And lost at least one user. I mostly stopped going to Reddit because of the miserable mobile experience, which is how I would normally consume the content there.
For example, on the javascript heavy new version 'my profile' link only loads about 50% of the time for me, and when it does work, it's far less usable than the old site.
I don't want an app for Reddit. I don't care which one it is. It's a simple website, let me use it in my fucking browser.
Lightweight! Easy to block ads and tracking! Multiple tabs! You can leave pages open in your browser and read them later! Bookmarkable! No proprietary app! No app updates! No spammy notifications! No use of Google Play Services! No taking up of dozens of GBs on my phone! RES!
Yeah I meant MB, that was a typo. My bad. Point still stands. The Reddit app on Android is 36 MB. Why does a simple message board app need to be so big?
Thanks for the recommendation. Just installed and liking it so far, nice simple experience and tablet optimized. F-Droid is one of the reasons I love Android.
As much as people sing praises of Apollo, it's very unhelpful that it's an iOS-only app. I don't understand why platform-exclusive apps are a thing in this day and age.
I just opened reddit.com for the first time in I don't know how long. Amazing. The actual content starts 2/3rds of the way down the screen. All the media is unfurled so I can see all of one headline on the home page.
I have seen my enthusiast desktop rig rev up and slow to a crawl just by scrolling down reddit. I have seen a collection of ~10 reddit tabs work on 6 (!!!) gigs of ram. Reddit has become a condensed form of all that is so awful about modern web design.
I used to love using reddit to find interesting niche communities, it was my primary way of engaging with the internet. These days I just hope it dies faster so that those communities can migrate to a better platform.
It sorta worked for twitter, but not for me and others like me. I use Tweetbot on iOS and a heavily customized (adblock, custom css, "suggest_"-filters) version of the web site on Windows. If those were not options for me I'd exit the platform just like I did Facebook.
It's just their official app is _so_ bad one is either required to use the web interface (which nags you to download their app) or download a 3rd party (cr)app just to read the damn thing.
Imgur, the Reddit image hosting offshoot, did precisely the same thing. They slowly began stripping features from the site starting with direct messaging and eventually prevented mobile users from logging in at all.
What is Imgur’s business model these days? The app doesn’t have any (obvious) ads. There’s a small banner on the bottom, but for me it’s always just advertising Imgur’s own features. There was a time when they were pushing ads heavily on the app (like full screen ads you had to swipe away), but that apparently didn’t work out.
"Growth and engagement" is the "business" model. I'm assuming they're pushing their own features to inflate their subscriber numbers so they can try and sell out to a bigger fish.
Surprisingly, its when I'm logged in to the mobile website that I wish the 'Open in app' button was there (to make commenting easier), but I'm only harassed to open the app when I'm logged out.
Well, to be fair, if the button would be there, there would be another HN user complaining about the nagging to install the app even when I'm logged in!.
While not exactly a fix for your case, Firefox on android has a prompt for opening sites in their apps if it's installed on your device. Match that with its extension support and it makes most of the mobile web far less obnoxious.
I want to thank the admins that made the app and the web one of the worst. You helped cure my reddit addiction. I now open it only once or twice a month.
You cannot view comment replies on the web. You cannot view any sub on the web. You cannot even read full comments.
Seriously. Thanks. I even started studying for my exams!
Even if that’s possible I personally feel that if those who run Reddit don’t want to web experience to be user-focused then I feel that I don’t want to spend my time there. I rather use HN or Lobsters instead.
On mobile and non-mobile, I use Firefox' Redirector addon to redirect all reddit links to https://ns.reddit.com/* which might be the same as old.reddit.com
If the company decided to make the UI not friendly, they will likely continue to make user hostile decisions in the name of maximising growth and profits.
In this case using addons seems like playing catch up with low chance of a long term win.
They could but seeing how good Reddit's UI is, how good do you think their log scraping is? And do they have the budget for keeping all access logs of anonymous users so they can try to line up all the ChainLinkFence enthusiasts with the people who also frequent r/MarijuanaEnthusiasts and r/WhiteMenGoneWild.
Edit: As a number of others have mentioned below. I too have reduced reddit intake due to the poor UI amongst a realisation of its not a good use of my time.
Then sometimes you click a link and it takes you out of old and into the hellscape that is modern reddit.
Can't wait until some manager decides old needs to go. They'll end up losing a bunch of long time users and some other site will finally gain traction.
In my discussions with Reddit admins, they've said that old.reddit.com will be around forever. However, it won't get new features (or a very watered down version of new features).
After all, .compact links [0] still work, and those are super old.
This has some serious Eternal September vibes, like when we reached the tipping point of more normies than nerds using the web. It makes me unreasonably angry that average users are being led down this path and are blithely accepting it, with those who object seemingly a shrinking minority.
I was practically shouting at my screen the first couple times I got thrown into the new design (before I figured out how to avoid it). If reddit really does shut down the old interface, I will absolutely be gone.
> This has some serious Eternal September vibes, like when we reached the tipping point of more normies than nerds using the web.
Sure, but there's something positive about this. Usenet's external September happend with maybe a million users, Reddit's with hundreds of millions. Which means that bigger communities are possible without the problems happening :)
On the other hand, Reddit surely changed during its growth, so there were probably multiple similar events. After all, HN was created as PG felt that was not a good place to discuss startup ideas.
There is a plugin for chrome which forces old.reddit.com, can't remember the name but should be easy enough to find. And for mobile I use the Apollo app, which is fantastic. I've actually switched from using reddit mostly on desktop to using it almost exclusively on mobile because Apollo is so good
The problem with blocking it is that reddit is not just for time wasting. It's also currently the most popular forum host for all sorts of experts, from audiophiles to network engineers. Whenever I have a technical query and Google is returning a whole load of SEO spam I append 'reddit' or a stack exchange site to the query and can fairly reliably expect to discover a technical subreddit which answers my question and where the best answers are the most visible, thanks to voting.
Same here but mostly because the content quality goes downhill after a critical mass of subscribers is reached and every subreddit I like suffered that fate sooner or later. At some point you might as well browse 9gag.
Same for me. I realized that reddit is yet another huge media corporation who just wants your sweet sweet data so they can resell it. If the blatant racist policies and heavy handed moderation of opinions wasn't enough.
I used to browse and post a lot on reddit. Mostly in the subreddits relevant to my interests and hobbies, but sometimes I'd open /r/all and drown in the algorithm-generated feed. It was so easy to waste time on reddit.
I'm thankful for the user-hostile experience they've implemented. Made it so much easier to stop using it altogether.
I don’t recognise your issue - I can go to reddit.com on iPhone Safari, access the mobile-optimised version of their new site, and the comments for every post are one tap away?
There are other issues, and it’s not great to use, but it is generally fully functional.
I've been using the mobile website for 2 years now on iOS and I've always been able to view comments and replies to comments, browse other sub reddits, etc.
I'm really confused what OP is talking about...
The only annoying thing is having to press continue all the time to use safari.
Without an account, I can't open hidden replies on Mobile. I see the first levels in a posting, but when I tap on "x more replies" I get a dialog demanding me to login and no way to avoid it and going directly to the replies. On desktop this still works fine.
I never had an account on reddit, and I never had problems with browsing/expanding the comments too. I am not from either US/EU so by the looks of it and the input of others it might be more of a regional thing rather than a universal one thus the conflict of information in discussions.
Add me to the list, though I'd say it was 40% due to the web experience and 60% due to the content. Not only is it designed to make you feel like you accomplished something in life just by reading the headline, but much of them are just blatent falsehoods or outright lies. As in, the events didn't happen, or the image isn't from that day, or the event and the image are from years ago but used to stoke outrage in the present about something unrelated.
Edit: 50-60% on the web UI. I forgot about AMP pages.
I think content is fine there is ton of subreddits that are very similar to old school bbs. As long as you don't browse front page or big generic subreddits reddit is fine.
It's indeed goldmine for anyone who's into history. I'm debating myself if this sub is good enough to keep Reddit around or am I better off to just stay completely away.
Every highly curated subreddit seems to have a regression toward some sort of lowest common denominator and any sort of deviance gets crushed even if it's good correct content that shouldn't be. I'm no historian but seeing this behavior in every subreddit where I have the experience to recognize BS makes me very skeptical of the idea that other subreddits are not doing the same.
r/AskHistorians has some very good posts, but it also has a good deal of misinformation, even coming from flaired users. The big problem with it is that the user base and the mods tend to believe that it's accuracy is better than it actually is (and comments from the mods seem to encourage this overestimation). I've seen many people who believe that if a flaired user on r/AskHistorians says something, then it's true (there seems to be a lot of people like that on the aptly named r/badhistory sub, for example).
In addition, their yearly April Fools' events (a bad idea in my view) as well the generally poor quality of posts during the first few years makes searching for past answers a pain. You get a ton of information that's flat out wrong, and in the case of April Fools' events the wrong information was actually encouraged (or written) by mods.
Okay so sure BreadStapledToTrees contains images of bread stapled to trees. But why? I mean, why do people go around stapling bread to trees, photographing it and posting it on r/BreadStapledToTrees and enjoying it, and enjoying others posting the same? I am confused.
There is only one way to truly understand. Take a slice of bread, bring a stapler, staple the slice of bread to a tree somewhere, snap a good picture of it and upload the picture to the subreddit. Then you will understand. It is the only way. It cannot be explained, it needs to be experienced in order to be understood.
/r/homelab is great, but you'll probably end up with a rack in your living room at some point. /r/mechanicalkeyboards was great at least, but due to my inactivity I can't talk about the last few months.
I moved to using inoreader recently from an OSS one. I really like it. I have my own instance of rsshub for hostile sites.
Consistent UI/UX, no toxic comments (train a filter), automatically archived, easier to share, can send to kindle, full text search of everything I read, no more ads/tracking/email subscription spam, keyboard navigation, works good on my terminal, etc.
The old school BBs didn't have a steady stream of internet riff-raff wandering through and defecating on the lawn. Every single "everything" platform that has user comments has this problem. Reddit and Twitter both make this problem particularly insidious by facilitating cross communication (cross posts and retweets) between the sub groups. It is impossible for subject or niche specific communities to have a high quality existence in this environment. For all their ills at least the chans make a good faith attempt to run "containment boards" to mitigate this problem on their own site.
Reddit front page is deliberately designed to keep you agitated on one hand and then keep coming back for some soothing oxytocin rush as the antidote on the same page.
Not all relationship/interactions with social media will be positive or neutral. Everybody knows about social media addiction already, for example. The analogy of abusive relationship IRL with various web dark patterns seems new.
Its interesting to contemplate if entirely new mental illnesses will eventually be discovered via toxic social media sites. I mean entirely new modes of dysfunction not merely "it used to be rare".
God I hate this. Self deprecation and making light of feelings of inadequacy. It's like high fiving your friend when you both fail a test in high school, except its applied to one's general state of living.
Same for me, as soon as I deleted Apollo ( to cure my addiction too) I use it less and less because the web UI makes me want to stop using it as soon as I open it.
Yes, I probably never got into pointlessly wasting time on Reddit because I refuse to be conned by the dark patterns they use to send you to the App. It's a forum website and I really do not see why it's so popular when they treat their users like idiots.
To be fair they aren't the only company that does this, Twitter and YouTube both have horrible web apps that have horrendous bugs and needlessly missing features vs the native app.
Hacker news is basically the opposite site which is why I like it so much.
Dito, I visited reddit many times per day a few years ago. That all changed with the new web app. Yes, old.reddit.com exists, but the old web app acted as a kind of gatekeeper the same way the ancient design of HN acts as a gatekeeper. With the new shiny web UI, different people came to reddit. From a marketing perspective, this was a great short-term success. From a quality perspective, a long-term decline began.
I can view most one the web but it does require multiple refreshes, new sessions, etc on my iOS device. I only sign in to throwaway accounts ( to infrequently post) via desktop.
Yup web experience is horrible... went to checking on reddit a few times a day to maybe once a week. Much like medium when I see "that popup" - I just close and move on.
True for me as well I’m not good at all with managing this addiction and being banned from commenting here helps as well reddit has been making it easy as has Facebook with instagram and onlyfans has no discovery it’s a good time I only wish reaspike would do something as well
Same here. Messing up the website and forcing users to install an app was the best thing that could happen to me: my days just went two hours longer and I started reading books.
I also had this experience. I was a regular on a particular subreddit but the combination of awful website + censorship coming from above has made me stop using Reddit entirely.
For the last few years, I've only used reddit through Relay for Reddit (Android app). The web experience is so awful that reddit has basically become a mobile only thing for me.
Recently I noticed that using ad blockers on iPhone will break the reddit mobile website - it will not allow you to scroll unless the annoying "use our app" popup shows from the bottom and you must click no. Some blockers like 1BlockerX or maybe Wipr block these annoyances and will lead to a broken un-scrollable reddit website. This started happening only recently and I wonder if this was a deliberate decision to also annoy users of ad blockers.
Oh, so thats what it is. I honestly thought that they somehow implemented scroll in js, and it doesn't work in safari, because reddit engineers didn't test it :)
I understand Apples logic for trying to build their own AdBlocker ecosystem but honestly browsing with Safari feels so unsafe now without uBlock Origin. Keep seeing ads slip through and it's not just standard banners it's the sort of ads that look like they'll give you malware if you mis-clicked them.
It's always interesting to see how the value of communities gets concentrated and captured.
1. Communities for around disparate forums
2. Those communities migrate to centralized service because of more eyeballs in one place, less work to maintain infrastructure, etc.
3. Centralized service captures increasing amount of value by running more ads, closing off more open channels, etc.
This is clearly the lifecycle for Facebook, Reddit, and arguably Google. My question is: what's step 4? Are communities going to start unbundling, or does this trend just continue?
The unbundling concept is making the rounds through the 'indie hacker' community. I've heard it mentioned a few podcasts recently. It'll be interesting to see what business spring up in the next couple of years that chip pieces off of Facebook and Reddit.
I wonder if in a century we'll understand the economy of the Internet as constantly oscillating between concentration and decentralization.
There is definitely space for unbundling reddit. The key is, you have to give something of value to that specific community to lure them over. Solely copying a subreddit won't do
Too late for Reddit now but free services should consider and publish their sustainability plans from the start, if they want to avoid this trap anyway
Well over half of all web traffic is from cell phones, and the mobile-first web is hostile to long text content. It is also incredibly hostile to user-created long text content.
With the exception of people who need keyboards for work (tech workers, academics, journalists, writers, etc) there's no one left online to make community content anymore. Hence, HN (a community for tech workers and similarly minded people) and Twitter (where most organic, non-public-relations major players are journalists, academics, or writers).
What passes for web communities have almost entirely become playgrounds for intellectual lightweights to spew memes at each other combined with a platform for entities posting inorganic content that pretends to be genuine.
Lots of people from all kinds of backgrounds, journalists and academics among those for sure, but also influencers, celebrities, politicians, artists, bloggers, even just more or less regular people, etc.
How it seems to you just depends on whether you go to Twitter for the latest tech news or fashion trends. And there's probably bigger interest in the latter. It's just like the internet in general.
Genuine, unrelated, question: What is an "influencer"?
I've only recently started seeing people refer to others or themselves as "influencers" (I'm not on Snapchat/Tiktok/Instagram/Twitter).
The distopian cynic in me only understands it as "person with a bunch of followers on social media who occasionally peddles products" a.k.a a human ad. Is this about right?
You’re factually correct but yes that is a cynical way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is that they’re entertainers of large audiences that make money through advertising. You know, just like TV/radio/newspapers do.
Thank you for the level-headed view of it. I'm not level-headed when it comes to advertising and I'm not very apologetic about it.
Somehow it feels more gross than a radio commercial. On the radio I can tell the difference between a song and an advertisement for the local law firm. When these people build a rapport with viewers and then peddle a product, it feels more manipulative to me.
I generally share your view, but I imagine influencers can also add value for the consumers, because they put their name behind the products they advertise. While there probably are more than enough influencers that just advertise anything, I'd expect there are some who actually use and like whatever they advertise. So they kind of provide a product vetting service to consumers. As long as you can tell their ads from their regular content, that is.
Total speculation though as I'm also not really active on that kind of social media.
99% of the content is made by 1% of the users, so I don't think this logic applies. Most reddit users do not participate in discussions, they only consume content.
Maybe if people who post any kind of self-promotion for content they create weren’t so aggressively punished on Reddit so often, maybe it’d get more people sharing on it.
As an example, I was once shadowbanned on the entire Reddit site by an admin for posting two links in gaming subreddits to show off a game I had spent almost six months developing full-time as part of a small team. I didn’t submit too many other links because Reddit was my main source of discovering content, but I commented a ton on the site, easily had hundreds of comments.
I was proud of what I had accomplished and I wanted to share with what I thought was my community at the time. I didn’t even realize I was shadowbanned and was commenting for months after until a moderator informed me and said they were manually approving my comments on a particular subreddit.
I tried their appeals “process” and never got a response, which is apparently is how 99% of appeals works on that site.
Harsh lesson I learned there. I never submitted any link for anything there ever again and didn’t read or comment again for a couple of years afterwards, in which I created a new account to do so.
I got into board games in a big way and started reading /r/boardgames, and that lured me back eventually, although since then I discovered all the people who work in the industry are using Facebook groups so that's where I talk board games now. It's also nice to see actual names associated with their comments when it's a bunch of people you know, instead of just usernames you have to mentally translate.
Apparently my shadowbanned account was unblocked eventually and I can post normally from it again, but I know it was banned for at least 4 years, because I checked periodically (If you're not logged in, the user page looks blank. I thought it was some weird glitch but no, it's because I was shadowbanned).
I've been mostly posting in /r/coronavirus lately since I don't want to get into fights with friends on Facebook about my thoughts on it.
> With the exception of people who need keyboards for work there's no one left online to make community content anymore
I was about to agree with you, then I thought about Instagram. It is truly a passive consumption platform. Getting 10 comments on a post by a user with 500K followers is pretty normal.
I can't trust those numbers after my recent experience. I made a fake account on facebook to check it out and then logged into all the other services. I got 50 followers on instagram within a day by following < 5 accounts on the recommended list. Nothing posted, a weird fake name.
Step 5 is then that an open, federated and/or decentralized protocol gets developed, and it either gets traction or dies.
Unfortunately, for many such communication channels, we are still only in the middle of this step 5, and we have no idea how it ends. E.g. Matrix for chat, ForgeFed for source hosting services, PeerTube for videos, or various other (mostly ActivityPub-based) efforts.
I wish this where true, but protocols aren't products. The normals want polished products. Only weirdos like us on HN care about protocols, or even know they exist for that matter.
For a protocol to matter to a normal person, it has to enable killer features that aren't currently possible.
I don't know but I'm pissed. That's why I started working on my own social platform as a replacement that has some core values that are aligned with the needs of the community:
- UX is paramount on any device.
- Your data is your own. This is especially important for community administrators who have literally no control over how the content is organized (true for Reddit, Facebook, etc) or where the content goes
- Communities define their own rules
- There is an easy way to organize meetups as well
It works with a simple subscription model where we host the service. No ads, tracking or other shady shit involved. If you're interested I'm gonna post it here once the MVP is complete.
There is already high friction for existing communities to switch over to a new platform before you factor in the dealkiller that is a subscription cost.
Those maintaining the web app must have a miserable existence. It's never fun having your work undermined like this, especially when so much care has gone into it.
I find the new reddit UI to be terrible, and still use old.reddit.com. I just hope they continue to host it. If they shut it down at some point, I will probably stop using reddit. And that will be a sad day.
Every now an then I try the new UI, I haven't in a while though. Every time the experience was the same, horribly slow and confusing.
I think the Reddit plan was to switch the users to an eternal scrolling, sort of like Facebook, to keep users on the site longer, but that really ruins the experience for pretty much everything but pure entertainment.
If anything I'm all little pissed at both Facebook and Reddit for killing forums, than the changing their platforms that aren't really suited for forum like discussions when they discovered that it's not actually profitable to run forums. The communities on both have devolved over time, so it's perhaps not a big loss. Reddit in particular have grown to have what I would call "accepted opinions", they may differ slightly in different sub-reddits. The Reddit community is, in general, stubborn, narrow minded and intolerant for different opinions and world views, but disguises it as left leaning politics, anti-racism, feminism and inclusiveness while behaving exactly like the people they claim to be against.
There's still a few positive and supportive sub-reddits, but the main ones are lost.
I would expect people that contribute to have a higher old.r percentage, and smaller subreddits as well. (Frankly I expect this to go with age, everybody above 17 must ude old.r in my Imagination). Do you have any insight on this?
I assume that's total, including apps? Or are you saying that between old, mobile web and new, 75% of hits are from new? If so that's quite different from my traffic stats, copying a comment from older thread:
According to my traffic stats (moderating ~400k subscribers), old + mobile web frontends make up about twice the traffic of new frontend. Apps are by far the most popular, about ~3x of all web frontends combined.
That's something I constantly wrote a few years ago, but since then they pretty much banned most subs I was subscribed to and made it very clear and they censor pretty much anything they want so that was ultimately what made me stop using the site.
Reddit keeps throwing me to the new website even though i have 1000 times selected that i want the old, desktop site on my phone. Are there any reddit developers in here? For shame, stop doing it.
It's like how Twitter switches you back to the algorithmic timeline every so often, "You're back home" is the extremely sneaky wording they use in the banner when they do it.
They hope that eventually you wont care or wont notice.
I don't notice... for a few minutes, then i go WTF why do i see those random things that other people liked in my timeline. Twitter devs ... you can't fool us, stop it
Yeah same reaction here, I scroll for a bit and the content is awful then I realise. It's crazy how clear the distinction is just from looking at the tweet content alone.
It's optimized for reading forums, i.e. walls of text, it's great for that. Maybe reddit should start monetizing that (with text ads or sth) instead of trying to become an instagram wannabe
I actually like the new UI set to compact, it’s even cleaner and more compact than old. But at least on my desktop (I assume it’s not fast on any kind of device) it’s super slow, and old is not much worse.
I agree. The only real problem I have with the new UI is that it is slow. However it is so painfully show, even on a fast device that it dwarfs and of the minor benefits of the new UI for me.
I end up using the new UI for mobile, because the old UI is basically unusable. Luckily I generally only open one tab on mobile and the old UI on desktop.
If the new UI was fast I would actually consider it good.
For months I thought there was no way to collapse a comment thread using the mobile site. Then one day I accidentally clicked on a comment timestamp and the thread collapsed. Which makes sense, because nothing say “hide these comments” like the text “17 minutes ago” :P
I wonder when the reckoning for poorly built single page javascript apps will come. Or are we already seeing it with users switching to native apps for social media?
Sounds like good old corporate to me, the boss says you won’t get your bonus unless there are x app installs, the product manager replies “hold my beer and watch this”.
This is a serious issue for users though and should highlight the risks with handing off control over important communication platforms.
tbh, I never understood the hate for the infinite scrolling in a domain of natural stopping point..
I have this problem with pages too.. "Just one more page..."
My main issue is when I accidentaly dont open link in new tab, and pressing back makes the page reload and I loose my scrolling progress..
This is a generally trending idea: make your users' experience miserable, improve short-term numbers, lose in the longer term.
We're seeing the same pattern with ad-loaded sites, "Your ad choices" popups with those terrible "Manage My Preferences" dialogs — I'm sure all those result in quarterly bonuses for a bunch of managers. But they are not the Right Thing to Do, and will come to bite back in the long term.
Eating the future seed corn in the hopes of higher profits now has been the business model of choice for most companies for the past 40 years, ever since compensation for senior management became directly linked to stock prices.
Allowing executives to walk away with short-term gains but stick shareholders (and/or the public) with long-term losses broke many, many things in corporate governance and society in general. It's no coincidence that quality of life measures began to stagnate when this became the normal way to do business.
In one sense it’s sort of a moot point, as companies that hire this type of executive will in the long term be driven out of business by those who don’t.
But I don’t think you can properly incentivize people to avoid this class of mistake (short-term thinking) unless top leadership are themselves long-term owners.
Long-term owners would be very interested in avoiding this mistake, though. But it does present a bit of a tax on e.g. public companies with fragmented ownership.
Shareholders are happy on it, considering that for public shares the horizon of future thought is "next quarter". Short term share price gains are utilised in trading.
It's only the long term shareholders that get burned on this, whether they own actual shares or just share the consequences
638 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 384 ms ] threadGallery view could be a bit better on old.reddit.com.
There are numerous principled statements of theirs that were chucked to the wayside when there was money to be made or power to be gained.
Once old.reddit dies there is a chance for a transition to a new site like Digg 2.0 -> Reddit
For example, on the javascript heavy new version 'my profile' link only loads about 50% of the time for me, and when it does work, it's far less usable than the old site.
Lightweight! Easy to block ads and tracking! Multiple tabs! You can leave pages open in your browser and read them later! Bookmarkable! No proprietary app! No app updates! No spammy notifications! No use of Google Play Services! No taking up of dozens of GBs on my phone! RES!
Hyperbole detracts from the point you're trying to make. Everyone reading your comment knows how much space apps take on their phones.
The problem here is caching, as in-app caches have different caches than the global system.
It satisfies most of your requirements
Bingo. If you're blocking ads, then you're probably not going to get much attention from the Reddit team.
IMO, it has a much better and cleaner UI.
https://github.com/Docile-Alligator/Infinity-For-Reddit/rele...
I don't know whether it is on the main fdroid repo.
Reddit shuts down their API in 3, 2, 1...
The new desktop interface is unusable. Really. It might work for 9gag kind of shallow content but not for a "frontpage" thing.
Try opening a video and see your computer heat up.
I used to love using reddit to find interesting niche communities, it was my primary way of engaging with the internet. These days I just hope it dies faster so that those communities can migrate to a better platform.
r/Android and r/iphone will lock the sub in protest
> July 25, 2013 – at 12:00 PM EDT US, Twitter turned off API v1 which effectively shut down the Android, iOS, and AIR versions of TweetDeck.
The hamburger menu on the top right. That>settings>Ask to open in App.
If you clear cookies, you have to do it again.
You cannot view comment replies on the web. You cannot view any sub on the web. You cannot even read full comments.
Seriously. Thanks. I even started studying for my exams!
If the company decided to make the UI not friendly, they will likely continue to make user hostile decisions in the name of maximising growth and profits.
In this case using addons seems like playing catch up with low chance of a long term win.
NOW there's a sub that needs more love imho.
Edit: As a number of others have mentioned below. I too have reduced reddit intake due to the poor UI amongst a realisation of its not a good use of my time.
Can't wait until some manager decides old needs to go. They'll end up losing a bunch of long time users and some other site will finally gain traction.
But yeah, old.reddit.com probably won't be around forever.
After all, .compact links [0] still work, and those are super old.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews/comments/imcl1h/reddit_a...
From the new features they have been adding lately, I'd call this a benefit... And that is the big disconnect between admins and the old community.
I was practically shouting at my screen the first couple times I got thrown into the new design (before I figured out how to avoid it). If reddit really does shut down the old interface, I will absolutely be gone.
Sure, but there's something positive about this. Usenet's external September happend with maybe a million users, Reddit's with hundreds of millions. Which means that bigger communities are possible without the problems happening :)
On the other hand, Reddit surely changed during its growth, so there were probably multiple similar events. After all, HN was created as PG felt that was not a good place to discuss startup ideas.
It's the best on android, but I haven't used it for more than a week or two. Don't want to get addicted again.
Sorting by hot gives you posts from smaller subs you like and removes all the political shenanigans
I meant 'best'. Not 'hot'.
Sorting by 'best' gives you content from smaller subs.
I have asked the dev to implement it. I have not gotten any reply.
I used to browse and post a lot on reddit. Mostly in the subreddits relevant to my interests and hobbies, but sometimes I'd open /r/all and drown in the algorithm-generated feed. It was so easy to waste time on reddit.
I'm thankful for the user-hostile experience they've implemented. Made it so much easier to stop using it altogether.
There are other issues, and it’s not great to use, but it is generally fully functional.
I'm really confused what OP is talking about...
The only annoying thing is having to press continue all the time to use safari.
If I am on a US or UK VPN, there are no login walls.
Try with an Indian IP.
Screenshots
Does anyone have a screenshot of this issue?
Screenshots-
Any subreddit is like this on the web - https://i.postimg.cc/x1XcGBbr/photo-2020-09-04-15-23-09.jpg
Comments - https://i.postimg.cc/YC6TPCFQ/photo-2020-09-04-15-25-45.jpg
This is what I see!
https://i.postimg.cc/8Cw9Q1ZB/Image-from-i-OS.png
https://i.postimg.cc/Y9sP0dKv/Image-from-i-OS-1.png
https://i.postimg.cc/15HjNRQx/Image-from-i-OS-2.png
https://i.postimg.cc/6pp1VsW8/Image-from-i-OS-3.png
https://i.postimg.cc/x1ppts8t/Image-from-i-OS-4.png
The most ridiculous thing is that if you click the "read more" link, it doesn't even work properly, the behaviour is incredibly stupid.
Edit: 50-60% on the web UI. I forgot about AMP pages.
In addition, their yearly April Fools' events (a bad idea in my view) as well the generally poor quality of posts during the first few years makes searching for past answers a pain. You get a ton of information that's flat out wrong, and in the case of April Fools' events the wrong information was actually encouraged (or written) by mods.
I moved to using inoreader recently from an OSS one. I really like it. I have my own instance of rsshub for hostile sites.
Consistent UI/UX, no toxic comments (train a filter), automatically archived, easier to share, can send to kindle, full text search of everything I read, no more ads/tracking/email subscription spam, keyboard navigation, works good on my terminal, etc.
https://www.inoreader.com/
Also, most "general" subs celebrate mediocrity.
Its interesting to contemplate if entirely new mental illnesses will eventually be discovered via toxic social media sites. I mean entirely new modes of dysfunction not merely "it used to be rare".
God I hate this. Self deprecation and making light of feelings of inadequacy. It's like high fiving your friend when you both fail a test in high school, except its applied to one's general state of living.
To be fair they aren't the only company that does this, Twitter and YouTube both have horrible web apps that have horrendous bugs and needlessly missing features vs the native app.
Hacker news is basically the opposite site which is why I like it so much.
But now? I do not want the app and Reddit seems to not want me then. Definitely helps my productivity a whole lot!
I probably spend like 50-40% less time on it.
I'm weary of download apps for content I should be able to view on a browser.
The app "mysteriously" takes up more space than the Chrome app to serve, arguably, less content.
I learned my lesson with the Facebook app, namely, that these companies are shady and their apps always require more privileges than necessary.
Enable uBlock Annoyances in the filter lists.
https://www.reddit.com/.compact
https://i.reddit.com
1. Communities for around disparate forums 2. Those communities migrate to centralized service because of more eyeballs in one place, less work to maintain infrastructure, etc. 3. Centralized service captures increasing amount of value by running more ads, closing off more open channels, etc.
This is clearly the lifecycle for Facebook, Reddit, and arguably Google. My question is: what's step 4? Are communities going to start unbundling, or does this trend just continue?
https://latecheckout.substack.com/p/the-guide-to-unbundling-...
I wonder if in a century we'll understand the economy of the Internet as constantly oscillating between concentration and decentralization.
All other content gets drowned out by memes eventually, which is a real shame.
https://thegongshow.tumblr.com/post/345941486/the-spawn-of-c...
(That's been submitted to HN but with no traction to date: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)
Well over half of all web traffic is from cell phones, and the mobile-first web is hostile to long text content. It is also incredibly hostile to user-created long text content.
With the exception of people who need keyboards for work (tech workers, academics, journalists, writers, etc) there's no one left online to make community content anymore. Hence, HN (a community for tech workers and similarly minded people) and Twitter (where most organic, non-public-relations major players are journalists, academics, or writers).
What passes for web communities have almost entirely become playgrounds for intellectual lightweights to spew memes at each other combined with a platform for entities posting inorganic content that pretends to be genuine.
You can curate your following list to make it feel like that’s true, but it’s really not at all.
How it seems to you just depends on whether you go to Twitter for the latest tech news or fashion trends. And there's probably bigger interest in the latter. It's just like the internet in general.
I've only recently started seeing people refer to others or themselves as "influencers" (I'm not on Snapchat/Tiktok/Instagram/Twitter).
The distopian cynic in me only understands it as "person with a bunch of followers on social media who occasionally peddles products" a.k.a a human ad. Is this about right?
Somehow it feels more gross than a radio commercial. On the radio I can tell the difference between a song and an advertisement for the local law firm. When these people build a rapport with viewers and then peddle a product, it feels more manipulative to me.
Total speculation though as I'm also not really active on that kind of social media.
As an example, I was once shadowbanned on the entire Reddit site by an admin for posting two links in gaming subreddits to show off a game I had spent almost six months developing full-time as part of a small team. I didn’t submit too many other links because Reddit was my main source of discovering content, but I commented a ton on the site, easily had hundreds of comments.
I was proud of what I had accomplished and I wanted to share with what I thought was my community at the time. I didn’t even realize I was shadowbanned and was commenting for months after until a moderator informed me and said they were manually approving my comments on a particular subreddit.
I tried their appeals “process” and never got a response, which is apparently is how 99% of appeals works on that site.
Harsh lesson I learned there. I never submitted any link for anything there ever again and didn’t read or comment again for a couple of years afterwards, in which I created a new account to do so.
Apparently my shadowbanned account was unblocked eventually and I can post normally from it again, but I know it was banned for at least 4 years, because I checked periodically (If you're not logged in, the user page looks blank. I thought it was some weird glitch but no, it's because I was shadowbanned).
I've been mostly posting in /r/coronavirus lately since I don't want to get into fights with friends on Facebook about my thoughts on it.
I was about to agree with you, then I thought about Instagram. It is truly a passive consumption platform. Getting 10 comments on a post by a user with 500K followers is pretty normal.
You have 500k followers and only 10 of them comment on your posts. That's terrible engagement.
and that's what instagram is all about
I am still getting more followers.
Unfortunately, for many such communication channels, we are still only in the middle of this step 5, and we have no idea how it ends. E.g. Matrix for chat, ForgeFed for source hosting services, PeerTube for videos, or various other (mostly ActivityPub-based) efforts.
For a protocol to matter to a normal person, it has to enable killer features that aren't currently possible.
- UX is paramount on any device.
- Your data is your own. This is especially important for community administrators who have literally no control over how the content is organized (true for Reddit, Facebook, etc) or where the content goes
- Communities define their own rules
- There is an easy way to organize meetups as well
It works with a simple subscription model where we host the service. No ads, tracking or other shady shit involved. If you're interested I'm gonna post it here once the MVP is complete.
As other have said, their end goal is cashing out in an IPO
My solution to this has been to use old.reddit.com, which is (IME) a much nicer experience, faster and more responsive.
I think the Reddit plan was to switch the users to an eternal scrolling, sort of like Facebook, to keep users on the site longer, but that really ruins the experience for pretty much everything but pure entertainment.
If anything I'm all little pissed at both Facebook and Reddit for killing forums, than the changing their platforms that aren't really suited for forum like discussions when they discovered that it's not actually profitable to run forums. The communities on both have devolved over time, so it's perhaps not a big loss. Reddit in particular have grown to have what I would call "accepted opinions", they may differ slightly in different sub-reddits. The Reddit community is, in general, stubborn, narrow minded and intolerant for different opinions and world views, but disguises it as left leaning politics, anti-racism, feminism and inclusiveness while behaving exactly like the people they claim to be against.
There's still a few positive and supportive sub-reddits, but the main ones are lost.
Some of the javascript is broken, but still works in most cases. I too, hope they don't remove it one day. Otherwise i might have to quit reddit...
According to my traffic stats (moderating ~400k subscribers), old + mobile web frontends make up about twice the traffic of new frontend. Apps are by far the most popular, about ~3x of all web frontends combined.
Problem is newcomers don't know about old, and will eventually push down that 1/4 over time
We shouldn't have to but, I use this plugin and never see the new website: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...
They hope that eventually you wont care or wont notice.
I actually like the new UI set to compact, it’s even cleaner and more compact than old. But at least on my desktop (I assume it’s not fast on any kind of device) it’s super slow, and old is not much worse.
I end up using the new UI for mobile, because the old UI is basically unusable. Luckily I generally only open one tab on mobile and the old UI on desktop.
If the new UI was fast I would actually consider it good.
but I'm not expecting the action to be to collapse the thread
Reddit desktop site still lags on it, client-side.
They're at real risk of becoming another digg I think
Formerly, without an account, you were able to easily browse all content for an unlimited time.
Now, after a certain amount of actions or time, it asks you to log in.
Removes all the login crap on Insta, Pinterest, Quora and imgur.
https://github.com/Docile-Alligator/Infinity-For-Reddit
https://github.com/QuantumBadger/RedReader
https://i.reddit.com
https://old.reddit.com
This is a serious issue for users though and should highlight the risks with handing off control over important communication platforms.
If they ever remove the ability to opt out of infinite scroll I'm out. There has to be that natural stopping point or know I can't even start.
[1] well, and everything else that makes the new design absolutely unusable.
My main issue is when I accidentaly dont open link in new tab, and pressing back makes the page reload and I loose my scrolling progress..
We're seeing the same pattern with ad-loaded sites, "Your ad choices" popups with those terrible "Manage My Preferences" dialogs — I'm sure all those result in quarterly bonuses for a bunch of managers. But they are not the Right Thing to Do, and will come to bite back in the long term.
Allowing executives to walk away with short-term gains but stick shareholders (and/or the public) with long-term losses broke many, many things in corporate governance and society in general. It's no coincidence that quality of life measures began to stagnate when this became the normal way to do business.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/stockcompensation.asp
https://www.equilar.com/reports/3-equity-vesting-schedules.h...
The only thing that could incentivize more long term performance would be even longer vesting periods, but that comes with downsides too.
But I don’t think you can properly incentivize people to avoid this class of mistake (short-term thinking) unless top leadership are themselves long-term owners.
Long-term owners would be very interested in avoiding this mistake, though. But it does present a bit of a tax on e.g. public companies with fragmented ownership.
It's only the long term shareholders that get burned on this, whether they own actual shares or just share the consequences