Nobody wants the redesign. Reddit doesn't need avatars. It used to nicely tread the line between enough people to make it active, but not so many that it didn't still feel niche. It feels very mainstream now, and I think it's lost a lot of what made it actually good. It's asymptotically approaching a social network, but to no benefit, and only the downsides that come with that.
Early reddit was a really fun place. Not sure how to explain it, but it kind of felt like one of those movie/cartoon mad science labs, but as a community. Basically everyone was an engineer, programmer, or scientist of some sort, or so it seemed. Most of the front page was science, tech, and programming news, and the remaining bit was people posting about tech gadgets and other stuff they made. It seemed pretty similar to HN, but more active and with a less market-oriented crowd just making stuff for the hell of it (which HN still gets a decent amount of).
Then people started posting pictures of cakes, political/religious discussions were everywhere, and it just felt weird. Digg was starting to decline and small waves of people started coming in, and once v4 launched and killed Digg, reddit's comment section completely changed, and the submitted content soon followed.
Now I go and see avatars and people buying gifts and gold (someone actually took an old 4chan joke and turned it into a business idea) and endless fake videos and random images. It looks like an absolute circus now.
People having been mentioning that finding niche subreddits is the answer, but in my experience, it's just a game of musical chairs. Virtually all of them get bad eventually.
I think this is where everyone goes off the rails a bit, and I want to explain why: Reddit can't be a community. Reddit is too big to be a community. Reddit is too diverse to be a community. Where's the community between Old-School Runescape players and Lisp programmers? There might be some tiny Venn-diagram overlap, but there's no shared goal there, no spirit of common purpose. The two worlds aren't allied, they aren't opposed, they're simply sharing a common platform useful for allowing online discussions, and they don't cross paths otherwise.
After all, what's a great white shark to a wolf?
If you expect a platform-as-a-whole to be a community, you'll be driven off one platform after the other, time and time again, until you either find one so niche it's never going to grow, or you die unsatisfied. Hell, you might not even be satisfied with the niche platform, given that it'll be a stagnant backwater utterly ignored by the rest of the Internet.
Reddit's solution is Usenet's solution: Subdivisions! Allow tons of smaller sub-platforms to proliferate, and allow them to be communities. Or not. There are some fairly community-like subreddits, and there are some clubby Usenet newsgroups.
Around 2004/5, it wasn't too big or too diverse. They didn't even have comments at first, much less subreddits. Once comments showed up , I figured "oh well -- now it's no different from slashdot." Of course I was so wrong. I enjoyed coming to the comments after reading the article and seeing lots of interesting commentary.
Right you are that subreddits span quite a spectrum. I chuckle to myself when I overhear conversations about reddit pro/con. It's clear that some people judge reddit by the default front page and they have a very different experience from mine. I've had no thumbnails as the default for probably almost as long as the user preference was available. The combined difference in content and UI between "old" reddit-no-thumbnails-my-subscriptions and new reddit-popular is night and day. It's two vastly different sites.
I can confess to being a part of the problem, though. I started the bad habit of reading the title then the comments and skipping the article. And once imgur appeared, I upvoted the onslaught of mindless memes while never taking the time to consider thoughtful articles. They are after all, the "it" that we have supposedly "redd". I'll put in a plug for /r/TrueReddit - there's often interesting content there.
For example: I might get into a mood. I rant, I take the least charitable reading of a situation, I move away from people. I know I'm not always like that, I just get like that sometimes, and I move on.
When someone else does it, if I don't know them, I might think "Wow. White t-shirt brown shorts is an asshole. Stay away from them." See what I did? I said they are an asshole, not that they're in an assholish mood.
(Side note: This is one reason E-Prime, an English without the verb "to be", exists.)
The cure for the fundamental attribution error is knowing the person in multiple moods. Some people, OK, are snippy little shits who will self-aggrandize and look for every opportunity to start a fight, but most people have ups and downs. Knowing a person means seeing beyond any given mood or action to the person beyond the moment-to-moment.
Make a group big enough and there's no effective way to do that. You can't keep track of 50,000 names. You can't keep track of 50,000 unique images attached to names. Everyone fades into the mass, unless they're Power User level celebrity scale, and then they're reduced to a few broad strokes in your head. All you have to relate to them is what they're doing at the moment. The fundamental attribution error is the entirety of your social context.
That means you can't give anyone the benefit of the doubt. Are they arguing in favor of an unpopular opinion? Downvote and move on. They're an asshole because right at this moment they're taking the asshole's part. The biggest voting block wins, and the space is a hive mind, since there's no way to make a good argument for an unpopular position and have it be heard, whereas bad arguments for popular positions are promoted.
In addition to the problem of maintaining community when the number of people increases, I also think that it’s a function of communicating in writing, rather than in person.
I vaguely recall attempts at quantifying the loss of information when communicating in writing due to the loss of tone of voice and body language. i.e. even if your words are rough, your tone of voice and body language may allow you to be better perceived.
In addition, the increased likelihood of participants writing in something other than their first language, increases the chance of misfired communication significantly.
People can make "I know" sound like anything from a death threat to an erotic tease using everything which doesn't come through in text.
> In addition, the increased likelihood of participants writing in something other than their first language, increases the chance of misfired communication significantly.
Even within a language there's plenty of room for people to misunderstand: How much swearing is necessary to avoid sounding like a stuffed shirt, and how much makes you sound like you're too ignorant to be worth reading? Which specific words are comradely and amusing, and which ones are going to derail everything the moment they appear?
If two people have a relatively slight disagreement on that, you can end up with a rather loud argument over a horrible perceived insult, on one side, and some weirdo who got extremely bothered by an adult talking like an adult, on the other.
For if that were the case, YouTube would be a thriving beacon of clarity, when it clearly isn't. And as an effective counter-example of a only-written-yet-successfulish-conveying-meaning you have HN.
So no, communication by writing is not the problem.
It's certainly easier to get the 'road rage' mentality when writing, than when conversing in person. As well as losing information, communicating through text makes it more difficult to relate to other people as people. It can lead to people behaving in terrible ways that they'd never do in person. Road rage does a similar thing: ordinarily nice and well-balanced people can be enraged by other road-users, but would never have such a response walking down the street. (This was captured rather brilliantly by a comic [0].)
I wasn't the only one who was surprised to see that real-names policies (such as on Facebook) fail to get people to behave themselves.
I guess I should find friends in real life (also known as 'meatspace')
Note: that's literally what I think, I'm not trying to sound smug , neither am saying this ironically. Stupid limits of written communication, haunting me even here!
I do think it has become a tire fire disgrace but that doesn’t matter much.
I remember this one user... robotrecall? Something like that. She was really intelligent and her insight and opinions on things were such a joy to read. When she left, I remember thinking that was kind of the end of it for me. It coincided with a lot of other changes as well. Whenever I go and check it out it’s kind of jarring how weird it has become in comparison. None of the content really seems real on the main subreddits (like the early days but so different); the site seems like an enormous native advertisement or subversive troll playground.
I'm imagining all this because I've never done it, and it must be hard to do it and certainly impossible to please this crowd anyway, but I can see how it happens.
But, given a platform that gets big enough before it plateaus, it has usually already hired on a CEO and taken on investors that now expect it to keep growing anyway. It can only do so by tossing away the things that made it unique, in order to appeal to the people it previously repelled; and hope that the people it previously attracted with that uniqueness, will stay through inertia.
It seems inevitable that every growth-driven platform will -- like a balloon -- be grown until it bursts.
'Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.' Especially when founders leave.
That's how the WWW felt when it first started, then the AOL lot turned up.
Even Twitter was like that in the first 6 months or so.
See the problem was not about the age specifically but rather childish behavior. So by realizing that we targeted the most obvious one( being impatient) and had great results.
So yea, making something deliberately harder to use might be just enough.
Avoiding eternal september sounds like a killer feature to me :P
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com
Although hn doesn't have an exact assigned niche (it falls towards science and technology but that's not an enforced rule), it's fairly civil because the site doesn't need to make money and it's well moderated (almost to the point of authoritarianism, albeit that's not necessarily a bad thing in a website). A similar phenomona can be found in a place like r/neutralpolitics (heavily moderated to keep everyone on track, doesn't need to make money since subreddits are free).
This isn't feasible for a site the size of reddit though (they need money for servers and stuff), so federation is the only real alternative since each sub would pay (probably a provider, honestly, but they could selfhost) a little to keep their spot going. The trick is to make the federation invisible to the end user through some kind of reddit-ish frontpage site, which would be much like current reddit's frontpage but be accessing the federated subs, each with it's own moderators/janitors. This may be unfeasible, but it's the only way anything like reddit could keep free speech up. Add an easy to setup ad-network for each sub (they can opt-in to serve ads to the people accessing their sub's page, like Google ads on blogs) and it works. If a sub becomes evil just unsubscribe.
Also Google+, then Google noticed they accidentally built something right and proceeded to fix it.
I'm pretty sure that's how Reddit is supposed to work.
People keep saying Reddit is blah blah.
I usually only go to Reddit to find an answer / solution / review / commentary on something specific, and via internet search always land in some subreddit or another which seems like a fairly reasonable community.
If you want to see whats percolating in the high-traffic subreddits, use r/all. I find it's worthwhile to check it no more than once a week, but it's useful for checking the pulse.
I think people are committing the age old error of romanticizing the past
How do you feel about the quality of advice Reddit gives on subjects that you are an expert in?
Because I know how I feel and that makes Reddit the absolute last place I would go for advice on something I'm unfamiliar in. I can google something and skim the top results myself.
Reddit gave me the impression they are surplus genuine OEM keys. I paid AU$45 rather than AU$339. Mind you, if I change harddrive or motherboard I have to get another license, but I'd have to do that 7.5 times before I've spent $339.
Went ahead with the purchase, activated by phone no problems. All good. Thanks Reddit.
My other recent use was to get a feel for whether the diesel heaters for motorhomes being sold on eBay for ~AU$300 are any good, versus the name brand units at ~$AU2000. Yep, all good, went ahead with the purchase, no problems, all spare parts available. Thanks Reddit.
Seems to work as intended, for my use case anyway :D
To answer your question though, I actually don't know! I'm an expert in about four fields-- anatomy & pathophysiology, nutrition, metal fabrication and laser cutting / CAM of ferrous and non-ferrous metals, 2D CAD, but haven't really thought about looking at Reddit on those topics. Maybe I should, I might have something to contribute.
Of course, it's gotten much worse still, since then.
Like pretty much everything on the internet.
It wasn’t just random, I noticed a major shift leading up to the 2008 election. Reddit’s decision to lock some vocally awful subreddits (/r/politics /r/atheism /uspolitics etc) made the homepage a gaggle of Obama & anti-religious rhetoric rather than anything compelling.
Now that's an interesting phenomenon I hadn't thought about before. There's been a lot of discussion recently about tech companies removing/blocking content they do not agree with. In most cases (racism, hate-speach, etc) this seems pretty well justified as it helps keep these people from rallying together, but I never thought about those boards being a sort of trap crop [1] for the internet, keeping the pests distracted and away from the areas the rest of us enjoy.
They just binned /r/t_d entirely, and, in my opinion, that IS an agree/disagree decision. The same folks will be back with the same content under a different sub, but I doubt they spend enough to punch through again this time. I think, given their success last time around, that the price will be much higher.
Then again, what do I know? I was a pretty avid user at one time. Now I block the whole site and everything related. At this point, there's very little useful content left. It's basically just a giant portal for porn, and with 2 young boys in the house, and no way to filter it, I don't want it on my network. If they'd offer a DNS-based "safe" mode, like search engines, I'd open it back up.
Back in the day, I was an avid SlashDot reader, I even participated in the Sony Rootkit fiasco (I got my 10 minutes of Internet fame for compiling a list https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/398332-neowins-official-s... ) .
At the end of that time, I remember briefly looking into Digg and been nauseated about it, looking into Reddit and just finding it weird (no story summaries?) and looking at HackerNews comments and thinking what a bunch of capitalists wannabe they were (I think with time the discourse in HackerNews has become more "leftist" leaning towards Open Source, freedom, and similar thoughts).
I ended up coming more and more to HackerNews as the quality of the discourse in Slashdot went down, and because the quality of the discourse here in HackerNews became better. I also got into the "startup culture" around that time, so I am sure my perceptions changed.
For some reason I also got more and more into reddit at that time, specific subreddits (mainly about my country while I was an expat, but also about US Politics which I find pretty entertaining to follow).
One thing I have been seeing in HackerNews in the last years is that the "comment effort" has decreased. You see more people writing single line comments like "or so he said" that do not really contribute anything. Although the moderation team make their best to maintain a good amount to SNR in the site, I think something like a reminder each time you are commenting with the main guidelines (be civil, strongest plausible interpretation, good-fate, etc) would help as more an more new people join.
I think this is the inevitable result of letting anyone post anything.
Yup. I've had a reddit account since r/politics was relatively balanced! It was fun and awesome.
And now I am seriously thinking of deleting my account altogether. It is just not worth it any longer.
"The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong."
It's very young right now, I don't think it's been live much more than a month (?), so is a bit of a ghost town. Unlike the other Reddit clones that have popped up recently (ruqqus, saidit, voat) it is not overrun with right-wing trolls (yet).
I think it's going for a distributed model, like Mastodon, where anyone can run their own instance with their own rules and whatnot.
Use Archive.org to compare 2008 to 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016 and onwards. The addition of thumbnails and gradual shift of the frontpage away from textual content and towards images is almost as remarkable as the increase in high-anxiety, anger and tribalism.
At some point sub-reddits were added, as well, which probably didn't help with the tribalism.
At what point in time could one derive value from reddit without subreddits?
Hah that was in 2006.
The real change for subreddits was when they became user-creatable, but even that was already in 2008.
Point is it's not like they're a recent addition.
edit: Just noticed who I replied to. I guess you would know better.
Reddit was a better Digg, just as Digg was a better Slashdot. Like Digg before it, there was an “Eternal September,” and one of the consequences was that Paul Graham launched Hacker News to preserve the culture that was being diluted.
This is one of the reasons HN has a strongly opinionated culture and the appetite for firm moderation to maintain that culture: It’s not just a tool for YCombinator, it’s a deliberate attempt to maintain something that was repeatedly lost when previous “hacker” social media sites hit the mainstream.
Even if we look away from its more controversial aspects, at the root of the issue is a simple truth that all successful social media sites become their own worst enemy.
You and I can exchange arguments about whether Reddit 2008 was or wasn’t better than Reddit 2014, but fundamentally, I suspect we agree that “dilution” has a certain effect on culture.
The flip side of that, of course, is “Who are we to scoff at the newcomers?” I am not a more valuable user than someone who joined yesterday, and there is nothing wrong with a social media site evolving to serve newcomers with new tastes and interests.
My son loves exchanging Star Wars and other memes on Reddit. I love that HN doesn’t do memes. C’est la vie.
To me, jumping the shark is typified by the creators/stewards of a thing making more and more desperate attempts to cling to relevancy, with no coherence between their attention-grabbing efforts, and with nearly all of them corrupting the thing that made the original show/site popular to begin with.
HN may not be the place it was, but I don’t see the site doing wild things like allowing people to post videos that play on the site.
I really think “Eternal September” describes it: There is a new generation of users that now dominates the culture. Thus, it is no longer what it was, but nevertheless the stewards aren’t trying to recover its lost “glory” with stunts.
To me, it feels like a pub that used to be a cloth-cap and sandwiches place, but as the neighbourhood around it gentrified, it evolved to serve a wider menu. But it’s still a pub, it’s not like they pulled out the darts boards and replaced them with a DJ and dance floor.
Reddit, on the other hand... Reddit is throwing stuff at the wall incoherently.
I remember the thing that really struck me about the Reddit community back then, even on some of the larger subreddits, was that people generally thought of themselves as a community of people helping each other. Lots of "I live in town Foo, I can donate Bar to you" type of stuff. I distinctly remember how that felt like a novel thing for a (relatively at the time) large community. Sure, there was some trolling, but absolutely nowhere near the level of toxicity that is just much more common now.
In some ways that mirrors online discourse at large, but in other ways you're right, just feels like whenever I community reaches a certain size it just starts to suck by definition.
I remember having a deep sense of fear in choosing to give up my digg account, knowing I was going to get banned for posting the AACS key. It was like I was losing a vital part of my identity online.
After a while with my reddit account I felt the same way (it being a vital part of my identity online), but, in recent years I care less and less about the platform. My account is now dead. I just checked and it's almost 2 years since I posted anything.
I have created a few alt accounts which I use for discussing some specific niche things on some niche subreddits which I enjoy, but, the site as a whole has no appeal to me anymore. If I couldn't unsubscribe from the default subs, I would leave the site and never return.
There are some cool communities I enjoy. I spent time (on an alt) in /r/thelastofus discussing the game after I finished playing TLOU2. I spent time on /r/seattle and /r/seattlewa reading about CHAZ/CHOP and events there.
I enjoy HN a lot, but, it's very focused which has an effect of myopia.
When the redesign becomes mandatory and old reddit goes away (and don't kid yourself, it will), I will probably leave and never return, but, unlike digg in 2007 I'm not going to feel like I'm losing anything when I do.
What about your online identity do you value so much?
It just feels like some sort of weird emotional and mental investment I suppose?
Will it? The old phone design has been running for many years now, no?
HN has 3? moderators. Number of moderators isn't the issue it's whether they're operating with ulterior motives, particularly hidden motives. Here, I think you can assume promoting Ycombinator and other pg associations are a motive that's not explicit.
People who only stick to the image-posting part of Reddit seem to like it. Not that it speaks highly of it.
Is looking at images profane all of a sudden?
Post blurry picture of tv “is this any good?” Every response: “the model # is on the back.”
Thankfully there is respite in third party apps. I use Apollo, but there are many good options that push the new "features" to the side or omit them entirely.
Feels like a lifetime ago...
Had to look that up, fancy pants.
I don’t think there is an near tangent approach plan at all, more like what seems a clear intention.
Add in their beta-ing a pay to win karma system right now... it’s like they want the worst of everything.
Next they’ll make a “Reddit award” that is just a loot box, trying to edge a n the worst part of gaming.
I still use Reddit rather often, don't get me wrong, but my interest has been dwindling.
Same here, really.
I guess I don't understand how to browse reddit correctly. Say there is a thread and it has replies. Now I want to read the replies. Via "old.reddit.com", the replies are listed below.
In the new reddit, most replies are hidden. If I click on "continue thread etc.", then again a window opens where some replies are shown, but not all - neither in the branch of the thread nor generally. If I scroll down, I end up in a different reddit thread altogether.
I have to frantically click several links to find all replies, or alternatively I switch to the old layout.
I am convinced I am just dumb, but I just don't get the interface. So let me genuinely ask: How does one browse reddit correctly nowadays? There must be some logic behind the redesign that I don't get.
It helps to realize that you’re not really their target audience. The goal is to keep reddit users on reddit for as long as possible. Counterintuitively, one way to do that is to stuff the screen full of seemingly unrelated stuff, because most people are there to see unrelated stuff. They’re not there to read a comment thread in full. In fact, it wouldn’t be surprising to learn that 90% of traffic doesn’t read comments at all, most of the time.
I don't think so. Askreddit is one of the most popular subreddits.
Not sure how long they will keep old.reddit.com around though...
Why would you need a plugin? You just set it in your preferences and it will switch to that as soon as you log on, isn't it...? At least that's what happens to me.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/multi-account...
I'm pretty sure I saw in an AMA that Reddit has an Accounts database (maybe split further by sharding) which I'd assume holds your settings as well.
But I rescind my point; it could very well be attributed to database infrastructure issues, whether that's hitting a shard with stale data, or splitting account settings to its own DB that it can't access when you log in.
I guess it's supposed to increase engagement/addiction, but it does the complete opposite for me. Having to click through 5+ links just to try to read 15 short comments is extremely aggravating. I know about old.reddit but its days are probably numbered so why keep fighting with a site that hates me and my time? I just avoid Reddit whenever possible these days.
i also just open every sub conversation in new tab, on occasions when i can't login to reddit. (since they conveniently forget that you were on old.reddid.com if you are not logged in )
I prefer it, even though they regularly "forget" that you've opted-out of the redesign, on desktop, and "forget" that you don't want the Mobile version of their site on phone.
That's putting it mildly -- I think the "door close" button in elevators is more reliable than the reddit opt-out.
I started timing how long the door would take to close on all of the solo rides I took on my regular elevator, alternating hitting or not hitting the button. The results confirmed my intuition that the button did speed things up significantly. I've forgotten the exact numbers but the increase was pretty large, something like 5 seconds vs 15 seconds, if I hit or didn't hit the button.
The Door Close button is not for you. It's for when the elevator is in an override mode, like when there's a fire, or when someone is moving something large in the elevator.
If you have the right key, you can turn the switch to a mode like "Fire" or "Independent," during which the doors do not automatically open and close. This is so the elevator can be moved to a particular floor, ignoring all of the other elevator requests, and the door only opened and closed when the keyholder wants it.
There are some building owners who configure the Door Close button to respond to pushes. But they're not common.
/I briefly worked for a large apartment complex, and had to assist people moving in and out of the buildings.
[0] https://www.ultimatesecuritydevices.com/Original-OTIS-UTA-ke...
[1] Americans with Disabilities Act
As the other replies have said, the button isn't for you, but it does have the psychological side effect of giving you a feeling of control over your experience, which can help quell anxiety. This is also the reason mirrors are common in elevators; the space feels much bigger and less claustrophobic, and you can waste a few seconds while you check yourself out in the mirror which makes the trip feel faster.
However, the button will usually work in a hospital, as they want the door to be open for a long enough period that people who are less mobile can enter before the door closes, but at the same time there are often urgent situations where seconds count, so you need to be able to get the door closing faster in an emergency.
Has this been fixed? I was relying on a workaround, but forgot to set it up again when I reinstalled Windows a few months ago. I only realised that just now, when I went to check the details in order to recommend it. (I'm being vague because I'm unsure what it was; I think it was a Firefox extension.) I wouldn't have lasted this long if I was still frequently being sent back to new reddit.
For Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...
For Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...
I'm sure they'll force it on everyone once the new design is tweaked and/or becomes more popular (I see new users don't care or don't know about the old design).
If I go to the old design and hover over somebody's username, a popover with their avatar appears. Tested on desktop safari. I find it very annoying.
It sold for a lot, and suddenly the new owners are eager to get returns on that investment.
And here we are.
A new Reddit, that somehow does not get sold, would run just fine without all the BS and people would love it and do damn near anything for it.
I consider Reddit a great example of why a public utility type model could work and serve users much better than what exists right now.
Or... some other ownership model that does not include a billion dollar exit would do the same and mean a very nice living for whoever does it.
Reddit launched in June 2005, sold to Condé Nast in October 2006, and was spun off as an independent company with Advanced Publications (Condé Nast's parent) maintaining a majority interest in 2011. So it's only actually been sold once, back in 2006, and that was not for a lot of money -- under $20M. Maybe there's a billion dollar exit in the company's future, but there definitely hasn't been one in its past.
(N.B.: I doubt there's one in its future, either.)
Thanks for the data.
"Billion" was not intended literally. "Large" would make as much sense.
The point being the current parent expects more than may make sense and appears willing to devalue what they have to get there.
Likely does not understand and or care what they have.
The people in charge may absolutely expect more return than makes sense and may be willing to devalue what they have to get there -- but those very same people were literally there at the beginning. What I was getting is that there is no "current parent". Reddit is, as of this writing, an independent company whose current CEO is one of its original founders, and whose executive chairman until recently was one of its other original founders.
So I guess I just think this is a more complicated case than the usual story of "great thing ruined by new owners." If Reddit is being ruined by executives who don't understand the the product, it's not because the original founders sold out to uncaring corporate overlords -- it's because they chose to become uncaring corporate overlords themselves. It's not at all impossible that former corporate overlords at Condé Nast may have understood the value of Reddit better than Reddit's creators do.
The original vision was perfectly sustainable.
Now it is generally not, and the value is dropping away.
Wasted.
They generate a good life for their owners, although less than billions, are self sustaining, are privately owned, and often times the brands are known for quality, uniqueness, or exceptional user experiences.
Wolfram Research, author of Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha, is a great example of this type of business as a software company.
Could be any of the following:
User owned
Public entity
Lifestyle
Non profit with a charter to maintain value to users
I remain unconvinced discussion requires the increasing messes thrown at it.
https://nomoretax.eu/ikeas-founder-paid-tax-for-the-first-ti...
I really hope we will have an alternative or some 3rd party client because reddit is still a great way to get information or "socialize" with same minded people.
The new design is literally unusable.
The stacked modals so that less than 1/3 of your screen is used for content. The laughably terrible performance and failure rate when loading comments that don't show on the main thread page. The fact that comments more than 3-4 layers deep can't be expanded on the same page and to see them you have to go to a different page. And when you do that, it saves your vertical scroll position so that they jump you past all the contents you were trying to look at, to where the 'related posts' are. Like honestly how hard is it to build a UI where the comment tree expands in-place?
I honestly think it's the worst engineered site on the internet that operates with that scale of users.
How so? I don't see what changed on that front.
Its a shame because I got to briefly meet Alexis Ohanian in person and he's a great guy. I remember when redditors used to speak of the hivemind, but you don't hear about it anymore.
I was one of the Digg refugees from 2007.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Epstein/comments/hnckn0/umaxwellhil...
It seems...sort of strange, to say the least? I don't buy it, but you can see the discussion linked.
https://www.inputmag.com/culture/is-ghislaine-maxwell-secret...
Summarizes the current claims, while providing healthy reminders about exercising skepticism.
But it's still a dumpster fire of hate, bots and/or paid-for responses, for any sub that reaches critical mass.
Given how far they're willing to go with dark patterns to con people into installing an app I'm actually amazed that they still bother to maintain this legacy versions. Seems like it would've been easy to let them bitrot into being unusable.
According to my traffic stats (moderating ~400k subscribers), old + mobile web frontends make up about twice the traffic of new frontend. Apps are by far the most popular, about ~3x of all web frontends combined.
I do not know a single person that moderates a 100k+ subreddit using the redesign, everyone still seems to be using old + modtools + enhancement suite. Personally, I believe this is the only reason they didn't kill it already.
Edit to add: The new frontend is the default for logged-out users, and it still makes up half of old. If that isn't a failed redesign project, I don't know what is.
e: I just realised, you may need old.reddit.com if you don't sign in.
There are a few extensions around for each browser that fix this, but every time it happens it makes me angry at whatever person thought this was a good idea.
If they rely on metrics for old vs. new this 'feature' obviously distorts the reality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg#Digg_v4
* Waste of real estate with redesign
* pushing users towards more social features
* Increasing ad presence in feeds instead of just the sidebar
* Taking no steps to stop the hategroups that flocked to it in 2015.
> … this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling. It's cobbling together features from more popular sites and departing from the core of digg
Couldn't make this more ironic if I tried.
I still go there for content of smaller subs, but not nearly as often as before.
From Wikipedia:
> Digg faced problems due to so-called "power users" who would manipulate the article recommendation features to only support one another's postings
This circle jerking can also be seen on reddit. People have suggested that moderators should be restricted to a few subs, but that didn't happen. They actually removed diversity they so often proclaim to champion.
Name some? That's how I found HN and reddit after Digg.
Reddit has been a hot mess for 5 years. It's T_D's fault. Content is less of an issue when you don't subscribe to the lowest-common-denominator subs and you just go there for focused interests like hobbies. It's the only way Reddit is of any use anymore. Social discourse is dead there. The trolls ruined the site.
Before the election, Reddit was not so popular, more tech, more news, less drama, though it existed.
Fast forward to 2015. T_D is created, pepe the frog is the mascot, and Trump is now the 4chan troll candidate. (You remember GOD PEDE EMPEROR, right?) T_D was a disgusting cesspool of brigading, trolling, and platform abuse. It wasn't just the politics, those people fucked up the experience for everyone else. That fucking sub got every pass possible from the admins and the owners.
To go back in history from where T_D came from, Trump wasn't even that popular early in 2015. T_D was made-popular, if-not-started by 4chan's /pol/ board. That board was one of the biggest hotbeds for your "Jewish question of the week" / racist memes, "OK guys, redpill me" trash designed to turn young, white, "disenfranchised" teens into internet warriors. Russian internet troll agencies like the IRA worked on these campaigns used to recruit and redpill.
They recruited enough people using heavily-doctored SJW cringe videos and "Carlson Dunking" talking head videos on people to convince their followers that Reddit must transform into T_D-land, and the Reddit community (And the rational admins) hated what it became.
Soon, racist subs like frenworld / clownworld showed up casually displaying nazi signs. These subs do damage, and these posts were all intentional. All these subs were flocked to by T_D members.
After each of these hate subs shut down, they start infiltrating mod spots on popular subs, trolling entire subs until they are kicked out by Admins.
Now, mass accounts have started flocking here, because, again, like Reddit, there's no barrier to making an account here, so why not troll and shitpost all over every thread with doctored counter-arguments like "So many people are declared a hategroup now".
Say what you want about astroturfing and power-users but most of the content is user submissions still.
Are you aware of Lemmy as a federated replacement for Reddit, which is under development?
Just can't stand Firefox or chrome.
There’s a lot more to the Internet than the karma-farming thieves, astroturfing shills and larpy activists on reddit. Broaden your horizons and you might be pleasantly surprised!
Yes but you should do it anyway for the good of humanity, if you don't want to feel defeated then help to build the alternatives like Lemmy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23664067
Can anyone explain?
They initially attract some combination of 1) principled free speech absolutists, 2) ordinary people annoyed by the political leanings of the dominant platforms (maybe because they are on the opposite side, maybe because they simply want more free discussion and less groupthink), 3) genuine extremists (of the kind that the average person would not be comfortable sharing even a virtual space with), and 4) people unwelcome elsewhere less for political reasons than because they are dedicated to being extremely obnoxious. If you begin with too many people from groups 3 and 4, they pretty quickly cause an exodus of groups 1 and 2.
edit: and even if it doesn't go to that extreme, you can easily end up with at least as bad an echo chamber as the ones you were trying to escape, only with the polarity flipped.
Personally I'd suggest "regular", nonpolitical guilds like +Dumpsterfire, +mansbestfriend, and +memes
Sometimes things need to be scrapped and started over, largely because of mistakes in the foundation. That's not being defeatist, it's just refusing to try to fix something that is almost certainly easier to rebuild (even if that's a lot of work).
Reddit's goal is to make money. They sell flashy badges and other worthless items and make ridiculous cash from things with literally zero value in addition to their ad money. Any activity there boosts their numbers and just makes them look better on paper.
Unless you're the type of person who solely posts about how horrible reddit is and how everyone needs to leave it (in which case you'll just annoy 90% of the users while the other 10% agrees and buys you a useless badge, fueling the problem more), there's nothing you can do. Ceasing activity is the best action to take. Boycotting is an old and proven method.
Usually only if the boycott is coordinated effectively, which isn't going to happen unless you remain in communication with the relevant stakeholders.
I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
I worked at reddit for 4 years but quit in late 2016, largely because of the direction the site was starting to go even then. They've taken $500 million in venture capital in the last 3 years, so it's only going to keep getting worse as the pressure builds to create a return for those investors.
A few months after leaving, I decided to start a non-profit so I could work on building a community site that would be able to stick to the principles I believe are important: no advertising or investors, open-source, privacy, higher-quality non-fluff content, etc. There's more info about the site and its goals in the original announcement post: https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes (HN discussion of the announcement here, but note that it was completely private at the time and you couldn't even view it without getting an invite first: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103093)
It's still invite-only for registration, but it's relatively active and consistently gets several hundred posts/comments a day. If you (or anyone else here) is interested in an invite, please read the blog post I linked above and send me an email at the address listed in there and I'll be happy to give you one. It's not intended to be much of a barrier, I just want to keep the growth controlled while we continue to get the site culture built up.
I've already paid that opportunity cost to get most of the basic functionality built, so if you're interested in helping with development on Tildes itself or even adapting it for your own similar site, it might be worth taking a look at the code as well. This is probably the best place to start: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING....
Communities don't just magically spring into existence, it's a long process.
+dumpsterfire would like to upvote you
Personally, I want to see Usenet come back. The idea of pulling down content and reading them later offline appeals to me.
I agree. Though our perception of usenet from the compuserve era is probably tinted by nostalgic fondness.
Once the internet took off - as I recall - usenet started to become a cesspool of trolls and advertisements.
That's when it become obvious that a lot of what made Usenet work so well was that the population was small and very homogenous (making it easy to build a high-trust culture), and that neither of those were staying true.
I can confirm. I'm still active there, however when USENET was created they couldn't know that when Internet entered in every house, the worst individuals would access it and very predictably abuse/exploit it. As of today I see no way it can be brought back without some serious technical modifications to keep trolls/shills/abusers away.
With hindsight, it turns out people have more of an influence on a medium than the medium does on the people.
[1] for memory: when nearly everyone on USENET was highly geeky and it was aggressively non-commercial, the former due to barriers to access and the latter due to trying to stay under the radar of the organisations which were footing the long-distance bills.
(one of the best discussion media I'm on is pre-USENET, or nearly so. Unfortunately it has no ouija gateway, so it's been losing members to organic attrition: cancer, heart disease, etc., more rapidly than the epigonoi have been adopting.)
But, Gopher is growing again, and unlike Usenet, there is no (minimal..) noise, only signal.
The best internet communities are ones that don't need to be a "company".
HN is a great example. HN is run by a rich guy as a hobby. There will never be ads, there will never be a board of directors, the UI will basically never change, there will never be consultants hired to figure out how to make money off of us posting. Yeah you probably could put ads on HN or data mine and make some money, but it won't be enough money for Paul Graham to get out of bed for.
Twitter is also like this. Jack makes his real money from Square. He can run Twitter like his hobby. That's what makes it so great.
Don't kid yourself that it's anyone's hobby. If it were, they wouldn't constantly ask VCs for money, wouldn't run ads, and wouldn't have quarterly earnings calls about how they can grow revenue.
Twitter is just a less successful Facebook.
I don't think the world would be worse off if Twitter or even the concept of microblogging had never taken off.
But, with a general audience of hundreds of millions of users, it does devolve into smug, uninteresting arguments very quickly.
Just out of curiosity, when did you first come across Reddit? Prior to the Digg exodus 10 years ago it was a super solid community, and if my memory serves correct, it didn't really start going downhill until somewhere between 2012 and 2014.
Twitter is like a BDFL hobby project. I obviously don't mean that literally and am aware it's a publicly traded corporation. Twitter is a hobby project in the way that Oculus is a hobby project of Zuckerberg, even though Zuckerberg is the biggest shareholder of Facebook. It's a matter of where the leader made his money--Zuckerberg made his money from selling ads on FB (not VR), Jack made his money from selling a financial product (not social media).
Yes. it's brilliant and highly tasteful IMHO. I haven't responded to any of those myself, but their frequency is low enough and interesting enough that they don't bother me. I'm glad the site gets support to cover costs.
Definitely agree, it's a long and challenging journey to build any new product, and more so with no guarantee anyone will use it. I'm working on a new hybrid discussion site after being exhausted from using reddit and other sites for the past decade. There will _never_ be animated avatars on this site. Still in active dev but feel free to check it out! https://sqwok.im
Advertising is one of the biggest factors for wealth disparity. What used to be thousands of people handling marketing now consists of millions of people gambling away their life savings on ads in hopes of making it big.
I speak to at least 20 sellers a week and some of them have acos of more than 60% taking in a loss for months in hope of making it big. Most of them go bankrupt.
The house always wins.
> I suppose Reddit's new userbase may
> not even know what that means.
I immediately set mine to a nausea-inducing (or worse, apologies) red-green-blue strobe. In protest.
That was ... eventually ... fixed. But yes, gratuitous user-specifiable animations are horrible.
Reddit decidedly has problems.
Much better signal to noise ratio.
I agree with everything else you’ve stated.
That would just leave labour of love sites, institutional sites or sites you are on because you want to buy things. This covers all the sites I actually like.
A hot streaming mess....
But fundamentally it's just more proof that a centralised internet only ever turns to rot.
https://saidit.net/s/whatever/comments/55v1/since_hate_speec...
Helped me stop using the site impulsively anyway.
Old Reddit wouldn't have cared if you left the site to read an interesting linked article. The new one does everything it can do get you to stay on the site, or better, install and never leave the app.
Judge this through the lens of the bigger picture. See their endgame and how it may not be in line with your expectations.
- being an SPA prevents the browser from remembering the scrollheight of a page so if I click on the margin (why does the entire margin act as a back button closing the comments?) I lose my place in comments. How hard would it be to stick a "scrollheight = localstorage[url].scrollheight || 0" in the 6 megabyte javascript bundle?
- clicking "view more comments" does keep my scrollheight since its not a page reload, but since there's like 5 comments instead of 5000, I'm suddenly at the bottom of the page and have to scroll to the top
- it loads the top level comments before the subthreads, so while I start reading the 2nd or 3rd comment, everything gets pushed down to make room for more comments -- or even better I just get a "something went wrong" for like a half second and then the replies come in. I actually see this pattern a lot - SPA thinks that everyone has a megabit connection and if content.length = 0 then something must have gone wrong !
Or how about when it says "18 more replies" and I click on it and there's only one reply? Can't javascript count?
This one is actually a reddit quirk. The API reports the number of comments, however doesn't take into account removed comments, or users that have been shadow-banned.
However users notice and complain about this constantly, so it still needs to be improved
So it's querying an API to ask how many comments there are, and getting a different result when it actually fetches the comments. So there's two different SQL queries somewhere I get that, but how can they diverge so much, is there a team assigned to "Queries that count comments before showing them" and a different team assigned to "queries that show comments" ?
It's just so frustrating as a developer to see the same broken behavior all over the largest web properties.
There are alternatives, I tried notabug.io for a few weeks, but realized the racist brigade is already infesting that corner of the web.
I'm having a lot less fun on the internet lately than I had 20 years ago.
Why the hell do we need avatars on Reddit anyway? Most of them are animated, strobing distractions.
Reddit has jumped the shark. If there weren't significant opportunity cost, I'd happily work on a replacement. It's become a low-signal, high-noise ad-laden dumpster fire.
Advertising is eating the Internet alive. I fucking hate it.