghetti framework with no documentation
Credible, from which facts are known. Still unbelievable because it plays into my suspicions too perfectly.
There exists this entire class of business theory now based on the principle of hatred towards the users. Think about the products you actually like and purchase/use... how many of those companies' behaviors are completely inexplicable unless they hate you and want to punish you for buying their stuff?
funnier yet because matrix's old name used to be riot so it would be "riot or revolt". They really like their violent names don't they. Whatever happened to subtle names like teamspeak or mumble
Matrix can replace the 1-1 and group chat function of Discord, but you would need Zulip to replace the Slack/Teams group forum function. And having them separately kinda kills the whole idea, doesn't it? That's not including that neither have screensharing. Not even sure if they have group audio.
The first warning shot for me was when they pushed stages really invasively in the UI to compete with clubhouse. I'd thought the high rate of nitro subscribership might have stalled it longer, but no.
I suspect that the people who “matter” (frequent, registered, trackable users) are using third party apps or scripts over the service itself, so there hasn’t been a reason to invest in the interface.
It feels like Reddit is in the same place Twitter was pre-Musk. Kind of lost in terms of purpose/trajectory for monetization. Or maybe it’s the other way around: it’s where Twitter will be in a few years, stagnated because it was bought to be part of a larger portfolio, a bauble that sits on the shelf and doesn’t really have anything innovative going for it.
To me there isn’t anything interesting about Reddit anymore. I only use it to hear from people who claim to live in a place I’m living or visiting, or to get very specific troubleshooting advice, where I find a specific post using an external search engine. Mostly I think the culture of the site itself is annoying. Any time I stray outside of regional or technical subreddits it feels like I’ve accidentally landed in a middle school cafeteria.
If you go to the front page without logging in, you’ll quickly notice the target demographic is teens/young adults. The redesign makes a lot more sense with that context
Do you imply that teens/young adults don't care about usability? Or that they don't have the attention span to read comments and just want to endlessly scroll through crap?
We are biased , as HN users, to prefer text-based, minimal, UIs that lead to (mostly) insightful conversations. Reddit on the other hand caters to a hivemind type mentality that loves things like emojis, karma, dramatic posts, etc. The current UI definitely favours that, and I think generally teens/young adults prefer that as well
HN is not free of hive mind effects, and I imagine most users here are also the type that seek “high engagement” material at least time to time. I’m guilty of it myself as recently as early this year. But reddit is intolerable to the point I don’t visit it aside from it being the default for search results.
I think teens and young adults merely tolerate it because it's what they've been given. Any seemingly positive embrace of such drivel is actually an adaptation of it into something more culturally meaningful and better coded to elude boomer advertisers' prying eyes.
Teens/young adults, or really anyone "new" to the web/internet, haven't learned yet the importance of information transmission speed, or which use patterns will make them lose more time than get them something worthwhile in return. They're also discovering a lot of "basic" stuff in all types of content, so are more tolerant of what more seasoned users would call repetitive crap. That includes ads, which they are more likely to perceive as novel and entertaining, even be happy to see some of them.
It enables making ads indistinguishable from real content, to get more clicks through deception.
That's another interpretation. You'd think ad buyers would have a problem with this, but I guess not.
I've begun dragging a small "ultraportable" laptop with me, because it makes a lot of things bearable again: youtube, reddit, stackoverflow ... I'm not sure why people treat mobile users so horribly bad, but here we are.
> I'm not sure why people treat mobile users so horribly bad, but here we are.
Maybe because those people "don't care" about usability, or better said, never got to know what this even means. The young generation was socialized on mobile. They just don't know better so you can treat them like that without consequences.
If you’re on android you can use Firefox with ublock. It’s my biggest loss switching to iPhone, to the point that HN comments are literally the only web page I will visit on my phone. Anything else I wait for laptop access.
Supposedly supposed to get side loading later this year which hope to god means Firefox with extensions on iOS
Also ad buyers don’t mind, and often prefer, deceptive or discrete advertising. Product placement and “native advertising” has been around for decades or maybe even a century.
It also puts more focus on visual content on the main page instead of buried under the links. Personally I hate this. I prefer about a 90-95% text to visual ratio.
As I understand it teens/young adults generally have more free time and less responsibilities (housework, kids, family, etc.). I'd be surprised if that didn't drive a different type of engagement model.
I generally praised Reddit, as the opposite of endless service. I can check updates from couple niche subreddits that interest me and I'm done, there's nothing more to get until later.
I found out recently (not sure where) you can still append ".i" instead of ".compact", and it works. Annoyingly all links then go to ".compact", so you need some browser magic to actually make it usable.
If they remove old.reddit I'm done. The new design is awful for actually reading anything. If I want my brain sucked out with a dental vacuum I'll use TikTok.
Products like reddit are complete. They do everything they need to do and there’s very little you can really add.
That’s a big problem when you have thousands of employees. It’s like youtube or google. What can you really do with all these people?
A rational person would say fire them. But firing people feels wrong because growth is good and big is good. So the only solution is to make a project for them to work on.
The natural project for them is a UI change because it won’t break the product and it caters for their lack of ability. So that’s why finished products like reddit and youtube have a new worse UI every year for seemingly no reason.
I agree, whenever I hit the new site I just close the tab. I never figured out how to get more than 2-3 comments on it, so I don't even bother these days.
> There must be some force here, because Twitter's UI is also garbage.
It's called modern frontend, I'm afraid :-)
By the way the next iteration of Reddit web UI, which this time is based on web components with Lit rather than on React, is less garbage — at least in terms of raw performance. Design-wise it may still be horrible; but at least technologically, it feels like a definite improvement. You can check it out if you browse Reddit without logging in.
I thought so too; but then I discovered that I was seeing seconds-long interaction delay on my old laptop after scrolling down the feed a bit. The performance profile I recorded in dev tools then looked like this:
> I don't understand how a popular product like Reddit has so atrociously bad UI.
One of the third-party apps effected is Apollo, which is the vision of a single, talented iOS developer/designer who isn't beholden to investors and the whims of every other team and committee within a large org.
I follow subreddits related to topics I'm interested in and I scroll through posts looking for interesting things. I then read the post/click the link and read comments and maybe make a comment once in a while.
I'd imagine that's quite mainstream, no?
(Of course I use old.reddit or a third-party client.)
That used to be the case, but they heavily slowed down the site (back in the day the front page was different every hour, it now changes like once a day or so)
What they want is lots of comments and little to no nfsw. Aka the metrics that are easy to sell to advertisers and to IPO with.
You can see every action taken through the lense of "does it affect IPO price" and understand almost all their choices. And because it is so transparent, its almost offensive when you consider their entire moderation happens with free workforce. All the mods see 0 benefit from the increased traffic, increase polarization and stalled content refresh that the website pushes, they get more work, less tools and more abuse but the IPO price is gonna make the owners rich
The old “I.Reddit.com” (which was just completely turned off) was very good IMO. Just titles and up/downvote buttons basically. Gear icon to expand for more options per post. My only real gripe was infinite scrolling. I don’t like it in general, but in this case there was also an issue with either the implementation or mobile safari where clicking a link and going back completely borked progress.
"Relay for reddit" offers a good experience: removes header and footer on scrolling, shows a list of post titles with previews, hides all actions behind a finger flick, with less used ones in expandable menus.
Apollo's UI on iPhone is arguably worse than the Reddit apps (which I have no real complaint with other than the annoying video bar being too close to the bottom). The webpage is in fact abysmal unless you use old.
I’m not sure why it’s user base doesn’t seem to understand this. They have to make UI changes to make money. It’s either that or everyone pays for subscriptions.
2. The AI threat is real.
It’s not even remotely fair that the large tech players of the world get to train their models on others content for cheap. It’s sad what’s happening to Apollo but they need to beef with Microsoft and Google. Reddit does not owe that guy a cheap pipe.
It’s no different from any other situation where market conditions shift and impact existing models.
> It’s not even remotely fair that the large tech players of the world get to train their models on others content for cheap.
Ironic for Reddit to be angry at this considering the reason their company has any value at all is because of both the free content provided by users and the army of moderators who aren’t paid a cent for their work.
I understand that some people think that these changes will "make them more money", but I don't think that you have to destroy the UI to do that.
In fact making the UI garbage will chase away users and will make them less money in the long-run, or maybe even run the company into the ground if people starts to migrate to some alternative with non-sucky UI.
There's also nothing about the UI that's related to AI.
... then why would anyone bother to preserve the UI? It's completely irrelevant even in the best case scenario. But allow me to present another more cynical:
They both hate anything good/competent/well-made, and the users too, and also want to make money.
> In fact making the UI garbage will chase away users
When I first started reading reddit in early 2006, the web was a larger place with many thousands of fora. But reddit's growth was at their expense, most are dead or dying. It's depressing when you're looking for something specific, and you end up on one of the old phpbbs... no one's bothered to post a comment in months. If they have, no one ever replied. But in their archives, it shows that just 15 or even 10 years ago, an hour wouldn't go by without someone saying something.
They've solved the "chasing away users" problem by making certain there's nowhere to flee to. Some small fraction might just cut that sort of internet use out of their lives entirely out of spite, but not enough to matter.
someone should create a union a content producers and submitters, do that the biggest influencers on Reddit could easily migrate to a clone that's less shitty. it won't happen unless a large enough body leaves Reddit for greener pastures.
Give it another 12 months when the rest of the web has been gunked up with AI written crap and reddit will be one of the few reliable sources of useful opinion out there.
Hell, it is right now given how frequently I and others append "reddit" to our google queries.
What you're describing is in a really rough spot already.
You need to append "reddit" to get any useful result, but unless you're on desktop, the mobile site is essentially broken if you're looking for answers. The app nag is omnipresent and the comment section is always broken after 2 or 3 comments with a "show more" button and lists of other posts.
If information is hard to glean from reddit, and the rest of the internet is AI blogspam, what is to be done?
I think Musk has shown that this is not accurate. Established players will play and smaller fish will die off as intended further consolidated a given field.
For the record, I am not happy about it, but I disagree with your assertion that LLM is not part of the consideration here.
What's the connection between Apollo and getting data from scrapping. Wouldn't issuing a license to the Apollo dev that forbids persisting the data solve this concern? They could also require that users login if they want to use a third party client and then rate limit the number of posts the user can fetch.
Except Reddit doesn't have a product if they don't have people reading it. The TERRIBLE UI and user experience means that a percentage of users will only use reddit via 3rd-party apps. Apollo is BY FAR the best client. This isn't capitalism, it's self-harm by stupidity. Reddit's only value is the user eyes and data. Remove the users and Reddit dies a quick death. Maybe they will still pull in users but having less value but charging more to drive away your Users sure seems like a dumb plan capitalism or not.
HN is popular within certain demographics and tends to have somewhat circular discussions as a result. As someone who works in finance in NYC, I know nobody else who reads it. I imagine if I worked in tech in Redwood City, I might think differently.
I do, using a 3rd party app which has an excellent user-friendly UI.
Due in part to the excellent UI and user-friendly reading experience, both on that mobile app and in a browser on my laptop, HN is the site I visit most often every day for a pleasant break to learn new things.
Reddit on the other hand is something I look at maybe once a month, where I'm reminded each time it's disorienting and hard work to use, so it's not somewhere I go to enjoy a calm read. So for me Reddit is just for finding specific information from a search result then leaving.
The Reddit UI has a lot to do with that. It ties to the "randomness" of the content. HN content also has randomness but because of its UI you can skim a lot in seconds so it's easier to pick out things of interest with low stress and just enjoy them.
Typically I glance through the top 100 to 150 headlines of HN to pick a few of interest, several times a day. It takes about 10-20 seconds to read those headlines, and to know I'm done - which is very different from scrolling-oriented sites which deprive the reader of perspective. I can see how this might be different for people who cannot skim text quickly or who find that difficult, or who are trained to infiniscroll through things showing only a tiny number of large cards on the screen at a time. The latter is how you destroy perspective.
Ah, I'm using Materialistic too having tried others and found them less good.
I had no idea it was gone from the Play Store or not updated in a long time - or maybe I forgot soon after installing. I'm using the version installed via F-Droid.
The good news is it still works :-)
It has a lot of forks. I wonder if anyone's developed it more.
I do, and it's fine. Not ideal (things like the vote arrows are hard to hit with fingers, as the most egregious example), but still vastly better than the average "mobile" website.
I'm typing this comment on a third-party app (Hacki) I'm trying out for the first time, so that's another option.
On iOS at least you can just change the text size in safari. HN respects the user setting. Sites that try to overdo their UI tend to screw this up somehow.
The arrows could be better, but they aren’t actually an essential part of the site from an individual user point of view. They are there to help HN. If they decided that getting this help from mobile users isn’t a priority, that’s fine.
- Lacks basic responsiveness (would not be difficult to make links/buttons larger on phones while impacting nothing for desktop; as it stands they are very hard to hit on mobile)
- Long threads become unreadable due to shifting right with no end as replies come in, occasionally becoming comical
- Supports just enough markdown (asterisk italics, indented code blocks) to lead people to think they can use all of it (want bold, or in-line code? You lose.)
- Code blocks are unreadable on mobile since they cannot be scrolled
- Despite being an obvious design choice, breaking accessibility by reducing the contrast of unpopular comments is a deficiency.
As with others, I'm not sure what you mean by pagination.
The lack of response notification is a feature, though yes, it can be annoying, and I find the degree to which comments or questions go unresponded is ... disappointing. That said, notifications abuse by modern Web / App systems is rampant. I'd like some sort of middle-ground, perhaps a responses / notifications link which would consolidate these. "Threads" is the closest there is to that, though it includes all a person's comments whether (newly) responded to or not.
Mobile experience is pretty poor, agreed, though it's sufficient for reading logged-out (my preferred mode). Composing text on mobile devices is a category error.
Deep threads (and greyed text with downvotes) is a very intentional site design. pg's discussed that in the past, see:
I'm pretty sure this is intentional in order to avoid shallow discussions and not grab too much attention. I actually like this, but I agree with you that it can make it harder to get answers sometimes and you do miss some replies, on especially older comments.
Not sure what you mean by this, the lists of posts are very obviously paginated, as (admittedly a bit awkwardly) are larger comments threads. Maybe you mean auto-scrolling pagination?
> No notifications on reply, so it's difficult to get answers to clarifying questions (/threads helps but isn't it).
As long as old.reddit.com still exists for desktop, the site is semi-usable, although the insane moderation policies and narrow ideology makes the site basically useless except for niche reddits. Though I have gone from a daily user years back to maybe once a month. It's that bad.
On mobile, I can still read direct links to reddit posts that crop up on HN using Firefox for Android. Can't say same for the Twitter, which just says, "You need to enable javascript." Well, I won't.
On the contrary, Reddit is one of the most useful sites out there. With Google search nearing total uselessness for local information, using "site:reddit.com" is almost obligatory.
None of the real value of Reddit is coming from the parts of it that resemble Twitter or 4Chan.
Count me as another person who frequently adds site:reddit.com to my google searches. I realize there's a lot of astroturfing that goes on there, but it's still useful when I want to get a pulse from real people.
Also count me as another person who abhors the "new" UI. Every once in a while I get bounced out of the old UI and I don't know how people do it. The old UI isn't my perfect UI but it's darn near close to it.
Astroturfing is the least of the problems; most threads are filled with fake experts (of a very specific demographic - usually very young, american, male, etc) projecting.
This is fine if you consciously remember this while browsing, but when you start to believe that you can get a pulse from "real people" on Reddit, you've already lost the game. Remember: to even post a comment on Reddit already puts you in a niche group of people who use Reddit.
This becomes self-reinforcing as well, everyone else will feel alienated even if they do get over the hurdle of commenting, while those who fit the aforementioned mold will feel at home. Can't get much of a pulse, unless you specifically want to know what a very certain demographic feels once you filter out all the fanboyism and astroturfing.
Yes, HN also shares those problems. The upside is I don't see many people proclaiming to add HN to their google searches to find the pulse or whatever it may be, on the contrary it seems many come here just to debate.
Which is the bigger problem, someone coming to a niche place to debate, or someone who believes adding reddit to their google searches is going to provide them with better insight? I'd say the latter: they aren't conscious of the BS being pushed onto them.
Also kind of funny your comment is an exact demonstration of what I mean, that self-reinforcing style of "comedy" coupled with a nonsensical assumption.
What grew Reddit for me was the informed comments that were generally related to the discussion and often brought more light to a topic than the posted article.
With voices leaving Reddit the point or appeal of it is gone. For me at least.
I've been on Reddit for over 10 years. It's a search engine for me now, I've simply aged out of most of the discussions on there. I'm fine with that, because it's still useful for search queries like "Things to do in [city_name]".
On mobile you can’t read reddit comment threads unless you install their official app. I hate that Google surfaces reddit threads since the site itself often doesn’t contain the information indexed by the search.
Check the settings of your Reddit client app. I set mine to open links from reddit.com and old.reddit.com. So when I click on a search result, it pulls up the page in the app.
Reddit conveniently unchecks the “redirect me to old Reddit” button every ~6 months. Quite annoying. I’ve been using Reddit for ~8-9 years and it’s gotten palpably worse. I knew it was dying the first time I saw an emoji on there. Seems they want to go the way Digg did.
Interesting. I don’t think it’s a big enough annoyance for me to install yet another extension. Moreover, since I use old Reddit on my phone, I’d still have to change it back.
Yes. It’s in the preferences section only when you’re logged in. I notice it as I use multiple accounts somewhat sporadically and it seems like when I log into one after a while it’s almost always back on new Reddit. I’m not alone in complaining about this - plenty of threads on Reddit mentioning this.
My biggest gripe with the Reddit UI is having to continually click expand to see nested/additional comments. It makes it difficult to read comments on a topic. I much prefer the HN approach of open by default with a collapse/expand button.
It used to be that clicking outside the central border of comments would navigate you back to the subreddit, but it looks like they have fixed that.
Be warned, either new reddit or the mobile apps (not sure which) deliberately insert extraneous slashes or underscores into links, so many links are broken when viewing on old reddit / need manual editing.
I'm pretty sure they're going to kill off old reddit, which will 100% certainly mark the end of my 15 years there.
New and old reddit use different markdown rendering engines. New reddit is able to handle the slashes introduced by the new reddit WYSIWYG editor, it also supports fenced code blocks.
Old reddit supports neither resulting in broken links and broken code blocks.
What, did you prefer the site in the days of the Chimpire? Jailbait? Reddit's history has been the perfect case-study in the downsides of a libertarian approach to moderation. They've come to where they are now because every other approach resulted in horrifying racism, sexual exploitation, disinformation, and abuse.
They're arguably popular because of the moderation, not in spite of it. You're free to follow whatever subreddit you'd like or create your own, which is the benefit of Reddit as a platform.
I do wish there was much more transparency around "power-moderators" though.
HN has very opinionated mods, it's just that what they're opinionated about is primarily a matter of tone rather than a matter of content. I mean it's their site, I might disagree but it's their site.
Just some racism as long as you don't say the bad words, and light thought policing? It sounds like you want the HN mod policy, which makes sense bc that's where we are. Other sites can have different approaches though.
This isn’t the GP’s point; you’re being unfair to them and not reading their comment in good faith (which ironically is against the HN rules here).
I had a topic about the speed of light on askscience get deleted because the mods weren’t in the right mood that day. There is indeed a middle ground and we aren’t there.
Reddit’s model doesn’t work with what they want to do with the site. And things that worked when it had 1M, 10M users no longer do.
Ok? That's the point though. It collects a bunch of external sources in one spot that are all related to the same issue -- and provides the context. A really great way to get a handle on the wider implications.
And the initial HN submission you linked to, "Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing" -- does that in any way allude to its content?
> That's the point though. It collects a bunch of external sources in one spot that are all related to the same issue -- and provides the context.
You're missing the point, which is that this submission is just the latest in a long string of duplicate submissions, some of which have already been marked [dupe] by the moderators.
> It's literally the link quoted by "The creator of Apollo has done the math, and says"
So? The headline of the submission lacks meaning and provides no information. You would have to click into the link to realize wha the discussion is about.
> You're missing the point, which is that this submission is just the latest in a long string of duplicate submissions, some of which have already been marked [dupe] by the moderators.
My point is that this article sets up a different (and valid) discussion, provides wider context, and has a submission headline that gives human-readable context to the topic. (And the HN title has since been updated to use the article secondary heading to be even clearer).
The link you posted had a big discussion yesterday, but it has already been bumped way down from the front page. Other discussions on subsequent days (especially if new information comes out -- or when other developers affected by the change speak up) are useful and should also be encouraged.
> The headline of the submission lacks meaning and provides no information. You would have to click into the link to realize wha the discussion is about.
> My point is that this article sets up a different (and valid) discussion
Different? No. The discussion is the basically same as before.
> provides wider context
Some of the other HN submissions I linked above also provide wider context. This is a dupe.
> Other discussions on subsequent days (especially if new information comes out -- or when other developers affected by the change speak up) are useful and should also be encouraged.
No, that's actually contrary to HN policy:
"Are reposts ok? If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we bury reposts as duplicates." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
> Nonetheless: "Please submit the original source.
What's the 'original' source? One developer's specific problem with the Reddit API policy change?
> The discussion is the basically same as before.
Disagree. For one, it's active and on the main page. And, easier to jump in.
> No, that's actually contrary to HN policy:
That's for reposts. Our thread here is arguing whether or not it's a repost/dupe. I believe it is not.
> the other developer's link in the Kotaku article was also already submitted to HN
Ok? And with no discussion? But, again, this post puts it together, provides links to those sources, and tries to add some context.
You're saying this submission should not exist: "Please submitters, check before you submit." but I disagree and think it's valuable for providing more information, links to related content, and a place for new discussion.
Why does this post remain on the front page if it is so clearly a 'dupe'?
Why has the headline been updated by HN?
Heck, you've even made me think that second-day update posts should be encouraged on HN. First-day posts tend to lack a lot of critical information and a lot of knee-jerk/hot take reactions. As of now, has anyone from Reddit come out to refute or clarify the claims of the third party devs?
>You're missing the point, which is that this submission is just the latest in a long string of duplicate submissions, some of which have already been marked [dupe] by the moderators.
Then let the moderators moderate, and you can choose a different hill upon which to die, so to speak.
I pointed out a dupe, which is an ordinary, everyday thing done on HN. Nothing unusual there.
For some strange reason, interestica (and now you) chose to argue with me about it, futilely, as it turns out. I wasn't the one dying on a hill.
My understanding is that the moderators often see comments pointing out a dupe, or pointing out that an article title is missing a (YEAR), and such comments are helpful. Indeed, I've seen them thank some such comments. Moreover, it's also a signal to other readers of the submission.
I've been a reddit user since 2010. I have over 40k karma points (whatever that means) and I've never once bothered to try any 3rd party app. I was only briefly cognizant of the "old.reddit.com" thing because some subs sidebars hadn't been updated.
The official site is fine. I have one or two small gripes about the UI. The official iOS app is also fine. I have a few small gripes about the UI there, too. I guess I wish it didn't have ads but hey, shit's not free.
I used the official app for a while but got tired of being advertised literal scams, and found the app just a bit slow. Switching to Apollo was transformational in my usage and engagement, a far better product, and would be great even with ads.
As for the site, the new redesign seems to have improved a little in the last few months, but for years it has been nearly unusable. On an Intel Mac JS was just far too slow and my fans would spin up on any Reddit page. It was like this for years.
The Reddit UX might be good enough on mobile, and might have gotten better on web, but users have been burnt hard. I know so many regular users who use alternative apps or the old site.
I used the official app for years until I started getting curious about which of my iPhone apps was using like 15 GB of data per month. Deleted the Reddit app and downloaded Apollo and haven’t had that issue since. When I can’t use Apollo anymore I guess I’ll look at HN or some other site more but not interested in going back to the official app.
