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.
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.
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.
Funding is needed, monetization at all costs is not.
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.
[0] https://redditblog.com/2019/12/04/reddits-2019-year-in-revie...
The defense against sociopaths is eternal vigilence.
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.
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.
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.
If you don't like those subreddits, don't visit. I'm not interested in alt right (or left;) but your 'unfortunately' seems misplaced to me.
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.
Voting, for all its problems of bias and agenda driven voting, eliminates 99% of the chaff that makes chrono-forums unreadable.
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).
Take my upvote!
Here's gold for you good sir, hearty lols!
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.
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 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 makes me wonder if Reddit will try to push down or altogether ban NSFW content a la Tumblr because of the site's popularity.
And if you have a kid with unmonitored access to the internet, they're going to access nsfw content regardless of what a site operator does.
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, Reddit is a single place to go for all of my niche hobbies.
Indeed, subs and groups in social media have decimated web forums, web2.0 has consolidated most communities within a handful of sites.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Only the most salient news/tweet/insta screenshots make it to the top of usersub. It’s great
Reddit is really big, there are really different people there and and there are many different ways you can use it.
"Reddit is fun" has a very decent interface.
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.
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.
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.
If there’s a post with an image hosted on Reddit itself, old Reddit often doesn’t show it.
I have to open in incognito to see it.
It could be NextDNS blocking someone Reddit url I need to whitelist (though I’m skeptical since it works in incognito).
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.
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.
People rage at airlines all the time. Any given us legroom back? No, as people still boarded the plane.
It's like buying a car with a 150 hp engine and then complain it's slower than the more expensive 250 hp model.
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?
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.
Where is a good feed finder?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
What reddit replacements exist out there that have the niche communities that Reddit supports?
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 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.