It sees Google credentials and then auto creates an account that you can change the name on. I keep deleting them but reddit keeps making them. I just gave up and kept u/redditisastupidhead as my minor protest.
It was the final straw, I now just avoid the place altogether. It is like having a preappreoved credit card turn up in the mail, it is trying to suck you in. No thanks!
Even imagining a bug in the registration code, you would at least go to a confirmation page before creation is commited.
I wonder if offering different experiences for what is the same site is actually working out better in practice than we'd expect. That contradicts what we seem to know about site design and would be considered uneconomical, but might it help Reddit keep a broader set of communities? I'm not sure how we'd know this externally, but perhaps someone here has some insights.
Great for mindlessly scrolling images, but less so for content that you pick and choose what to view, text based content, and commenting. I think it'll come back to hurt them in the long run.
By the time New Reddit was launched old reddit wasn't even the primary way to view the site anymore. Nowadays new reddit crushes old reddit. Reddit doesn't need it's old users, it doesn't need you, and it doesn't need me. It could kill off old reddit today and it would be fine.
I doubt they tell their friends about it either.
They are too busy posting on Reddit.
HN has an entirely different business model. Regardless of heady ideas by the creators, from a business perspective this site is little more than an advertisement for ycombinator's actual services. I'm not sure what model reddit could go with at this point in their growth outside of their ad platform (and their odd cult-like "token" awards).
I'm thankful HN is not designing for 'engagement' or MAUs at the UI level.