It means that the company has started the review process with the SEC. The company is going to go back and forth with the agency to make sure their filings, audits, disclosures, etc. are up to par before the company files publicly in a few months. Once the filing is public the company will wait for 15 days before launching their roadshow.
And yes, this is how the process works with every company
This is accurate. They have lead left for their syndicate selected if they’re going the traditional underwriter route. They’ll pick all the banks for their syndicate with help from their advisors, and then teach sell side research about the company and use this as a trial period for fielding questions while everyone is under NDA’s before the public flip. Once the roadshow is launched it’ll be something between 1-2 weeks before pricing, though that’s been compressed towards ~1 week since everyone is doing digital meetings now vs in person.
Strongly agree. Those who are skeptical and have recently joined HN just need to rewind, read a few threads from 2015, let alone 2010. The quality of discussion, the disagreements, the back and forth, the deep respect for each other - all those are eroding away on HN, albeit slowly. Still there is good discussion, especially on deep technical topics (e.g. Semiconductors). It may not be the fault of HN - today's internet is full of toxicity and pretty much everything is politicized. I naturally like to play devil's advocate and it is basically impossible on HN without getting flagged or worse - called names and get insults thrown at you.
I would love to get Dang's perspective but it would be difficult for him to say anything.
I'm not dang (or spartacus) but I want to say, I think the logic here is fallacious. Quality may or may not be going down, overall I tend to think not, its distortions of size effects, not absolute decline.
But more specifically there is no nexus between the decline, or behaviour, and a desire to IPO and realize profit. Not all things co-relate, they can be contemporaneous and un-related.
Whatever Dan has, and he has a lot of "it" -it includes tolerance and forbearance, and an ability not to buy into the paranoia at large. I don't think he'd be part of an IPO decision logic which went "yea it's boring: lets profit and run" -there might be a "profit" and there might be a consequential "run" and there might be "its boring" but I don't personally see them as causally connected.
I’ve been here for a while. Maybe we can break the rule in a thread about Reddit going for an IPO? :-) Also, I am not saying HN is turning into Reddit. We are just degrading.
FWIW, I didn't mean to imply that you shouldn't comment on it. Just that in HN's "lore" saying that it's turning into reddit is a common theme.
As to your comment itself, I don't think HN is degrading that fast? The low-quality "meme" responses usually get downvoted and while polarization is alive and well, most of it leads to interesting arguments so it's not necessarily a bad thing.
I've only been here for 2-3 years though so maybe it was different before.
I've been here 8+ years and I don't feel like it has changed much. It probably has in some way that hasn't been very noticeable to me. Just my personal observations.
These things are subjective but I find old HN substantially and irrefutably different (and better) for the reasons I said earlier. It is so obvious to me. I wonder why so many people disagree. Something wrong with me?
I feel pretty strong about this. Usually, if I’m not convinced, I wouldn’t put it in such strong terms.
Yeah, I’ve been here a few months only and there is a very different attitude than on better-known websites like Reddit. HN is the only forum I’ve seen where anyone who argues in obviously bad faith will get downvoted to invisibility, and most well-made arguments get upvoted, no matter which side they’re on.
A few years ago, trying to have the same conversations on reddit, everything degraded into personal attacks eventually.
I migrated here in 2016 a couple of months before the American presidential election because the comments on Ars Technica kept derailing into American politics or culture war, even when the article was about science or technology. The problem seems to have followed me. I recognize your name as one of the numerous people using HN for discussing American politics and culture war.
Nah, HN is reasonably healthy as far as I can tell.
Sometimes things get flagged incorrectly, but usually within a few days issues get fixed. Sometimes you see a flurry of unneeded downvotes.. but scores don't matter much and things get worked out.
My sarcastic comments generally score poorly, my helpful ones do well - which is about the desired outcome.
The goal is not to prevent inflammatory takes or have scores reflect some ideal of values, just to keep the signal above the noise threshold.
I still get odd emails from other HNers and still have interesting conversations.
Since you're getting a lot of contrary viewpoints, I'll be the one to echo your opinion. I'm seeing a lot more people more interested in "winning" an argument/discussion than in engaging in a discussion.
old.reddit.com with redditenhancementsuite.com extension is still the best way to browse. I'm impressed that they've kept the old UI for so many years. The usage must be significant to keep it around.
One of the most important lessons about mass-use computer tools is that overwhelmingly people use defaults.
I first realised this back in the 1990s when shitty default monitor resolution and refresh rate would literally inflict pain (headaches and eyestrain).
MS Windows 95 / 98 shipped with a default of 800x600@60Hz. This was on CRTs, many viewed under office flourescent lighting, which gave rise to a bloody awful flicker that people mistakenly attemtped to correct with "glare screens" and other useless crud.
The solution was simply to crank up refresh rate slightly. Bumping up resolution also gave more useful area and clearer, easier-to-read fonts. (This was also before Cleartype / sub-pixel rendering.)
And yet something like 90-95% of systems monitored ... somehow (possibly an early Web tool) revealed 800x600, and I believe 60 Hz refresh. This on systems which could easily be bumped to 1024x768 or better.
And this was literally a click away off the desktop.
Lesson Younger Me learned: users won't change any default.
So:
- Pick really good defaults. Autoconfigure for best experience if possible.
- If you want to cram things down users' throats, you can just change the default experience, especially on a SAAS app.
I agree with your general point, but the specific example isn't as egregious as you make it out to be. In the mid-90s, protocols for determining supported monitor resolutions were just coming out. The first widely-adopted protocol was DDC2, which wasn't standardized until mid-1996. Had Windows 95 or 98 defaulted to 1024x768@72Hz, a significant fraction of users would upgrade and find their display didn't work. To get a usable system, they'd have to figure out how to boot into safe mode and manually tweak the display settings.
I'm pretty sure this was 1999--2000 or thereabouts.
It's possible that standards were still too rough, but the statistic left a strong impression on me. I believe the general concept is validated elsewhere as well --- I'm pretty sure Jacob Nielsen has a similar finding.
That's how I browse, but I think you need to have an account to be able to set the old theme. I was assuming that scenario was included in old.reddit.com traffic. If it's not, then 10-15% of traffic hitting the old.reddit.com domain seems really high.
Oh, so they are! So what happened here, IYI: I did a paranoiac double-check that both domains resolved and showed content before commenting, but my (...)/.compact result was with smaller text/more "squeeze". I thought it odd but it made sense because, y'know, "compact."
Turns out I had at some point set an 80% zoom while visiting there on this particular browser. Sorry for the confusion!
They keep it around, but I've noticed recently I just randomly get opted back into the new design. When I go to settings to opt back out, it shows that I'm already opted out. Then I just click it, which going by the button state would opt me in, but it opts me back out again. It's weird, and it seems clear that they're just auto opting me in on the back end and hoping I'll just deal with it, which I can't because the new design is impossible to navigate.
How is Reddit IPO'ing after they were bought by Conde Nast?
I've never really looked into it. It's an interesting thing that they managed to get un-acquired somehow.
In fact, there are so many questions. Does YC get a payday out of this, or was their stock acquired during the acquisition? 2% of $5B is $100M, so it's a lot of money at stake.
I don't think a lot Gen Z don't like the old.reddit.com because it looks kind of old fashioned vs say react "modern" pages and they're afraid of lookign old-fashioned. However, that is what keeps me coming back along with relative anonymity and content on topics that I like.
information density is too low. Why would I spend 2.5x time scrolling through www.reddit.com/r/fantasyfootball when I can read all the important headlines faster at old.reddit.com ... the redesign also loads fewer posts at a time so you constantly wait for a spinner to fetch new content
I have always felt that new Reddit's information-sparse and brightly-coloured looks attracted a certain type of emotionally under-developed and low-attention user.
> The capital will be used to redesign Reddit’s famously cluttered homepage, co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman tells Recode. The company also plans to pour more resources into user-uploaded video.
Wow, time has not been kind to this paragraph. The redesign is still hated by a large portion of the userbase and the Reddit video player is infamously unreliable.
That's correct. I'm the author of Reveddit. A few things like user pages and the desktop extension work entirely without Pushshift. Threads can function somewhat without it. I maintain a FAQ with details of how it works in case anyone's interested,
Really interesting thing about the Grateful Dead is back in the 90s their tour was the distribution network for the Bay Area organization that made virtually all of the US market’s LSD. Back then the DEA actually published their internal research on the Internet. Their research conclusively showed it was a single lab making it all. It even discussed how impossible it was to infiltrate the network because they were spiritual zealots and not mercenary drug dealers. I miss those days.
A strange choice of time, to me. With such intense market volatility, it's easy to both leave money on the table by setting the IPO price too low, or to have trouble selling stock by by setting it too high.
OTOH the freshly printed money look for returns, so the stock market is more likely to be bullish even in relatively near term; maybe they are trying to catch this trend?
Market predictability is at an extreme low. Rug pulls are happening on a regular basis, and spy is regularly being propped up by a few random, overvalued stocks.
I actually don't know what "market predictability" means. Like, the market is never predictable, right? That's why most money managers don't consistently make big profits. Is this a notion that can be quantified? Can you cite some evidence for what you've said?
Anyway, the person I was responding to said volatility and that is the metric I cited.
That’s because there was an FOMC meeting today, it’s always more volatile before one. The market was told that what it expected would happen is going to happen, and it was pleased. It expected more bond purchase tapering and 3 rate hikes (75 bps total) next year.
VIX is back under 20, volatility is settling down.
Some unprofitable growth stocks have been sold off lately, but the rest of the market is chugging along just fine, at least until rates start to go up.
What are some examples of rug pulls? All of the ones I can think of are ICOs, not IPOs. I can, however, think of dozens of IPOs that have gone gangbusters.
there's been a bit of back and forth in tech lately and there are some signs it is nearing or passing a peak valuation. Get the money while you can and don't look back. Reddit's getting old too
My first thought was that the interest rate hikes coming next year may have spurred it, but I'm guessing this sort of thing has been in the works for quite awhile now.
not the parent commenter, but my sense is the argument is that all-the-more-so as a public company, user/engagement growth will be king, so the notion that dark patterns and growth hacks will go away is wishful thinking at best.
Agreed. The pressure to push numbers before an IPO will be even stronger after. Especially as control of the company/board shifts more towards returns focused shareholders.
Nice, I hadn't heard of that [1]! I'm pretty indifferent towards owning a Blockchained micro-share of a publicly listed company, but I'd be very interested if reddit were to end up user-owned akin to the Packers
Congratulations folks! I'll say that Reddit has become one of my favorite sites to visit occasionally and I feel they've earned their success. I honestly feel it is a positive factor in my life, for the little I use it. There's really excellent content to be had, like well moderated educational content at subreddits like r/AskHistorians and r/COVID. I've learned a lot from hobby communities that are hard to find elsewhere (like for pizzamaking).
I also like that they've kept discussions text oriented, instead of allowing for embedded tweets, images, or videos to clog up comment threads (I like this about HN, as well). They might renege on this in the future, but I like the distinctly 2000s feel to discussions.
>I've learned a lot from hobby communities that are hard to find elsewhere (like for pizzamaking).
I wish that was my experience too.
Generally I'll avoid the subreddits for anything I'm interested in, as they're frequented by "experts" who feel the need to ruin everyone's fun.
It's great for things I'm not interested in, though, as it's a quick way to get genuine information on what is considered a good brand of bike shorts or hair curling products.
> Generally I'll avoid the subreddits for anything I'm interested in, as they're frequented by "experts" who feel the need to ruin everyone's fun.
Mind giving an example? I'm just curious because to me the high point of reddit is learning way more about interests I already love. For example I don't think I would've gotten nearly as into mechanical keyboards without /r/mechanicalkeyboards around.
Genuinely confused by this statement. You don't visit things you know about, because fake experts ruin it. Then you visit things you don't know about, because you believe the information to be genuine.
Not trying to be a dick here, but this line of reasoning just isn't clicking so asking.
This got me to thinking though...almost every news outlet flubs covering deeply technical things folks here would be familiar with, and we all have a laugh. But we get our news from them and generally believe it, so do we all suffer from it to some extent?
The underlying presumption of it is every person working at a paper is equally wrong about the topic they write.
However, most newspapers are focused on politics and so those might be better.
I would not expect a good analysis on the Palestinian conflict from Linus Tech Tips nor a good analysis on the latest graphics cards from Foreign Affairs.
>I would not expect a good analysis on the Palestinian conflict from Linus Tech Tips
I know you were just making an extreme comparison, but I genuinely think they'd do a good job of it if push came to shove. Linus and the people who work for him are beyond professional.
> I would not expect a good analysis on the Palestinian conflict from Linus Tech Tips
No, but such analysis would be informative when you stop to analyze just how persuasive he manages to sound when he's talking about something he obviously knows nothing about. His tone, cadence, body language.. it would reveal to you how good he is at mimicking the superficial characteristics of being an expert. If he's bad at those things when speaking outside his wheelhouse, that's a good thing! But if he's really good at seeming like an expert when you have good reason to think he isn't one, that's a huge warning sign that he might not actually be so proficient in the things you previously believed him to be good at.
Essentially, whenever I look into communities of things that I'm interested in, I'll see a dedicated core of people insisting that it must be experienced a specific way, and any other way is wrong. Basically wine snobs, but for everything.
However, if I'm an outsider looking to get information for a gift or something I have a passing interest in, this can be quite often useful. If the snobs acknowledge something as legit, then I know that it's likely to be good.
Edit: Karrot_Kream put it perfectly with their use of the phrase "gatekeeping". Special interest groups have this problem, and Reddit fails to solve it.
> Generally I'll avoid the subreddits for anything I'm interested in, as they're frequented by "experts" who feel the need to ruin everyone's fun.
This kind of gatekeeping was pretty common in the old days on niche-interest forums too btw. I don't know what a good solution for this is. You even see this kind of behavior in academia.
Will they be banning porn like tumblr? I know they removed it from "All" and then I believe they hid it in other ways. Just wondering when the Digg 4.0 / Tumblr will happen to Reddit. So far it's been a slow burn but I'm waiting for the great purge to bring down the house. It always seems to happen around an IPO.
I use old reddit on mobile too. It's legitimately a better experience (just make sure to turn off the font size boosting feature of mobile Chrome which interacts poorly with the layout).
The new design gets worse every time I try it. There's always a new thing trying to lure me into a conversion funnel. Latest attempt: I had to ad block the little bouncing coin thing in the top right just to focus. Then I was hit with auto-playing ads on the main page. That was as far as I got.
I deleted my 14-year account when an admin suspended me for speaking my mind. Never had an issue up to that point. The content quality has declined dramatically over the years and the astroturfing is out of control. I just got sick of it.
Eh there are zealots everywhere, I got a suspension and sent in a request for them to review and I got a message the next day it should never had happened and it was unfair. Pretty sure someone just didn't like my opinion (there was no "hate" in the comment as per the original complaint, it just had a bit of libertarian bent and some admin/moderator pushed a button somewhere to get me banned)
Yeah I think people will have a diaspora to discord/matrix which only sorta fills the same itch with very limited history. The day they require emails is the day I quit.
The funny thing about the r/all porn removal is it's only gone if you ARE logged in. If you aren't logged in and hit r/all the porn will appear once you get to the 4th or 5th page. It isn't nearly as prevalent as it was and I haven't seen it hit the front page as it did years ago but it's certainly there, I suspect to entice people to make accounts.
Didn’t they start requiring you to be logged in? I can’t imagine how awkward that must be. “Please log in to watch your embarrassing porn so we can track you and sell the data and connect it to your real identity”
Content aside, Reddit is possibly the worst performing large commercial website I have ever seen. Like half of all page loads and requests end with “something went wrong”. Search has been unusable from day 1, and somehow getting worse. Their new video player makes me want to throw my computer across the room. I have been using it on and off for a decade now and I can’t think of one aspect of the site (whether in terms of performance, reliability, UI, usability, features) that hasn’t degraded in quality.
Happy about the IPO, but PLEASE invest in some engineering and infrastructure work.
(Edit: weird that this comment was sitting at the top of the page for an hour and then suddenly moved to the very bottom. Someone on the HN team must really like Reddit.)
I use Reddit daily, and for the last ~week their UI has added multiple things to click and be taken to my 'Reddit recap', which I think is supposed to be like Spotify's 'your year in review' feature.
Reddit's product managers very much want me to check out my 'Reddit Recap'.
Well I've navigated to my recap about 30 times now in the last week, from multiple links, in app and desktop, and it's still totally broken.
On desktop now, it doesn't show anything except a "retry" button which is incorrectly stuck to the left side of my screen (CSS fail).
I can understand things being broken, but its really bad form to funnel a user to a prominent feature, have that feature be broken, and then have a broken and terrible error state.
I do wonder what kind of engineering team bungles a big feature release like this.
The second old.reddit.com goes offline, I'll probably never visit the website again. I haven't used the new version once (what is it 4 years old now?) - they toyed with literally the perfect UX for what? For a PM to have something to do?
Oh god the recap is hilariously broken. Doesn’t work on my iPad or my iPhone browser. Haven’t tried the app because fuck the app. Sorta works on my desktop browser. Kinda.
I experienced a somewhat comical bug where the Reddit recap chose my most downvoted comment as my "Comment to end all comments" (probably because its absolute value was greatest). Seems unlikely that this was an intentional easter egg (it was accompanied with "Out of all the comments you made in 2021, this one sure got a lot of upvotes").
Also, I just discovered that the built-in screenshot generator for Reddit recap is broken as it only captures the rendered portion of each card, leaving out the scrollable overflow.
This case alone offers a strong testament to the poor quality of most Reddit features.
This is all their attention grabbing tricks -- by MBA style middle managers to juke the stats for their OKRs and KPIs. Reddit is to that part of their life-cycle where the soul gets crushed out for the capital (it's a re-run, you've seen it before).
I'd wager $1 that over the next few years Reddit becomes even more of an Attention-Vampire (or tries to)
It's almost feeling Reddit, Facebook, Twitter -- these "social" echo chamber sites are all getting to the contempt phase of life -- the next disruptor cannot come soon enough.
I don’t know if there will be a “next” one. I think these vampires will be with us for the foreseeable future. There will be a separate “enthusiast web” (maybe out of the fediverse but I’m not gonna hold my breath) but it’ll never get big enough to go fully mainstream.
Already the real action is happening on chat apps these days. These are your discords and slacks and clubhouses. In them I see the vitality of the old IRC and forum culture eras.
Completely agree – search is absurdly poor considering the resources available to any solo developer these days. The mobile app is generally usable, if all you want to do is doomscroll without interacting with a single piece of content. Even normal interface interactions induce ridiculous UI delays that I haven't seen in any level of software product for years.
This is the thing, i hate their new ui... and if ever they get rid of their 'old' ui I would leave reddit. Their "New UI" was brought in in 2018, and to me was like a digg moment.
To me, Hackernews is what Reddit was 10 years ago, just without subreddits. Clean top quality content.
It's weird. I was a huge user of Reddit from its launch to 2013 when I fell off the Internet. I didn't use it again until 2021, so I had a big jump in UI. As a UX designer I really don't get all the hate about the current interface. It works great for me.
The actual visuals and layout are fine imo. I don’t need to see a billion posts at once. The problem is it runs like shit, gives errors all the time, and has a billion nag popups.
It's literally 10x slower on all devices that I have, shows less content (particularly, long comment threads), and 100 other reasons they I'd sure hope you understood as a UX designer.
It's 2021, I don't want to see a "Loading..." icon like I'm on dial-up in the 90s.
Honestly, I have seen no performance issues for new Reddit on any of the devices I own. And I own some really shit devices. I'm broke, so I bought the cheapest laptop on Amazon. My phones are the lowest free Android devices.
Whereas about 80% of other sites on the Internet were unbrowseable until I installed an adblocker.
The UI is fine. It’s nothing special in terms of design but it’s not outright offensive except to people used to the old one. The issue is that it’s dog slow.
No, it isn't. The information-dense old style is useful, doesn't force scrolling (the forcing of which appears to be the intent, for whatever reason), and does not aid in quick scanning of material & moving on. It's intended to keep people desperate for content engaged while not giving them anything useful.
It's just a sucky pile of JavaScript libraries.. I'm always stuck looking at the "pulsing gray bars as a placeholder for text" for way too long. They should focus on making it perform so it doesn't need tricks like that.
My main driver isn't the fastest (skylake i5) but it's much slower than any of the other sites I use. And on my gaming pc (Ryzen 5 5600) it's slow too. And I have 1gbit fibre.
Ps serious question, isn't it difficult being a UX designer when you've been off the internet for 8 years? Stuff has really changed a lot.
My only driver is a $300 Acer Windows 10 laptop and new Reddit works great for me on Chrome.
I really don't think the Web has changed very much at all in the time I was gone. Pages are much better at being responsive. Bloat is 100X worse, but was solved by installing an adblocker. The cookie pop-ups can fuck themselves. But, fundamentally, nothing is different. I like that CSS and HTML have advanced to the point where it is simpler and cleaner to write good code if you are a decent human being.
The content density of old reddit is much higher than new Reddit. Additionally, I've always been deeply unhappy with endless scroll. Pagination just feels much more stable to me.
Fair point. For contrast, here's a list of reasons why I think Reddit's new UI sucks:
1. Stability: videos rarely play for me. Sometimes I break Reddit too (their words, not mine).
2. Slow: if I want to read the comments, I have to wait 3-5 seconds for them to load. I know that the comments could load instantly because the i.reddit.com interface can do it.
3. Unhelpful interface: it is not easy to identify how to expand a comment thread. But more important, the interface often won't tell me that a comment chain keeps going - it looks as if it just ended, even though it keeps going several levels deep. You can keep reading the chain if you click on the last comment, but again, why would you click on it if you don't know whether it keeps going?
3b. In relation to the previous point: I saw your comment because I was scrolling pretty deep into this thread. In the new Reddit UI it would have been cut off.
4. Annoying: if you're not logged in, content is kept from you just because. Again, the i.reddit.com interface shows everything, but the "regular" interface keeps pestering you with "Log in to see this content" or "Open in app". These popups cannot be dismissed.
All of these changes are pro-metrics and anti-user. Sure, the interface itself looks fine (once it rendered, if it renders). But interaction-wise? It sucks.
I'm beginning to see why they banned several subreddits and accounts, began forcing people to use the app, had tons of front page content re-upped as bootlegs from tiktok, and then turned the place into a Frankenstein of all the other social media sites.. Finally the truth comes to light... Whelp... Thanks for the fish, it was nice until it tanked about 2 years ago.
New reddit is scary... Almost like IG with boxes around everything, and all the controls are hidden in places you'll never find them. It's like driving a poorly serviced 92 Fiero through a hidden curve on the autobahn. But even old reddit has the same recycled content and reposts, so there's that... :\",
At least you have the giant stickied Covid Misinformation comment on on every single post on .... r/funny. The place I go for all of my up to date covid information.
I was thinking exactly the same thing, till you mentioned old reddit, and I remember I've never actually used new reddit. I just opted out in Preferences when it was first released and have been using old reddit ever since. It's still the same good reading/content experience it was 10yrs ago.
> The "new" UI they have is unusable, and may God have mercy for the poor souls that walk into it.
This would be reasonable if there weren’t subreddits that are totally broken on old.reddit.com and proclaim loudly in their sidebar that they no longer support it.
And at least for now, there's a multitude of third party parties with all the features one could care about, minus all the bloat. But who knows how long the api will last?
The clock is ticking on that. I'd wager we see it shut down within the next 2 years. There will be insane pressure to increase ad revenue now, even more pressure than was already there. 3rd-party clients are a "leak" in this regard.
There's actually a mobile web view which works even better than old.reddit.com - it's i.reddit.com , and it's even faster, cleaner, and less javascript, with the added benefit that it doesn't display any of the custom CSS or customizations from the subreddit (like the header banners etc).
I've used the old site exclusively since the rewrite (and for a long time before it), and https://old.reddit.com specifically is still the most unreliable large commercial website I can think of by a wide margin. It's fast when it works, but I get orders of magnitude more 5XX errors on https://old.reddit.com than on any other site I can think of.
> You might be trying to use the dumpster fire that's https://reddit.com
IMO this has dual meaning. Of course, the (new reddit) UI is not my preference for sure. But the content on (not logged in) reddit.com is just so unbelievably different from what I see when logged in (to old.reddit.com). Therein lies the dumpster fire. I've had thumbnails disabled since forever ago, and picked a handful of subreddits across a couple of multireddits. I never really understood why people would think Reddit was anything like Facebook or any such similar site. Until one day I saw what it looked like to everyone else.
Reddit for me looks a lot like it looked back in ~2004, but with comments :)
Aren't every one of those facts supposed to be the sort of thing that gets you downranked on Google? Slow pages, pages that don't load, pages appear in Google but when clicked present a logon wall?
I've posted on own blog on Reddit and found that a search for the exact title has, as the first hit, that reddit post. And my blog itself is on page three. It's infuriating.
My first reaction was "Oh no, here comes the the paywalls and the ads and all that". I sincerely hope that my initial reaction is wrong here, but the constant desire to please investors is unlikely to have a positive impact on the communities, no?
Yes, despite how Reddit has gotten worse over the years, it will be a huge loss for the web once it finally fully jumps the shark. Already it’s pretty much the last place to find real human opinions in a sea of content marketing garbage.
yes, i only visit reddit directly a 1-2 times a day now as opposed to 100+ from maybe 2010-2017, but i still often append 'reddit' to certain searches with great effect.
Reddit has me on some sort of ban that causes accounts to be permanently suspended within 24 hours of account creation regardless of what I do with that account, even if it's just make it and leave it alone. Also, anyone that comes to my home and connects to my wifi and then their reddit account will find their account permanently suspended within 24 hours. I've reached out to them multiple times to see what is happening and what can be done about it but get a boilerplate "your ban will be upheld" message from them with a link to the content rules so I can "prevent future bans".
I had over 40k useless internet points on that site before the ban and an 11 year old account but they refuse to help. Oh well.
Have your ISP cycle/release->renew your IP address. Don’t attempt to sign in to any of the previous accounts from the new IP. Should avoid their anti evil team’s tooling as long as you’re not causing trouble.
Better yet, don't give them an email address at all. The UI would make most people think it's required, but it can be left blank. It will nag you for a while to add one too, but that banner can be removed with uBO.
That's a whole other can of worms. I assumed that and asked ATT to do so and got the phone support equivalent of blank stares. I miss the old cable modem days where you could change the MAC address of the primary device attached to the ethernet port and force a new IP but not so with this Fiber ONT they gave me.
Reddit routinely shadowbans me and roommates because we'll see a post on /r/all and comment on it. It was way worse when I lived in a dorm. My upvotes/downvotes and submissions were completely broken. Took months for whatever anti-abuse system they have to unflag me.
Their anti-abuse is really bad. I once reported a serious doxxing with a death threat towards another user and after three weeks received a canned message saying something along the lines of 'Sorry, there's nothing we can do about the post. It will stay up.' This was circa 2019, when they already had a formalized 'anti-abuse' team. What exactly they do, I have no idea.
This is not good. The only reason I am still using Reddit is because of the old.reddit.com interface. Feels like an IPO will make them retire it at some point.
If they retired old.reddit then the only time I would browse reddit would be when I use my phone, which I only do when I have no computer to interact with or before bed.
If they then do the logical thing and block third party apps then I will just stop using reddit completely, because using the official app just isn't worth it.
Right there with you. There are a LOT of us. This is ostensibly why they've allowed old.reddit.com to live for so long despite almost no development and maintenance anymore. This IPO will probably be the catalyst for some "house cleaning." I imagine old.reddit.com is not long for this world.
I only use teddit.net to access reddit these days. On those odd occasions that I follow a link to the actual reddit site I'm reminded why I avoid it:
- Pop-up to download app
- Pop-up has been un-clearable on a number of occasions
- Having to click "read more" to see more than two posts
- Having to click a link to a new page to follow a thread more than two / three replies deep (and often finding that it's only a single, useless reply)
I cyncially feel like your third point is to save them on egress data. Better to send two comments for a post that quite a few people will never read the comments of.
Serving a few more lines of text is trivial, even at Reddit's scale. It is absolutely about making the mobile user experience worse for those who do not wish to download the app.
The old interface actually solves all those issues. I used to be in disbelief how anybody could survive using the new design for more than 15 seconds but then realised that the way people use Reddit is completely different nowadays. It turned into some sort of 9gag/instagram amalgamation where people scroll through an endless feed of images, enabled by the instagram-like format that is the default with the new interface.
Among many bad features and bad coding, I somewhat recently found out the "new" reddit on desktop has a live chat option for some reason. I put in a 4/10 effort in looking to disable it but couldn't find it. It appears its only use is to receive real-time death threats, and to harass women from some of the screenshots I've seen.
Reddit is operating on the shakiest house of cards, and their investors are being swindled, along with their advertisers. For one of many examples, they're grossly inflating viewership numbers on Reddit Live by injecting the top broadcast into the front page of 25,000 users every ~30 seconds -- largely against their will[1] or without knowledge[2] -- and then selling those as "video views" to record labels, Adobe, League Of Legends and others. The administrators and moderators have repeatedly lied about this to the community, going as far as claiming they "don't even have the ability to manipulate the top broadcast mechanism," and yet they have a list of streamers who receive special treatment, along with the paid ads (which are not marked as ads, and instead offered as "user content.")
A year ago, they even implemented a follow mechanism so that streamers' fans could get push notifications when they went live. But when the admins decided to make manual manipulation of the top broadcast mechanism a priority, they removed the notifications for Reddit Live altogether because it was too easy for the Reddit community to upvote "riff raff" into the top spot. They changed their story about why bringing back notifications "was impossible, but we're working on it" a dozen times or more. In reality, they just need certain broadcasts to receive the most views to generate the most money through their awarding system.
On top of hundreds of lies at this point, they've been actively banning anyone who discusses this. They ban streamers who ask questions about how the ranking mechanism works, including an autistic streamer with a large following on the site, simply for making note of how certain streamers get special treatment. They even banned a user for making a notifications replacement and discussing why they made it.
In fact, if you get banned from the r/pan subreddit for asking any of these questions (which happens often), you have to be careful about the content you interact with on Reddit as a whole. Since they forcefully inject the Reddit Live top broadcast into every desktop page view (and most mobile ones) without actually labeling it as r/pan content, if you click on that broadcast and vote or make a comment, they ban you from the site.
It's completely out of control, and that's how every level of the site operates these days. The influxes of cash and IPO hyping paint a rosy picture, but peeling back just one layer of the Reddit onion quickly reveals a company which is flailing, and desperately grasping at anything that will help maintain the charade until crossing the IPO finish line.
Despite the fake viewership numbers, RPAN is actually the best marketing tool on the internet for content creators. It's the only site that gives you a built-in audience without any effort, and musicians in particular have used it to build massive followings outside of Reddit, on the order of tens (and even hundreds) of thousands of followers. There's honestly no better way to find an initial fanbase -- even if you never get top broadcast.
>On top of hundreds of lies at this point, they've been actively banning anyone who discusses this.
Reddit's been like that for at least a decade. I remember arguing with Huffman and later Pao about their awful corporate newspeak ("enabling authentic conversations") and how reddit is being actively gamed by advertisers and has been for years. The same goes for every user-hostile change they've made (and there have been many). It's always under some noble pretense but really it's about making reddit more palatable to advertisers. When confronted, the admins either avoid responding or else claim Big Tobacco-levels of ignorance.
It's all so patently obvious to anyone who chooses to look, and I think the blatant contempt the admins display towards their users (without whom, let's not forget, reddit would never have taken off) contributes to the toxicity on reddit, or at least it did years ago when reddit was smaller and the toxic culture is now self-perpetuating.
If you thought site performance is bad now, wait a few quarters when there are grey beard investors pressuring leadership to wring out the last shekels from this carcass.
Man, what a ride Reddit must have been. I wonder if any of the original team are still there, or if they still have any equity.
One of the first useful things I ever programmed was a Greasemonkey script to collapse comment threads on Reddit before they had the ability to do that. They implemented the collapse feature a few weeks or months later and made it useless. I still like the way my script worked better though, it left the top comment visible.
I wish I hadn't deleted my original Reddit account. It would probably be one of the older ones around by now.
I saw yesterday that gilding in /r/AskReddit have paid for 868 years of server time. It seems like they might be able to make a vanity payment model instead of just advertising. That would be nice. If they made the old.reddit.com interface available by subscribing to Reddit Gold only, they might make a fortune off of just that...
I can’t help but think this is the end for that site. It started off with a very old school minimalist designed forum vibe and has been devolving into dark patterns and advertisements as of late.
I guess good things can’t stay free forever and the bills need to be paid somehow. Wish they went to a donation model like Wikipedia instead.
Well, they tried. For a very long time they asked people to donate. They even tried to gamify it with reddit gold and the like. I suspect it just didn't work.
Disclaimer: I worked at Reddit prior to when ads were a major revenue source and left in 2018
Prior to ads and the current dark patterns you see on the site, Reddit primarily tried to monetize through Reddit Gold. It didn't work, and users never purchased it in any meaningful volume to keep the site afloat. So while you wouldn't give them money for the decisions they've made recently, they weren't making enough money when they were (ostensibly) making better decisions.
How would you go about solving this problem? It's a genuine question without snark - if social media companies are unable to stay sustainable through direct user funding, then they're going to look to ads or other sources eventually.
Interesting - I never knew that was the purpose of Reddit gold. I feel like a donation drive with direct acknowledgement that it would keep the site private and free of external financial interests would have provoked me to donate.
I thought Reddit gold was just some meaningless emoji thing.
The meaningless emoji stuff was added later to boost sales (think of it similar to skins in video games). You used to not get any of that, and the clear thing you did get was no ads (IIRC, this is still the case and if you have Reddit gold you get no ads on the site).
I remember 4chan did it by donate or die. They needed server money and they got it because it wasn’t working as long as they didn’t have a server. That was a much smaller scale though.
Can you talk about your work there? It’s cool if you don’t want to, how was it? You left obviously so I can guess.
I honestly don't have any hard feelings or ill will towards Reddit - I liked my coworkers and my time there was fun overall. I worked on mostly backend/data stuff during my time there, but over time it became painfully clear that there was no way Reddit would make it as a business without resorting to the kinds of shady tactics that you see today.
I sincerely believe that the leadership tried to avoid the ads revenue stream and all the ills that come with it for as long as possible, and searched for a lot of ways out (see things like Reddit Notes in the past). But I don't think I'll work in the social media domain again, because the experience really soured me on the sustainability model as a whole. People are generally unwilling to donate/pay for the content, and it's impossible to operate a site where there's no subscription revenue coming in.
What do you think of substack? I like it as decentralized news. Medium dropped off the face of a cliff but substack has freedom of speech, email lists that is controlled by the writer, and they made it a subscription based long form article model.
I don’t disagree with you though, if it’s given to you free it’s expected to be free forever. They’ll try to get money somehow but nobody will like it. I definitely liked it at first too, but it’s become so much different.
Substack is good, and certainly much better than Medium! But I think it serves a different purpose, since it lets content creators monetize their audience rather than managing P2P user interaction like most social media.
I'm not sure where the P2P interactions will go - it's possible that they stay centralized on the major platforms of today, or we see a return to smaller forums as we had back in the late 90s and early 2000s.
They have been touting MAUs and DAUs a lot over the last one year. Turns out their numbers are very very public.
Whenever a new user creates an account, she automatically gets added to r/announcements. It's not a choice, they dont even show it as an option.
The current subs of r/announcements is 127M. It was 124M at the start of this month. Just shows that reddit - with newer design or not - has not found much acceptance in the upcoming generations. They tend to visit the site, yet are hesitant to create an account. For reference, their MAUs for month of Dec 19 alone were 430M. They got a lot of help from SEO for everyone of their threads being indexed, and hence the high traffic, but regular users and personalized ads isnt there. Likely low ARPU.
Edit: This is probably the reason for those dark patterns too. If I can see that low conversion rate, so can people inside, and they would try and improve that via different UX patterns. Because it seems like a low hanging fruit when it is not really one.
Yeah, “Reddit is going down because they only converted three million new users in the last month.” Is probably not the argument that will convince anyone who’s ever built a b2c of your point.
That is not my argument. A standalone number of 3M is good, especially when 3M new users combined with 100M existing ones demonstrate huge stickiness.
What I am trying to say is that, reddit is attracting a lot of new users through SEO, yet they have not been able to convert them like at all. The existing userbase is sticking and has been very active, but the site is not as appealing to new users who are just finding out about reddit.
I don't use Wikipedia any more, they wouldn't leave me alone with their constant begging. I could just set up a block for the things, but I'd rather just be edgy and never use the site again. The content has been going downhill for years anyway. A lot more fun to find specific resources on cooler websites.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 447 ms ] threadAnd yes, this is how the process works with every company
I would love to get Dang's perspective but it would be difficult for him to say anything.
But more specifically there is no nexus between the decline, or behaviour, and a desire to IPO and realize profit. Not all things co-relate, they can be contemporaneous and un-related.
Whatever Dan has, and he has a lot of "it" -it includes tolerance and forbearance, and an ability not to buy into the paranoia at large. I don't think he'd be part of an IPO decision logic which went "yea it's boring: lets profit and run" -there might be a "profit" and there might be a consequential "run" and there might be "its boring" but I don't personally see them as causally connected.
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
The actual quote has a bunch of links that I worth looking at. People were echo'ing your comment 7 years ago.
As to your comment itself, I don't think HN is degrading that fast? The low-quality "meme" responses usually get downvoted and while polarization is alive and well, most of it leads to interesting arguments so it's not necessarily a bad thing.
I've only been here for 2-3 years though so maybe it was different before.
I feel pretty strong about this. Usually, if I’m not convinced, I wouldn’t put it in such strong terms.
A few years ago, trying to have the same conversations on reddit, everything degraded into personal attacks eventually.
Sometimes things get flagged incorrectly, but usually within a few days issues get fixed. Sometimes you see a flurry of unneeded downvotes.. but scores don't matter much and things get worked out.
My sarcastic comments generally score poorly, my helpful ones do well - which is about the desired outcome.
The goal is not to prevent inflammatory takes or have scores reflect some ideal of values, just to keep the signal above the noise threshold.
I still get odd emails from other HNers and still have interesting conversations.
I first realised this back in the 1990s when shitty default monitor resolution and refresh rate would literally inflict pain (headaches and eyestrain).
MS Windows 95 / 98 shipped with a default of 800x600@60Hz. This was on CRTs, many viewed under office flourescent lighting, which gave rise to a bloody awful flicker that people mistakenly attemtped to correct with "glare screens" and other useless crud.
The solution was simply to crank up refresh rate slightly. Bumping up resolution also gave more useful area and clearer, easier-to-read fonts. (This was also before Cleartype / sub-pixel rendering.)
And yet something like 90-95% of systems monitored ... somehow (possibly an early Web tool) revealed 800x600, and I believe 60 Hz refresh. This on systems which could easily be bumped to 1024x768 or better.
And this was literally a click away off the desktop.
Lesson Younger Me learned: users won't change any default.
So:
- Pick really good defaults. Autoconfigure for best experience if possible.
- If you want to cram things down users' throats, you can just change the default experience, especially on a SAAS app.
Well, on a 14 inch CRT with no DPI scaling it’s debatable whether a higher resolution was ‘better’.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130321082317/http://www.bbc.co...
Font selection dialogue: https://www.bbc.co.uk/staticarchive/0c3b043fb25425d17444ff8e...
https://neurologicexam.med.utah.edu/adult/cases/windows_disp...
The effect would still be finer resolution AND readable fonts. Less eyestrain.
Unlike, say, on present-generation MacOS, which does effectively limit upper-end display resolution.
It's possible that standards were still too rough, but the statistic left a strong impression on me. I believe the general concept is validated elsewhere as well --- I'm pretty sure Jacob Nielsen has a similar finding.
You can have the old UI with the base site given the correct settings/cookies.
old. and RES is my method as well
There's also https://i.reddit.com which is a similar but slightly different experience.
EDIT: per commenters below correcting my mistake, this is "the same" experience AFAWCT
Often .compact and i.reddit.com will interchange in my experience. (I forget which switches to which.)
Turns out I had at some point set an 80% zoom while visiting there on this particular browser. Sorry for the confusion!
https://old.reddit.com/r/beta/comments/8lv96l/feedback_pleas...
I've never really looked into it. It's an interesting thing that they managed to get un-acquired somehow.
In fact, there are so many questions. Does YC get a payday out of this, or was their stock acquired during the acquisition? 2% of $5B is $100M, so it's a lot of money at stake.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/31/reddit-just-raised-a-new-r...
* spend 9 figures for a redesign
The choice was obvious
Wow, time has not been kind to this paragraph. The redesign is still hated by a large portion of the userbase and the Reddit video player is infamously unreliable.
I'm curious what happened behind the scenes here.
It hasn't worked for some time.
https://www.reveddit.com/about/faq/
OTOH the freshly printed money look for returns, so the stock market is more likely to be bullish even in relatively near term; maybe they are trying to catch this trend?
https://www.google.com/finance/quote/VIX:INDEXCBOE?safe=off&...
Anyway, the person I was responding to said volatility and that is the metric I cited.
VIX is back under 20, volatility is settling down.
Some unprofitable growth stocks have been sold off lately, but the rest of the market is chugging along just fine, at least until rates start to go up.
Here’s a way to keep an eye on the probabilities the market is assigning to rate hikes at future Fed meetings: https://www.cmegroup.com/trading/interest-rates/countdown-to...
Hopefully, they'll be able to remove it after they go public.
[1] https://slate.com/technology/2021/11/web3-explained-crypto-n...
I also like that they've kept discussions text oriented, instead of allowing for embedded tweets, images, or videos to clog up comment threads (I like this about HN, as well). They might renege on this in the future, but I like the distinctly 2000s feel to discussions.
https://old.reddit.com/r/InsanePeopleQuora/comments/kip08x/w...
I wish that was my experience too.
Generally I'll avoid the subreddits for anything I'm interested in, as they're frequented by "experts" who feel the need to ruin everyone's fun.
It's great for things I'm not interested in, though, as it's a quick way to get genuine information on what is considered a good brand of bike shorts or hair curling products.
Mind giving an example? I'm just curious because to me the high point of reddit is learning way more about interests I already love. For example I don't think I would've gotten nearly as into mechanical keyboards without /r/mechanicalkeyboards around.
Not trying to be a dick here, but this line of reasoning just isn't clicking so asking.
This got me to thinking though...almost every news outlet flubs covering deeply technical things folks here would be familiar with, and we all have a laugh. But we get our news from them and generally believe it, so do we all suffer from it to some extent?
The underlying presumption of it is every person working at a paper is equally wrong about the topic they write.
However, most newspapers are focused on politics and so those might be better.
I would not expect a good analysis on the Palestinian conflict from Linus Tech Tips nor a good analysis on the latest graphics cards from Foreign Affairs.
I know you were just making an extreme comparison, but I genuinely think they'd do a good job of it if push came to shove. Linus and the people who work for him are beyond professional.
No, but such analysis would be informative when you stop to analyze just how persuasive he manages to sound when he's talking about something he obviously knows nothing about. His tone, cadence, body language.. it would reveal to you how good he is at mimicking the superficial characteristics of being an expert. If he's bad at those things when speaking outside his wheelhouse, that's a good thing! But if he's really good at seeming like an expert when you have good reason to think he isn't one, that's a huge warning sign that he might not actually be so proficient in the things you previously believed him to be good at.
Essentially, whenever I look into communities of things that I'm interested in, I'll see a dedicated core of people insisting that it must be experienced a specific way, and any other way is wrong. Basically wine snobs, but for everything.
However, if I'm an outsider looking to get information for a gift or something I have a passing interest in, this can be quite often useful. If the snobs acknowledge something as legit, then I know that it's likely to be good.
Edit: Karrot_Kream put it perfectly with their use of the phrase "gatekeeping". Special interest groups have this problem, and Reddit fails to solve it.
This kind of gatekeeping was pretty common in the old days on niche-interest forums too btw. I don't know what a good solution for this is. You even see this kind of behavior in academia.
Happy about the IPO, but PLEASE invest in some engineering and infrastructure work.
(Edit: weird that this comment was sitting at the top of the page for an hour and then suddenly moved to the very bottom. Someone on the HN team must really like Reddit.)
Reddit's product managers very much want me to check out my 'Reddit Recap'.
Well I've navigated to my recap about 30 times now in the last week, from multiple links, in app and desktop, and it's still totally broken.
On desktop now, it doesn't show anything except a "retry" button which is incorrectly stuck to the left side of my screen (CSS fail).
I can understand things being broken, but its really bad form to funnel a user to a prominent feature, have that feature be broken, and then have a broken and terrible error state.
I do wonder what kind of engineering team bungles a big feature release like this.
Also, I just discovered that the built-in screenshot generator for Reddit recap is broken as it only captures the rendered portion of each card, leaving out the scrollable overflow.
This case alone offers a strong testament to the poor quality of most Reddit features.
No doubt a team that is very diverse and equitable.
I'd wager $1 that over the next few years Reddit becomes even more of an Attention-Vampire (or tries to)
It's almost feeling Reddit, Facebook, Twitter -- these "social" echo chamber sites are all getting to the contempt phase of life -- the next disruptor cannot come soon enough.
Already the real action is happening on chat apps these days. These are your discords and slacks and clubhouses. In them I see the vitality of the old IRC and forum culture eras.
To me, Hackernews is what Reddit was 10 years ago, just without subreddits. Clean top quality content.
It's 2021, I don't want to see a "Loading..." icon like I'm on dial-up in the 90s.
Compare with https://old.reddit.com — open them side by side, refresh, click around.
We can have a serious discussion about what sucks in the "new" UI, but I really hope it's obvious.
Whereas about 80% of other sites on the Internet were unbrowseable until I installed an adblocker.
My main driver isn't the fastest (skylake i5) but it's much slower than any of the other sites I use. And on my gaming pc (Ryzen 5 5600) it's slow too. And I have 1gbit fibre.
Ps serious question, isn't it difficult being a UX designer when you've been off the internet for 8 years? Stuff has really changed a lot.
I really don't think the Web has changed very much at all in the time I was gone. Pages are much better at being responsive. Bloat is 100X worse, but was solved by installing an adblocker. The cookie pop-ups can fuck themselves. But, fundamentally, nothing is different. I like that CSS and HTML have advanced to the point where it is simpler and cleaner to write good code if you are a decent human being.
1. Stability: videos rarely play for me. Sometimes I break Reddit too (their words, not mine).
2. Slow: if I want to read the comments, I have to wait 3-5 seconds for them to load. I know that the comments could load instantly because the i.reddit.com interface can do it.
3. Unhelpful interface: it is not easy to identify how to expand a comment thread. But more important, the interface often won't tell me that a comment chain keeps going - it looks as if it just ended, even though it keeps going several levels deep. You can keep reading the chain if you click on the last comment, but again, why would you click on it if you don't know whether it keeps going?
3b. In relation to the previous point: I saw your comment because I was scrolling pretty deep into this thread. In the new Reddit UI it would have been cut off.
4. Annoying: if you're not logged in, content is kept from you just because. Again, the i.reddit.com interface shows everything, but the "regular" interface keeps pestering you with "Log in to see this content" or "Open in app". These popups cannot be dismissed.
All of these changes are pro-metrics and anti-user. Sure, the interface itself looks fine (once it rendered, if it renders). But interaction-wise? It sucks.
Reddit is lightning fast, and is very stable...
...oh. I got it! You might be trying to use the dumpster fire that's https://reddit.com
Ignore that, and head over to the actually functional Reddit at https://old.reddit.com
It's like HackerNews in terms of performance. You can still set it as default.
The "new" UI they have is unusable, and may God have mercy for the poor souls that walk into it.
This would be reasonable if there weren’t subreddits that are totally broken on old.reddit.com and proclaim loudly in their sidebar that they no longer support it.
Could you link to an example? In curious :)
The clock is ticking on that. I'd wager we see it shut down within the next 2 years. There will be insane pressure to increase ad revenue now, even more pressure than was already there. 3rd-party clients are a "leak" in this regard.
IMO this has dual meaning. Of course, the (new reddit) UI is not my preference for sure. But the content on (not logged in) reddit.com is just so unbelievably different from what I see when logged in (to old.reddit.com). Therein lies the dumpster fire. I've had thumbnails disabled since forever ago, and picked a handful of subreddits across a couple of multireddits. I never really understood why people would think Reddit was anything like Facebook or any such similar site. Until one day I saw what it looked like to everyone else.
Reddit for me looks a lot like it looked back in ~2004, but with comments :)
All you have to do is learn to type "old" instead of "red" in the address bar, and your browser will do the rest.
Kind of like typing "n <Enter>" probably brings you here, and typing "p <Enter>" brings up, erm, Pinterest.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...
I've posted on own blog on Reddit and found that a search for the exact title has, as the first hit, that reddit post. And my blog itself is on page three. It's infuriating.
So I am afraid Reddit won't care about the web UI much now.
i hate the CDN they use, it's slow af, you notice a lot on the gifts hosted on the reddit hostname
I had over 40k useless internet points on that site before the ban and an 11 year old account but they refuse to help. Oh well.
Their anti-abuse is really bad. I once reported a serious doxxing with a death threat towards another user and after three weeks received a canned message saying something along the lines of 'Sorry, there's nothing we can do about the post. It will stay up.' This was circa 2019, when they already had a formalized 'anti-abuse' team. What exactly they do, I have no idea.
But they might of course try to shut them down as well.
Being able to chose to use a different front end only solves part of the problem.
If they then do the logical thing and block third party apps then I will just stop using reddit completely, because using the official app just isn't worth it.
- Pop-up to download app
- Pop-up has been un-clearable on a number of occasions
- Having to click "read more" to see more than two posts
- Having to click a link to a new page to follow a thread more than two / three replies deep (and often finding that it's only a single, useless reply)
- Other progressively more trivial annoyances
A year ago, they even implemented a follow mechanism so that streamers' fans could get push notifications when they went live. But when the admins decided to make manual manipulation of the top broadcast mechanism a priority, they removed the notifications for Reddit Live altogether because it was too easy for the Reddit community to upvote "riff raff" into the top spot. They changed their story about why bringing back notifications "was impossible, but we're working on it" a dozen times or more. In reality, they just need certain broadcasts to receive the most views to generate the most money through their awarding system.
On top of hundreds of lies at this point, they've been actively banning anyone who discusses this. They ban streamers who ask questions about how the ranking mechanism works, including an autistic streamer with a large following on the site, simply for making note of how certain streamers get special treatment. They even banned a user for making a notifications replacement and discussing why they made it.
In fact, if you get banned from the r/pan subreddit for asking any of these questions (which happens often), you have to be careful about the content you interact with on Reddit as a whole. Since they forcefully inject the Reddit Live top broadcast into every desktop page view (and most mobile ones) without actually labeling it as r/pan content, if you click on that broadcast and vote or make a comment, they ban you from the site.
It's completely out of control, and that's how every level of the site operates these days. The influxes of cash and IPO hyping paint a rosy picture, but peeling back just one layer of the Reddit onion quickly reveals a company which is flailing, and desperately grasping at anything that will help maintain the charade until crossing the IPO finish line.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/pan/comments/rejfsa/what_in_the_f_i...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/pan/comments/rcvi52/according_to_th...
Reddit's been like that for at least a decade. I remember arguing with Huffman and later Pao about their awful corporate newspeak ("enabling authentic conversations") and how reddit is being actively gamed by advertisers and has been for years. The same goes for every user-hostile change they've made (and there have been many). It's always under some noble pretense but really it's about making reddit more palatable to advertisers. When confronted, the admins either avoid responding or else claim Big Tobacco-levels of ignorance.
It's all so patently obvious to anyone who chooses to look, and I think the blatant contempt the admins display towards their users (without whom, let's not forget, reddit would never have taken off) contributes to the toxicity on reddit, or at least it did years ago when reddit was smaller and the toxic culture is now self-perpetuating.
https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/theres-another-abusive-...
I wonder how investors will react to having horrible people moderating their investment.
One of the first useful things I ever programmed was a Greasemonkey script to collapse comment threads on Reddit before they had the ability to do that. They implemented the collapse feature a few weeks or months later and made it useless. I still like the way my script worked better though, it left the top comment visible.
I wish I hadn't deleted my original Reddit account. It would probably be one of the older ones around by now.
I saw yesterday that gilding in /r/AskReddit have paid for 868 years of server time. It seems like they might be able to make a vanity payment model instead of just advertising. That would be nice. If they made the old.reddit.com interface available by subscribing to Reddit Gold only, they might make a fortune off of just that...
I guess good things can’t stay free forever and the bills need to be paid somehow. Wish they went to a donation model like Wikipedia instead.
They didn’t learn.
Prior to ads and the current dark patterns you see on the site, Reddit primarily tried to monetize through Reddit Gold. It didn't work, and users never purchased it in any meaningful volume to keep the site afloat. So while you wouldn't give them money for the decisions they've made recently, they weren't making enough money when they were (ostensibly) making better decisions.
How would you go about solving this problem? It's a genuine question without snark - if social media companies are unable to stay sustainable through direct user funding, then they're going to look to ads or other sources eventually.
I thought Reddit gold was just some meaningless emoji thing.
Can you talk about your work there? It’s cool if you don’t want to, how was it? You left obviously so I can guess.
I sincerely believe that the leadership tried to avoid the ads revenue stream and all the ills that come with it for as long as possible, and searched for a lot of ways out (see things like Reddit Notes in the past). But I don't think I'll work in the social media domain again, because the experience really soured me on the sustainability model as a whole. People are generally unwilling to donate/pay for the content, and it's impossible to operate a site where there's no subscription revenue coming in.
I don’t disagree with you though, if it’s given to you free it’s expected to be free forever. They’ll try to get money somehow but nobody will like it. I definitely liked it at first too, but it’s become so much different.
I'm not sure where the P2P interactions will go - it's possible that they stay centralized on the major platforms of today, or we see a return to smaller forums as we had back in the late 90s and early 2000s.
Whenever a new user creates an account, she automatically gets added to r/announcements. It's not a choice, they dont even show it as an option.
The current subs of r/announcements is 127M. It was 124M at the start of this month. Just shows that reddit - with newer design or not - has not found much acceptance in the upcoming generations. They tend to visit the site, yet are hesitant to create an account. For reference, their MAUs for month of Dec 19 alone were 430M. They got a lot of help from SEO for everyone of their threads being indexed, and hence the high traffic, but regular users and personalized ads isnt there. Likely low ARPU.
Edit: This is probably the reason for those dark patterns too. If I can see that low conversion rate, so can people inside, and they would try and improve that via different UX patterns. Because it seems like a low hanging fruit when it is not really one.
What I am trying to say is that, reddit is attracting a lot of new users through SEO, yet they have not been able to convert them like at all. The existing userbase is sticking and has been very active, but the site is not as appealing to new users who are just finding out about reddit.