I think you kind of answer your own question. Social media is just a gossip page on steroids. None of their features are worth paying for; at least, not enough people are willing to pay for it. They realized given showing ads and charging customers, showing ads probably generates 10x revenue for them. Plus, what's to stop another person to offer a free reddit clone?
People pay for junk food all the time. Maybe internet companies are being too greedy and they are pricing themselves incorrectly.
Would you pay $2 USD for all of reddit for a year?
How many users does reddit have? It'd probably be a lot of money, but not super profitable. Hence they use adds because they won't shift on price.
The alternative monetization model is usually subscriptions / freemium features. These don't usually work out for social media sites as people are not willing to pay for user generated content, and the main draw is the content itself so freemium features are usually not high-value enough. Thus, the only remaining viable model is ads.
Reddit's model is based on unpaid moderators managing most of the site. There's already controversy around a few moderators controlling all the large communities, karma farming and behind the scenes deals. Introducing money into the mix will just result in even more abuse as moderators try to take their own cut. It's a very messy eco-system that money will just make even messier.
If you think moderators won't take advantage of their position to get a cut of that money then you're living in fantasy land. Or just sell their accounts to others who will do that.
I really hate that Reddit insists on you using an app. I tried to share a Reddit post with some friends recently who aren’t on that platform. To my dismay they reported that they couldn’t see the post at all because of the GET THE REDDIT APP in your face bull feathers they were presented with. Reddit, you are a website. I want to use my normal browser tabs to use you, not your app. Please make it web-first.
Reddit has pathetic ad revenue per user versus every other social media platform. Part of this is likely due to anonymous users that they lack data on for proper targeting. This is their attempt to "fix" that.
What advantages does a user account have over anonymous session ids? User accounts survive users clearing cookies, but I doubt users clear their cookies often enough for that to be a problem.
It makes sense - there will be greater revenue for a few years maybe, in which time the team/product VP responsible would have been promoted. By the time the site culture/userbase dies (maybe in 5 years) these people would be long gone. Maybe even the higher management don't care about a timeline longer than 5 years tbh.
The true management (ie: stock holders) wants to exist at some point. There's talk of an IPO this year in which case they just want to pump up the numbers and hold things stable for another year before they can sell their stock.
I would think that Reddit would have an advantage here in some ways. As an advertiser, instead of trying to pick interests of a general population, you can just pick specific subreddits.
If a store sells geeky/sci-fi clothing and gifts then I found it is way better to just target anyone that visits /r/startrek and some other relevant subreddits. No need to build profiles on users.
I found Facebook to be a lot harder to accurately target users as you are relying on Facebook's profile of a user. I got a lot more reach, but much less conversion.
The most disrespectful pattern I encounter regularly on reddit is that it forgets that I want the nicer, more compact interface. There will come a day when they remove it entirely, clearly, and that will be the end of my reddit usage, more or less.
By 'compact', do you mean i.reddit.com, or old.reddit.com?
I've found that the former does sometimes redirect me to the garbage mobile version when I click on a thread (even while logged in), but the latter persists as long as the setting is enabled in my account.
It keeps forgetting for me too. That is to say, in my mobile browser and desktop browser I opt out of the redesign in favor of the old.reddit.com design, but about once per month it'll just revert back to the redesign. I don't think my cookies are being cleared because I'll stay logged in and I've never found any other setting that flips in the same way, it is only the Redesign opt-out that does this.
I don't know how to explain why many people say "this never happens to me" and other people say "this happens frequently."
While I'm on the subject, another grey pattern the article missed is the button to opt out of the redesign on mobile. When clicking the hamburger menu there used to be a button at the bottom called (iirc) "Opt out of Redesign." The same option exists today except they've moved it into a Settings submenu and renamed it "Request desktop site" which implies it's a temporary change.
Lastly, if you search you'll find threads where people say the web pages are sometimes rendered without any opt out button. I just opened an incognito window to test this and I simply cannot find a button to revert to the old design, even when using my mobile browser's Desktop Mode. So unless a visitor knows about old.reddit.com they are forced to use the new design.
This started happening to me only a few weeks ago. I’ve noticed it happens every Monday for me, so presumably some setting is being erased weekly to get users to move to the new design.
Then Mozilla had to go and fuck up extensions on mobile firefox, so now I simply avoid Reddit from phone. On totally unrelated note, I suddenly find myself with extra free time!
The "full extension" I linked is 800 bytes of JS, and thanks to being an extension it can redirect network requests before the page even loads (useful because sometimes Reddit can be quite sluggish to respond, and also because it's good nettiquette to not make spurious requests).
Besides which, applying a UserScript requires a much larger "full extension". I'd much rather have a small purpose-built extension which is, via browser-enforced policy, only allowed to run on the specific domains for which it is required.
I audited the code, installed it, turned off updates, and it has faithfully served me for a while now.
This is an assumption that I'd had until I read feedback from users who joined reddit after introduction of the new reddit design, that old reddit web interface is ugly. Well, I think reddit knows better than us. They have the data!
That's the whole plan, keep the old interface around (along with power users) until the new user population (who only knows the new interface) grows large enough to be able to get rid of the old interface without getting a full Digg-like exodus.
Hostile design either makes the user login (a user reddit can monetize) or makes the user to close the site (a user reddit can't monetize, thus no need to waste resources), both scenarios is a win for reddit.
Third scenario: People keep using it in anger until something better shows up, and by that time there will be enough unhappy people to spark a growing community in the New Place.
If that were true, it would've happened long ago. Say what you will about reddit's questionably/shitty policies, but they do a pretty decent job of keeping the extremists/racists/crazies/etc contained.
Nearly every attempt at a reddit alternative over the years has been flooded by those types of people. Even if you ignore the fact that advertisers will avoid that community like a plague, the average person will want to avoid it too.
> Nearly every attempt at a reddit alternative over the years has been flooded by those types of people
Yes, most of the time because they have advertised themselves as a "free-speech place". Of course the people these places attract are the "5G is a Jewish conspiracy to vaccinate everybody" kinda people
It would be interesting if it turns out reddit has a team to flood new competitors with unsavory accounts. It's exactly what they did when they started reddit, just with positive fake accounts instead of negative.
"Huffman said one other strategy proved crucial to Reddit’s early success, which most people are unaware of: The team submitted a ridiculous amount of content under fake user accounts to give the appearance of popularity."
...
“The first thing it did was it set the tone,” by the activity it displayed to visitors, Huffman said. “We were submitting content that we would have been interested in seeing. That meant the content on Reddit … was good. And when you show up , you know exactly what the site is about.”
The only way I can stomach using Reddit is via Reddit Sync.
I firmly believe that soon Reddit will prevent third party clients from using their API. Perhaps there'll be a subscription service where paid accounts can still use it with their client of choice, or maybe they'll just kill the ecosystem in an attempt to get people on the official app. Either way, that's me done with it.
The hostility makes it somewhere I'm just unenthusiastic about visiting. It's a Facebook-style manouvre.
The percentage of people who would pay for it, probably wouldn't make up for the dev time to implement it.
Once upon a time the HN userbase and the reddit user base weren't a million miles apart, those days are long gone, reddit is mainstream and mainstream consumers don't care that much about ads, the new UI or everything else this thread is up in arms about, it's still the defacto internet forum and nothing I've seen looks likely to replace it.
Edit: apparently I’m misreading the traffic page and third party apps are not included. So disregard this paragraph. I really doubt they’ll kill API access. From the stats on my (medium sized) sub a full third of uniques (desktop and mobile combined) are from unofficial clients.
And that’s not to mention the number of near-essential bots used by many subs for community management.
Now, what they are doing is not putting new non-core features into the API, like chat and RPAN. But while that’s still irritating, it is a bit different than killing API access.
Surely the most annoying thing is the endless requests to download the app. So irritating! I refuse to download it just because they insist so hard. Reddit is the most basic site ever, there is absolutely no need for me to have an app.
old.reddit.com is not mobile optimized at all, but still infinitely better than reddit.com. Alternatively, get one of the non-official apps (on Android I use rif).
Teddit supports multisub URLs. I am not sure if the effect is the exact same as the front page, but it looks similar enough. Just create a multisub and save it in your bookmarks. Like this:
Once upon a time, links from .compact would always refer to other .compact links. That has slowly been going away, however. I think they are trying to slowly kill it off.
Just this week they changed "visit old reddit" to be under a "more" item in the menu. I am concerned that this is the first step to removing it for good. I don't know how to get my interaction data except on old reddit.
Do you need a Reddit account to use the unofficial apps? Also, I prefer to search Reddit content from Google - will Reddit links open in one of those apps, instead of giving me the usual shitty Reddit Web UX?
I'm surprised that there isn't a version of the Reddit Enhancement Suite extension for old.reddit.com. Especially now that they had to trim features to support the redesign.
I prefer old Reddit because it isn’t mobile optimized. Most mobile optimized experiences are ugly, waste space, neutered experiences. My phone does a great job of rendering a desktop page. We don’t have shitty toy browsers anymore on mobile. Stop giving me the shitty toy experience.
I just found that there is setting checked in the menu (for anonymous and authenticated users) called "Ask to Open in App." I find it kind of curious that they would offer an option. Who would actually want this setting to be enabled? Maybe some developers snuck it in so they could use their own site without contracting cancer.
Not Reddit per se but I find it hard to wrap my head around the app thing for Reddit or similar. HTML5/CSS3 is so sufficient for this... The web gave birth to an economy going away from itself. And. Ow everything is there twice or thrice.
Surely there's some good economical or political reason it. Maybe systemic (any large market will create redundancies.. I don't know)
Here's how reddit's business model probably works: you have power users which create or submit the content and write the witty comments and then you have the lurkers which just browse. what reddit is trying to monetize is the interaction with the latter user group: comments provide little space to promote ads, so most of them are hidden by default. instead they promote lots of posts with images interspersed with ads. the power users on the other hand use dedicated apps and have a custom interface anyway. they are (so far) not really bothered by the changes and continue to create and submit content.
Lurkers will always outnumber posters on any forum I think, but I have to believe Reddit has a worse ratio than most because the echo chambers are so strong and anything outside of them is downvoted to oblivion.
And it's easy to feel engaged by just reading threads mindlessly upvoting or downvoting endlessly.
Reddit bought Dubsmash last year, too. I imagine the app will eventually operate almost similar to TikTok: funny picture, advertisement, cat video, person live-streaming.
Whether or not they can attract more of these power users to use the official app to upload short videos and livestream remains to be seen. I don’t think they’re able to on third-party apps. I’m not able to on Apollo, at least.
You left out the moderators. Some of what they do is useful tending of communities, but some of what they do is provide free labor that addresses a hard problem.
Indeed, content moderation is the single hardest problem on the internet right now, and every big tech company is struggling with it. From Youtube to Twitch to Twitter to Facebook, etc. Reddit, while not perfect, has done relatively well, but as you mention it's all on the back of volunteer unpaid moderators. I'm surprised they haven't yet setup any sort of revenue sharing with large popular subs.
As a moderator of a decently sized sub (215k+ or so): we're suffering. I feel like its a lot of work and not a lot of support. We're not allowed to make any money off of it and the users just throw shit at us at every oportunity.
I don't have a reddit account but some small subreddits are quite good. I use https://teddit.net/ on the desktop and RedReader from F-Droid. Teddit doesn't have infinte scroll and RedReader can be limited to how many are loaded each time and you have to press to load more. This way it's much easier to not doomscroll, there are far fewer dark patterns, it's lighter, less tracking. You can bookmark subreddits on a browser and pin them in RedReader. Subreddits also have RSS feeds although I wouldn't advise it for popular ones because of the amount of hits you'll get.
RedReader is a fantastic reddit mobile client for Android - they are rolling out a new version right now with a ton of community contributions (both bugfixes and new features).
Some may claim that laypeople like the new UI better, but anecdotally, among my social circle of non-techy people, that's not the case. In fact it is becoming something of a meme that Reddit is now impractical to use on mobile if you're not registered.
I mostly read reddit on a desktop. Lots of people complain about the new UI, but I don't mind it. What I don't understand is how after all this time basic functionality of the site still doesn't work. Like, at least once a week you get logged out and can't log in or you click on a subreddit or a post and it won't load the content. I just don't understand how this is still going on and they are putting resources into avatar microtransactions and the live streaming. Does anyone use the live streaming stuff on reddit?
> you set your status to “Hiding”. An obvious attempt to effectively shame people into using it.
Or maybe it's just a humorous take. Remember "Anonymous Coward" from Slashdot?
Not against the main take of the article though. But that has more to do with economy. On economic down turn years free sites like this start to crumble. And they take pro-monetizing user hostile steps like this.
Reddit is free to squeeze every last dark pattern in order to monetize, just like we are free to stop browsing Reddit. The past few weeks have been frustrating, enough that I've almost stopped Reddit altogether. Funny though... I feel like I haven't lost anything.
As a startup community, we often talk about services being painkiller vs vitamin, or on a scale between 0 and 10 how sad would we feel if we no longer had access to a service. I've been thinking this the past few weeks, and losing Reddit has made me feel kind of meh.
I've long thought about making a thread like this so I'm happy to see it. Fed up with this actively user-hostile web experience to try and drive people to the app.
My main gripe is definitely expanding comments -
> First of all, only the top comment will be shown. Then you can tap view more which will load another two. But you cannot open all the comments.
Because the "create an account to continue" toast pictured is unclosable on my phone. Meaning not only can I not expand any more comments, but I can't even go back see other un-expanded comments. I need to refresh.
Not grandparent commenter, but I don’t. I switched to the logged out, default experience recently. It’s so user hostile it’s been pretty effective at curbing my Reddit addiction and making me waste less time on that site.
you’re not alone and it’s a common complaint. along with the complaint that toggling “opt out of redesign” is constantly coming untoggled randomly and without warning. This doesn’t even happen between browser sessions where one would think a cookie got dropped, it can happen simply between pages. one moment you’re using old reddit, click a comment link, boom..you’re back on the redesign and having to change the setting again.
Reddit has become another VC invested company where crippling features, dark patterns on forced "adoption" and dark "growth" hacks du jours are the norms.
I'm a very early and long term user, and I slowly moved away after "the" investment.
HN on the other hand is still safe, as the huge success of YC and their aim of gathering talent and readers gives more financial freedom. What if some investor now invests in HN, gathers a board, assigns a CEO with the profitability and "growth" target? I'm afraid to ask this, but the same could happen.
HN is too niche to milk for profitability like Reddit. Only relatively technical people hang out here and will probably move to, or setup, an alternative if HN gets sold out.
The value of HN to YCombinator is keeping a large community of plugged-in and knowledgeable people on-tap. If there were any hint of commercializing HN, it would be clear as day that Ycombinator was now run by idiots. Everyone would flee faster than a jackrabbit from a pack of wolves.
Nail on the head about marketplace feature. Reddit doesn’t want to build hard products, they want to build easy dark features which aims for more profiling and resultant ad dollars.
Reddit is an absolutely grotesque website, both for these UI issues and the toxic hate it engenders on all the subreddits. It’s magnitudes worse than any other social network. I have a genuine question: do people openly say they work for this company or is it workplace where people have to hide that they are part of it?
> the toxic hate it engenders on all the subreddits.
I always see people saying this and I have to wonder what subreddits they're subscribed to. My experience is basically fine, sure there's some shitty discussions or a few hostile idiots lurking about, but it's no worse than message boards generally, and most conversations seem rather good.
Part of me wonders whether some posters are just extraordinarily sensitive, and intentionally dive into the most downvoted top level comments so they can get their daily dose of outrage at the things trollS say.
I guess the specialized subreddits are okayish, but I am always shocked when looking at the frontpage. The amount of hate and misery that appears in the most liked posts (posts and comments) is disconcerting. Just checked: Cringetopia, IdiotsInCars, MurderedByWords, JusticeServed, facepalm, PublicFreakout, iamverysmart, ChoosingBeggars...
I know that most reddit visitors are teenagers or young adults and that controversal topics get more clicks etc. etc. That's what people want to see? It's so...how should I say it?...sad.
Specialised subs with good moderation, dedicated to topics that are positive things, are pretty much always fun experiences. Those subreddits you mention though - I think I've filtered every single one of them from my feed because they are just inherently negative
Check any main mildly political post on a main subreddit and find the top comments to be in support of genocide of chinese people for the crime of challenging us supremacy.
Absolutely. Aside from programming problems, “product/service reddit” is probably my most commonly used Google search query.
Whenever I’m looking for information about a product, service, restaurant, etc. one of the first things I look for is a discussion on Reddit. As much as I hate what Reddit has become, it still is the best place I’ve found for discussion from locals or enthusiasts that provide a much more accurate description of a product/restaurant/etc. than user reviews or ad filled blogs.
I use Google for this since Reddit’s search is garbage.
If you're adding "reddit" to the search query that's a bit different, in that case you're explicitly looking for results on reddit. Penalizing reddit in the rankings shouldn't change this use case.
I was more thinking about generic search queries that have reddit in the results. In my experience that doesn't happen very often.
I just don't think reddit gets a significant amount of traffic from search results so penalizing it in the rankings won't have a big effect.
Yes, I only end up on Reddit via Google searches, looking for the answer to a question.
Then when looking at the discussion from the search result, I'll sometimes see other topics that look interesting.
Unfortunately the web experience is so offputting, and so weirdly discontinuous, that it's hard to stick around and enjoy it. It's high friction and reminds me how much time I'm wasting by it being so clunky. Other interesting places are easier to get into without the same feeling.
The way the other topics shown (that aren't the answer to my question) are the most recent ones is offputting as well. It means no context around the time of the discussion I was looking at, no chance of seeing related discussions from the tine, and if I land in the same subreddit from multiple searches, no variety to show me why the subreddit is interesting.
So I've never felt interested enough to stick around and create a Reddit account, and my only visits are from Google searches that occasionally land on Reddit.
Facebook makes $32 per user per year. That is across all billion+ users worldwide. They make around $170 per user in the US And Canada. No non-advertising monetization strategy will come close to that number. Assuming 10% of users pay (which is a very generous assumption) you'd need to have each user in the US pay $1700 per year!!!!
Does anyone else want to rant about Reddit’s AMP pages that show up on Google? Oh I could go on about it…
The managers at Reddit, in their infinite wisdom, decided that the preferred experience of a Google user searching for content on reddit should redirected to their wonky app. And if they don’t have the app, they should be punished with modals upon modals. “Reddit looks better in the app!” Oh, you disagree? Well press this tiny button to indicate your unsaved preference and we will allow you to view a preview of the thread you came for. But…if you can find the illusive button which shows the whole thread, we will grant you full access — after asking you to install the app again!
It’s enough to make the designers of the Get Smart door scene collapse in embarrassment knowing that their parody has become the reality of every unsuspecting person who just wants to browse Reddit.
And while I have you here, please tell me what’s going on with the Reddit’s scroll positioning when navigating out of the site. Just by clicking a external link in a thread, you’ve not only lost your position, navigating back to Reddit will tease you with the last version of the page before everything refreshes back to the top.
And God forbid if you keep a tab open up for too long, encountering the most obnoxious error screen imaginable. “Ouch! Something went wrong. Refresh!” Yeah, something did go wrong. You broke your site. You killed the golden goose. You were the Chosen One! It was said that you would destroy Digg, not join them. Bring balance to the force, not leave it in darkness.
speaking of their google results, let's also draw attention to the fact that they lie about post dates in google results to get you to click on a result from this week, only to click through and find that it's a post 7 years old
There is also a bug with the AMP pages such that the submission dates for the threads are often wrong. For example you're searching for threads that have been posted in the last month, some of the results will say something like "7 days ago" until you click and see it is actually 5 years old.
Reddit has a MASSIVE security vulnerability with their AMP pages and I really hope they get in trouble for it because of how much they shove it down people's throats.
It's possible to visible quarantined or even banned subreddits through their AMP pages. From there you can still view deleted videos and other content through the autoplay "previews".
What annoys me even more is that they kinda block the ability to read more /all comments when you're not logged in, at least this has been my experience so far.
The Reddit mobile web experience is so obviously bad that I can only assume it's intentional.
There must be some huge incentive for Reddit to push users toward the mobile app. Most likely, the app allows for higher or more accurate monthly active user counts and enables more targeted advertising, both of which are critical to increasing advertising revenues.
Reddit is in a difficult spot because they're mostly an ad-supported business but their users are vehemently opposed to advertising and any forms of tracking. They have to tip-toe around all of the advertising and user tracking that they do. Strangely, their users mostly seem to give them a pass on the tracking. Their users are relatively trustworth, viewing Reddit as far more trustworthy of a company than Facbeook, despite the two companies having largely similar business models.
"Reddit, the investors who bought the product" are in a difficult spot. And certainly haven't shown an overabundance of creativity in monetization approaches.
Suffice to say, you probably don't deserve a "front page of the Internet" tagline if your first display is a redirect request to your app.
Reddit is a potential B Corp or non profit masquerading as a VC backed tech startup with exit or ad revenue potential. Bag holders get tired eventually.
Reddit is building the best content moderation tools for humans - by blundering in every possible direction, often in direct opposition to potential progress.
Mod tools and the data on what works is the untapped resource.
Every other major data or tool set for moderation is behind an NDA.
Yeah and you can't appeal if some crazy mod got offended and permanently banned your on every sub he's mod because he didn't like your comment about China or you mentioned that BLM riots killed people, left burned and looted shops or that George Floyd got killed by drugs and was holding a gun on pregnant woman's stomach.
This was my take at one point, but a lot of actions made it clear that's no longer the case, and it's now more of a social media site/app that also has porn.
What bothers me about OF is that it has turned authentic communities into billboards. "Why are you entitled to free porn?" OFs defenders will ask as they completely miss the point of the communities they have hijacked.
As the saying goes: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
I downloaded the app alright. Just not theirs. Apollo for iOS is such a pleasure to use compared to the Reddit app. They can’t even get the app experience right.
Apollo is probably one of the highest quality iOS and iPadOS apps around, Reddit or otherwise. The developer is super responsive to requests or criticism, and the app just works insanely well. It doesn’t have quite the same feature set as some of the other 3rd party android Reddit apps, like Sync, but everything on the app is exceptionally well designed and thought out.
> There must be some huge incentive for Reddit to push users toward the mobile app.
From what we hear, the app isn't even that well designed. It seems that many users are still using unofficial clients because the app can feel heavy and sluggish, with only a barely acceptable UX.
RedReader user here, can confirm. I don't even know what half of the complaints in the link are talking about, as they're largely problems with the "official" mobile experience.
Which is why I think alternatives like Lemmy[0] ought to up their UX/UI and mobile applications because on the backend, they offer much respectful design and since they are not after money, operate under less duress. Such alternatives offer real possibilities to challenge Reddit but they have a long way to go on user interface.
It’s much easier to track user and adds they see on mobile apps then mobile web... So more money from advertising and selling people usage patterns and info would be my guess...
As a dev who works with telemetry in my day job I HATE when "better metrics" gets in the way of a feature or product improving.
(I also hate the pervasiveness of identifiable tracking but that's a whole different rant.)
You don't need to perfectly A:B test your two different offerings if that means preventing users from using the product in a way that best suits them. Stop putting shit behind "read more" buttons just because you want to see if people are actually reading your articles. Stop breaking things into multiple screens just so you can track your damn funnels. Better MAU _tracking_ (not even better MAU) does nothing for user experience and pursuing that at the expense of everything else is just plain foolish.
Yeah, it becomes just about getting a "better metric" which is in fact a number that sounds better to others instead of using metrics to improve user experience.
I've tried alternatives, and I keep going back to i.reddit.com for mobile. I've also installed extensions to deal with the bullshit on desktop.
My number one gripe right now is when using Google to search for stuff on reddit and use the time filter ("last week"), Reddit does not accurately report dates, and you get 4 year old threads showing up as "last week".
Regarding desktop, and even mobile. old.reddit.com still points to the previous version of the site. It's less than ideal for mobile but you can set this as the default site in your account settings. It's under beta section, need to uncheck box for using the new reddit site.
Every time I get annoyed by something like this, I go to the front page if Reddit, see that 90% of the posts are political advertisements disguised as viral content, and realize it’s a minor problem in the grand scheme. I just wish communities would make their own message boards again instead of coalescing on subreddits that they have zero control of.
Reddit's design is what actively pushed me to Hacker News, the Risks Digest, and a healthy mix of paid news (WSJ, FT, Bloomberg, etc). The site is really being redesigned to enable astroturfing and user manipulation on a commercial level. Ads are made to look like posts, and sometimes the posts themselves are just ads.
I've come to the opinion that it's impossible for any free social media platform to avoid this unless the people running it are doing it as an act of charity. If you want to make money, you either make users pay or you sell access to / information from the userbase itself.
Really? Hacker News is even worse. This POS site lets you type out an answer to something or a comment, only to reject it with "YOU'RE POSTING TOO FAST." Really? Anything beyond two comments an hour is "too fast?" Then why do you let us even bring up the commenting window and waste our time?
Not defending Reddit, but it's the same with Facebook, and have you seen the Google Search results in a "developed country"? First full screen on mobile is ads that look like search results. Thankfully there's a small "ad" in the corner that no one can see.
Kinda afraid of this at this point. I honestly have no idea how they can get away with the non-old version of the website which is one of the most unstable pieces of shit I've ever seen.
The day old reddit dies is the day I stop using reddit entirely. The desktop version is every bit as awful as the mobile version. For some reason they seem to think that seeing a few more posts or comments on the screen at page load is too much information to process, but taking up 1/4 of my screen with some pictures or videos is a better use of the space. Everything is so obfuscated and difficult to find. I can't stand it.
old.reddit.com is great, but it has nothing to do with what's described above, which is google results. At least on mobile I think you're automatically sent to the stupid AMP page regardless.
Yes this is the way. What reddit has done to its own mobile experience is incredibly disrespectful, I couldn’t agree with this article more. Just... let me see your fucking ads?
Does anyone know a way on ios to forcibly redirect all reddit links to old.reddit.com?
Reddit is literally the worst use of AMP I've ever seen, and honestly probably plays a great part in why a lot of people dislike AMP. It honestly has no place using AMP in the first place since it isn't really a static page.
Do yourself a favor and install a third-party app: Apollo, RIF, Boost, Infinity whatever. A few are available on F-Droid. No ads or other bullshit, web links open in the app, which loads must faster than the website.
As long as Reddit maintain their API and keep it free, I'll keep using Reddit. If they ever drop it, there's not much chance I will.
515 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 317 ms ] threadA marketplace would have a very real value for users.
And it would create a much better moat.
Would you pay $2 USD for all of reddit for a year? How many users does reddit have? It'd probably be a lot of money, but not super profitable. Hence they use adds because they won't shift on price.
> Reddit has 10x the traffic because it's free.
Reddit acquired more traffic because it's free, true. But now, they aren't looking to acquire more traffic. They're looking for more revenue.
One way to get that revenue is to allow already existing content creators to charge for a part of the content.
I think that would not only encourage better content but would bring in other users and generate good revenue.
Brave can do that for reddit and other social media sites now [1]
[1] https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360030752872-Whi...
I suggest to compensate creators not moderators.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/6bj5de/state_of_sp...
Facebook has over a decade of data on its users, no session id will match that.
edit: Also knowing users emails will allows advertisers to match the reddit accounts to their own data stores on users.
If a store sells geeky/sci-fi clothing and gifts then I found it is way better to just target anyone that visits /r/startrek and some other relevant subreddits. No need to build profiles on users.
I found Facebook to be a lot harder to accurately target users as you are relying on Facebook's profile of a user. I got a lot more reach, but much less conversion.
I've found that the former does sometimes redirect me to the garbage mobile version when I click on a thread (even while logged in), but the latter persists as long as the setting is enabled in my account.
I don't know how to explain why many people say "this never happens to me" and other people say "this happens frequently."
While I'm on the subject, another grey pattern the article missed is the button to opt out of the redesign on mobile. When clicking the hamburger menu there used to be a button at the bottom called (iirc) "Opt out of Redesign." The same option exists today except they've moved it into a Settings submenu and renamed it "Request desktop site" which implies it's a temporary change.
Lastly, if you search you'll find threads where people say the web pages are sometimes rendered without any opt out button. I just opened an incognito window to test this and I simply cannot find a button to revert to the old design, even when using my mobile browser's Desktop Mode. So unless a visitor knows about old.reddit.com they are forced to use the new design.
There's a handy browser extension for automatically redirecting you if you click a link to Reddit's other domains: https://github.com/tom-james-watson/old-reddit-redirect
If you'd like to disable custom subreddit styles even if you're not signed in, you can add these custom filters to uBlock Origin:
https://pastebin.com/raw/niGCX6AH
Then Mozilla had to go and fuck up extensions on mobile firefox, so now I simply avoid Reddit from phone. On totally unrelated note, I suddenly find myself with extra free time!
Besides which, applying a UserScript requires a much larger "full extension". I'd much rather have a small purpose-built extension which is, via browser-enforced policy, only allowed to run on the specific domains for which it is required.
I audited the code, installed it, turned off updates, and it has faithfully served me for a while now.
To each their own, I suppose.
This is an assumption that I'd had until I read feedback from users who joined reddit after introduction of the new reddit design, that old reddit web interface is ugly. Well, I think reddit knows better than us. They have the data!
Nearly every attempt at a reddit alternative over the years has been flooded by those types of people. Even if you ignore the fact that advertisers will avoid that community like a plague, the average person will want to avoid it too.
Yes, most of the time because they have advertised themselves as a "free-speech place". Of course the people these places attract are the "5G is a Jewish conspiracy to vaccinate everybody" kinda people
"Huffman said one other strategy proved crucial to Reddit’s early success, which most people are unaware of: The team submitted a ridiculous amount of content under fake user accounts to give the appearance of popularity."
...
“The first thing it did was it set the tone,” by the activity it displayed to visitors, Huffman said. “We were submitting content that we would have been interested in seeing. That meant the content on Reddit … was good. And when you show up , you know exactly what the site is about.”
https://venturebeat.com/2012/06/22/reddit-fake-users/
https://www.vice.com/en/article/z4444w/how-reddit-got-huge-t...
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...
Which means that they've data to back up what they are doing. Probably "exploiting" less savvy and/or privacy conscious users.
> How can this be good for them?
> This is the question that keeps bothering me.
Only thinking of short-term benefits aka typical behavior of publicly owned companies and VC.
I firmly believe that soon Reddit will prevent third party clients from using their API. Perhaps there'll be a subscription service where paid accounts can still use it with their client of choice, or maybe they'll just kill the ecosystem in an attempt to get people on the official app. Either way, that's me done with it.
The hostility makes it somewhere I'm just unenthusiastic about visiting. It's a Facebook-style manouvre.
Once upon a time the HN userbase and the reddit user base weren't a million miles apart, those days are long gone, reddit is mainstream and mainstream consumers don't care that much about ads, the new UI or everything else this thread is up in arms about, it's still the defacto internet forum and nothing I've seen looks likely to replace it.
And that’s not to mention the number of near-essential bots used by many subs for community management.
Now, what they are doing is not putting new non-core features into the API, like chat and RPAN. But while that’s still irritating, it is a bit different than killing API access.
That tells you what their own experience is like. Thanks for sharing that.
It works well on mobile and desktop.
https://teddit.net/r/programming+python+haskell/
There's a bug where opening a post from a subreddit's main page always results in a weird border, like it's opening the post as a floating dialog.
(Just to confirm tried it logged and out, same result: https://imgur.com/a/6yK9D8V)
That results in comments being squished down to a few characters wide and many many lines long
I used to think it was a "me" bug, but it's followed me across 4 iPhones over the years!
How can they have such an experience breaking bug on one of the most homogeneous major platforms out there? iOS only has one browser engine!
Try m.reddit.com
Good! I do not want any mobile-optimized webpages on my mobile phone. That's what double-tap-to-zoom was invented for, and now pinch-to-zoom.
Surely there's some good economical or political reason it. Maybe systemic (any large market will create redundancies.. I don't know)
Yay to old.reddit.com
Location tracking
Probably other tracking capabilities as well.
The technical frameworks make vastly more surveillance information and channels available via apps, AFAIU.
Worked flawlessly and never had to see those crappy dark patterns again :)
Been using it for a decade and it does everything, even mod stuff. Simple and clean interface.
And it's easy to feel engaged by just reading threads mindlessly upvoting or downvoting endlessly.
Sure, there is lots of decent content on it.
https://old.reddit.com/r/RedReader/comments/o7oxdu/version_1...
Available under GPLv3 ever since I remember, and always had fantastic UX (assuming RedReader has reached parity with latest update)
That's it'd be interesting in looking at their data.
Or maybe it's just a humorous take. Remember "Anonymous Coward" from Slashdot?
Not against the main take of the article though. But that has more to do with economy. On economic down turn years free sites like this start to crumble. And they take pro-monetizing user hostile steps like this.
As a startup community, we often talk about services being painkiller vs vitamin, or on a scale between 0 and 10 how sad would we feel if we no longer had access to a service. I've been thinking this the past few weeks, and losing Reddit has made me feel kind of meh.
My main gripe is definitely expanding comments -
> First of all, only the top comment will be shown. Then you can tap view more which will load another two. But you cannot open all the comments.
Because the "create an account to continue" toast pictured is unclosable on my phone. Meaning not only can I not expand any more comments, but I can't even go back see other un-expanded comments. I need to refresh.
Just an absolute rancid experience all around.
[1] https://github.com/tom-james-watson/old-reddit-redirect
I'm a very early and long term user, and I slowly moved away after "the" investment.
HN on the other hand is still safe, as the huge success of YC and their aim of gathering talent and readers gives more financial freedom. What if some investor now invests in HN, gathers a board, assigns a CEO with the profitability and "growth" target? I'm afraid to ask this, but the same could happen.
Sounds like early reddit.
FTFY.
I'm pretty certain it used to work and they intentionally broke it so that you cannot close the modal popup.
I always see people saying this and I have to wonder what subreddits they're subscribed to. My experience is basically fine, sure there's some shitty discussions or a few hostile idiots lurking about, but it's no worse than message boards generally, and most conversations seem rather good.
Part of me wonders whether some posters are just extraordinarily sensitive, and intentionally dive into the most downvoted top level comments so they can get their daily dose of outrage at the things trollS say.
Just look at r/all
I know that most reddit visitors are teenagers or young adults and that controversal topics get more clicks etc. etc. That's what people want to see? It's so...how should I say it?...sad.
I genuinely cannot believe the comments people post there sometimes. It's like some sort of misanthropic, one-upmanship circle-jerk.
I really wish Google would start de-ranking behavior like this.
Whenever I’m looking for information about a product, service, restaurant, etc. one of the first things I look for is a discussion on Reddit. As much as I hate what Reddit has become, it still is the best place I’ve found for discussion from locals or enthusiasts that provide a much more accurate description of a product/restaurant/etc. than user reviews or ad filled blogs.
I use Google for this since Reddit’s search is garbage.
I was more thinking about generic search queries that have reddit in the results. In my experience that doesn't happen very often.
I just don't think reddit gets a significant amount of traffic from search results so penalizing it in the rankings won't have a big effect.
Then when looking at the discussion from the search result, I'll sometimes see other topics that look interesting.
Unfortunately the web experience is so offputting, and so weirdly discontinuous, that it's hard to stick around and enjoy it. It's high friction and reminds me how much time I'm wasting by it being so clunky. Other interesting places are easier to get into without the same feeling.
The way the other topics shown (that aren't the answer to my question) are the most recent ones is offputting as well. It means no context around the time of the discussion I was looking at, no chance of seeing related discussions from the tine, and if I land in the same subreddit from multiple searches, no variety to show me why the subreddit is interesting.
So I've never felt interested enough to stick around and create a Reddit account, and my only visits are from Google searches that occasionally land on Reddit.
Facebook is a database and a UI with ten billion dollars worth of ad exec salaries glued on.
The managers at Reddit, in their infinite wisdom, decided that the preferred experience of a Google user searching for content on reddit should redirected to their wonky app. And if they don’t have the app, they should be punished with modals upon modals. “Reddit looks better in the app!” Oh, you disagree? Well press this tiny button to indicate your unsaved preference and we will allow you to view a preview of the thread you came for. But…if you can find the illusive button which shows the whole thread, we will grant you full access — after asking you to install the app again!
It’s enough to make the designers of the Get Smart door scene collapse in embarrassment knowing that their parody has become the reality of every unsuspecting person who just wants to browse Reddit.
And while I have you here, please tell me what’s going on with the Reddit’s scroll positioning when navigating out of the site. Just by clicking a external link in a thread, you’ve not only lost your position, navigating back to Reddit will tease you with the last version of the page before everything refreshes back to the top.
And God forbid if you keep a tab open up for too long, encountering the most obnoxious error screen imaginable. “Ouch! Something went wrong. Refresh!” Yeah, something did go wrong. You broke your site. You killed the golden goose. You were the Chosen One! It was said that you would destroy Digg, not join them. Bring balance to the force, not leave it in darkness.
Google is notoriously bad at indexing the correct time a Reddit thread is posted.
I have no clue why this is, I assume perhaps it is seeing a different date somewhere on the page (e.g. the "recently viewed threads" box).
It doesn't seem to be directional either. That is, it's not just old threads pretending to be newer, but new threads also sometimes appear older.
This is why I don't attribute any malice to the issue.
One of my favorites is how it’ll load a basic profile with just your name, 0 karma and no subs when the site seems to be overloaded.
It's possible to visible quarantined or even banned subreddits through their AMP pages. From there you can still view deleted videos and other content through the autoplay "previews".
There must be some huge incentive for Reddit to push users toward the mobile app. Most likely, the app allows for higher or more accurate monthly active user counts and enables more targeted advertising, both of which are critical to increasing advertising revenues.
Reddit is in a difficult spot because they're mostly an ad-supported business but their users are vehemently opposed to advertising and any forms of tracking. They have to tip-toe around all of the advertising and user tracking that they do. Strangely, their users mostly seem to give them a pass on the tracking. Their users are relatively trustworth, viewing Reddit as far more trustworthy of a company than Facbeook, despite the two companies having largely similar business models.
"Reddit, the investors who bought the product" are in a difficult spot. And certainly haven't shown an overabundance of creativity in monetization approaches.
Suffice to say, you probably don't deserve a "front page of the Internet" tagline if your first display is a redirect request to your app.
Mod tools and the data on what works is the untapped resource.
Every other major data or tool set for moderation is behind an NDA.
As the saying goes: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
1. How well is this working for them 2. If the answer to 1. is "not very", how long will they stick to this strategy.
They've been going at it for a couple of years now, so I imagine they're approaching the moment when they have to reassess how well things are going.
I wonder if we'll see a change of direction any time soon.
From what we hear, the app isn't even that well designed. It seems that many users are still using unofficial clients because the app can feel heavy and sluggish, with only a barely acceptable UX.
- Ad-Targeting: a mobile app has a lot of data points to create a unique "finger print" for each user.
- Conserving resources: a well designed mobile app can really save a lot of bandwidth and server resources for an online platform like Reddit.
[0] https://join-lemmy.org/instances
(I also hate the pervasiveness of identifiable tracking but that's a whole different rant.)
You don't need to perfectly A:B test your two different offerings if that means preventing users from using the product in a way that best suits them. Stop putting shit behind "read more" buttons just because you want to see if people are actually reading your articles. Stop breaking things into multiple screens just so you can track your damn funnels. Better MAU _tracking_ (not even better MAU) does nothing for user experience and pursuing that at the expense of everything else is just plain foolish.
My number one gripe right now is when using Google to search for stuff on reddit and use the time filter ("last week"), Reddit does not accurately report dates, and you get 4 year old threads showing up as "last week".
I've come to the opinion that it's impossible for any free social media platform to avoid this unless the people running it are doing it as an act of charity. If you want to make money, you either make users pay or you sell access to / information from the userbase itself.
FUCK YOU, HACKER NEWS.
So why does Reddit use AMP at all? I can only understand AMP being good for some news site where it gives you them a mobile site design "for free".
Like... How bad can they fuck this up?
Does anyone know a way on ios to forcibly redirect all reddit links to old.reddit.com?
As long as Reddit maintain their API and keep it free, I'll keep using Reddit. If they ever drop it, there's not much chance I will.