Its so stupid that this is all "for" an IPO. I can't imagine huge investing houses, retirement funds, analysts and such investigating Reddit, and missing the massive user retention issues these changes precipitate.
Its not like the stock market is littered with social media website corpses or anything...
Chances are, the investment bank looked at Reddit's financials and said "Here's the IPO price we can hit", and Reddit's execs realized it would be well below the amount they thought their stocks option packages would be worth.
It makes sense if the mobile app provides more "monetizable" users. Shift everyone to the mobile app (or try to) and juice those numbers for advertisers and provide better revenue numbers for the IPO.
Unlike the API change though, I think they do risk losing users with this who still see ads and provide some return.
But that comes at the great long term expense of alienating some of Reddit's most prolific users.
I know what they are thinking, but (setting aside the whole enshittification thing) it makes me sad to see yet another long term sacrifice for some quick profit. It makes me not want to invest in them.
There is only one appropriate, effective response to disrespect, and that is to not reward the offending party.
I made it a matter of principle to not use the Reddit app. Even if they removed all ads and made it an acceptable user experience, I'll never use the app as long as they are harassing me about it.
It's simple. Don't reward bad behavior.
Sometimes, denying obnoxious people something they want means denying yourself something you want.
The issue is for every person like you and me, there are 10 or 100 others who put up with this crap, and reddit attracts people, centralizing communities, giving you little option for alternatives. It drains activities from forums, etc, toward itself as it is presented as a more convenient solution. I for one will try to undo my past contributions to accelerate its decline. The blackout is unlikely to work, but I hope it can be longer (a month or something) to encourage people to find alternatives.
I think you're right, partly. But I also think that a lot of the people who put up with it are the passive ones who don't really contribute much to communities anyway; they're just there.
The people who do the real contributing—posting, modding, defining the culture and building the communities that Reddit benefits from—are, as far as I can tell, more likely to get a lot angrier about abusive corporate nonsense, simply because they're more invested.
The more invested you are, the more screwed you feel. That's something that a person like Huffman is incapable of grasping, to his company's detriment.
I don't think the blackout alone will end Reddit. I don't think any one thing will end Reddit. I think, similar to Twitter, that it'll be a series of things: indignities large and small that successively alienate the people who matter most to these companies whether the C-level/marketer types realize it or not.
And at some point, similar to what I expect will happen to Twitter, Reddit will simply no longer be relevant in the way it once was. Whether they understand why is another question, but to me, it's always been clear.
tl;dr: Reddit the company is just a dumb pipe. Reddit as we think of it is a culture and community. That culture and community is defined by a relatively small collection of people who are on there because they care. When enough of them get disgusted enough to go elsewhere, Reddit—both the company and the community—will cease to exist in any meaningful capacity.
> The people who do the real contributing—posting, modding, defining the culture and building the communities that Reddit benefits from—are, as far as I can tell, more likely to get a lot angrier about abusive corporate nonsense, simply because they're more invested.
I suspect strongly that these people have been purged already over the past 2-3 years. You simply don't hear much about it, because de-platforming them muzzles most of them, and if anyone does complain elsewhere it's easy to smear them as Nazis or whatnot. I mean, they can't effectively defend themselves against that sort of lie when reddit has scrubbed their comment history from anyone else's view.
OP didn't claim that. You're giving a very uncharitable reading of the argument.
Fact is, the best people on Reddit have been leaving for many years. There have been many purges, of many scales. The fact you didn't hear about them helps demonstrate OPs point (their actual point, not the one you put in their mouth).
And those purges are just one thread in a long tapestry of disrespect towards moderators and users of the site. Spez in particular has been caught lying, editing people's comments, making false accusations, etc on many occasions.
They claimed that "The people who do the real contributing—posting, modding, defining the culture and building the communities that Reddit benefits" were driven off ("these people have been purged already over the past 2-3 years.")
Small groups and individuals can be extremely important. It's less about the raw numbers of 'how many <X> did we gain/lose' and more about 'what kind of tone are we setting'.
When Reddit allowed /r/the_donald to flourish, what sort of message did that send? When there was a purge in/of leftist communities, what sort of message did that send? Politically, what Reddit allows is actually quite narrow, and it's trending toward mainstream sanitized neoliberal center-right (aka 'advertiser-friendly').
When Reddit started to corral everyone into one shitty app by breaking the mobile web experience, what message did that send? And now, what message is being sent with this API cash-grab?
Reddit's positioning is constantly chafing against Reddit's core demographic. The people who operate Reddit don't understand what they want (aside from $$$), don't understand their customers/content providers, and now seem unwilling to even listen to their customers/content providers.
Many messages stacked up over the years eventually form a story. What's the story of Reddit?
Those people aren't common on the default subreddits, which might make it feel like there is not much community. But in the places that count, the more niche communities that actually have real community, those people are still around.
Besides, its a question of scale. There are loads of people like myself who make effort-post/comments sporadically on a few different platforms. There is enough such people that there can be (and is!) several viable twitter-like platforms at the moment. There's no reason the same can't be true for reddit.
I commented about a month back how the /r/programming seemed dead in the last two years compared to Hacker News. It’s not even close to what it used to be, and I suspect the new design and other bad choices contributed to that. It’s like the really good programmers who made interesting comments I learned from left. But of course I was downvoted and someone said HN users are “probably inept nerds like me”.
Reddit once faked tons of users making posts. I have a feeling they'll look for ways to do it again.
I wonder how hard it would be to have a series of bots that harvest posts from other social media sites, add a little 'human' LLM magic to it, and make it look like actual people are posting lots of content?
I lurk in a few subreddits that have well established forums outside of Reddit (decades old with tens of thousands of users) that are the top Google results and I'm always a bit amazed that people will still post on Reddit instead of using those other forums where they will get much, much better answers.
Sure, I mostly understand. I meant amazed more like the context of the OP of Reddit draining people away from other forums. Amazed that all it takes is saving them 15 seconds of creating a new account, often on a forum that has better features than Reddit, for them to prefer Reddit. It doesn't take much for people to opt in to a centralized internet.
The forum software itself may be unfamiliar. Does it have better features than Reddit? Some do; others don't. Does the forum have really bizarre rules or conventions? Subreddits can too, but it seems to be less common. Will my first ten posts get held for moderation? They probably won't on my 17 year old Reddit account.
It would be nice to see a federated identity/reputation system take off though. I'm thinking of OpenID plus [some other technology that probably exists, but isn't popular] where any of many service providers or my own website can confirm my identity, then offer vouches from other forums along the lines of "Zak has been a member of [community] for 2 years, posted 473 times, and has not been banned as of [date]".
Your own comment doesn’t include any specific examples of these communities, which I think reflects the big problem: discovery. As big as HN is, I rarely see it mentioned anywhere that’s not HN-adjacent. I’d love to hear about some of these other communities, but I do suspect they’ll each have varying features, cultural norms, and suboptimal onboarding guides for newbies. Especially if they’re decades old.
I think if you’re “in-the-know” and have grown with some of these high quality forums/communities for years, you’ll lose touch with understanding what new users need to join as the quality and depth of discussion become higher and deeper.
I never wanted to use the reddit app. Must have caved and installed it one day. I use it now, and it doesnt feel different from the site.
Say what you want about HN, but at least the contrarians bring out opposing views. The bigger reddit subs have a mob mentality that use to annoy me, and now scares me. People are itching for a chance to hate, and pile on from every angle. It's childish, naive, and most of all vindictive and bitter.
The point isn't that it's different or the same, the point is that the very definition of the site is that all content and moderation pretty much is created by users, and that the users hate being forced to install yet another app when it works fine for years as a mobile webpage. There was/is a spirit to reddit and it's being destroyed and if you love something and someone takes steps to change the thing you love into something you don't then you're going to resent and hate it. There's also the idea of not feeling powerless and at the mercy of every corporation by banding together to try to effect change. But you act like it's just a bunch of immature kids who are pouting about something silly. It's deeper than that.
I agree with the poster above, since at this year most of people are accustomed to install an app to interact with a website. It’s not where we wanted the web to be, but also it’s a minority that find it annoying.
My parents are technical sheep. They'll do what a site tells them to, even if it bogs down their phone, adds notifications, and inserts yet another advertising tentacle into their life. They won't be mad because they don't understand. As an engineer, I think it's reasonable to be mad for myself and those that don't know better.
> The bigger reddit subs have a mob mentality that use to annoy me, and now scares me.
It has gotten way worse right? Or is it me getting older? Many subs are like sects with a razor thin point of view allowed that is shifting constantly. It feels like insane people are pushing every BS problem as a do or die proposition and that those are dominating.
The Reddit app is a worse experience than users currently have on mobile with 3rd parties. Reddit let this go on for years and has now decided, without warning, to make the product worse for a lot of users including myself.
I use Apollo to aimlessly scroll through Reddit (probably too much) and now I'll use that time to learn something and find other communities that are less disruptive.
There's a million ways Reddit could've gone that would've been less user hostile.
> I for one will try to undo my past contributions to accelerate its decline.
This is a great idea. I'm going to bulk edit then delete my old comments (I recall reading somewhere that editing them overwrites the original field in the database whereas deleting just sets a deleted flag).
Destroys the value that I've created for free for that shitheap, plus it's helpful to make doxxing me harder.
Yes, I had to run the script several times, but it eventually edited and got rid of stuff that was super old. Basically every single comment made by me is gone (which I wanted).
I ran it before the blackout though, not sure how it would work with Reddit in its current state.
I don't know about this argument. "Everyone else is doing it so there are no alternatives." I believe less in this argument every year.
* There are alternatives. Like for me it's Mastodon, IRC, SDF and the Tildes. Now there's this thing Lemmy bouncing around out there which is a straight up federated clone of Reddit. Are they all kind of different from Reddit yeah, are they smaller yeah, so what? The alternative is you can go help make them better. You can help create.
* None of this stuff is essential for life, work etc. Reddit is not an essential service. So why would it be such a big deal if you totally changed your media consumption habits to basically anything, like let's say just start reading one newsletter from one publisher you think is ethical, and that's it. Seems fine to me. Your world will keep on turning. You'll get more fresh air.
* I just don't feel that what the masses are doing is such a huge issue. Fuck em. I read stuff on and participate in a bunch of little communities now, still use Reddit too but will never use their app, I would absolutely survive if Reddit disappeared tomorrow.
Not trying to pick on you btw, just trying to address the mindset of "<insert dickhead Internet site here> has all the users and therefore is the only option." I just feel like this is all much ado about nothing. Reddit's not a big deal. Let it burn, let it shine, let it do whatever, life's gonna go on and as humans we're creative so if they suck we'll find better things to do.
I would add a small counterpoint to your second point. For me, reddit is becoming pretty essential in my life. Since Google has been taken over by blogspam and ads, I struggle to find reviews or opinions of things I buy or use. I use google to search reddit to find comments relating to thing I'm interested in. Those comments might be astroturfing or paid support too, but it's easier to sus that out by searching past comments and painting a picture of the user. It's not perfect, but it's much better than trusting the authenticity of random blogs save a few I have bookmarked.
That's how Meta pulls you in, but reddit has always felt less user-focused than subreddit and comment-focused. Read a link, make some smalltalk about it asynchronously for a few hours, move on.
Reddit is probably among the least sticky social media sites because of it.
It may be less sticky from a social perspective, but its comprehensiveness is (was?) its strength to me. I often search Reddit for very specific questions about a range of subjects. That's what I come back to it for.
(Although it's been a while now; the user hostility is just too much).
Are / were they really 'friends' though if doing so obliterated your connections? Most people tend to misclassify being friends with being open & friendly with another.
Yes. Putting people through hoops and then going "were we really friends if you didn't do it for me, huh, HUUUUH?" is a "I'm the main character" mindset.
A friend recently deleted all his apps and he asks me I just email him if I want to talk. I'm just not gonna do that. I barely remember to email my work people.
> Yes. Putting people through hoops and then going "were we really friends if you didn't do it for me, huh, HUUUUH?" is a "I'm the main character" mindset.
Interesting point.
> A friend recently deleted all his apps and he asks me I just email him if I want to talk. I'm just not gonna do that. I barely remember to email my work people.
Oh. You have zero self-awareness. Got it.
Since you can't figure it out yourself -- you are doing that first thing in that second thing. Your poor friend.
> A friend recently deleted all his apps and he asks me I just email him if I want to talk. I'm just not gonna do that. I barely remember to email my work people.
If you put them below “work people”, they’re not a friend. Or rather, you’re not a friend.
Ah yeah man totally wanting to jump through hoops (email was just an example), installing shit like wechat, kik, tiktok etc is the same thing) totally makes me the 'main character.'
That's something this strategy helps to trim out. Who I want to talk to and jump through hoops for, and whom I don't.
There’s nothing wrong with having acquaintances that aren’t close friends though. I always see this argument and don’t get it.
Yea, my “true” friends will contact me anywhere, but it’s nice to have a small network of people I know that I can invite to stuff or even better yet invite me to events and activities. They may also become close friends at some point.
i don’t in my hometown and didn’t go to school near my home state.
old friends get harder to see every passing year. it’s just incrementally harder to stay in touch given the geographical distance. i do text and visit when i can
It's not a problem with reddit. I've been there maybe 15 years and never had a single "friend". I rotate the accounts every year or so, not a big issue.
>I did this with facebook and it obliterated my social connections.
Huh... I did this with Facebook and it basically changed nothing. I was forced to text my friends life updates, that was it.
Out of every social media site I've quit, Facebook seemed to have the lowest impact on my life(as long as I or my wife checked it every 1-3 weeks for Events).
It seems Facebook has an ability to make you feel popular without actually making you friends. I'd be skeptical of the 'friends' you make on Instagram. I've made a few over the last 6 years, but since quitting, I really only talk to 1-2 of them rarely.
I would've agreed with you 5 years ago. However, my weak connections seem to have thinned themselves out—the people I'd only ever see on FB have gotten bored and stopped posting there. Everyone else, I have other means of contacting.
I find it funny people have been going on this anti Reddit turning profit crusade, but ignore the fact Reddit is pretty similar to Facebook groups, just has much better ui and indexability
And everyone I know in real life who uses Reddit on a daily basis is also in at least 2-3 FB groups. Be it a local mom/dad group, Costco group, the car they own, or something more niche
They’re not big Zuckerberg fans but they’re much more accepting of him making billions than the Reddit shareholders
FB groups also utilize mods who work lots of hours for free. So those who say Reddit cannot IPO because of the free labor are wrong
Just because every single comment complaining (rightly) about Reddit’s current behavior does not include a comparison to Facebook does not mean it’s ignored.
People can dislike two things at once, and it doesn’t need to necessarily be said. Three, even, if they’re feeling frisky.
Unless there’s a post specifically about Reddit and Facebook, then you shouldn’t expect people to even bring up Facebook. It’s at best barely relevant.
The outrage from users that Reddit is trying to do what everyone in the tech industry does makes no sense
And furthermore, if they give up the IPO focus, let’s say they don’t do the obvious and sell to Meta
What do they do? Layoff 80% of employees? Cut down the servers? Obviously if they are going to screw over the investors, no one will give a penny to another funding round
If, theoretically, the investors really don’t have a majority of votes, like someone here mentioned, the 2021 funding round was the last one, Reddit just burns it’s cash until it shuts down
Okay, and? Bytedance is also profitable. Apple is also profitable. Netflix is also profitable. They all do vastly different things to achieve profitability. What works for one company won’t necessarily work for others.
Just because another company is profitable does not mean it needs to be mentioned every time Reddit is, and that was my entire point.
People don’t even necessarily have a problem with Reddit trying to become profitable, but with the extreme disregard for their users they’ve shown in the last few weeks. Is that common between all the companies above? No. And certainly not to the extent Reddit has shown. And that’s what all these topics have boiled down to.
I’m sure if an article comes up which talks about Reddit and Facebook, then Facebook will come up in conversation. Unless that happens, there should be no real expectation for it to come up organically.
Yeah, I’ve been using BaconReader for years. It’s going to stop working soon and I’m simply going to stop using Reddit. I used to use it for more but the last few years I only use it for porn and I recently discovered that the redgifs site is great for that. Obviously not everyone uses Reddit only for this purpose but I suspect that when the third party apps go dark redgifs will get a nice bump in new users.
Is jumping from one corporate ship to another a good idea? At some point they peak and become greedy. I don't know what's the solution. Can we have better open source alternative and people fund it? Recently I learned DPRreviews went down because Amazon didn't profit enough from it. There are way too many stories like this.
Sure - the next corporate ship will torch VC money until they can't, they'll go user hostile then the next corporate ship will have received VC money to torch to fill the void
There's a second response: to not reward AND punish the offending party.
I've been recommending people to replace their content in Reddit with literal gibberish (from random generators), and then delete their accounts. Each person doing this makes Reddit data less valuable for LLMs, and eventually it means that not even Google, Amazon, Microsoft etc. would ever bother paying for API access.
I sunk 15 years of myself into reddit. I am there in all my teenage angst, and you get to see me mature before your eyes.
I can't just delete. I've helped people there, and been helped. If my data is part of a corpus that betters humanity, than so be it. Hopefully one day that corpus will be released under a FOSS license.
I can relate to your intentions, but keep in mind that, when you leave your data there, you're effectively encouraging people to keep using a user-hostile platform that will likely wall those people's content in. In the long run, you aren't making humanity better - you're worsening it.
Instead a better approach is to migrate whatever you deem useful in your Reddit history to another platform. And then remove it from Reddit, either by deletion or replacing it with gibberish.
You might also be interested in this text, as food for thought:
Even more valuable info will be generated, and I don't think that we should just cram it there like that. We would be exposing this new info to information loss.
And someone might say "I won't post it there", but once the person leaves some info in that site, they're encouraging others to interact with it, and generate more info there, in that walled garden, instead of somewhere else.
Note that the potential of information loss in Reddit does not come just from users deleting their stuff. It's also mods (including automod) and Reddit Inc. itself. One day Reddit will decide "we're going to flush out old content!", and here goes your info anyway, no matter if you deleted it or not. Or Reddit itself will go off, and the info in it will be lost, just like the info from the forums that Reddit itself killed. That's the main reasoning in the link that I've provided, and you know what, I think that the author is 100% right.
Also note that there are ways to reduce the information loss. People can - and IMHO they should - migrate that info, before removing it from Reddit.
I think that you're looking at the info present there _now_ in a short-sighted way, without realising the consequences elsewhere.
>The thing is that there's a lot of valuable information that I don't think we should just delete like that.
Agreed. In the past 2 days I've been overly annoyed as both days I've had multiple google queries dump me to seemingly useful threads that I can not see because of this foolish nonsense of shuttering communities in "protest".
I’ve once held a similar view, but then realised that kind of data really isn’t worth holding on to. I deleted my 15 years worth of posts and account, and felt a massive weight had been lifted. Reddit had a negative effect on me, and freeing myself of that was well worth it.
I should also mention that Reddit archives exist, so those post will live on somewhere.
In the game of prisoners dilemma if someone chooses to defect (bad behavior) rather than cooperate, and you choose to cooperate (reward bad behavior), bad behavior becomes a winning strategy, so you can expect even more bad behavior in the future.
That's assuming that everyone has a good grasp on what's going on, and considers this funny-picture-App to be their top priority.
That's the issue with operating on principle:
We HN users might be aware of this particular issue, but there's thousands of products that we use, because we're unaware or don't have the energy to fight.
So with all the exploitation, abuse and pollution that you indirectly support, why do you expect most users to draw the line at a weird website?
Exactly, don't take it personally just vote with your feet. Reddit doesn't owe you anything. The flip side is that you don't owe it anything either. If they do something you disagree with, that is their good right. But you are of course under no obligation to stick around.
In any case, it looks like Reddit is going to join the ranks of long forgotten startups on a slide towards basically being empty shells of their former selves. More interesting to ask is where the users, content, and attention will go.
I never really cared for Reddit. The signal to noise ratio just feels wrong to me. Lots of people yapping about whatever and just not a lot of stuff that interests me. I lurk in a few sub-reddits but as communities they are pretty weak.
Might be a nice one for Elon Musk to buy. But I'd recommend he does that at a big discount. This company needs the same kind of shock therapy that Twitter received to have a realistic shot at surviving. Including a big layoff round probably. I get that people are still upset about what happened at Twitter, but they too were on a long slide towards irrelevance. It's debatable whether Musk's intervention is going to be good enough of course.
I can't believe they would do this AND kill off third party apps. I'm with you on not rewarding reddit, they have become very user hostile all the sudden.
I was going to ban personal reddit use this week but I already broke that to read this topic and respond to the one dev that replied to it.
The incredible thing is that this is an "experiment", not a policy. As an experiment they're ready to harass and alien X percentage of their users? Amazing.
Also, the answer theoretically should be right below the question 'cause it's most relevant but I can see how no one could bring themselves to upvote this.
Yes, despite assuming that old.reddit.com was static, it doesn't seem to be. Periodically they tweak something about it and break it a little more. Trying to convince people to stop using it I guess.
I was part of this test - I've refused to install the app for years (I prefer websites and the option to open tabs for later browsing).
It was extremely annoying for a site I've used for 12+ years to treat me like that. It did massively cut my usage of Reddit (which I would consider to be quite high), I primarily access it from my phone and I all but stopped using it for the week or so I was in the "experiment".
People refusing to use their app etc. are likely a minority. Most people are completely used to being bullied into submission by tech companies, and will happily follow along.
I'd assume their goal with this isn't to convert the stragglers, it's to just close the gates to them so that they disappear from ad-view related statistics.
Edit: Further to this point, the Apollo app which everyone was talking about the other day has 50000 (fifty thousand!) paid users. Reddit has hundreds of millions of monthly users. They don't care about this minority of users, they just want the shitstorm to pass so they can move on. They also don't care that there's likely a small minority of users creating most actual good content, but it doesn't matter because the site can be floated entirely by meme spam bots and porn posts and still be massively profitable.
> I prefer websites and the option to open tabs for later browsing
The number of times I lost a post because when I switched app or didn’t use my phone for a while reddit would just reset to the home page… I think they really didn’t realize how much the shitty UX would enrage people against them.
Would be faster to just shut down the corporation and give the money back to the shareholders, whatever they have anyway, but your approach is not without merit, mostly in that I think it would be funny at this point.
That's basically why I'm advocating what I posted, that and also because I think it'd be a great chapter in tech history, showing how doubling down on a stupid user-hostile decision can destroy a company (assuming it does). Then, 30 years from now, people will still talk about how Reddit self-destructed when they decided they needed to control the user experience and forced everyone to use their app.
Rationally, your approach is of course better, but the current narcissistic execs aren't going to do anything like that, whereas I can certainly see them doing something as stupid and out-of-touch as forcing everyone to use their app on both mobile and desktop.
> Then, 30 years from now, people will still talk about how Reddit self-destructed when they decided they needed to control the user experience and forced everyone to use their app.
No. What they'll be talking about is how Reddit had too many holes in its fence, and all its cows escaped. They'll then discuss all the advancement in cattle fencing and barn construction that happened in the 30 years since.
Why do people assume Reddit C-suite and investors are being stupid or narcissistic here? That would make sense if the relationship between them and the users was a friendly one. It isn't. It's adversarial. For Reddit (as well as Meta and other social media platforms), the users are cattle. Even worse than that - they're stochastic cattle. Nobody at the top cares if you or me are having a nice experience with the site/app. They care about the value extracted from us in aggregate. To them, it's an optimization problem, and it's been apparent for a long time now that the optimum point is usually "the most shitty and abusive possible version that still clears the 'fit for purpose' bar" (the end point is more obvious when you look at goods and services that have been around for a couple decades or more, and thus subject to decades of "value engineering").
It doesn't feel as bad when they're optimizing for future value extraction, but that time is past, and Reddit is currently squeezing value out of its cattle-base.
Is it sustainable? Since when did that question mattered to the captains of the industry? "Reddit" as a brand and company matters to the users; for its leaders and investors, it's just a money making instrument that takes time to mature, but exists to be squeezed, discarded and replaced by something else.
That's exactly my thinking. They can make a special Reddit app with Electron that basically recreates the website, but forces users to see lots of annoying unblockable ads while hogging lots of memory. Users trying to use the normal website will just be directed to download and install this app, and only shown a preview of the site that they can't use. What could possibly go wrong?
For all this UX design, responsiveness, mobile-friendly talk and SAAS products for conversion funnels and what not, does no one in management ever use their own app or website on mobile? Seriously, open practically any random website on a stock chrome or Firefox on mobile and just see how horrible it is. Scrolling loses position, you randomly click stuff and shit happens, half the page is filled with a sign-up newsletter popup or a privacy banner. And wow if you have to input anything and all the nonsense you have to put up with dealing with the page or app responding to the keyboard. Or you have to scroll in an input field.
Like seriously. What is wrong with these people that designed this shit and how do we not have an alternative.
Or clicking on some post. Nothing happening. Trying to click again, but new screen appears from original click, so your second attempt lands on some new link.
That's the point actually. And not only in Reddit, but in all current social networks. You must lose posts, you must always look at the fresh snapshot of posts. And it works, people are conditioned to work with ephemeral internet. Apps and sites all work like this nowadays - Facebook, Instagram, Shitter, Reddit main page, Netflix main page, even HN partially. You blink and everything is gone, here is new content for you, enjoy, but not too long and don't become attached.
This drives up engagement in the population with attention disorders and promotes advertisement, since it is organically natural to see ads between ad-like endless posts.
The whole auto-refresh thing is bullshit in general. You see something interesting, and then two microseconds later it is gone because the app (or even tab) decided to refresh and bring you new content.
I was on reddit before they tried updating their designs, the only reason I'm still there is because they still have the old.reddit.com frontend available. I even use it on mobile where it's not exactly practical. It's not because I have some sort of aversion to change, well, I guess I'm really uninterested in downloading apps considering I didn't even bother to try things like Apolle to see what the fuzz was about, but their various attempts at redesigns have been so bad that I would rather use old.reddit.com than them on mobile, even though it's impractical.
On a computer I see no benefits from any of the redesigns compared to old.reddit.com. I work a lot with Typescript and also React myself, and I love the language, so it's not because I dislike that sort of thing, but I think a list of links with comments just works better without being put into a virtual DOM or even just JS. HN is the perfect example of that, there has been a lot of hobby JS frontends from people, but they all work worse than the real deal and somewhat hilariously they work better than reddit's professional attempts. Now I get why reddit wants to move away from the page-reload. They want a lot of the SoMe interactivity, like their silly chat and so on, but I'm not sure who would ever want a Facebook with total strangers instead of people you actually talk with. I sure don't.
I signed up for Reddit last year, finally. I’m a happy user of old.reddit.com. And if it goes, I go. I survived a decade without an account, and it would be easy enough to go back that way. My opinion is not that important to share.
Old Reddit with a Stylus theme is how I've been using it for years. I'd occasionally switch to the new site just to check it's progress and while it has gotten a bit better in the last year or so, little nitpicks eventually drive me back to old.
As much as old reddit is a clear winner ok desktop it is pretty awful on mobile. Personally I actually prefer the new site on mobile (although it is awful too) but I understand why sone people still prefer the old site on mobile.
Could someone explain why a new web interface, albeit arguably better for mobile and actually enjoyable on desktop if the following can be forgotten, is so damn slow? When loading it appears to emerge from unknown depths and open up with a heavy sigh. Personification of a tool but this the impression it gives me every time. I thought 2020s were years when multi cores and gigabytes of memory would render everything snappy.
It's built by the idiots sons and daughters of rich people as their "my first job" project. Lots of sectors apparently function like this. Children of the elite can have play jobs, money is distributed to friends and family and everyone suffers.
There were posts on reddit about the most toxic work culture there i remember with drugs and bizarre politics straight out of some san fran sitcom.
And some quite funny posts on just how grotesquely "my first react project" the whole code base was, and still is. These people are absolutely clueless. They nuked the whole "new reddit feedback" forum with posts pointing out just how bad the whole thing was, like pulling tens megabytes of starter boilerplate in production and loops with script loads inside of them that could grind a powerful computer to a halt.
Yelp started doing this years ago. They slowly cut access to their mobile site that used to work perfectly well. Sure I could install the app, but the obvious disrespect to the user pretending that the mobile site didn’t work perfectly well and that you have to install the app was so frustrating that I just stopped using Yelp altogether. And that’s saying something, seeing as I own a local theater venue and refusing to engage with Yelp hurts be more than it hurts them. But screw it, I hate being bullied by these platforms.
Fortunately their app is compatible with the ReVanced project (think YouTube Vanced). It's terrible you have to recompile apk's to get a useful experience (sans ads, sharing tracking, other restrictions), but for me it's currently the only viable way to use Reddit.
Revanced is the only way to stay sane while using Youtube and Twitch on mobile. The adverts and other spam are more obnoxious than cable TV.
I just hope it flies under the radar enough that Google don't start banning accounts for using it. I don't log in to the Youtube app for this reason, but I'm sure there is a line in a EULA somewhere that means they could if they wanted to.
Which reminds me, i need to backup all my email...
I stopped using reddit when the .compact interface was removed. No I go back once in a while but if this goes through I will probably simply never visit.
You can still use old.reddit.com, which is vastly superior and faster than the modern reddit. It also loads videos and images inline (when you click for them to load) and it de-emphasizes comments. This allows you to work like the compact feed where you scroll through posts and only go into comments sections if you _really_ want to. It is a good alternative.
It's funny because I also sing the praises of old.reddit.com but would describe it/my preferences in a totally different manner. My preference would be for reddit to be as close to HN in UI format as possible, perhaps with some minor thumbnails for visual content.
What I like about the old UI is that I find it emphasizes the post titles instead of content. I *don't* feel inundated with images & videos, besides the little thumbnail. I usually just want to skim titles, not look at visual content, and I find that impossible in the new UI. And I find that it's easier to get at/see the comments than in the new UI.
EDIT: Forgive me, I’m cranky. Of course the communities resting on Reddit’s beach are themselves the castles. I’m so tunnel-visioned on the API aspect that only used that lens.
The sandcastles are the communities built around subreddits. The subreddits are on a corporately owned beach, the owners are building a mall, and the sandcastles are in the way.
I guess you can get karma here? But it is not as if anyone is attempting to build communities on the HN platform. I'm not even generating worthwhile content, let alone doing tens or hundreds of hours a month of free moderating. I don't think it is the same at all.
It was my experience that Reddit stopped caring about its users a long time ago. I am convinced that Reddit unofficial motto is: "Moderators own the place they operate and are free to do whatever they want with it". So it isn't a surprise that the admins think they can do whatever they want with the entire site.
For a less popular opinion, I don't sympathize at all with the reddit moderators who are up in arms about the API problem. They have had full, unfettered control of their subreddits where their power is near absolute and they enjoy pushing their own views and punishments on anyone they don't like. But now that a higher power is enforcing their rules on them, they cry oppression (see u/awkwardtheturtle and the moderators of r/art). It is pure hypocrisy and almost hilarious to me.
I know not all moderators are the same, but with the way reddit is designed, power is only exercised in one direction and power abuse is unavoidable. The very culture of reddit at its core is flawed now and I think it is funny that only now, when the higher caste of redditors, who are in the minority, started to get affected that we see some calls for action.
Isn't it like this at most places? Even here, where mob rule (the introverted ones hiding behind their downvote ability) oppresses contrarians?
You know, the best choice is not to do general socializing via web. Specialized discussions okay.
Spend your leisure time at a pub or similar places with the regulars. And bring a book in case you don't anyone meet up that day. So much more fun and relaxing than trying to argue with strangers or wrestling with mods.
>Isn't it like this at most places? Even here, where mob rule (the introverted ones hiding behind their downvote ability) oppresses contrarians?
To be fair Reddit has an additional issue:
Whoever is the top mod is based on seniority. This sort of system tends to attract basement dwellers with no social skills (even if those are essential for a good mod), who are there just for the power.
If you save the world and then fart once in public, nobody will remember you as "the hero that saved the world". You'll be forever remembered as Mr. Fartman. And the same applies to any group of people.
Being a mod doesn't make you a good mod, not even a good person; you're bound to have a few piece of shit moderators, like awkwardtheturtle, godofatheism, millionsofcats, bardfinn and the likes. And when you remember "the mods" you'll remember those farts, and end blaming the rather decent big majority, who silently does their mod duties for the best of their communities. I sympathise with _those_ moderators.
In a sense releasing things like they have is testing. It just doesn't seem like tests because they haven't had to pull anything back. They should have had to though. If people heeded Stallman's warnings, nobody would have continued to support Apple after they launched the iPhone without third party apps (other phones had them) or when they launched third party apps with no sideloading. The world would be much better for it.
When you keep selecting people for an specific behavior, you get a population biased towards that behavior. If you suddenly decide you want something else, then you have a problem.
Apple people are a weird cult to me. I think Apple is happy to have a subset of customers willing to pay exorbitant prices, and fine with a large chunk of people (like me) who won't buy any of their products.
If Apple one day said they were pulling the plug on macOS and force-installed Windows on everyone’s computer, people would complain! That’s the level of user-hostile disruption we’re dealing with here.
That reminds me of the butterfly keyboard. Many were in the habit of buying macs with working keyboards and they took the working keyboard from us in order to get a thinner keyboard.
I stopped using Reddit for a few weeks because of this. I use Reddit almost exclusively on my phone and I don’t need nor want to download a separate web browser just for one site.
But then one day I checked out of habit and I was back in.
But if they want to “ban” me from the site because I visit with my phone’s browser, so be it. Honestly they’d probably be doing me a favor. But I’m not downloading the stupid app.
Screen Time on iOS/macOS lets you override the clock but in a “snooze” style. It blocks me from habitually browsing the front page but lets me land there from search.
This whole thing has felt like the other person in an unhealthy relationship ending things. Maybe a little painful at first, but very obviously, and immediately so, for the best.
The Reddit official app only reflect the poor quality of management of Reddit: completely bad designed app, only your competitor could approve this. The web experience is much better. It is the case when you think nobody knows where Reddit is going.
Right, which is why they should shut down the web site and instead force users to install an app (including on PCs). If they believe that strongly in users being required to use an official app, they should force this everywhere.
Well there goes the last social site I was engaged with, other than this one. I just don't get it when a business decides to declare war in its users. I'll miss the 3D printing subreddit, oh well.
Since the redesign they shifted their focus on images, and well, I don't have any hobby best communicated by images. So, lately I have been only looking at the joke subs.
I unsubscribed from the 3D printing sub a while ago, because the good stuff didn't get upvotes, because they were not images, so nothing good would make into my home page.
I wonder if some kind of discord server aggregator will become a thing soon, something one can add their server and invite link to so people know it exists. That plus a forum thread only setup might make it a viable replacement for a bit.
IMO, the cool stuff was things like somebody coming with a question like "oh, what is the best way to add a filament spooler on a Prussa i3?" and an endless discussion of the current possibilities with pros and cons appearing on the comments.
Today, the closest you could ever get is somebody posting a picture of the support they made for their spooler, and people talking about this one design. What is much worse.
So many of the subs I used to follow or would use for reference have become a dumpster fire of consumeristic box shots.
pcmasterrace is basically just "check out this pile of boxes of expensive stuff."
The home server / selfhosted subreddits are endless pictures of a wifi router, 2-bay NAS, and a small form factor PC sitting on a shelf (and in the case of the selfhosted subreddit, also screenshots of people's web dashboards for their home server which is almost entirely torrenting / media related.)
My local area subreddit is almost entirely photos of scenery, with little in the way of anything of substance like news or politics.
They are desperately trying to be TikTok. It will not work and has no chance of working. Look at their hilariously terrible acquisition of Dubsmash for $50 million (they converted it to a subreddit with 1.5k subscribers when they had 200 million users at their peak and touted having 25% of black teens in their acquisition press release. Every post is people saying the Reddit app sucks and asking where Dubsmash went)
Probably Reddit thought they were just buying a mailing list and a development team. So the cost should be compared to Reddit marketing's acquisition costs and Reddit HR hiring costs.
It's only absurd if you misunderstand the true intention. They didn't acquire Dubsmash to profit from its technology and users. They acquired Dubsmash to shut it down.
Today's social media corporations are so fat with (venture) capital that they can, and do, spend that kind of money just to keep any potential competitors locked out. TikTok, the last social network that became truly big, was launched in 2016, seven years ago. Seven years without any new player entering the space. That's an eternity. I can promise you this wouldn't be happening without (very costly) interventions from above.
I get buying it for that purpose, but why then kill it? Especially when it is a personal video platform, when Reddit is mostly an anonymous text platform?
That only makes sense when there’s competition. Why maintain two apps when it’s cheaper to maintain one? Now, in this case it seems like an awful strategic choice, given what happened with TikTok. But I think the reason is nevertheless the same.
Modern tech capitalism doesn’t want to compete in the “let the best product win”-space. It’s just not enough money and making stuff is hit or miss. They want to own access and rent-seek. At least that’s my interpretation.
But this is the same discussion as with communism, where the fans will rush you for saying that real-life communism sucks so badly, and tell you they will do it By The Book (or something). It's always surprising how many people take their truths from books instead of what's in front of their noses...
Unfortunately, Real Capitalism has never been tried before...
The point is to show the contradictions of market liberalism, how they never fulfill their ideals and by necessity lead to the conditions under which we live. Communism simply says: let's live in a society without money, without a state, without class. Where one fishes in the morning, hunts in the afternoon, and debates in the evening. Where we live, produce, and labor in a social fashion, where people's basic sexual and physical needs are always attended to as the highest priority of the collective. Where each and every person is given the opportunity to pursue the fullest extent of what they can be as a person, to flourish as a human being.
Somewhere in here the Soviet Union fits in: for having the highest degree of sexual freedom, for guaranteed housing and jobs, for fair working hours and a living wage, for gender parity in all aspects of life. All at the expense of a vast police and security complex employed to crush potential dissent, and to use those political prisoners as a free pool of labor in order to compete with western late-capitalist states (which they failed to do).
The Dengists succeeded by simulating market capitalism to generate the industrial conditions necessary to move towards a more fully socialized state--the Soviet Union, on the other hand, was never willing to subject their backwards populations to industrial capitalism, which led to even greater violence in some respects. People wonder how far it will actually take them, we'll see...but the CCP seems to be uninterested in an internationalist movement.
I think that the basic propositions of Communism are mostly appealing, its just that people are not sure how to get there. We've had successes, like the Paris Commune, that were ruthlessly crushed by the state--they don't tend to last very long. Is there a way to achieve revolution without strict military disciplinary measures? After all, the hierarchies of an army nearly reproduce the hierarchies of capitalism with marked precision. Short answer, nobody knows, the French almost had a successful revolution in 1968, that failed, they spent many decades theorizing why, alternatives to an armed movement. Foucault, the great French theorist against disciplinarian social organization, became a neoliberal. Many of those who descend from these french thinkers became Neoliberals, like Jonah Peretti (who founded Buzzfeed) or Nick Land. You could also call them accelerationists, who believe that by accelerating the contradictions of capital one can bring down capitalist society faster, as it will end up crushing itself.
Everybody knows the system doesn't work, we're all sick of it, but nobody knows what to do about it. Everything else besides plain and simple labor organizing seems like a lost cause. Anybody who says anything else is usually confused or in someone else's pocket. We had a nearly international, decentralized protest movement only a few years ago that could've toppled multiple governments if the people were angry enough. You don't think the people won't get angry again?
Of course it is. It's right there in the name. It's not "competitism" or "winwinnism" or "fairism". Capitalism is about accumulating and making money from capital - that is, making money from what you own, not from what you do. It's pretty close to rent seeking - I'd dare say "rent seeking" is what we call it when you do capitalism too hard, and it starts feeling viscerally unfair.
They want to intentionally hamper the website to drive mobile app usage for more juicy data. They don't care about those users who fail to migrate as they are generating less revenue. They begrudgingly keep things working just enough to keep some engagement to drive mobile app use.
They don't seem to understand a couple key things, one of which is that if they can't make a website work, I will not install other things they make. They break trust.
Robert Reich explains it well using Hacksaw Bob. There are facets he doesn't touch on in that example which he addresses in the full series. Very excellent presentation.
And the way a certain MassiveCorp talked about the acquisition of my previous workplace, lead less experienced employees to believe they were doing so in order to diversity their offerings in that area.
Guess how long we lasted before being "brought into the fold".
That's exactly the standard playbook. The acquisition happens, and there is a lot of talk sbout how important it is to keep everything the same, no one getting fired, no real changes except for a few different people to report to. Basically, no one gets fired in the first year while the new owners figure out what's actually going on with their purchase.
Just over a year, as the comments below guessed (congratulations! Prizes coming your way!).
Not many people got fired though, only a few managers (who to be fair, were a bit useless). Most others left "voluntarily" after the corp changes were made (you know, the ones that definitely weren't going to be made). It wasn't so bad though, we all got a good deal.
>Dubsmash allowed users to videotape themselves while lip syncing over audio clips and including sections of songs, movies, and famous quotes. Users could upload their own audio and add colour but not filters and text animation to their videos
Is this really the kind of competition that made reddit quake in its boots? Like, I never heard of Dubsmash until now but this was still around the later years of Vine.
Reddit is an aggregator so from what I understand here, social media that encourages original creations/re-creations are a commodity, not competition. As seen by how most of the current front page at any given time has aggregated TikTok videos.
> Massive behemoths buying competitors to shut them down goes against the spirit of capitalism.
That depends on which theory about capitalism and its purpose you subscribe to - in your (and my) case social-democrat style capitalism (which was the dominant theory prior to the collapse of the USSR/GDR/Yugoslavia block) generally assumes a responsibility of the corporations towards society at large: paying fair and livable wages to employees (so that they can buy the products), paying proper taxes so that society can fund what's needed to give the corporation a chance at being successful (i.e. education of new workers, road and rail transportation, a fair court system), not laying off people for pure number games and invest a part of the profit to improve the corporation (invest into new machinery, R&D, or training the staff). Stock markets primarily serve as a way for corporations to raise money for investments.
Modern-day "neoliberal" capitalism however is a different beast. Basically, making money is a goal all on its own, with no rules and limitations on how to make it. As a result, we got "investment banks" "creating" insane amounts of money from thin air (and growing so large they threaten the financial stability of entire countries), everyone is constantly looking on how to squeeze those below him out of money on all levels, and if you got money you're free to do with it whatever way you please, including burning it or using it to snuff out a competitor.
I agree with much of what you wrote, except that if you don't think business have ALWAYS been running on the principle of "make money and disregard external costs to society/environment/human well-being", that's just rose colored lenses. Even in the pre-USSR-collapse heyday you're referring to, look no further than the tobacco industry. They literally killed people because it was profitable.
I think the problems we're seeing today is that the government is just not doing its job (or more charitably, not moving fast enough to keep up) in regulating the industries _before_ the damage is done. And before the entrenched interests of the resulting megabillionaires can just pay the govt to look away for as long as they can milk this cow.
It's hilarious to me that Reddit is only relevant at all today because Digg 2.0's redesign was so hated that everyone from it flocked to Reddit. Then they buy a moderately successful app, completely destroy it and yet their execs are sitting there rapidly killing the ways people like to use their site and trying to force them into an objectively awful app and yet are seemingly completely oblivious to their history and why they're here in the first place.
Reddit, you are replaceable. The moment you turn off old.reddit, I'm gone. I'd definitely admit I am addicted to reddit in it's current form but new reddit and the app are just too insufferable I'll happily give it all up and find somewhere else.
They ended that way too early. There is so much good content to write about now. I know it’s hard to transition, but do you really need (near) the full cast still?
The last season was my favorite. I was amazed how well it captured the AGI vibes in my corner of Silicon Valley at the time. These days I think most people would easily recognize OpenAI and GPT, but it was filmed 5 years ago!
What we really need is more shows to take up the concept and satirize modern tech (and SV specifically) from their own unique angles.
The only one that did was the short-lived Amazon original Betas, which had more irritating younger characters, yet for all of its memespeak it really did feel like it grokked the startup bubble culture well enough, especially since it was actually set in the SoMa of San Francisco, rather than Silicon Valley’s Palo Alto!
I've seen a few shows go through this kind of death phase, and have always been curious about the internal writing dynamics that leads the team towards these bite sized episodes without an overarching story line of interest. Especially because it seems like such a staple of good shows to have an overarching story, then a few concurrent story lines, with a final dose of single episode dynamics. I'd think they have to know they are breaking away from an established successful formula and instead trending towards the show being cancelled, I just wonder if its on purpose, or they just can't get the good writers back, producers meddling, or what.
Indeed. They could go with an anthology of seasons style show, however, if Mike Judge is up for it. New start ups with new seasons, with the occasional throwbacks perhaps.
Anyone that I know that has worked in Big tech in the past decade knows that. There has nothing that managed to capture the slice of life absurdity that Big Tech can be at some times than that show.
There were times I thought "I know someone like that", there were times I thought "I know that person", and there were times I literally knew people on it... It was disturbing to watch.
Its going to tank but for a different reason -- because like Coinbase, Robinhood, and other hyped stock listings, all the insiders are going to dump shares on the unsuspecting retail public. I imagine day 1 of trading will be the highest the stock ever gets.
Lol, good luck doing that during a recession, and after pissing users off. They might have tricked me into buying it before this fiasco, but definitely they lost me now.
For Reddit to go public they have to submit a financial disclosure known as the S-1. This will give the public an idea of Reddit's finances and business model.
There's a long way to go before shorting can happen. If anything, Reddit are shorting themselves.
> 25% of black teens in their acquisition press release
Not necessarily illegal, but I had thought that, for sure, one shouldn't boast about heavily discriminatory race-related factoids, even if they thought that it would be for a "good" cause.
Didn't they think what would have happened had they replaced the "black teens" in their press release with "white teens"?
Is that as cool for investors? I would imagine, for better or worse, being black correlated with being poor, and therefore black userbase is less valuable then white for ad serving purposes.
You're missing why this would be important. It's cool for investors because the black user base draws in a bunch of other people along with them. It's also not about people saying "omg black people, I must be there!" Culturally, historically, in the USA, black culture has set a bunch of trends. See NBA, NFL, hip-hop/music, comedians, dance, etc.
Same as when a "cool" person goes anywhere, you don't monetize them, you monetize all the people they bring into the club, bar, theater, etc.
Please don't focus on whether on not they should or should get credit or any political statements, focus on the fact that they are the ones that made the "cool" dances that the most followed two girls on TikTok used, which then went viral, which in turn made TikTok a bunch of money because those millions of views had ads played against them.
The fact that hip-hop originated from the black community and got big (you might want to read on how exactly it got big) doesn't really translate to a marketing/talent scouting strategy going forward.
You could shoehorn K-Pop like that too, quick somebody buy Kakaotalk for a ridiculous amount!
No because it is a different thing. US black population has their own distinct culture (grown out of a shared struggle and history) that simply does not exist for the group that people call 'white'. In this case black teens isn't just pointing at skin color but at culture, one that is very valuable for the VC crowd because it's where cool stuff originates.
> one that is very valuable for the VC crowd because it's where cool stuff originates.
Still sounds racist, in its way. As in, why aren't the black kids seen as the boring, nerdish kids that will get to form the VC crowd themselves in 20 years' time?
Later edit: Reminds me of this Dave Chapelle skit [1], the part with the "white dude" whispering:
> Oh, my God, I think those black guys are gonna try to save us
> As in, why aren't the black kids seen as the boring, nerdish kids that will get to form the VC crowd themselves in 20 years' time?
That's a good question and if you're sincerely interested in understanding the answer, there's a long history of thought on the topic of black excellence in the context of racial oppression. You could start with W.E.B. Du Bois and the "Talented Tenth"
For the record, I'm assuming your questions are disingenuous, but answering in good faith for other readers who might interested.
Found it funny that one of the establishment's darling magazines, I'm talking about Foreign Affairs, has started doing the token racial thing when it comes to Du Bois by finding out that he had, indeed, written for them 70 to 80 years ago [1], and in the May/June issue they even re-published a July 1943 piece of his. No mention of his communism, of course, that would defeat the purpose of talking about race without really looking at what stands behind race.
Where did you get the $50 million from? The actual amount seems to not have been disclosed and it sounds a bit low for the time and 200 million user base.
It's interesting everything trying to be TikTok. As a user, if I wanted TikTok i'd use TikTok. I don't want TikTok, so I don't use TikTok.
I use Facebook mainly for hobby/owners groups these days as that's where a lot of them are. I sometimes use the market place. My feed is mainly my interests, motorbikes, local events, local cafes/restaurants etc etc. Then there's reels i never interact with which get forced on me every other week after clicking hide. The Reels are all short thumbnails of young girls of questionable age wearing little clothing in provocative poses/dances! They don't fit my usual browsing habbits, I don't interact with them but they force them on me as likely they'll gain lots of clicks from mid-thirty year old male demographic! I'm no prude but I don't want to see what look like children in my feed. We know why they do it though, they all likely get high clicks.
Youtube is the same except content more relevant to me feed. I use Youtube for longer form videos, travel, motor vehicles, tech. They still insist on forcing shorts in my feed. Mobile has got particularly bad as they mix shorts in the feed timeline as regular videos. AndroidTV Youbtube isn't so bad but they are slowly promoting shorts there to.
Not shorts but similar is I used Spotify for many years then it started forcing Podcasts on me as Podcasts where the hot thing. On my homepage where I had music which was relevant to me I had to hunt around to find my music as my homepage was full of podcasts I had no interest in so eventually cancelled my membership.
It's sad when every tech company tries to replicate another companies features ditching the very thing which their users originally joined them for.
This just seems to be the strategy they teach at business school, and it never works.
I remember in the 2000s, all these mmos were popping up saying they were the "WoW killer". Um, no, people who play WoW already play WoW, and you are really trying to convince everyone who doesn't want to play WoW to play a game that is designed to be very similar. It never made any sense.
But I guess if you are a business exec, and you are risk averse, and lazy, you don't mind any of that. You just say "WoW makes money please make me one if those." That is not how creativity and innovation work though.
Big tech businesses always suffer from lack of creativity but most importantly they often lack a central product vision where someone can say “no”.
What happens usually is some middle tier exec (or big name customer if B2B) will say, “hey did you see Snapchat new stories feature? We should do something like that” and then without careful customer research, or a product leader connecting it to an overarching vision, the devs just start work on it and it rolls out because it’s just there.
Everyone needs something to do and everyone loves new features right?
Blindly copying some other company’s new features or UI patterns, and pigeonholing it into an app without cohesive product-wide strategy (aka connecting it to what customers already like about your service but even better) is always the sign the company has entered mediocrity. Largely a talent issue and execs who don’t really care about long term product dev. People just looking at generic growth charts and hoping they go up and then buying other companies when their own teams can’t hack it, hoping they can seed some life, without fixing the root causes.
> Um, no, people who play WoW already play WoW, and you are really trying to convince everyone who doesn't want to play WoW to play a game that is designed to be very similar.
Is that really the goal though? You can have a successful MMO without killing wow. Warhammer Online, Guild Wars 2, etc. were all great games from the business perspective.
>Warhammer Online, Guild Wars 2, etc. were all great games from the business perspective.
OP said:
>all these mmos were popping up saying they were the "WoW killer"
Guild Wars and WHO weren't positioned as WoW killers. They were positioned as WoW alternatives that prioritized or PvP or had an endgame that revolved around PvP. Which is probably why they did well - they offered something that WoW wasn't good at instead of trying to eat WoW's lunch.
Lord of the Rings Online, Archeage, Tera, Wildstar, Kingdoms of Analur, City of Heroes, The Matrix Online are all from that era of every MMO trying to be the WoW killer and needing to supplant WoW for their business model to work.
What's funny is WoW has declined so much but is still clearly a viable business, but I'm sure things like LOTRO, City of Heroes and Tera peaked at higher levels than current WoW. But the WoW of their time was on like 10-12million subs so that was a failure.
It's something that does work in other industries. If fantasy books are big you pay someone to write another fantasy book. If people start buying crossovers, you build a crossover.
The difference is that these are replaceable, consumable or temporary. With 'platforms', it's not enough to make something similar to something that someone likes, you have to make something that displaces something someone likes. How someone spends their leisure time is a limited, valuable resource.
In the case of social network platforms, you have to do more than than convince someone to switch one person at a time. Using one social network platform over another is a group decision and you have to convince an entire group to switch at the same time. It does me no good to switch platforms if the people who I interact with are still using the old one.
This means you need more than just a better product; you need some inciting event that forces entire groups of people off the old product at the same time. Something like that product deciding to destroy the tools people use to access it...
Blizzard spent $100,000,000 building the first version of WoW. They captured most of the other MMO players. Every company that claimed to be the next "WoW killer" had a budget that was basically "3 bent paperclips and some bellybutton lint". No one was willing to make the content.
> It's interesting everything trying to be TikTok. As a user, if I wanted TikTok i'd use TikTok. I don't want TikTok, so I don't use TikTok.
> ...
> It's sad when every tech company tries to replicate another companies features ditching the very thing which their users originally joined them for.
I wonder if we might give this a name like "tradegy of the social networks".
It's easy to see how a company, like Meta/Instagram can choose between keeping their own smaller market, or taking half the tiktok market by transforming their app to reels. They can't do both, as nobody would install a new app.
For the users this suck, as the total market is now smaller, meaning less choice and diversity.
You are right, it probably generalizes to other industries as well.
Say you have a shop and brand that sells chocolate cake; but a competitor appears that sells ice cream, and their market turns out to be 10 times bigger than yours.
You could try to make a new shop, selling ice cream, but the lack of brand awareness might make it never take off.
So instead you turn your chocolate cake shop into an ice cream shop, and use your existing customer awareness to catapult you into taking half that market.
Good for you, since you now have half of a 10 times bigger market.
Bad for the customers, since they now lose the choice between cake and ice cream.
Ok, maybe the part about "using your existing brand" is where social networks are a bit different from other industries.
There are hundreds of companies that could create a good social network, but the hard part is getting a big enough user base going.
Probably this is less of an issue in the cake industry.
This has happened before. I joined FB and Twitter when they were new, and loved the interaction with people I knew, people in my city and some very few online-only acquaintances. Both over time pushed people into following random people they have no real connection with, and that is now how they work.
You want some experience, but then you describe how Youtube is forcing you to click through shorts and BS as that.
I think power users should give up on direct interaction with internet. With youtube you can have a scripts that download videosm, and filter out shorts, ads and other garbage. With news you can just print everything on laser printer... Spotify should be exported as bunch of MP3 files...
It is very easy to hire some English speaking assistant in India or Philippines, or have cron jobs that does tedious work for you. I think today, if you see ad on web, or you are directly exposed to some shifty behavior like Reddit does, it is major red flag for your lifestyle. Like when you live in an apartment without proper ventilation or with toxic fumes.
i (at least), as a power user, don't want to work for every small thing in my life. my free time gets spent on hobbies and friends, not on fixing the broken web. if i can use those tools with low friction, i will, if not, i will stop doing it entirely.
> It is very easy to hire some English speaking assistant in India or Philippines, or have cron jobs that does tedious work for you.
Mate, can I interest you in a bit of GPT? We got 3.5 and 4, good shit, you don't need to hire someone. The newsfeed is not a critical task, AI will suffice.
The solution to social media companies behaving badly once they have users locked in may not be to lock yourself into another unprofitable company's closed ecosystem that's temporarily free.
They have a point, though. In my honest opinion, more than 50% modern apps and services I've used - including e.g. Spotify, or pretty much every e-commerce site - have UI/UX strictly inferior to that of MS Access. Less functional, less ergonomic, less integrated, less useful.
A lot of UI and design work that people think is creative, making a positive contribution, is actually spending millions of dollars on removing and reducing value delivered to the users relative to cheaper or near-free alternatives.
Sometimes it's even funny. How many startups are explicitly or implicitly trying to be a replacement for some internal Excel spreadsheet? How many of them realize that their offering would work strictly better if it was distributed as an Excel spreadsheet or plugin instead of an SPA?
But it's not about utility, it's about control. Driving users through funnels, putting them on flows that minimize actual creative or maintenance work for you, locking them in and bleeding dry with subscriptions.
I think web browsers need to get back to basics and do their original job as "The User's Agent" rather than what they are today: Instead of being a tool to fetch and display hyperlinked text, they've morphed into this API platform built for web companies to control down to the pixel what users see in their browser window.
Today browsers barely give you a few blunt tools to control your own browsing experience: Javascript on/off, Styles on/off, and so on. I want a browser that 1. fetches YouTube's HTML, 2. understands it to be essentially a bunch of links to video URLs, and 3. present me a simple list of those video URLs that I can click to watch or download. I don't want my browser to act against me by being a platform where YouTube executes god-knows-what on my system to render everything the way YouTube wants and to show me things that YouTube wants and push content that YouTube wants to push. Put the user back in control.
Same for Reddit. Browser should fetch Reddit's HTML, realize it's essentially a list of links, and simply display those links, ignoring all the other shit that comes down in the site's HTML, CSS, and JS.
I realize that step #2 above is hard and probably magic at this point. But that's the direction I'd like to see browsers go. Stop adding even more APIs that companies can use to control my browser.
It’s how they’ve been taught to attract younger users. Cool new video app work to attract teens, we buy cool new video app.
There’s a relationship between how social- or video-centric an app is and how well short form video fits into their mix. You can’t shoehorn it in. Not least if you feel obliged to because you paid some ludicrous sum to tout the name.
For example, short form video feels ass-y on Reddit. It feels okay on YouTube, even if you don’t engage with it.
It's roughly analogous to a tire company producing a lemon of a tire that needs constant repairs, then acquiring a chain of repair shops, Revenues are up, engagement with brand are high. The company seizes on those metrics, refusing to acknowledge the downside: the tires are bad products, which could easily tarnish the long term reputation of the company. But who cares? They have a steady trickle of income from their customers. It's a gamble, but lucrative in the short term.
Short term thinking makes money, but dooms the brand to an uncertain future.
I only use Spotify for music, and recently, my homepage was all podcasts and audiobooks, with only 1 or 2 lines of recommendation for music. Spotify, please stop! You’re literally turning your homepage into something that is unusable for me!
>Not shorts but similar is I used Spotify for many years then it started forcing Podcasts on me as Podcasts where the hot thing. On my homepage where I had music which was relevant to me I had to hunt around to find my music as my homepage was full of podcasts I had no interest in so eventually cancelled my membership.
Back when I got my car, I installed an Android Auto head unit and justified a Spotify subscription because I could easily navigate the AA app and play any music I wanted.
I had a major breakpoint one day driving home from work, and there was *no* music on my main page anywhere. I had to scroll 3 full pages down to get past all the podcasts they were trying to get me to listen to. After that I just canceled my sub and went back to buying/downloading my music, 2007-style.
Because they want to force the content on you. It's not the goal that you can choose to enjoy TikTok-like short videos. You can already do that. They want to mix the videos into your feed so that you get caught in the net, like they already do on their app.
It’s likely that very few Reddit actually users want short form video. And that the acquisition was mostly for the user base which they then tried desperately to hold on to.
So the obvious answer is to create a standalone service… which it was before they acquired it.
And it's harder to block ads/sponsored content. And they can send annoying push notifications that lots of people don't know how to disable. Dark patterns all the way down.
I tried to official app recently, and while I did figure out how to remove ads using ReVanced, I don't think I managed to get the notifications I wanted (replies) without notifications I didn't want.
Using tiktok without the app is also an interesting experience. I was perfectly happy with the mobile website, but they recently started limiting how many results you can see and putting more "install the app" banners up.
> Look at their hilariously terrible acquisition of Dubsmash for $50 million
gah that's frustrating. they could have bought apollo for 10 million probably. (in his own words that would have been life changing money) but instead they go down a darker path.
I remember few forums I was in a long time back, and all of them went offline and all its content is gone, so yeah there would always be this risk with a user maintained forum.
> It looks like you’re part of one of our experiments. The logged-in mobile web experience is currently unavailable for a portion of users. To access the site you can log on via desktop, the mobile apps, or wait for the experiment to conclude.
Wow. Most companies at least have the grace to allow users to opt out of these kind of experiments via a "labs" kind of configuration.
Doesn't make it appropriate at all but since they're testing "will the average user put up with this crap" restricting to just people who went out of their way to go into settings and enable labs would yield really biased results.
No self-awareness that running such a test ya know might make you the bad guys though.
I mean the other way around. Sure, bully your users by default but let them opt out via a somewhat hidden setting. If they use the setting instead of installing the app you have your result.
It's still not quite what the experiment is designed to test. How many people who opt out when given the ability would stick around when not given the ability?
If they make opting out difficult (ie. You go to a page in settings that you have to directly link to because you’re “signed out” in the main app) then that wouldn’t skew the results that significantly, while still providing an escape hatch that isn’t “wait for this to be finished”.
They do – there is a beta option in preferences that is unticked by default that lets you opt into experiments. However it seems to me they just kinda forgot about it?
I've subscribed to the beta experiments years ago, before the dark patterns started emerging and I was actually looking forward to any changes, and you're absolutely right, it is totally abandoned. The subreddit has just become a place for people to vent their frustrations and to be completely ignored by the admins.
I get wanting to test the hypothesis that disabling logged-in mobile web will drive app downloads, but the user experience a critical flow you used to use went a way for no apparent reason, and workarounds also went away. It would feel like you're going crazy or your device/IP got banned, somehow.
They accidentally tipped their hand with this. Everyone suspected, but it's basically confirmed that they're pushing to get mobile users onto the first-party app.
I have been in this A/B test group and I have been in the A/B test group that tries to show a TikTok style feed (one that gets new content based on the content you spent time observing) rather than a normalized upvote based one.
Without old.reddit.com, I would have not used reddit. I think it is important to never comply with these forced changes.
I think there is a larger discussion on professional ethics to be had. Is it ethical to implement dark patterns and "force" users into behavior or to degrade experience, not as a cost saving measure, but as an effort to force compliance?
We implement these things we would probably not tolerate ourselves. We implement ads but use ad blockers. We try to force app usage but allow old.reddit.com for ourselves. How is that ethical?
While I do not agree with the trend, especially how it's currently going, I think this is how Reddit leadership (and many other C-level/PM people of other brands like YouTube) view it: the site isn't a place to choose what to see, it's a consume consume consume kind of thing.
Similar to YouTube removing granularity levels for filtering videos on channels, it's not a content library. It's not even a video rental store. It's a movie theater. Sit down, watch what's on today, move on.
That's not the attractive part of TikTok-style feeds for business leadership: it requires you to engage with exactly one thing at a time. And you don't decide what that one thing is, and they can make it an ad.
It's not a movie theater, it's a TV station. As long as the thing you're looking at is compelling enough to stay after they slap you in the face with an advertisement every few seconds (every 8-30 seconds, on my Instagram reels feed right now), you'll just keep doing it. As long as the commercials aren't too long or obnoxious, you won't change the station.
I'm always surprised by the sheer amount of ads on Instagram. TikTok barely shows me any ads, even through prolonged periods of me using the app. Using Instagram is pain with the constant amount of identical ads being shoved down the pipeline.
This would make me suspicious, and my first assumption would be that the ads are hidden as fake content. On reddit it's quite obvious, when there's yet another /r/funny post about some (for example) "funny" Coke bottle thing or some other brand. Lots of those kinds of posts, actually. Also a lot of quite obvious fake engagement-encouraging posts, such as the many question reddits with thread-creating questions (/r/AskReddit comes to mind, a large subreddit also shown on the frontpage when I'm not logged in) that even look and sound like they were planned and designed (and they all have a similar vibe, as if coming from the same source).
Modern ads are not the obvious type that are marked as such. It's more like product placement and a bunch of other less obvious methods.
I’m almost positive that Instagram also has those sort of embedded promotions/ads, which are generally done outside of the official platform. But they also have a metric shitton of actual ads, within their own platform, that they queued up.
They're either hidden extremely well, I'm oblivious to them or they're not there as much I'd say.
Most of the things I get on TikTok are, I would argue, genuine content that someone made because they wanted to or is following along a trend that is ongoing. I don't get a lot of people showing off a product, and often when they do it's for stuff I'm interested in and I'm already following them for.
Perhaps its a matter of diversity. Instagram feels very monotone in its ads: bottom barrel mobile games or brands trying to sell me their garbage I don't need nor would be interested in. TikTok on the other hand feels less monotonous in what I get shown.
I want both. I want the old.reddit.com UI, but I would like to have algorithm curated feed. I am sick and tired of all the USA politics on there. I've added a lot of the political subreddits to my filters, but that just means sometimes when I browse r/all I just get a blank page since every single post on that page was from political subreddit.
I've been wondering if I'm in some experiment sometime as well. Sometimes my r/popular will be filled with content from niche subreddits I don't follow with barely any upvotes. The content is generally bad. Seems like a failed attempt at a "for you" page (and then I would just have browsed my own frontpage with subs I follow..)
But if I refresh, it's back to "expected" content. So weird.
I mean... It's not ethical. What discussion needs to be had? If "we" don't like doing those things, why don't "we" find a job doing something we believe in?
Sorry to sound hostile- I think your implicit inclusion of me in your "we" got my back up. Do you personally work on building ad tech or implementing dark patterns? Do you feel you have no alternatives that are accessible to you?
"When political leaders set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become more important. It is hard to subvert a rule-of-law state without lawyers, or to hold show trials without judges. Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labor." -- Timothy Snyder (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F75dhfkXjw8)
As engineers we are building these systems, such as ad tech and personal data markets, that we do not wish to participate in. We (and if you're back is up, then in all likelihood you) are responsible for the world we are creating.
As engineers we have an ethical responsibility to build a world we wish to live in.
As a class of people exercising power together, we can use that power to make a world we want to live in. When we implement systems that sell personal data we disempower ourselves and empower those who benefit from making the world a worse place.
Right, but actually I chose the job I'm doing now because I believe it's good for the world. I've put a lot of hard work into bootstrapping a renewable tech company, and made sacrifices to do so. That's why I felt annoyed at the implication.
"Vote with your feet" is probably a more realistic strategy for enacting this kind of change, so to deny that there are software jobs that are not part of the problem is a bit defeatist. I'd be all in favour of a general strike on building adtech, though I personally couldn't participate.
I am absolutely blown away by the number of subs that have gone private and shocked at some napkin math of how many total subscribers are affected.
Further, the Discord is well, finally getting a bit too riled up to hear coherently, but is easily the largest live, wholesome gathering of people I've participated in a live event with. And on top of that, numerous people are signing up for Matrix and joining the bridged room.
Lots of conversations about what platforms will go down this same route.
I use Apollo to read Reddit, but mod using desktop web.
Definitely the Apollo and handling of the API changes is annoying.
But this was much more a straw that broke the camel’s back thing from a mod perspective.
I’ve mentioned this before but I am on the mod team for r/portland and the Reddit admin has been terrible at providing tools and support for serious content mod problems and straight up platform abuse.
There was an incident where we had someone who stuck out as disturbed say they would be carrying out a mass shooting event.
There are a lot of problematic posts but this one was so subtly wrong and the second post from the user, rewording it from another pac NW sub.
IIRC, at the time there was no way to report a content type problem like this to the Reddit admin. The content reporting UX was a dark pattern, seemingly purposefully or thoughtlessly designed to avoid allowing mods to report this kind of concern.
I found a category to report it to anyway, and had to follow up multiple times to get any confirmation that an actual person had received my report.
When I finally did get a reply, the message was a short form letter, providing the least possible commitment to addressing the concern. It was just a terrible showing. I recall discussing this specific instance w other portland mods and how much of a bummer it was to not have the company’s support on such a serious problem.
But much more pedestrian of a concern has been astroturfing. There has been a persistent effort to highlight news and article headlines intended to divide people along racial and economic lines.
It is ~ the same playbook used in targeted ads on Facebook leading up to the 2016 presidential election. This has been going on _years_, and it is no secret.
It got to be so bad, at one point I emailed YC managing director and Reddit board member [1] Michael Seibel, about the problem and still got no reply.
While Portland is a large city sub and likely has unique unaddressed moderation challenges inherent to it, I imagine there are many stories from the all-volunteer moderators in large subs who have been let down in various ways by Reddit.
I wouldn't say unique, r/bayarea has been a dumpster fire for a long time now. r/sanfrancisco followed suit a few years after that. I won't miss the toxicity they bring to Bay Area discourse at all.
Wow! Reddit as a business does a disservice to mods by not compensating them for the effort they put in to keep these communities safe and functional.
Also, this entire thing about the API has made me feel that there is a future for decentralized apps, where money in the forms of tokens can exchange hands between - content creators, mods, consumers and those that help run the network, without a central entity consuming all the profits.
>Wow! Reddit as a business does a disservice to mods by not compensating them for the effort they put in to keep these communities safe and functional.
No one is forcing us to mod. We mod because we value the communities we mod and like being active parts of them. I don't want Reddit to pay me, it isn't a job, it's a passion and a hobby.
Why couldn’t the third party apps just ask the user to provide their own api key?
It’s how chatgpt works, what is the pushback with this? I heard Apollo requires the app to communicate with an Apollo server. So are the Apollo devs mad they are now being charged for their data stream?
That is how it worked already, apps made requests through the users OAuth creds and rate limits were specified by unique OAuth cred and App combo. The new system is just each app having global rate limits, after which they have to pay. Getting an API key requires submitting a written application to reddit and seemingly precludes "I want to use a third party app".
The Reddit API changes are hyper-focused on killing 3rd party mobile apps.
Most mod tools should be unaffected simply because they fall well-inside the free usage limits. As for the remaining mod tools? Reddit admins have even resorted to making explicit promises to fix those if they break (probably just by exempting them from API limits).
But most (if not all) Reddit moderators are also reddit power users, some of the biggest power users too. And power-users as a whole dislike the direction reddit is moving. Even if they don't use the 3rd party mobile apps themselves, they see the writing on the wall. They typically use old.reddit.com, which hasn't really seen any updates in the last 5 years and it seems likely that it will be next on the cutting block.
So even if their mod tools aren't going to be effected, moderators have decided to draw the line here and make a stand.
Those 3rd party apps have mod tools built in that have been requested for years by moderators and never implemented by reddit.
The official apps and tooling is paltry in comparison, and rarely used because 3rd party tools have done the job. Even basic things like mod queue in the mobile apps is not a thing in the official app.
“Mod tools” in the way it’s been defined by Reddit is an extremely small category of apps which doesn’t adequately cover the tools mods actually use to do their unpaid job.
Reddit has committed to fixing this, sure. But they’ve also said that for the last few years and ignored the most basic of features so why should mods trust that they’ll actually stick to their promises this time, when they haven’t for many, many years?
I'm mostly worried about how long this can last and whether it will have the intended effect. It's a huge community rallying point but Reddit has clearly shown it does not care about the community's opinion.
> I am absolutely blown away by the number of subs that have gone private
really?!?!? I find that surprising given that something like <1% of the subreddits have gone private. Are you blown away because it's so few? Honestly, given that mods have the power and people with no life love to mod like 10s-100s of subreddits, this could be something like a protest of 100s of people who happen to control lots of subreddits.
Honestly, these mods only have the power to do this because other people don't care enough to deal with the bullshit that mods have to. While reddit needs mods, it doesn't necessarily need these mods.
It may only be <1%, but many, many subreddits are barren, unmoderated, entirely inactive wastelands. I would assume that if you only consider subreddits with actual content being regularly posted, the percentage is significantly higher.
Counting subreddits is meaningless as a stock percentage. For example, there are millions of subreddits, but only 150k or so even have any activity at all. A small percentage of those are responsible for most activity.
The number of users impacted by the (very popular) subs that have gone dark looks in the region of almost... everyone.
What will reddit look like without r/pics? Without r/funny? Without r/Music, t/aww, r/todayilearned, r/explainlikeimfive, r/DIY? Etc.
Less than 1% of all subs are going down, but it's substantially comprised of subs that matter the most, appeal to the largest number of users and literally have characterised the site as a whole for over a decade.
I'm the mod of a small subreddit [1] with a few thousand members. Today I've spun up a Discord server [2]. Personally I've had a guts full of the banners trying to force the Reddit mobile app down my throat. It sucks it's a shitty app. Just no.
I don't like how Discord is a walled garden however it seems like Reddit too is also becoming a closed platform. I might as well go for the company that can actually build a great experience and Discord is miles ahead with their UX and people seem to love it.
There's so many places you could take your community that aren't another VC-backed SV startup well on its way to trying to be the next TikTok or whatever (see the Discord username change fiasco).
Try Discourse, or Zulip (disclaimer: I used to work there), or Mastodon, or spin up your own forum using any number of self-hostable solutions. Try anything but Discord. Future you will thank you when Discord is the one in the news some future day.
I dislike how sync Discord is, too. I mean, I don't have time to sit here and chat with people for hours. That is why I'm on HN and Reddit. I read, give it a thought, post some good comments (plus a couple of shitposts) and then I get off my computer. I come back later to check on my responses.
Discord just doesn't work for me. I'm not going to scroll through hours of chat, and I'm not going to sit there and watch the chat rehash the same discussion people had hours ago.
I have things to do... kids to take care of, a house to clean, groceries, dinner, places to go, etc.
If Discord tacks on a layer of forum-like discussions besides the chat... It might take over a chunk of current reddit-focused communities.
At least for me, personally, that would supply the only thing I still use Reddit for, some of my hobbies have communities on Reddit + Discord and I participate in both, if Discord provided a discussion board to allow a more asynchronous communication I would ditch Reddit completely.
It seems to have something like this. I'm in the CloudFlare community Discord and there seem to be some channels which are message boards. Crappy message boards, though. Just like Slack with threads, I haven't seen evidence of a chat platform adding meaningful async communication that doesn't feel tacked-on.
I'm considering them now. I tried kbin yesterday and it seemed very slow. I doubt I'll be able to get enough of a critical mass to make it work but it might be worth a shot. Certainly a torrent like forum system is nicer than yet another walled garden.
650 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 360 ms ] threadIts not like the stock market is littered with social media website corpses or anything...
And that includes retirement funds and such, especially the general ones that follow indexes of various types.
Unlike the API change though, I think they do risk losing users with this who still see ads and provide some return.
I know what they are thinking, but (setting aside the whole enshittification thing) it makes me sad to see yet another long term sacrifice for some quick profit. It makes me not want to invest in them.
I made it a matter of principle to not use the Reddit app. Even if they removed all ads and made it an acceptable user experience, I'll never use the app as long as they are harassing me about it.
It's simple. Don't reward bad behavior.
Sometimes, denying obnoxious people something they want means denying yourself something you want.
The people who do the real contributing—posting, modding, defining the culture and building the communities that Reddit benefits from—are, as far as I can tell, more likely to get a lot angrier about abusive corporate nonsense, simply because they're more invested.
The more invested you are, the more screwed you feel. That's something that a person like Huffman is incapable of grasping, to his company's detriment.
I don't think the blackout alone will end Reddit. I don't think any one thing will end Reddit. I think, similar to Twitter, that it'll be a series of things: indignities large and small that successively alienate the people who matter most to these companies whether the C-level/marketer types realize it or not.
And at some point, similar to what I expect will happen to Twitter, Reddit will simply no longer be relevant in the way it once was. Whether they understand why is another question, but to me, it's always been clear.
tl;dr: Reddit the company is just a dumb pipe. Reddit as we think of it is a culture and community. That culture and community is defined by a relatively small collection of people who are on there because they care. When enough of them get disgusted enough to go elsewhere, Reddit—both the company and the community—will cease to exist in any meaningful capacity.
I suspect strongly that these people have been purged already over the past 2-3 years. You simply don't hear much about it, because de-platforming them muzzles most of them, and if anyone does complain elsewhere it's easy to smear them as Nazis or whatnot. I mean, they can't effectively defend themselves against that sort of lie when reddit has scrubbed their comment history from anyone else's view.
Fact is, the best people on Reddit have been leaving for many years. There have been many purges, of many scales. The fact you didn't hear about them helps demonstrate OPs point (their actual point, not the one you put in their mouth).
And those purges are just one thread in a long tapestry of disrespect towards moderators and users of the site. Spez in particular has been caught lying, editing people's comments, making false accusations, etc on many occasions.
Only some small groups were actually driven off.
Small groups and individuals can be extremely important. It's less about the raw numbers of 'how many <X> did we gain/lose' and more about 'what kind of tone are we setting'.
When Reddit allowed /r/the_donald to flourish, what sort of message did that send? When there was a purge in/of leftist communities, what sort of message did that send? Politically, what Reddit allows is actually quite narrow, and it's trending toward mainstream sanitized neoliberal center-right (aka 'advertiser-friendly').
When Reddit started to corral everyone into one shitty app by breaking the mobile web experience, what message did that send? And now, what message is being sent with this API cash-grab?
Reddit's positioning is constantly chafing against Reddit's core demographic. The people who operate Reddit don't understand what they want (aside from $$$), don't understand their customers/content providers, and now seem unwilling to even listen to their customers/content providers.
Many messages stacked up over the years eventually form a story. What's the story of Reddit?
Besides, its a question of scale. There are loads of people like myself who make effort-post/comments sporadically on a few different platforms. There is enough such people that there can be (and is!) several viable twitter-like platforms at the moment. There's no reason the same can't be true for reddit.
I wonder how hard it would be to have a series of bots that harvest posts from other social media sites, add a little 'human' LLM magic to it, and make it look like actual people are posting lots of content?
The forum software itself may be unfamiliar. Does it have better features than Reddit? Some do; others don't. Does the forum have really bizarre rules or conventions? Subreddits can too, but it seems to be less common. Will my first ten posts get held for moderation? They probably won't on my 17 year old Reddit account.
It would be nice to see a federated identity/reputation system take off though. I'm thinking of OpenID plus [some other technology that probably exists, but isn't popular] where any of many service providers or my own website can confirm my identity, then offer vouches from other forums along the lines of "Zak has been a member of [community] for 2 years, posted 473 times, and has not been banned as of [date]".
I think if you’re “in-the-know” and have grown with some of these high quality forums/communities for years, you’ll lose touch with understanding what new users need to join as the quality and depth of discussion become higher and deeper.
Say what you want about HN, but at least the contrarians bring out opposing views. The bigger reddit subs have a mob mentality that use to annoy me, and now scares me. People are itching for a chance to hate, and pile on from every angle. It's childish, naive, and most of all vindictive and bitter.
It has gotten way worse right? Or is it me getting older? Many subs are like sects with a razor thin point of view allowed that is shifting constantly. It feels like insane people are pushing every BS problem as a do or die proposition and that those are dominating.
I use Apollo to aimlessly scroll through Reddit (probably too much) and now I'll use that time to learn something and find other communities that are less disruptive.
There's a million ways Reddit could've gone that would've been less user hostile.
This is a great idea. I'm going to bulk edit then delete my old comments (I recall reading somewhere that editing them overwrites the original field in the database whereas deleting just sets a deleted flag).
Destroys the value that I've created for free for that shitheap, plus it's helpful to make doxxing me harder.
[1]: https://github.com/andrewbanchich/shreddit
* There are alternatives. Like for me it's Mastodon, IRC, SDF and the Tildes. Now there's this thing Lemmy bouncing around out there which is a straight up federated clone of Reddit. Are they all kind of different from Reddit yeah, are they smaller yeah, so what? The alternative is you can go help make them better. You can help create.
* None of this stuff is essential for life, work etc. Reddit is not an essential service. So why would it be such a big deal if you totally changed your media consumption habits to basically anything, like let's say just start reading one newsletter from one publisher you think is ethical, and that's it. Seems fine to me. Your world will keep on turning. You'll get more fresh air.
* I just don't feel that what the masses are doing is such a huge issue. Fuck em. I read stuff on and participate in a bunch of little communities now, still use Reddit too but will never use their app, I would absolutely survive if Reddit disappeared tomorrow.
Not trying to pick on you btw, just trying to address the mindset of "<insert dickhead Internet site here> has all the users and therefore is the only option." I just feel like this is all much ado about nothing. Reddit's not a big deal. Let it burn, let it shine, let it do whatever, life's gonna go on and as humans we're creative so if they suck we'll find better things to do.
i installed instagram in december and it’s so much easier to make friends. I feel in touch with what’s going on in the community
Reddit is probably among the least sticky social media sites because of it.
(Although it's been a while now; the user hostility is just too much).
Considering making it back let’s see
A friend recently deleted all his apps and he asks me I just email him if I want to talk. I'm just not gonna do that. I barely remember to email my work people.
Interesting point.
> A friend recently deleted all his apps and he asks me I just email him if I want to talk. I'm just not gonna do that. I barely remember to email my work people.
Oh. You have zero self-awareness. Got it.
Since you can't figure it out yourself -- you are doing that first thing in that second thing. Your poor friend.
Not wanting to jump through hoops for someone you don't necessarily care that much about ain't 'zero self awareness'
It helps me trim down 'friends' who might not be real friends.
I tend not to be the person who tends to bother other people constantly even after getting signals that they don't want to interact with you. Are you?
That's something this strategy helps to trim out. Who I want to talk to and jump through hoops for, and whom I don't.
If you put them below “work people”, they’re not a friend. Or rather, you’re not a friend.
That's something this strategy helps to trim out. Who I want to talk to and jump through hoops for, and whom I don't.
---
Yea, my “true” friends will contact me anywhere, but it’s nice to have a small network of people I know that I can invite to stuff or even better yet invite me to events and activities. They may also become close friends at some point.
Internet misanthropes contributing to the trend for people to lose friends and acquaintances as they age.
i don’t in my hometown and didn’t go to school near my home state.
old friends get harder to see every passing year. it’s just incrementally harder to stay in touch given the geographical distance. i do text and visit when i can
Huh... I did this with Facebook and it basically changed nothing. I was forced to text my friends life updates, that was it.
Out of every social media site I've quit, Facebook seemed to have the lowest impact on my life(as long as I or my wife checked it every 1-3 weeks for Events).
It seems Facebook has an ability to make you feel popular without actually making you friends. I'd be skeptical of the 'friends' you make on Instagram. I've made a few over the last 6 years, but since quitting, I really only talk to 1-2 of them rarely.
gonna take your advice and cut off the people i’ve met because hospitalJail is skeptical!
Appreciate you providing insight into my life
And everyone I know in real life who uses Reddit on a daily basis is also in at least 2-3 FB groups. Be it a local mom/dad group, Costco group, the car they own, or something more niche
They’re not big Zuckerberg fans but they’re much more accepting of him making billions than the Reddit shareholders
FB groups also utilize mods who work lots of hours for free. So those who say Reddit cannot IPO because of the free labor are wrong
People can dislike two things at once, and it doesn’t need to necessarily be said. Three, even, if they’re feeling frisky.
Unless there’s a post specifically about Reddit and Facebook, then you shouldn’t expect people to even bring up Facebook. It’s at best barely relevant.
The outrage from users that Reddit is trying to do what everyone in the tech industry does makes no sense
And furthermore, if they give up the IPO focus, let’s say they don’t do the obvious and sell to Meta
What do they do? Layoff 80% of employees? Cut down the servers? Obviously if they are going to screw over the investors, no one will give a penny to another funding round
If, theoretically, the investors really don’t have a majority of votes, like someone here mentioned, the 2021 funding round was the last one, Reddit just burns it’s cash until it shuts down
Okay, and? Bytedance is also profitable. Apple is also profitable. Netflix is also profitable. They all do vastly different things to achieve profitability. What works for one company won’t necessarily work for others.
Just because another company is profitable does not mean it needs to be mentioned every time Reddit is, and that was my entire point.
People don’t even necessarily have a problem with Reddit trying to become profitable, but with the extreme disregard for their users they’ve shown in the last few weeks. Is that common between all the companies above? No. And certainly not to the extent Reddit has shown. And that’s what all these topics have boiled down to.
I’m sure if an article comes up which talks about Reddit and Facebook, then Facebook will come up in conversation. Unless that happens, there should be no real expectation for it to come up organically.
I've been recommending people to replace their content in Reddit with literal gibberish (from random generators), and then delete their accounts. Each person doing this makes Reddit data less valuable for LLMs, and eventually it means that not even Google, Amazon, Microsoft etc. would ever bother paying for API access.
I can't just delete. I've helped people there, and been helped. If my data is part of a corpus that betters humanity, than so be it. Hopefully one day that corpus will be released under a FOSS license.
Instead a better approach is to migrate whatever you deem useful in your Reddit history to another platform. And then remove it from Reddit, either by deletion or replacing it with gibberish.
You might also be interested in this text, as food for thought:
https://karl-voit.at/2020/10/23/avoid-web-forums/
It has been shared a few times here in HN, so I believe that plenty users here know about it.
When you search about a Neovim issue for example, often the solution is in an old Reddit thread. When you delete that, it will be gone forever.
And someone might say "I won't post it there", but once the person leaves some info in that site, they're encouraging others to interact with it, and generate more info there, in that walled garden, instead of somewhere else.
Note that the potential of information loss in Reddit does not come just from users deleting their stuff. It's also mods (including automod) and Reddit Inc. itself. One day Reddit will decide "we're going to flush out old content!", and here goes your info anyway, no matter if you deleted it or not. Or Reddit itself will go off, and the info in it will be lost, just like the info from the forums that Reddit itself killed. That's the main reasoning in the link that I've provided, and you know what, I think that the author is 100% right.
Also note that there are ways to reduce the information loss. People can - and IMHO they should - migrate that info, before removing it from Reddit.
I think that you're looking at the info present there _now_ in a short-sighted way, without realising the consequences elsewhere.
Agreed. In the past 2 days I've been overly annoyed as both days I've had multiple google queries dump me to seemingly useful threads that I can not see because of this foolish nonsense of shuttering communities in "protest".
I should also mention that Reddit archives exist, so those post will live on somewhere.
It's about 2TB in zstd compression, so finding the needles will be interesting - but it'll probably be much easier years from now.
Thank you for this info, it's fucking great. This means that the info loss for whatever came before March/2023 will be exactly ZERO.
This is mathematically backed.
In the game of prisoners dilemma if someone chooses to defect (bad behavior) rather than cooperate, and you choose to cooperate (reward bad behavior), bad behavior becomes a winning strategy, so you can expect even more bad behavior in the future.
That's the issue with operating on principle:
We HN users might be aware of this particular issue, but there's thousands of products that we use, because we're unaware or don't have the energy to fight.
So with all the exploitation, abuse and pollution that you indirectly support, why do you expect most users to draw the line at a weird website?
Not simple at all.
In any case, it looks like Reddit is going to join the ranks of long forgotten startups on a slide towards basically being empty shells of their former selves. More interesting to ask is where the users, content, and attention will go.
I never really cared for Reddit. The signal to noise ratio just feels wrong to me. Lots of people yapping about whatever and just not a lot of stuff that interests me. I lurk in a few sub-reddits but as communities they are pretty weak.
Might be a nice one for Elon Musk to buy. But I'd recommend he does that at a big discount. This company needs the same kind of shock therapy that Twitter received to have a realistic shot at surviving. Including a big layoff round probably. I get that people are still upset about what happened at Twitter, but they too were on a long slide towards irrelevance. It's debatable whether Musk's intervention is going to be good enough of course.
I was going to ban personal reddit use this week but I already broke that to read this topic and respond to the one dev that replied to it.
Also, the answer theoretically should be right below the question 'cause it's most relevant but I can see how no one could bring themselves to upvote this.
They seem to have broken the back button now on iOS/safari. I’m sure it wasn’t like that a few weeks ago.
It was extremely annoying for a site I've used for 12+ years to treat me like that. It did massively cut my usage of Reddit (which I would consider to be quite high), I primarily access it from my phone and I all but stopped using it for the week or so I was in the "experiment".
I’m not downloading the app. I am just not doing it. Period.
But surely Reddit has already calculated that “[search query] + Reddit” is traffic they don’t care about?
Nowadays Google is equally user-hostile and is happy to accommodate its peers.
I'd assume their goal with this isn't to convert the stragglers, it's to just close the gates to them so that they disappear from ad-view related statistics.
Edit: Further to this point, the Apollo app which everyone was talking about the other day has 50000 (fifty thousand!) paid users. Reddit has hundreds of millions of monthly users. They don't care about this minority of users, they just want the shitstorm to pass so they can move on. They also don't care that there's likely a small minority of users creating most actual good content, but it doesn't matter because the site can be floated entirely by meme spam bots and porn posts and still be massively profitable.
The number of times I lost a post because when I switched app or didn’t use my phone for a while reddit would just reset to the home page… I think they really didn’t realize how much the shitty UX would enrage people against them.
If they really believe in their forced-app strategy, they should bet the farm on it, not just on mobile, but everywhere.
Rationally, your approach is of course better, but the current narcissistic execs aren't going to do anything like that, whereas I can certainly see them doing something as stupid and out-of-touch as forcing everyone to use their app on both mobile and desktop.
No. What they'll be talking about is how Reddit had too many holes in its fence, and all its cows escaped. They'll then discuss all the advancement in cattle fencing and barn construction that happened in the 30 years since.
Why do people assume Reddit C-suite and investors are being stupid or narcissistic here? That would make sense if the relationship between them and the users was a friendly one. It isn't. It's adversarial. For Reddit (as well as Meta and other social media platforms), the users are cattle. Even worse than that - they're stochastic cattle. Nobody at the top cares if you or me are having a nice experience with the site/app. They care about the value extracted from us in aggregate. To them, it's an optimization problem, and it's been apparent for a long time now that the optimum point is usually "the most shitty and abusive possible version that still clears the 'fit for purpose' bar" (the end point is more obvious when you look at goods and services that have been around for a couple decades or more, and thus subject to decades of "value engineering").
It doesn't feel as bad when they're optimizing for future value extraction, but that time is past, and Reddit is currently squeezing value out of its cattle-base.
Is it sustainable? Since when did that question mattered to the captains of the industry? "Reddit" as a brand and company matters to the users; for its leaders and investors, it's just a money making instrument that takes time to mature, but exists to be squeezed, discarded and replaced by something else.
Like seriously. What is wrong with these people that designed this shit and how do we not have an alternative.
On a computer I see no benefits from any of the redesigns compared to old.reddit.com. I work a lot with Typescript and also React myself, and I love the language, so it's not because I dislike that sort of thing, but I think a list of links with comments just works better without being put into a virtual DOM or even just JS. HN is the perfect example of that, there has been a lot of hobby JS frontends from people, but they all work worse than the real deal and somewhat hilariously they work better than reddit's professional attempts. Now I get why reddit wants to move away from the page-reload. They want a lot of the SoMe interactivity, like their silly chat and so on, but I'm not sure who would ever want a Facebook with total strangers instead of people you actually talk with. I sure don't.
There were posts on reddit about the most toxic work culture there i remember with drugs and bizarre politics straight out of some san fran sitcom.
And some quite funny posts on just how grotesquely "my first react project" the whole code base was, and still is. These people are absolutely clueless. They nuked the whole "new reddit feedback" forum with posts pointing out just how bad the whole thing was, like pulling tens megabytes of starter boilerplate in production and loops with script loads inside of them that could grind a powerful computer to a halt.
I just hope it flies under the radar enough that Google don't start banning accounts for using it. I don't log in to the Youtube app for this reason, but I'm sure there is a line in a EULA somewhere that means they could if they wanted to.
Which reminds me, i need to backup all my email...
What I like about the old UI is that I find it emphasizes the post titles instead of content. I *don't* feel inundated with images & videos, besides the little thumbnail. I usually just want to skim titles, not look at visual content, and I find that impossible in the new UI. And I find that it's easier to get at/see the comments than in the new UI.
EDIT: Forgive me, I’m cranky. Of course the communities resting on Reddit’s beach are themselves the castles. I’m so tunnel-visioned on the API aspect that only used that lens.
For a less popular opinion, I don't sympathize at all with the reddit moderators who are up in arms about the API problem. They have had full, unfettered control of their subreddits where their power is near absolute and they enjoy pushing their own views and punishments on anyone they don't like. But now that a higher power is enforcing their rules on them, they cry oppression (see u/awkwardtheturtle and the moderators of r/art). It is pure hypocrisy and almost hilarious to me.
I know not all moderators are the same, but with the way reddit is designed, power is only exercised in one direction and power abuse is unavoidable. The very culture of reddit at its core is flawed now and I think it is funny that only now, when the higher caste of redditors, who are in the minority, started to get affected that we see some calls for action.
You know, the best choice is not to do general socializing via web. Specialized discussions okay. Spend your leisure time at a pub or similar places with the regulars. And bring a book in case you don't anyone meet up that day. So much more fun and relaxing than trying to argue with strangers or wrestling with mods.
To be fair Reddit has an additional issue:
Whoever is the top mod is based on seniority. This sort of system tends to attract basement dwellers with no social skills (even if those are essential for a good mod), who are there just for the power.
If you save the world and then fart once in public, nobody will remember you as "the hero that saved the world". You'll be forever remembered as Mr. Fartman. And the same applies to any group of people.
Being a mod doesn't make you a good mod, not even a good person; you're bound to have a few piece of shit moderators, like awkwardtheturtle, godofatheism, millionsofcats, bardfinn and the likes. And when you remember "the mods" you'll remember those farts, and end blaming the rather decent big majority, who silently does their mod duties for the best of their communities. I sympathise with _those_ moderators.
When you keep selecting people for an specific behavior, you get a population biased towards that behavior. If you suddenly decide you want something else, then you have a problem.
about Apple. About everyone else though, there are no limits. Observational anecdata from rApple and HN.
But then one day I checked out of habit and I was back in.
But if they want to “ban” me from the site because I visit with my phone’s browser, so be it. Honestly they’d probably be doing me a favor. But I’m not downloading the stupid app.
For the time being I'm just going to reallocate my Reddit time to reading about my hobbies.
I just flat block it, but use workarounds when I rarely need to view Google results, may follow this same approach going forward.
Screen Time on iOS/macOS lets you override the clock but in a “snooze” style. It blocks me from habitually browsing the front page but lets me land there from search.
Right, which is why they should shut down the web site and instead force users to install an app (including on PCs). If they believe that strongly in users being required to use an official app, they should force this everywhere.
I unsubscribed from the 3D printing sub a while ago, because the good stuff didn't get upvotes, because they were not images, so nothing good would make into my home page.
The latest cool thing I discovered was on youtube of all places on the topic of conical slicing.
https://youtu.be/1i-1TEdByZY
Today, the closest you could ever get is somebody posting a picture of the support they made for their spooler, and people talking about this one design. What is much worse.
pcmasterrace is basically just "check out this pile of boxes of expensive stuff."
The home server / selfhosted subreddits are endless pictures of a wifi router, 2-bay NAS, and a small form factor PC sitting on a shelf (and in the case of the selfhosted subreddit, also screenshots of people's web dashboards for their home server which is almost entirely torrenting / media related.)
My local area subreddit is almost entirely photos of scenery, with little in the way of anything of substance like news or politics.
That definitely belongs in a textbook on absurd corporate decisions.
I thought you must have been exaggerating somewhere, but nope, that is exactly how it went.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubsmash
https://old.reddit.com/r/dubsmash/
Probably Reddit thought they were just buying a mailing list and a development team. So the cost should be compared to Reddit marketing's acquisition costs and Reddit HR hiring costs.
Maybe money had to be moved under whatever pretense.
Today's social media corporations are so fat with (venture) capital that they can, and do, spend that kind of money just to keep any potential competitors locked out. TikTok, the last social network that became truly big, was launched in 2016, seven years ago. Seven years without any new player entering the space. That's an eternity. I can promise you this wouldn't be happening without (very costly) interventions from above.
Modern tech capitalism doesn’t want to compete in the “let the best product win”-space. It’s just not enough money and making stuff is hit or miss. They want to own access and rent-seek. At least that’s my interpretation.
That's simply -not- capitalism.
The point is to show the contradictions of market liberalism, how they never fulfill their ideals and by necessity lead to the conditions under which we live. Communism simply says: let's live in a society without money, without a state, without class. Where one fishes in the morning, hunts in the afternoon, and debates in the evening. Where we live, produce, and labor in a social fashion, where people's basic sexual and physical needs are always attended to as the highest priority of the collective. Where each and every person is given the opportunity to pursue the fullest extent of what they can be as a person, to flourish as a human being.
Somewhere in here the Soviet Union fits in: for having the highest degree of sexual freedom, for guaranteed housing and jobs, for fair working hours and a living wage, for gender parity in all aspects of life. All at the expense of a vast police and security complex employed to crush potential dissent, and to use those political prisoners as a free pool of labor in order to compete with western late-capitalist states (which they failed to do).
The Dengists succeeded by simulating market capitalism to generate the industrial conditions necessary to move towards a more fully socialized state--the Soviet Union, on the other hand, was never willing to subject their backwards populations to industrial capitalism, which led to even greater violence in some respects. People wonder how far it will actually take them, we'll see...but the CCP seems to be uninterested in an internationalist movement.
I think that the basic propositions of Communism are mostly appealing, its just that people are not sure how to get there. We've had successes, like the Paris Commune, that were ruthlessly crushed by the state--they don't tend to last very long. Is there a way to achieve revolution without strict military disciplinary measures? After all, the hierarchies of an army nearly reproduce the hierarchies of capitalism with marked precision. Short answer, nobody knows, the French almost had a successful revolution in 1968, that failed, they spent many decades theorizing why, alternatives to an armed movement. Foucault, the great French theorist against disciplinarian social organization, became a neoliberal. Many of those who descend from these french thinkers became Neoliberals, like Jonah Peretti (who founded Buzzfeed) or Nick Land. You could also call them accelerationists, who believe that by accelerating the contradictions of capital one can bring down capitalist society faster, as it will end up crushing itself.
Everybody knows the system doesn't work, we're all sick of it, but nobody knows what to do about it. Everything else besides plain and simple labor organizing seems like a lost cause. Anybody who says anything else is usually confused or in someone else's pocket. We had a nearly international, decentralized protest movement only a few years ago that could've toppled multiple governments if the people were angry enough. You don't think the people won't get angry again?
1. Have an excellent business idea 2. ? 3. Profit!
Also why does reddit mobile site lag? Takes 5-10 seconds of the stupid icon before you see the text. Compare it to instant i.reddit or old.reddit.
Are they so incompetent that they cannot write a site that doesnt lag? Or they just dont care?
They don't seem to understand a couple key things, one of which is that if they can't make a website work, I will not install other things they make. They break trust.
Hacksaw Bob: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kZtN3XTk5w0 Whole series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOLArO56vjuqhmPDfbLGa...
Dubsmash had a sizable userbase with almost no overlap with Reddit's and their conversion rate appears to be less than 0.01%
Guess how long we lasted before being "brought into the fold".
Mo 1-3 is new owners finding all the buried bodies, and restructuring leadership with people they can trust
3-6 mos is learning who is valuable and who is not (overlap with months 1-3)
6-9 mos is predicting how customers will react to X change or Y Change
9-12mos is final legal review of changes, exit packages, PR statements,etc (especially is mass layoffs are involved)
12-18mos is execution time frame for layoffs, and restructure of the organization
After the first year is when people get fired.
Not many people got fired though, only a few managers (who to be fair, were a bit useless). Most others left "voluntarily" after the corp changes were made (you know, the ones that definitely weren't going to be made). It wasn't so bad though, we all got a good deal.
Is this really the kind of competition that made reddit quake in its boots? Like, I never heard of Dubsmash until now but this was still around the later years of Vine.
Reddit is an aggregator so from what I understand here, social media that encourages original creations/re-creations are a commodity, not competition. As seen by how most of the current front page at any given time has aggregated TikTok videos.
It is just a very tough business.
That depends on which theory about capitalism and its purpose you subscribe to - in your (and my) case social-democrat style capitalism (which was the dominant theory prior to the collapse of the USSR/GDR/Yugoslavia block) generally assumes a responsibility of the corporations towards society at large: paying fair and livable wages to employees (so that they can buy the products), paying proper taxes so that society can fund what's needed to give the corporation a chance at being successful (i.e. education of new workers, road and rail transportation, a fair court system), not laying off people for pure number games and invest a part of the profit to improve the corporation (invest into new machinery, R&D, or training the staff). Stock markets primarily serve as a way for corporations to raise money for investments.
Modern-day "neoliberal" capitalism however is a different beast. Basically, making money is a goal all on its own, with no rules and limitations on how to make it. As a result, we got "investment banks" "creating" insane amounts of money from thin air (and growing so large they threaten the financial stability of entire countries), everyone is constantly looking on how to squeeze those below him out of money on all levels, and if you got money you're free to do with it whatever way you please, including burning it or using it to snuff out a competitor.
I think the problems we're seeing today is that the government is just not doing its job (or more charitably, not moving fast enough to keep up) in regulating the industries _before_ the damage is done. And before the entrenched interests of the resulting megabillionaires can just pay the govt to look away for as long as they can milk this cow.
Reddit, you are replaceable. The moment you turn off old.reddit, I'm gone. I'd definitely admit I am addicted to reddit in it's current form but new reddit and the app are just too insufferable I'll happily give it all up and find somewhere else.
The only one that did was the short-lived Amazon original Betas, which had more irritating younger characters, yet for all of its memespeak it really did feel like it grokked the startup bubble culture well enough, especially since it was actually set in the SoMa of San Francisco, rather than Silicon Valley’s Palo Alto!
But yes it would be great to have the show nowadays with a fresh look at the current environment.
There's a long way to go before shorting can happen. If anything, Reddit are shorting themselves.
Not necessarily illegal, but I had thought that, for sure, one shouldn't boast about heavily discriminatory race-related factoids, even if they thought that it would be for a "good" cause.
Didn't they think what would have happened had they replaced the "black teens" in their press release with "white teens"?
Same as when a "cool" person goes anywhere, you don't monetize them, you monetize all the people they bring into the club, bar, theater, etc.
An example. https://www.npr.org/2021/07/01/1011899328/black-tiktok-creat...
Please don't focus on whether on not they should or should get credit or any political statements, focus on the fact that they are the ones that made the "cool" dances that the most followed two girls on TikTok used, which then went viral, which in turn made TikTok a bunch of money because those millions of views had ads played against them.
I think it's self-evident that hip hop is at least a trillion dollar phenomenon and that it started with black folks in the United States.
Still sounds racist, in its way. As in, why aren't the black kids seen as the boring, nerdish kids that will get to form the VC crowd themselves in 20 years' time?
Later edit: Reminds me of this Dave Chapelle skit [1], the part with the "white dude" whispering:
> Oh, my God, I think those black guys are gonna try to save us
It's just essentialist stuff.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ORzNgXgDqU&t=65s
That's a good question and if you're sincerely interested in understanding the answer, there's a long history of thought on the topic of black excellence in the context of racial oppression. You could start with W.E.B. Du Bois and the "Talented Tenth"
For the record, I'm assuming your questions are disingenuous, but answering in good faith for other readers who might interested.
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cr...
Thank you for the your recommendation.
Found it funny that one of the establishment's darling magazines, I'm talking about Foreign Affairs, has started doing the token racial thing when it comes to Du Bois by finding out that he had, indeed, written for them 70 to 80 years ago [1], and in the May/June issue they even re-published a July 1943 piece of his. No mention of his communism, of course, that would defeat the purpose of talking about race without really looking at what stands behind race.
[1] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/web-du-bois-doc...
I use Facebook mainly for hobby/owners groups these days as that's where a lot of them are. I sometimes use the market place. My feed is mainly my interests, motorbikes, local events, local cafes/restaurants etc etc. Then there's reels i never interact with which get forced on me every other week after clicking hide. The Reels are all short thumbnails of young girls of questionable age wearing little clothing in provocative poses/dances! They don't fit my usual browsing habbits, I don't interact with them but they force them on me as likely they'll gain lots of clicks from mid-thirty year old male demographic! I'm no prude but I don't want to see what look like children in my feed. We know why they do it though, they all likely get high clicks.
Youtube is the same except content more relevant to me feed. I use Youtube for longer form videos, travel, motor vehicles, tech. They still insist on forcing shorts in my feed. Mobile has got particularly bad as they mix shorts in the feed timeline as regular videos. AndroidTV Youbtube isn't so bad but they are slowly promoting shorts there to.
Not shorts but similar is I used Spotify for many years then it started forcing Podcasts on me as Podcasts where the hot thing. On my homepage where I had music which was relevant to me I had to hunt around to find my music as my homepage was full of podcasts I had no interest in so eventually cancelled my membership.
It's sad when every tech company tries to replicate another companies features ditching the very thing which their users originally joined them for.
I remember in the 2000s, all these mmos were popping up saying they were the "WoW killer". Um, no, people who play WoW already play WoW, and you are really trying to convince everyone who doesn't want to play WoW to play a game that is designed to be very similar. It never made any sense.
But I guess if you are a business exec, and you are risk averse, and lazy, you don't mind any of that. You just say "WoW makes money please make me one if those." That is not how creativity and innovation work though.
What happens usually is some middle tier exec (or big name customer if B2B) will say, “hey did you see Snapchat new stories feature? We should do something like that” and then without careful customer research, or a product leader connecting it to an overarching vision, the devs just start work on it and it rolls out because it’s just there.
Everyone needs something to do and everyone loves new features right?
Blindly copying some other company’s new features or UI patterns, and pigeonholing it into an app without cohesive product-wide strategy (aka connecting it to what customers already like about your service but even better) is always the sign the company has entered mediocrity. Largely a talent issue and execs who don’t really care about long term product dev. People just looking at generic growth charts and hoping they go up and then buying other companies when their own teams can’t hack it, hoping they can seed some life, without fixing the root causes.
Is that really the goal though? You can have a successful MMO without killing wow. Warhammer Online, Guild Wars 2, etc. were all great games from the business perspective.
OP said:
>all these mmos were popping up saying they were the "WoW killer"
Guild Wars and WHO weren't positioned as WoW killers. They were positioned as WoW alternatives that prioritized or PvP or had an endgame that revolved around PvP. Which is probably why they did well - they offered something that WoW wasn't good at instead of trying to eat WoW's lunch.
Edit: Rift is probably another good example, though less high-profile than SWTOR.
What's funny is WoW has declined so much but is still clearly a viable business, but I'm sure things like LOTRO, City of Heroes and Tera peaked at higher levels than current WoW. But the WoW of their time was on like 10-12million subs so that was a failure.
The difference is that these are replaceable, consumable or temporary. With 'platforms', it's not enough to make something similar to something that someone likes, you have to make something that displaces something someone likes. How someone spends their leisure time is a limited, valuable resource.
This means you need more than just a better product; you need some inciting event that forces entire groups of people off the old product at the same time. Something like that product deciding to destroy the tools people use to access it...
> ...
> It's sad when every tech company tries to replicate another companies features ditching the very thing which their users originally joined them for.
I wonder if we might give this a name like "tradegy of the social networks".
It's easy to see how a company, like Meta/Instagram can choose between keeping their own smaller market, or taking half the tiktok market by transforming their app to reels. They can't do both, as nobody would install a new app.
For the users this suck, as the total market is now smaller, meaning less choice and diversity.
Say you have a shop and brand that sells chocolate cake; but a competitor appears that sells ice cream, and their market turns out to be 10 times bigger than yours. You could try to make a new shop, selling ice cream, but the lack of brand awareness might make it never take off. So instead you turn your chocolate cake shop into an ice cream shop, and use your existing customer awareness to catapult you into taking half that market. Good for you, since you now have half of a 10 times bigger market. Bad for the customers, since they now lose the choice between cake and ice cream.
Ok, maybe the part about "using your existing brand" is where social networks are a bit different from other industries. There are hundreds of companies that could create a good social network, but the hard part is getting a big enough user base going. Probably this is less of an issue in the cake industry.
You want some experience, but then you describe how Youtube is forcing you to click through shorts and BS as that.
I think power users should give up on direct interaction with internet. With youtube you can have a scripts that download videosm, and filter out shorts, ads and other garbage. With news you can just print everything on laser printer... Spotify should be exported as bunch of MP3 files...
It is very easy to hire some English speaking assistant in India or Philippines, or have cron jobs that does tedious work for you. I think today, if you see ad on web, or you are directly exposed to some shifty behavior like Reddit does, it is major red flag for your lifestyle. Like when you live in an apartment without proper ventilation or with toxic fumes.
Mate, can I interest you in a bit of GPT? We got 3.5 and 4, good shit, you don't need to hire someone. The newsfeed is not a critical task, AI will suffice.
As for myself, I'll just stop using Reddit (largely have over the last year), and do something else with the free time.
A lot of UI and design work that people think is creative, making a positive contribution, is actually spending millions of dollars on removing and reducing value delivered to the users relative to cheaper or near-free alternatives.
Sometimes it's even funny. How many startups are explicitly or implicitly trying to be a replacement for some internal Excel spreadsheet? How many of them realize that their offering would work strictly better if it was distributed as an Excel spreadsheet or plugin instead of an SPA?
But it's not about utility, it's about control. Driving users through funnels, putting them on flows that minimize actual creative or maintenance work for you, locking them in and bleeding dry with subscriptions.
Today browsers barely give you a few blunt tools to control your own browsing experience: Javascript on/off, Styles on/off, and so on. I want a browser that 1. fetches YouTube's HTML, 2. understands it to be essentially a bunch of links to video URLs, and 3. present me a simple list of those video URLs that I can click to watch or download. I don't want my browser to act against me by being a platform where YouTube executes god-knows-what on my system to render everything the way YouTube wants and to show me things that YouTube wants and push content that YouTube wants to push. Put the user back in control.
Same for Reddit. Browser should fetch Reddit's HTML, realize it's essentially a list of links, and simply display those links, ignoring all the other shit that comes down in the site's HTML, CSS, and JS.
I realize that step #2 above is hard and probably magic at this point. But that's the direction I'd like to see browsers go. Stop adding even more APIs that companies can use to control my browser.
There’s a relationship between how social- or video-centric an app is and how well short form video fits into their mix. You can’t shoehorn it in. Not least if you feel obliged to because you paid some ludicrous sum to tout the name.
For example, short form video feels ass-y on Reddit. It feels okay on YouTube, even if you don’t engage with it.
And to nobody's surprise US tech will be primed to offer their TikTok clone.
Short term thinking makes money, but dooms the brand to an uncertain future.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotelling%27s_law
Back when I got my car, I installed an Android Auto head unit and justified a Spotify subscription because I could easily navigate the AA app and play any music I wanted.
I had a major breakpoint one day driving home from work, and there was *no* music on my main page anywhere. I had to scroll 3 full pages down to get past all the podcasts they were trying to get me to listen to. After that I just canceled my sub and went back to buying/downloading my music, 2007-style.
Can't they make a TikTok-like app with a subreddit as a backend? So ppl get same content but with a different front-end?
So the obvious answer is to create a standalone service… which it was before they acquired it.
This model does not fit for Reddit with its poor execution (old.reddit.com is still the best) and its user base.
More sites will split off and use the old.reddit.com code base.
How? Its not open source. And its just a frontend. How would people split it off?
gah that's frustrating. they could have bought apollo for 10 million probably. (in his own words that would have been life changing money) but instead they go down a darker path.
Open the `/etc/hosts` in your favorite editor (vim).
Enter this line: 127.0.0.1 reddit.com
(google of course is taking great pains to prevent that, cheerled by the DoH hans on HN)
Wow. Most companies at least have the grace to allow users to opt out of these kind of experiments via a "labs" kind of configuration.
No self-awareness that running such a test ya know might make you the bad guys though.
https://www.reddit.com/r/beta/wiki/index
https://www.reddit.com/live/x3ckzbsj6myw/
It was used during the redesign where they added thumbnails like 14 years ago, to allow people to see the new design before it got launched.
This was the birth of /r/beta
The subdomain is basically the same as old.reddit now, but I continued using the domain all this time for no reason.
The /r/beta subreddit was repurposed for beta testing, but has been abandoned for at least 8 years. I don’t know why they leave the subreddit active.
The subdomain I can only imagine was totally forgotten.
They accidentally tipped their hand with this. Everyone suspected, but it's basically confirmed that they're pushing to get mobile users onto the first-party app.
Without old.reddit.com, I would have not used reddit. I think it is important to never comply with these forced changes.
I think there is a larger discussion on professional ethics to be had. Is it ethical to implement dark patterns and "force" users into behavior or to degrade experience, not as a cost saving measure, but as an effort to force compliance?
We implement these things we would probably not tolerate ourselves. We implement ads but use ad blockers. We try to force app usage but allow old.reddit.com for ourselves. How is that ethical?
Similar to YouTube removing granularity levels for filtering videos on channels, it's not a content library. It's not even a video rental store. It's a movie theater. Sit down, watch what's on today, move on.
It's not a movie theater, it's a TV station. As long as the thing you're looking at is compelling enough to stay after they slap you in the face with an advertisement every few seconds (every 8-30 seconds, on my Instagram reels feed right now), you'll just keep doing it. As long as the commercials aren't too long or obnoxious, you won't change the station.
Modern ads are not the obvious type that are marked as such. It's more like product placement and a bunch of other less obvious methods.
I’m almost positive that Instagram also has those sort of embedded promotions/ads, which are generally done outside of the official platform. But they also have a metric shitton of actual ads, within their own platform, that they queued up.
Most of the things I get on TikTok are, I would argue, genuine content that someone made because they wanted to or is following along a trend that is ongoing. I don't get a lot of people showing off a product, and often when they do it's for stuff I'm interested in and I'm already following them for.
Perhaps its a matter of diversity. Instagram feels very monotone in its ads: bottom barrel mobile games or brands trying to sell me their garbage I don't need nor would be interested in. TikTok on the other hand feels less monotonous in what I get shown.
But if I refresh, it's back to "expected" content. So weird.
Sorry to sound hostile- I think your implicit inclusion of me in your "we" got my back up. Do you personally work on building ad tech or implementing dark patterns? Do you feel you have no alternatives that are accessible to you?
"When political leaders set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become more important. It is hard to subvert a rule-of-law state without lawyers, or to hold show trials without judges. Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labor." -- Timothy Snyder (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F75dhfkXjw8)
As engineers we are building these systems, such as ad tech and personal data markets, that we do not wish to participate in. We (and if you're back is up, then in all likelihood you) are responsible for the world we are creating.
As engineers we have an ethical responsibility to build a world we wish to live in.
As a class of people exercising power together, we can use that power to make a world we want to live in. When we implement systems that sell personal data we disempower ourselves and empower those who benefit from making the world a worse place.
"Vote with your feet" is probably a more realistic strategy for enacting this kind of change, so to deny that there are software jobs that are not part of the problem is a bit defeatist. I'd be all in favour of a general strike on building adtech, though I personally couldn't participate.
On the pros the moderation tools are amazing and bots are first class citizens. Events are really nice for organizing stuff, A+ code formatting.
Search is kinda bad but not worse than Reddit. They do have a posts thing now but it seems seldom used and not as nice as arbitrarily nested threads.
Further, the Discord is well, finally getting a bit too riled up to hear coherently, but is easily the largest live, wholesome gathering of people I've participated in a live event with. And on top of that, numerous people are signing up for Matrix and joining the bridged room.
Lots of conversations about what platforms will go down this same route.
Today is an okay day after all.
My understanding is that moderators are the most upset category by API changes, because they are losing some unique mod features from 3rd party apps.
Definitely the Apollo and handling of the API changes is annoying.
But this was much more a straw that broke the camel’s back thing from a mod perspective.
I’ve mentioned this before but I am on the mod team for r/portland and the Reddit admin has been terrible at providing tools and support for serious content mod problems and straight up platform abuse.
There was an incident where we had someone who stuck out as disturbed say they would be carrying out a mass shooting event.
There are a lot of problematic posts but this one was so subtly wrong and the second post from the user, rewording it from another pac NW sub.
IIRC, at the time there was no way to report a content type problem like this to the Reddit admin. The content reporting UX was a dark pattern, seemingly purposefully or thoughtlessly designed to avoid allowing mods to report this kind of concern.
I found a category to report it to anyway, and had to follow up multiple times to get any confirmation that an actual person had received my report.
When I finally did get a reply, the message was a short form letter, providing the least possible commitment to addressing the concern. It was just a terrible showing. I recall discussing this specific instance w other portland mods and how much of a bummer it was to not have the company’s support on such a serious problem.
But much more pedestrian of a concern has been astroturfing. There has been a persistent effort to highlight news and article headlines intended to divide people along racial and economic lines.
It is ~ the same playbook used in targeted ads on Facebook leading up to the 2016 presidential election. This has been going on _years_, and it is no secret.
It got to be so bad, at one point I emailed YC managing director and Reddit board member [1] Michael Seibel, about the problem and still got no reply.
While Portland is a large city sub and likely has unique unaddressed moderation challenges inherent to it, I imagine there are many stories from the all-volunteer moderators in large subs who have been let down in various ways by Reddit.
[1] https://www.redditinc.com/blog/reddit-welcomes-michael-seibe...
Did you report that to 911?
Also, this entire thing about the API has made me feel that there is a future for decentralized apps, where money in the forms of tokens can exchange hands between - content creators, mods, consumers and those that help run the network, without a central entity consuming all the profits.
No one is forcing us to mod. We mod because we value the communities we mod and like being active parts of them. I don't want Reddit to pay me, it isn't a job, it's a passion and a hobby.
I use third party apps exclusively, and will not be participating in Reddit after Apollo shuts down.
It’s how chatgpt works, what is the pushback with this? I heard Apollo requires the app to communicate with an Apollo server. So are the Apollo devs mad they are now being charged for their data stream?
Most mod tools should be unaffected simply because they fall well-inside the free usage limits. As for the remaining mod tools? Reddit admins have even resorted to making explicit promises to fix those if they break (probably just by exempting them from API limits).
But most (if not all) Reddit moderators are also reddit power users, some of the biggest power users too. And power-users as a whole dislike the direction reddit is moving. Even if they don't use the 3rd party mobile apps themselves, they see the writing on the wall. They typically use old.reddit.com, which hasn't really seen any updates in the last 5 years and it seems likely that it will be next on the cutting block.
So even if their mod tools aren't going to be effected, moderators have decided to draw the line here and make a stand.
The official apps and tooling is paltry in comparison, and rarely used because 3rd party tools have done the job. Even basic things like mod queue in the mobile apps is not a thing in the official app.
“Mod tools” in the way it’s been defined by Reddit is an extremely small category of apps which doesn’t adequately cover the tools mods actually use to do their unpaid job.
Reddit has committed to fixing this, sure. But they’ve also said that for the last few years and ignored the most basic of features so why should mods trust that they’ll actually stick to their promises this time, when they haven’t for many, many years?
really?!?!? I find that surprising given that something like <1% of the subreddits have gone private. Are you blown away because it's so few? Honestly, given that mods have the power and people with no life love to mod like 10s-100s of subreddits, this could be something like a protest of 100s of people who happen to control lots of subreddits.
Honestly, these mods only have the power to do this because other people don't care enough to deal with the bullshit that mods have to. While reddit needs mods, it doesn't necessarily need these mods.
The number of users impacted by the (very popular) subs that have gone dark looks in the region of almost... everyone.
What will reddit look like without r/pics? Without r/funny? Without r/Music, t/aww, r/todayilearned, r/explainlikeimfive, r/DIY? Etc.
Less than 1% of all subs are going down, but it's substantially comprised of subs that matter the most, appeal to the largest number of users and literally have characterised the site as a whole for over a decade.
[1] r/Redactle - https://redactle.net puzzle game | [2] https://discord.gg/VKnrnXev
Try Discourse, or Zulip (disclaimer: I used to work there), or Mastodon, or spin up your own forum using any number of self-hostable solutions. Try anything but Discord. Future you will thank you when Discord is the one in the news some future day.
Discord just doesn't work for me. I'm not going to scroll through hours of chat, and I'm not going to sit there and watch the chat rehash the same discussion people had hours ago.
I have things to do... kids to take care of, a house to clean, groceries, dinner, places to go, etc.
At least for me, personally, that would supply the only thing I still use Reddit for, some of my hobbies have communities on Reddit + Discord and I participate in both, if Discord provided a discussion board to allow a more asynchronous communication I would ditch Reddit completely.