I genuinely wonder if the people in charge of Reddit ever come around to places like this to read these sentiments. Hell, they actually only need to read actual Reddit posts to understand that many people are utterly disgusted by their tactics to try and force you onto their mobile app, they're upset at how slow the (default) site is, etc.
Maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe people will keep using it forever. But I doubt it. They've turned Reddit from something that had potential to exist for a long time into something closer to TikTok (which, even without the current drama, was never going to be more than a fad IMO). There are more efficient ways to get low-effort shitposts and memes than Reddit. Those who want that will move on, and the people who were interested in more than that are leaving now.
I have come to the conclusion that reddit is 2 apps/websites.
The first is a tiktok-esque waste of time, instant gratification meme machine. Everyone on this app uses the reddit native app and doesn't care about dark patterns. They would never know that reddit's app is shit, because they literally don't care enough.
The 2nd is a Hackernews-esque collection of hobbyist sub-forums. These people are invested in their hobbies and sub-reddits. They use reddit to interact and discuss, but also a source of niche-news for their hobby. Every one here has a 3rd party reddit app or uses RES. (if you don't, please do). Unlike twitter, reddit lets 3rd parties offer feature complete wrappers for reddit. This group has ad-block, but will occasionally give someone gold. This group hates reddit, but also has no where to go.
If a person tries to make reddit both, then it is an annoying experience. I use reddit entirely as the latter. The front-page and r/all are garbage to me. Every super popular (barring sports) subreddit is trash. But, my niche subreddits are literally the best places on the internet to gain niche information.
Examples where the subreddit is the best source of open discussion on the internet for that niche: dota2, manga, soccer, metal, prog, civilized discourse, history, male fashion (kinda), calisthenics, small cities, fantasy fiction, niche YT channels, super authentic cooking....and that's just for me.
PSA : Use a 3rd party reddit app (SYNC is my preferred. Pay up the 2$ dollars. It is worth it). Use RES, and enforce filters strongly. Use RedditProTools to detect trolls, bias and top contributors. Use Imagus (hoverzoom has malware) for pop-image/video viewer. These will greatly enhance your reddit experience.
And I think this is why Reddit won't try to cater their main app to "our crowd" (Powerusers, HN readers, etc). In a way they already have an app just for us: their API.
Reddit knows it's going to be impossible to design a single app to cater to all types of users. They know there is always going to be a group of people that complain about one feature or another so they in-turn expose the API that we can build out own. Now if a group of users has a specific workflow they like, they can build an app that will specifically cater to them.
This would be fine if they just plain and simple catered to a group. What Reddit does though is they are actively hostile to one group.
I'm somewhat in the boat the parent is. I see the incredible value in something like Reddit - or maybe the Reddit of old. Where niche communities can self police and create a space for information and content that isn't found anywhere else.
Unfortunately everything has to be monetized. The people who own Reddit want to make money and therefore they try to toe the line of using just enough dark patterns to force the tiktok group to use the Reddit app and not to terminally piss off the nice groups.
What irks me is they're selling out their business to a userbase that is just as quick to ditch them when someone makes something that gives them a faster/strong hit of dopamine.
Not everything has to be monetized. Reddit is a data store of links, text posts (EDIT: as well as images and video per FalconSensei), comments, user identities, and associated meta data. Let's Encrypt runs on a budget of $3MM-$4MM/year. OpenStreetMap's budget is a few hundred thousand dollars a year. The Free Law Project could store and serve all of PACER for a similar amount. HackerNews is hosted on a single server. You could run a clone of Reddit off of the Internet Archive if built properly.
Funding is needed, monetization at all costs is not.
I feel like your argument is making the case for "Nothing has to be monetized", rather than "Not everything has to be monetized".
Not everyone is going to share this altruistic approach to running a business. The majority of monetization probably does, plain and simply, come down to greed. But outside of that, you have ambitious people who envision so much more than what they currently offer—which may require large scale growth.
Regardless, I'm sure the majority of people's morality will be skewed when the service you offer grows to 430+ million active monthly users [0].
Each user goes from being an individual to just a single part of this mass-collective, where the difference between making $1 and $2 off each user is so mind-boggling high that it's hard to keep morals in check.
I guess there's a reason sociopaths do so well in business.
You're not wrong. I think there's a certain flavor of Trotsky's "Eternal Revolution" at play when you have an industry based off of zero marginal cost economics, with the battle always raging between those who can deliver on a shoestring (and are satisfied staying small) versus those who are attempting to capture the entire TAM (or the appearance of attempting to capture the TAM to pay themselves well from investor funds) and milk it for all it's worth.
The defense against sociopaths is eternal vigilence.
Unfortunately >"our crowd" doesn't make money for social networks as consumers, we sink the ads into the Pi Hole, we don't buy the virtual emoji currency, even Twitter struggled to make any money when it was just a platform for wordsmiths and that's issue with social networks targeting niche crowds. Pushing non-contextual ads on Reddit is extraordinarily hard as every subreddit is a platform of its own, so if the >"tiktok-esque" part of Reddit makes them money to sustain, I don't mind as long as they stop degrading the experience for those who are not into it.
I get your general breakdown but my issue is somewhere in between.
I never use the tiktok meme machine part of reddit anymore. As you mentioned I do have a bunch of smaller hobby subreddits that I only visit on my locked down oldreddit RES configured personal devices.
My problem comes when I'm not on my own machine/device and I'm trying to troubleshoot with "xyz question site:reddit.com" through google and get bogged down in new reddit or app reddit. It's really infuriating the way new reddit compresses threads to only a handful of magically prepicked comments out of possibly hundreds. You have to remember everytime to click to load the entire comment section just to browse the UX abomination they created.
> Examples where the subreddit is the best source of open discussion on the internet for that niche: dota2, manga, soccer, metal, prog, civilized discourse, history, male fashion (kinda), calisthenics, small cities, fantasy fiction, niche YT channels, super authentic cooking....and that's just for me.
With the risk of sounding elitist, for some of those topics the main subreddit is overran with pointless and repetitive memes. You'd have to go to the r/true* subreddit to get the serious, in depth discussions.
The subs I often frequent are exhausting in their claims of being overrun by alt-right types. While I'm in no way saying that there aren't politically obnoxious people (even specific users whose damn job seems to be shitposting political content), in subs like /r/seattle, just being not 100% aligned with the popular hot takes gets you labeled as alt-right. Hell even disagreeing with part of something gets you in trouble. Are you for police reform but against the rioting? You probably didn't know this about you, but you're an alt-right troll.
It's funny how I've been labelled an alt-right troll and was banned from the UK subreddit for a while, because I stated that Gandhi's statue should not have been toppled, that he wasn't a racist, that Sadiq Khan and the London mayoralty is partly responsible for high rents, etc etc. Incidentally, at the time, I was a Labour member, with a whole ton of MPs in my phone book, including the current leader, and some of whom I was so close that we invited each other to our homes. It was laughable.
But that experience and the constant name-calling against people not expressing a far-left opinion kind of soured the whole reddit experience for me. I barely look at country subs or any of the major subs now, and focus instead on niche subs, only because reddit is also a good way to get some questions answered. Especially when stackoverflow comes up short and I get downvoted to oblivion for asking supposedly noob questions, I get much more help from the respective reddit sub.
There are plenty of both extremes, what's mostly missing are moderate "political" subreddits that aren't full of SJW and cancel culture. That's why I only bother on the hobby/computer subs. They're generally fairly well behaved and neutral as long as politics doesn't come up and the better mods are good at shutting such nonsense down. I don't care if you're a biden or trump support if I'm in r/diy
That one confuses me because I've only ever heard the label used as a slur so I expect the posts to be like /r/EnlightenedCentrism but it's actually a boring pro-Democrat sub. Certainly not evidence-based policy, unless you consider "removing Trump" as a policy..
. which apparently is Biden's platform, so yeah it fits.
The name is a joke. Moderate democrats get labeled as neoliberals by reddit leftists so they embraced it, the sub isn't actually neoliberal. Right now there are a lot of memes, but once the election happens it'll go back to normal. You can still look at the effortposts which are pretty high quality.
I'll admit most of those topics are those I don't browse reddit for, so it may be different for them, but in my experience most "true"/"real"/"uncensored" versions of subs are just full of bigots who got banned from the main one.
I can't speak for the others but in the case of Dota 2 the "true" subreddit just discusses the strategy of the game itself while the main one posts memes and fan art and talks about meta topics like eSports and the microtransactions.
There are so many examples where a niche subreddit got filled with drama, and then a significant chunk split off and created another subreddit that now fights with the original occasionally. Gaming subreddits appear to be particularly bad at this.
I unironically miss forums. It was a completely different experience from post/comment based sites because everything was one thread, but the biggest thing I miss is that forums were usually pretty well moderated, smaller, and devoted to one topic.
Reddit is the de facto site for making a community on, but there's something to be said for the focused insular forums of just a few years ago.
The issue with voting based forums is they tend to cater to low quality mass appeal comments.
More often than not an informative comment, while maybe not being downvoted, won't be the top comment. Instead, you'll see really low effort "zingers" which make it to the top. Those are further piled on with a flood of comments trying to one up each other.
So, you end up often needing really strict moderation to curtail this problem.
Chrono ordering suffers the same issue, somewhat, though it doesn't have the pile on problem (not to the same extent).
The Reddit/HN format makes everything time sensitive. If the post falls off the front-page, nobody will even see your comment, the discussion immediately dies. It's completely unfit for longer form discussion over time.
Sometimes you want a forum for discussion, not just a comments section of highlight reel one-liners.
Disagree entirely. Trading chronological sort for whatever drives the most ad impressions and engagements is responsible for the destruction of otherwise decent services.
This boils down to the community you are a part of.
One of the games I like to play has its own forums and they are still the best source of info compared to reddit. Discussions are surprisingly readable, though that may have something to do with the older target audience.
I agree, I can't stand them. That's why I won't use arstechnica comment section. I might look at the first few. I much prefer reddit and hackernews style
But that allows for discussion bubbles to form in this case. Contrarian views are downvoted to oblivion. Not much of an issue in HN, as it is in reddit.
Originally I was more in favor of phpbb style forums and anti likes/favorites/upvotes but I've abandoned that attitude.
I really think it's the same as it ever was. If you want to find quality you need to start with your interests and then find a community from there. Discovering a huge community and being frustrated or upset that it's not catered to your preferences is a mistake. The lower the barrier to entry, the lower the quality of the forum will be.
And it's important to remember barrier to entry isn't just technical knowledge. Barrier to entry could be something as obvious but unspoken as writing style. Even as I'm typing this comment I'm aware that using my "hacker news voice" with all of the attendant style rules that make it fit with the community.
*edit: also I'm sorry to see that you are being downvoted because I get your sentiment
It's pretty wild that the largest discussion site on the internet with untold numbers of young kids on it regularly has NSFW posts hit the top or second page.
It makes me wonder if Reddit will try to push down or altogether ban NSFW content a la Tumblr because of the site's popularity.
I think you may still have to flip a switch in settings saying you're OK with seeing that–but really you don't have to go very far to find content like that anyways, just click on the comments for any post and you'll find something questionable quite quickly.
I use it as both. Not everyone fits in whatever category you've designated there is a lot of middle ground on reddit. It's far better as a platform than facebook that force your identity. If reddit ever isn't mostly anonymous I'll head out.
> Every one here has a 3rd party reddit app or uses RES. (if you don't, please do).
I sometimes go long stretches without using Reddit, but I'm 100% in the second column when I use it. I've never used a 3rd party reddit app and I don't use RES. The reason is that I only ever browse Reddit on the computer (logged in, in "old" Reddit mode). If you don't browse Reddit on your phone, these aren't really necessary. (This isn't just a Reddit thing, I also don't browse Twitter, Facebook, or any other social platform on my phone. Mainly, this is because I want to avoid the dark patterns and unblockable ads of mobile apps.)
For me I use it for boardgames, boardgamedeals, BoardGameNews, 18xx, digitaltabletop, some other even more niche board gaming subreddits, woodworking, artisanbread, breadit, bodyweightfitness, stormlight_archive, gardening, etc.
For me, Reddit is a single place to go for all of my niche hobbies.
there are three 'main' tabs on the app --- News, Home, Popular.. When I'm done reading News,and Home... i say to myself, "time to stupid!" and click "Popular" lol
My time at Etsy (2012-2015) taught me that people will rationalize anything to avoid dealing with the fact that they made a fundamentally bad decision.
A big reason Etsy has lost a lot of trust with consumers is their inconsistently applied policies and their allowance of cheap knock off crap. When I was there a few years ago, there were all sorts of forum posts, reddit posts and tweets about the problem all the time. The leadership (and more importantly) the people in the company, absolutely refused to believe it was a problem. We came up with any excuse and rationalization we could for not addressing it. The most common one was, "they (the people complaining) don't have access to our data, they don't know what we know, therefore their points are irrelevant." Another was, "they're just mad, let them vent, it's no big deal." Pure denial, the simplest reaction to bad news.
By continuously shoving their heads in the sand and not addressing the perception (whether it was real or not) the company allowed the perception to become reality. I'd be pretty surprised if reddit leadership doesn't do the same thing when they see messages on HN talking about how shit reddit is. They'll rationalize how we're a bunch of pedantic, angry nerds who don't represent the average user. They'll ignore the growing negative trends in favor of looking at the positive ones. They'll do anything they can to not change the strategy they've committed to. It smacks of a company that doesn't plan, doesn't think about the consequences of their decisions, and goes with the first idea that pops into their head.
> It smacks of a company that doesn't plan, doesn't think about the consequences of their decisions, and goes with the first idea that pops into their head.
I imagine the new design is a huge success in terms of revenue. Users now endlessly scroll through countless promotions and advertisements that seamlessly blend with the content and most likely have much higher engagement rates.
They can kill all the serious subreddits and focus on meme, porn, drama, influencer content and still be far more financially successful than the old Reddit. They'll have no shortage of users.
We might hate it and leave the site, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's sustainable in the long term for them and the right financial move.
I think most people that use reddit are using it for specific sub-reddits, not for memes or 'shitposting'.
Apollo app makes reddit a really nice experience for me on iOS, but I'm not sure what Android has on that front. Problem is that 3rd party apps that provide a front-end to Reddit need to be in active development. Once the dev steps back for a couple months, everything is going to go to shit.
> I think most people that use reddit are using it for specific sub-reddits, not for memes or 'shitposting'.
Perhaps. But the shear size of r/pic or r/jokes makes me doubt that most people are there for "serious business". Yes, I understand that you can subscribe to many subreddits and that you can sub to r/jokes AND r/serious-topic-with-serious-people. I'm just skeptical. Reddit is trying to be for the masses. Most of the time people spend on their phone is to look at cat pictures. I'm not passing judgement necessarily. It's just what everyone I know does. They read news, check Facebook, and then pull up TikTok/Snapchat/Instagram and look at funny pictures.
I still visit particular subreddits. I never visit the front page- not even "my" front page. I go to exactly whichever subreddit I want to read from at the moment. Maybe lots of people are using that way, but it's not what I see in my bubble. Again, I could be totally wrong.
Aren't those subreddits default? Which would explain why so many people joined.
I don't generally "join" any subreddits anymore. I create a multireddit and add subs to the multireddit. My joined subs is really small and are the subs I monitor regularly so I see them from the main page. Multireddits let me "subscribe" to less frequently visited subs without actually joining or being forced to see them.
For instance, I have one for books, one for music, one for finance related subs, one for programming subs, one for humor, etc. Almost none of those contain subs that I'm subscribed to.
If you curate your home page there it works pretty well. Turn off the popular subreddits that are the "default" and it works well enough. I mean it -is- free. I'm not sure why anyone would expect academic level journal topic curation from something as anarchic as reddit.
> I'm not passing judgement necessarily. It's just what everyone I know does.
I like funny pictures, too. My point is that there are better sites than Reddit for it. So if that's who they're trying to retain, they're screwing it up.
You also need to take into account that Reddit and Imgur had a symbiotic relationship for this type of stuff for many years. Reddit has always had meme posts, but it was through imgur for the longest time. Those posts were often the start of our most enduring memes. More recently that whole scene has been dumbed down to the lowest common denominator set by Facebook and others.
Imgur has become a surprisingly good source of curated twitter and news content lately. It’s where I first learned of the Beirut explosion for instance.
Only the most salient news/tweet/insta screenshots make it to the top of usersub. It’s great
Seconded - love sync's offline capabilities. Especially on long flights. I commented above that android seems to have better options than IOS when it comes to third-party reddit apps. (I use devices from both platforms).
>I think most people that use reddit are using it for specific sub-reddits, not for memes or 'shitposting'.
Reddit is #17 on Alexa topsites, surrounding by search engines like google and yahoo and video content providers like Netflix and Youtube. I can't imagine reddit being the bastion for intellectual discussions on specific topic as much as any of those other sites are.
I use reddit as a google fix. Essentially I search for what I want + reddit then click the links in the posts. This has become harder due to the pile of shit that is google Amp but if it still works
In particular Searx[1], which is a search engine aggregator with dozens of backends, including one for Reddit. You can self-host it or use one of the public instances[2].
If you self host your searches likely won't be as anonymous as going through somethinglike duckduckgo or startpage unless you have a dedicated VPN 24/7
Once you get big you change your priorities. There is no reason the same can't happen to hacker news either. If they start allowing low quality shitpost. Right now I assume with the amount of traffic here, it doesn't cost lot of money to maintain this site. But the same for Reddit is different.
Reddit on its barely makes any profit and had made losses for a number of years. Right now they are too big to pull Digg and not suffer any major consequences.
many people are utterly disgusted by their tactics to try and force you onto their mobile app, they're upset at how slow the (default) site is, etc.
The problem is that not enough people are so disgusted that they stop using Reddit. As long as the managers can navigate that line between annoying people and turning people away, they will continue to make money.
I was never a Reddit person, and the few times I've gone there through HN links convinced me not to make visiting a habit.
I find that the images in galleries are hidden in old, until you click the Play or Plus button (or whatever the subreddit css defines for that) that's under the title on the comments page, just to the right of the up/down vote buttons and the score. Single images seem to show up just fine for me.
I'm chalking it up to my preferences; I have "Show Thumbnails" disabled, and I suspect that's it, but I haven't experimented to verify.
There are still interesting communities and multi reddit are cool.
But you're right, reddit is being poisoned. Maybe they will remove the front page and /r/all one day. They should. All of this might be caused by elections.
I wish somebody would write a repertoire of subreddit by tags or categories. I still love to read comments on science and other constructive debates. Curated posts should also be more visible, not like digg did though. Subreddit of the day is nice too.
The shit posts are annoying, but it's part of how reddit want to attract as many types of users as possible, like tumblr.
If you don't explore reddit your using it wrong. I should search for a repertoire though.
The airline example is even crazier. Even on a platform like Google Flights that shows you the legroom for each flight right next to the price, people still in large majorities select the lowest cost ticket with usually the least legroom. And then go on and complain about the legroom.
It's like buying a car with a 150 hp engine and then complain it's slower than the more expensive 250 hp model.
> Google Flights that shows you the legroom for each flight right next to the price
I've never seen this before on a flight booking site. How widespread and discoverable is this feature across the major booking sites, outside of Google Flights?
Why would they care if a small number of people hate that they aggressively push you to their mobile app when can achieve 50 million downloads? Follow the money. It will answer a lot of questions for you.
The people who want more non-meme content? I'm not sure. I'm not saying they've all moved on yet, but I bet they will.
For example, I preferred some of the more tech-related subreddits. Then I discovered HackerNews and Lobste.rs. That can't be the only demographic of content that has forums out there. And I imagine more will pop up.
Again, it's just my prediction/guess. I've certainly been wrong before. Perhaps I have it totally backwards. Maybe those people will stay because they're more tolerant of Reddit's bullshit to get to the good content. I don't think that's a smart bet for Reddit to make, though.
EDIT: Also, a lot of people are apparently moving to Discord chats.
My anecdata: I'm a long time reddit user, hate their new UI/UX, avoid their App and now visit less. I'm also still looking for what's next. Im thinking to go back to finding good RSS.
The closest service I've found to old-school RSS is Feedly[0], which allows me to subscribe to various news or social media pipelines and group them as I like.
Discord is great when you want real time conversation, but it exists parallel to a subreddit, not as a replacement.
To look forwards, you must look backwards, at new forum software such as NodeBB or Flarum. Specialist niche communities are already shifting in that direction, or have never left their old BBSes behind, but are due to welcome a resurgence of new members.
I still don't like it even for real time conversations. As they don't have threads, or any way to reply to a specific message, sometimes it's confusing to have 3 different conversations going on in the same channel
I've moved on, and come here. I always loved reddit for the news articles and conversation. I feel that both of those things have spread out to the margins. Some subs still have the quality text-based content that I like, but most have been snuffed out by power-hungry mods, or transformed by an influx of users who don't understand the older reddit culture.
When a friend referred me to hackernews, I found that it has the type of content and users that I miss from reddit. I also visit Tildes on occasion, but the user base is so small that the content is much more limited than it is here.
Management? Probably never. We are probably 0.5% or less of the reddit audience. Even on reddit commenters are only like 5% of the people visiting make comments so they don't mean much to reddit management. They will only know if there is a geurilla movement in social media to criticize some part of reddit and then reddit and twitter blow up. That's when management notices.
Adding to this reddit is centralizing themselves. Classically they were a link aggregator, a place pointing to other content. Now if you upload something there reddit is the place its pointing to. A video on reddit is hard to download, and a link to a video is always opened with a full reddit view with comments and everything.
I dont like the way they are going and have sought alternatives 2 years ago. Thats where i found hackernews and tildes.net which are pretty good. However not a good alternative to the niche subreddits we all love.
Meh, I know it's popular to hate but I don't mind the app and I don't mind the website redesign either, it works great for me. I'm not saying it does for everyone else but it's largely possible that people aren't as annoyed as you think.
Possibly. But have you seen the "this subreddit is only available on the app" page you get when you visit certain subreddits while on a mobile browser? Simply changing the url to old.reddit.com "reveals" that it's certainly not "only available on the app". Or the periodic nagging to "continue with the app" when browsing the mobile site?
I've not met anyone who thinks that's okay.
And I will never use their app because of that. I'm actually quite upset that their campaign appears to be "working", as seen by the OP.
I get so frustrated using reddit on mobile browsers because the reddit app popups or dark patterns that stop me from reading a complete post or the comments in the post are so antagonistic.
I don't know how much time I've wasted trying to get "Read more" to take me to the right spot just to find out I'd read the entire thing or there was one asinine comment in the entire thread it was hiding from me.
The new reddit ux is so bad but I don't use the site enough anymore to dedicate myself to a full app, and those have all of their own frustrations. It'd be nice if the default browser experience was the native and "clean" one, not the worst one.
I deleted the app because it was too much of a skinners box for me, but it worked well. The mobile site on iOS works well, and I literally never get popup prompts or blockers guiding me towards the app. Perhaps those people aren’t logged in? On desktop I use the redesign happily - the biggest complaint I’ve heard from power users is that it’s not as information dense, but that’s super easily fixed by changing the default layout from ‘card’ to ‘classic’ or ‘compact’. I suspect those people skipped the popup walkthrough that explained this when the transition happened, because I’ve run across many bitter people who used the old site a lot and didn’t know you could change the new one away from the massive cards. IMO that’s pretty ironic.
Reddit’s current UIs get a lot of hate, but I’ve been using the site at least weekly for the last 11 years and I really don’t get the complaints. The old site was ugly (albeit familiar), and the new skin doesn’t subtract from the functionality in any way besides a few obscure subreddits with wild styling. If that has helped bring people to my niche interest subs, that’s a huge win in my book.
I'm sorry I haven't seen that because I just use the app. It's really not a big deal. I'm pretty careful with picking my battles and I get quite a bit of value from reddit.
That's what I said about SNAP. It seems platform stickiness is stronger than some of us might have judged. Especially considering today's tech illiterate youth. They have no idea what the implications of installing an 'app' are.
I use old reddit redirect. If old.reddit ever went away I would stop going to reddit completely, similar to what happened with the digg bar.
I don't use reddit on mobile specifically because I don't download apps on my phone (outside of a few small games such as bejeweled), and I think surfing the internet on the phone is miserable regardless. The only thing I ever crack my browser open for is to look something up while at the grocery store, etc.
Maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe people will keep using it forever. But I doubt it. They've turned Reddit from something that had potential to exist for a long time into something closer to TikTok (which, even without the current drama, was never going to be more than a fad IMO). There are more efficient ways to get low-effort shitposts and memes than Reddit. Those who want that will move on, and the people who were interested in more than that are leaving now.