Maybe they were testing something? or did this as a trial balloon? or canceled it because of backlash?
I use Reddit mainly on phone, via browser because I use tabs and old.reddit.com because its the most content dense view and and is the fastest view (no stupid js loading icon thankyou). I'm not there, like I'm not here, for the design. I'm visiting for the content.
Reddit.com front page takes about three seconds to load with stupid blocking js, old takes about second before I can start consuming. Apps are no better.
I believe this is everyone's experience, even some admins'.
slashdot-->digg-->reddit-->[?]
But as already pointed out, not everyone on reddit would go here...
(P.S.: For my part, I skipped Digg.)
Well, if they do I'm out. The new is, and always has been, a steaming pile. I mean, people can't even confidently reply to who they think they are and often reply to the OP instead of a comment (I see this every single day in multiple threads) and as a mod I absolutely hate the way new Reddit is set up on the mod side.
New Reddit is also just flat out hideous in appearance. One of the reasons I've paid for Reddit for years is so I could strip custom themes to keep a plain experience not unlike HN. New Reddit is like 'Hey guys!!!!!! We discovered pastels, omg omg omg do you want to see pictures because here are a bunch of pictures loaded rather large that you didn't ask to see, pictures, yay pictures, omg omg pictures!"
Outside, a friend's house, visit family, etc
My observation is the worst aspect of monetization is on the communities themselves. For the first half, say, it was standard spectrum: some trolls and schmucks but for the most part regular folks with something to say. April Fools projects from the admins wowed us year after year at the creativity and cordiality.
Then came the ads and the apps, no picnic but down in the subs was a new problem: site policy. At some point, subs and posts were getting yanked or even altered by admins. Censorship, astroturfing, shilling, kowtowing to foreign investors, the whole political manipulation thing: you couldn't trust anybody's motivations anymore in a conversation. Most lately, the standard disney/youtube-ification has started.
I'm almost done, too.
Both of these violate netiquette!
As a reminder, proper netiquette is to necropost instead of creating a duplicate thread.
And shadow banning is not a tool that most moderators should even have, and should only be used against the most horrible trolls!
There's obviously a line to draw somewhere. You don't want 50 posts on the same topic clogging the top of the feed, but zombie threads where the first 90% is out of date or irrelevant are also bad. Locking a thread after it has been idle for a week or two seems like a reasonable compromise to me.
Good forum software makes it less of a sin, but that's pretty rare on the Internet. This isn't the Usenet where people's clients could be fully featured on every topic.
BTW, I prefer decentralized protocols like Usenet, there are plenty of features that would be unthinkable to leave out of "modern" clients, this could be one of them !
For a while I actually switched to facebook lists, but then facebook got hostile towards allowing people to sort their follows into categories. That one I really cant understand, because it made facebook infinitely more pleasant to use.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2476952/digg-users-are...
I’ve been an active member of various communities and forums over the years (excluding reddit), and I never actively left one. It was always just a realization I hadn’t been to the site (or really aging myself, BBS) in a year. Most of them where daily habits at one point.
That's how communities get big without becoming cesspools or going over the top on the moderation. See recent examples of Discord and Twitch, which started out targeted to gamers, and have gone mainstream from there.
Alas, it definitely seems to be the direction these services are going in, and (at least in my opinion), seems to be on the verge of outright replacing Reddit for communities about games and media related topics.
The tl;dw is that if your "alternative" platform doesn't launch with unique and valuable features of its own to attract users away from the original platform then you will only attract toxic people who get kicked off the original platform as the first users of your "alternative" platform (because they are the only ones really in need of an "alternative"). This creates a self-reinforcing pattern where non-toxic users are repulsed from your alternative platform by the toxic users so growth only comes from more toxic users. You can clearly see this in the dynamic between Reddit and Voat.
I'd remind you too that a lot of people - including myself - don't see this "toxic" dynamic the way you apparently do. Our stomachs might turn at the sight of much of what is on reddit nowadays just as yours might when you see the front page of Voat.
Maybe userbases are generally dividing as we seek providers with which we are more politically aligned, with decreasing focus on the bells and whistles they have on offer. That's their value.
Side note - I thought Victoria Taylor (/u/chooter) left for that competitor, but it appears that she was at WeWork and now at LinkedIn (as of August - just in time!)
Victoria never worked at Imzy though (and didn't leave for anything - she was fired). She was at Cake (https://cake.co/) for a while, I think that was between WeWork and LinkedIn.
edit: just checking out your project. Looks more like what I'm talking about!
Not all of the outcasts can end up on HN
Apollo (iOS) provides a nice and clean design, as does Joey (Android) which copies the style of the former. Even on the desktop, the experience is smooth and manageable, by using uMatrix and RES, whether you are browsing old.reddit or not. I don't understand the hesitancy in using these enhancements to enrich your user experience.
Not your parent, but I know of no mobile app that allows me certain enhancements that are simply standard on my (mobile) web browser: tabs, ad-blocking, & accessibility.
Tabs: because I multi-task, and I compartmentalise my reading. If all I have is an app, then the app either needs to re-invent tabs within it (none I've found so far) or I am forced to have at-most one post/thread I could be reading. The latter is particularly bad. Extra bad when it happens automatically: say I pause reading a post, go to a different app/website, and click on a reddit link there.
Add Firefox's Containers to the mix and the 'Tabs!' benefit becomes even better.
Ad-blocking: Need I say more? Well, more than blocking ads, the general ability to block annoying (highly so in the case of reddit) elements of a page using uBlock Origin or uMatrix. RES doesn't yet work on the mobile web (likely due to the lack of popularity of mobile browsers that _do_ support add-ons), but if it did, I absolutely would use it.
Accessibility: I can print, copy, link to, search in, or have read aloud any page or part of any page on the web. I haven't yet seen a Ctrl+F equivalent in a reddit app, but my mobile browser has Find In Page.
This is compared to the Washington Post mobile app, which is essentially a wrapper around the mobile site that prevents copying text, has annoying ads despite being a subscriber, and has no redeeming functionality.
> some people stick to third-party apps to evade Reddit's tactics
Guess what goes away next.
(My bet is old.reddit first, because no one supports two versions of a site for the same platform—other than for accessibility.)
https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/cfmlca/i_build_the_a...
Even if it's infinitely better? I have been using the 'reddit is fun' app for years, and it's the best experience by far. I hate even using my computer to browse reddit to be honest, I would rather sit and be comfortable with a phone. Can't say that about most sites.
On the opposite end, I hate browsing hackernews on my phone so I almost never do. I can't click anything because it's so small. So I just end up using it on the desktop, which is fine I guess.. but it limits my interaction with this site.
The “view discussion” and “view more comments” buttons are just utter, utter shite. It is near impossible to read all of the comments.
It’s clearly designed to satisfy KPIs other than actually reading a post. More like superficially bouncing from one post to the next, dropping an upboat and off you go.
I sincerely hope all these sign in-only forums with great SEO like Quora and Reddit suffocate on their own rot.
I thought / heard from someone that the View more comments button is a technical solution for preventing overfetching or excessively deep queries. Never crossed my mind for a second to connect it to KPIs.
But then I’d expect a “load more” button to expand a new level, and fetch those comments, leaving the rest in tact. Not to go to a new page and only show a subset of the comments yo want to load and hide the comments it displayed just a click away.
Instead the new page is rather short and has a completely different post at the bottom. It’s all about engagement. And more ads. But I hide em, so no idea where these are.
As you say, its not present on ud. or old.
Hopefully the results of said test show enough of a drop in traffic/conversions for the variation with the 'login requirement' that they drop the idea altogether.
Users will either login or switch to old/ud
There doesn't seem to be any downside to old/ud - it retains users that would otherwise leave whilst being enough of a pain that those who the wouldn't leave just login.
Perhaps they are testing it with a subset of users?
Obviously old.reddit.com doesn't have these issues, but I'm pretty sure the session on smartphone used the new site, and that let me keep reading without any interruptions too.
Either way, if Reddit does this, that's it. Not returning to the site. The internet doesn't need all these walled gardens, and it's worrying how this is going to affect how info is preserved for future generations.