I was the EM for Reddit's Growth team around this time. I am responsible for / contributed to a few features like the current signup flow, AMP pages, push notifications, email digests, app download interstitials, etc.
There was a new product lead who joined with many good ideas, but some of them were dark patterns that I heavily protested. After a few months of this, it was obvious that I was going to be reigned in or let go[0]; I immediately transferred to a different org.
Now let me explain the other side of the story. 4 years later, Reddit's DAU, MAU, and revenue have all grown at ridiculous rates[1]. Yes, power users complain—and still continue using the site—but the casual user does not. These dark patterns have been normalized on other websites.
These practices are done because it works.
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0: They changed it so I would report to the product lead, which is odd for an EM to report into a product chain and the only instance within the company ever.
1: Many friends are startup founders and I've been at a few startups myself—a byproduct of being in the Bay Area—and Reddit's growth numbers are impressive. As a former employee, I am quite happy about my equity growth.
I ran Product Engineering at a competing startup (hundreds of millions of MAUs) that tested/employed similar flows. And yes, they work in the short-term, and unless you are very principled, it's hard to avoid them. I'm glad you heavily protested them. But I'd like to further the argument for why they should be avoided.
First, yes they do work in the short-term. You run an A/B test with some adversarial flow that blocks mobile web traffic users from doing certain things. Most of them get pissed, but enough of them download the mobile app (which allows you to build up their engagement via phone presence and notifications) that the A/B test is positive. Rinse and repeat. A few dozen experiments later, and now these patterns are pervasive across your product.
Apart from whether they work (in the short-term), there are three other questions readers of this thread should think about because I'd hate for people to walk away thinking "these patterns are normalized and they work so, sigh, i should just do them too".
One is whether they work in the long-term. Yes, you can juice your metrics in the short-term, and sometimes that translates to long-term growth, but it's harder to measure secondary effects. Can you accurately measure product brand damage and quantify the long-term impact?
Second, and as an EM you should appreciate this, can you measure secondary brand damage like _recruiting brand_ damage? Dark patterns (and threads like this with hundreds of passionate engineers talking about how much they hate those dark patterns) _will_ damage your ability to hire the type of engineers you want to help you build your product.
Finally, there's some subjective ethical question in here. Even if these patterns work in the short and long term, do you _want_ to spend your life, your intellectual energy, your time turning the internet into this? Do you want to go out and hire smart, passionate people and get _them_ to spend their time and intellectual energy turning the internet into this?
(side note: I have no affiliation with the author of this post, but I wrote the original Disrespectful Design post he links to in his first paragraph)
One of the ways to measure long term impact is through the use of a golden cohort that is never opted into experiments. Unsurprisingly, I could not get this work prioritized on the roadmap.
We also worked with growth consultants (read: Bay Area B2C product leads) in scoping out some of these ideas. We accrued what I call "product debt" where we launch the MVP but never followed up to polish the feature[0] as they don't improve KPIs.
I assume this is the same with Growth teams everywhere but am happy to be corrected.
Regarding long term impact, we measured this through various dimensions in marketing, recruiting, and user research. The outcomes are largely positive.
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0: One feature I argued for was an opt out of the mobile app interstitial. It makes sense to show it once or twice, but users aren't going to download the app just because they saw it 50x.
Yeah, golden cohorts can work, but they are really hard to pull off, especially for logged out traffic (which is where you'd use most of these patterns anyway). Good luck tracking me over 6-24 months across different devices and locations. And cross-contamination is hard to prevent (for instance, the golden cohort might suffer from global effects like worse content due to loss of power users or even from stumbling across brand-damaging threads like this). It also just adds a lot of product complexity to keep behavior around that long.
That said, they can work. Twitter famously did something like that for their time-based vs algorithmic feed and I think YouTube does it pretty regularly.
The biggest issue, though, is that by the time you get results from any long-term experiments, most of the decision-makers (PMs, EMs, etc) have probably moved on away having taken credit for the short-term wins they delivered.
It’s shocking to me how people sell out like this. You have to know deep down that all these hostile short term juicers destroy the brand, each malfeasance creating more room for a competitor. I mean you guys replaced Digg, cmon.
The audacity to claim “it works”, in italics no less.
The real shame of the current tech companies is they have no principles, no long term vision. They all feel like they follow the same curve, a bunch of managers hitting KPIs during their 2-5 year stint before trading up, ending in some PE firm diving in at the end for the final squeeze.
They’re lemons being juiced dry, when they should be a garden of lemon trees.
It is not shocking when you realize it is about self-interest. You get your bonus and salary in the short term who really gives a shit what happens 7 years from now?
> Regarding long term impact, we measured this through various dimensions in marketing, recruiting, and user research. The outcomes are largely positive.
You almost make it sound like this is something the users like and want.
As a long time Reddit user I can say that if they force the new site on to me along with their mobile app, I'm gone. It's not worth it.
> I wrote the original Disrespectful Design post he links
Following the links from your blog, it looks like you worked at Quora. Outside of news websites, Quora and Reddit are probably the two worst offenders of pushing dark patterns onto the Internet. I still don't understand why Google hasn't deranked Quora for cloaking its pages, a dark pattern that would get any other website banned from the SERPs.
I like your point about recruiting. I can't imagine many engineers would choose a job offer from Quora or Reddit over one from any other company. You're basically selecting for candidates who can only attract one offer.
Honestly, yes, Quora and Reddit both have some bad patterns around their signup flows (esp mobile). I won't defend those.
That said, they are far from the worst offenders. Facebook has done some really shady things around inviting your contacts, recommending people you may know, sharing/exposing your data to other apps, etc. LinkedIn has done some lawsuit-worthy shady things in that area too (e.g. [1]). News sites (and others) are paid to put tracking pixels on their sites so data can be harvested via data brokers and sold back into the ad/tracking ecosystem.
All around, Quora had some of the smartest, most passionate engineers / PMs / managers I've ever worked with (some of which have gone on to start very successful companies themselves). I'd be lying if I said I didn't think some product decisions affected recruiting at all, but it's a far cry from "candidates who only attract one offer".
As a consumer of posts who wants to occasionally read Quora on my phone's DDG browser, I just no longer bother to click the link. Ditto with Reddit unless I feel like fighting their popups. Logging in or downloading the apps? You've gotta be kidding. Nothing would be a bigger waste of time or storage on my phone. FB is obnoxious in that they only let you view one page w/o logging in, but I never had a FB account so I just ignore any links to them. I suspect a lot of other people as consumers - not privacy advocates or engineers - find these login/download walls annoying enough to drop engagement. Quora is particularly obnoxious and I've never had an account with them, but removing a few invisible divs in the dom editor usually lets me read what I need to.
> I can't imagine many engineers would choose a job offer from Quora or Reddit over one from any other company.
Considering these dark patterns translate to growth (and thus more money), I don't know why they wouldn't. Lots of people are still working for the tobacco industry.
You say power users complain but the casual user does not (as a result of these features) - this sort of position ruins reddit's community as it suggests that reddit doesn't really care about the members who have contributed all kinds of content over the years and instead favors trying to get new members who are just marginally interested, or worse, just like endlessly scrolling through a timeline. This thread has mentions of several users that don't use reddit anymore (me included) and as reddit continues shoving monetization down the user's throat you'll see that those members will continue leaving until the platform is indistinguishable from the likes of Facebook, Digg, etc.
> and instead favors trying to get new members who are just marginally interested, or worse, just like endlessly scrolling through a timeline
You can literally see communities go to shit because of this. Actual content is pushed away as low effort content, easy-to-view-in-a-timeline content, claims the frontpage, because of what you said. It infuriates me to no end when communities I've frequented for years literally get supplanted by faceless non-contributing vagrants who never contribute, comment, or post. They just see funny picture, blow air out their nose, and upvote, not knowing that they're incentivizing behaviour that's killing the community that built the space in the first place.
I liked the proposal that I saw here a while back, that members only see votes of members who joined before they did. So when you join a community, the voting behavior gets "frozen in time".
The purpose of reddit at this point is to keep as many naive and docile users as possible, and keep them clicking. Anything that could cause cognitive dissonance is bannable, while advertising and astroturfing are essentially encouraged. Any interesting comment or opinion that's actually worth reading will be hidden near the bottom or middle of any popular thread. If you try to engage in any potentially controversial conversation, you are at risk of getting banned, or having several comments in the convo deleted. The only thing left worth anything in on reddit are relatively small, niche subreddits.
I think reddit did a rather clever thing in keeping around old.reddit.com. So power users got mad but they had a fallback, meanwhile the default experience is SPA dark pattern hell
For desktop, sure. I've tried a few mobile apps but the UI was worse than the mobile site in my opinion. I can deal with the UI of their mobile site, but all of the UX issues that OP mentioned keeps me away from it, so I never browse reddit on mobile devices.
I just noticed a few users below mentioning that i.reddit.com exists, which seems to be a similar UI to old.reddit, but for mobile. From the couple minutes I've spent browsing it seems to be a massive upgrade from the current mobile site.
If you're on iOS, try https://apolloapp.io/. Using it on an iPad has become my main way of accessing reddit. Super customizable, has keyboard shortcuts and supports pretty much all reddit features. The developer is also very active and quick to respond to bugs.
(I know this is starting to sound like an advertisement which was not my intention, I just really enjoy using that app).
I tried appollo a while back and I was not a fan. My biggest gripe with the UI of appolo and post-redesigned reddit is that it feels like instagram or a facebook. I don't like endlessly scrolling through pictures and auto-playing videos since most of them are of no interest to me. If I want to view a picture/video I'll click on it. It clutters up the page with content I don't care about. Mobile browsing (for me at least) is already a slower and more tedious process because less items can be displayed on the screen at once than a full desktop version, and typing/navigating is considerably faster with a physical keyboard and mouse.
You can completely customize Apollo. I have it setup like so with a compact layout where images and gifs and videos play only when I tap on the thumbnails. Otherwise, they stay out of my way and I can focus on the title more. (Also autoplay is customizable even if you use the large layout).
That being said, I still use the desktop reddit with RES, old reddit redirect and VIM-like keyboard shortcuts. The day they gimp the third party app apis and push people to their redesign is the day I stop using reddit.
It's basically the biggest reason I stick with Opera on Android. It handles text wrapping on zoom so well, that I can use old desktop Reddit on a really tight phone without issue.
This happens with any social media. The great Digg exodus happened, and Reddit boomed. Reddit’s content and community grew healthily, then Reddit blew up exponentially, and now the content and community have grown sure, but very unhealthily.
Actually, unhealthily for what Reddit used to be (long form content and discussion), healthily for what it’s becoming (social media a la infinite scroll, chat, and notifications galore).
The point I’m trying to make is I don’t think this sort of effect is preventable - any community which encounters growth will see an influx of shitty content, unless you keep the community exclusive purposefully. Reddit just decided to roll with the punches so they could make some stacks on a nice IPO I imagine in the future.
ditto from Twitter. and then they ignore your "do not notify me about anything ever" setting. Now I never use Twitter anymore. The short-term boost is not worth the long-term loss of trust.
I wonder if the next successor to reddit could possibly become successful by limiting its user base. Once it reaches a certain size, you can only join when someone else leaves. Or be put on a waiting list while you scroll and lurk.
And apart from being a user, you (and others on this thread) could be a potential person Reddit could try to hire in the future... But with these patterns, I'm assuming they don't stand a chance.
It works for metrics. It works for making more money than you know what to do with. It absolutely doesn't work for keeping your user base loyal. The moment you implement the dark patterns, the users immediately start looking for alternatives to your platform that respect them.
That said, I still use reddit. Except I use the old design and RES. And a third-party app on my phone.
I haven't been using old.reddit.com for years because I'm resistant to change. I've been using it because the new reddit design has sucked for as long as it's existed.
Likewise. I’ll probably end up writing an aggregation tool, a Bayesian filter, and a summary-bot, and just skip caring about what the chattering mobs say about the news of the day. Except for a very few tightly-moderated groups, most threads are nasty muck and rarely a pearl. I’ll be better off without reading them.
I just use tiktok now for "front page of the internet" some random sub reddits still otherwise. If I'm going to be subjected to tracking and ads I might as well go with the superior option. Half of the front page is tiktok videos anyway.
I was actually mocking the GP, who claims they worked at reddit and their justification for using dark patterns is that "they worked".
Of course they do, that's the whole point, dark patterns trick users into increasing your metrics. Doesn't mean it's a good idea to use them. That's like saying not allowing users to unsubscribe really decreases the unsubscription rate. No shit.
They've been fairly clever having their cake and eating it too with old/new reddit UI. They're basically cultivating a whole new userbase that only knows the new UI, while still keeping the old userbase around. I can imagine that once the new one because large enough to be self-sustainable, they'll kill the old interface and the mass exodus won't fully kill reddit since they still have the other half who won't care.
It's a dangerous game they're playing. They don't create original content, so if someone clones or creates a site with the old user-friendly interface then the switch might flip on them as abruptly as it did for digg.
I hope so, I’ve come to seriously hate Reddit. I never used Facebook or Twitter as a replacement for the forums of the 2000s internet so it didn’t bother me as much that they were gamified and had low quality content. Reddit pivoting to a social media site breaks my heart and the fact that people who work there come to HN and say, “we don’t care what you or power users think because we have record engagement,” just infuriates me.
Reddit killed the old Internet forums but was a good replacement for them to an extent, and now they’ve destroyed and stopped trying to be that replacement leaving the internet with a serious lack of niche communities for discussion. I’ve tried putting together ideas for something that could fill that niche and not be susceptible to becoming overran with low quality meme content but I don’t really have the time to work on such a thing with the attention it deserves right now; and it isn’t a trivial problem to solve.
I always think that by building products that treat the consumer like an enemy to be conquered will eventually result in someone building a better product and stealing the market. It never happens though.
I wonder if some of the tech like Cloudflare Workers will eventually allow someone to build competing products that crush the existing platforms. IMO it’s dangerous (business wise) to get addicted to revenue that comes from treating your users very badly. I think we’ll eventually see companies like Facebook and Reddit get conquered. At least I hope so.
How are cloudflare workers relevant? The tech of reddit has always been pretty simple to replicate. I think the code was open sourced at some point? I remember creating a reddit-clone for France a long time ago but bringing users in didn’t work. It was not a tech problem.
$5 / month gets me the same scaling capabilities as someone paying $50000 / month. I can build stuff with a low cost of operating since most stuff is never going to get massively popular, but if I get lucky and win the popularity lotto I can scale with a credit card instead of an architectural change.
AWS, Azure, etc. are similar, but they get expensive really fast. The traditional cloud platforms have a "hump" in the pricing where you're too small to get discounts, but too big to afford it.
So basically what I'm saying is that as compute / scaling improve to the point where you don't have to sell your soul to venture capitalists to pay for everything, we might see a lot more "fair value" minded entrepreneurs start to succeed.
I think it frequently happens. Reddit built a better Digg for instance. It's just that once the new companies supplant the existing ones they seem to start doing the same things.
That's the thing. I don't doubt that it does. But certainly there are _other_ things that work as well that may or may not be as profitable but are certainly more ethical.
And that's basically what bugs me.
They don't seem to be in earnest trying to do anything else that might provide much more value.
> power users complain—and still continue using the site—but the casual user does not.
And that's what makes it worse. That's effectively exploiting the fact that most users are not well informed about privacy.
At the risk of sounding too hyperbolic, a similar but more nefarious example is that power users didn't fill in Cambridge Analytica's quizzes, but casual users did.
I'm /u/zjz on wallstreetbets. That google sign-in flow thing has caused us a good bit of hassle because people became convinced that usernames fitting the Word-Word-#### scheme are all bots.
It doesn't help that the kind of person who lets a google sign-in type flow suggest a username for them is probably a lazy commenter.
Perhaps an announcement in the future when a user-facing identifier is auto-generated would be wise.
For those trying follow along, from Andrew Chen's site:
DAU/MAU is a popular metric for user engagement – it’s the ratio of your daily active users over your monthly active users, expressed as a percentage. Usually apps over 20% are said to be good, and 50%+ is world class.
How did this metric come into use? DAU/MAU has been a popular metric because of Facebook, which popularized the metric. As a result, as they began to talk about it, other consumer apps came to often be judged by the same KPIs. I first encountered DAU/MAU as a ratio during the Facebook Platform days, when it was used to evaluate apps on their platform.
Which practices, though? A number of the practices you note (e.g. streamlined signup flow) are not user hostile at all, and others are a mixed bag. (E.g. one could argue that AMP + a properly featured mobile site and 'official' app were necessary steps with a subpar implementation). But when looking specifically at the dark patterns that power users are most likely to complain about, it's unclear that they would help DAU/MAU much, if at all. Casual users might not complain overtly all that much, but they're almost certainly discouraged by many such practices.
It was more streamlined before. You literally only had to input a username and any password, no policies, email or anything else you had to adhere to/provide.
I stopped using reddit back then after using it several hours daily for years, so not every power user ignored these changes
Sign up flows serve more purposes than just a funnel for new users (which IMO is part of a problem with how we build websites in general, but I digress).
Anti-scam/fraud account identification can rely heavily on inputs up front. I'm honestly surprised reddit went so long without requiring other inputs, despite their rising popularity.
> But when looking specifically at the dark patterns that power users are most likely to complain about, it's unclear that they would help DAU/MAU much, if at all. Casual users might not complain overtly all that much, but they're almost certainly discouraged by many such practices.
Power users of sites like Reddit are already hooked. They’re already logged in, already have an app installed, and they don’t see all of the nags and pop-ups that appear to users who aren’t logged in.
It’s the unregistered users and those who aren’t logged in who have to suffer the nags and pop-ups and limitations. And as the site constantly reminds them, they can fix the problem by downloading the app and joining the ranks of trackable users.
When a website makes their money from advertising, user metrics are king. The more app installs, DAUs, and unique registered users you can show, the more money you can collect from advertisers. Advertisers would rather show their ad once to 1000 people than 100 times to 10 people. They want to use unique user counts, not just guesses based on volatile IP address, to support that.
As a result, it’s more beneficial for a company to alienate 1 user who won’t register (and therefore won’t contribute to metrics) in exchange for gaining 1 other user who will register. If I had to guess, I suspect Reddit is gaining more like 10 or more users for every 1 user who is alienated.
The unfortunate reality is that when it comes to free sites and services, power users (who generally install ad blockers or have been trained to ignore ads) can cost more than they bring in revenue. It’s the casual users who don’t have ad blockers and don’t have any aversion to ads that ultimately bring the revenue.
> It’s the unregistered users and those who aren’t logged in who have to suffer the nags and pop-ups and limitations.
The problem with this strategy is that it's easy to add so many nags that many more users will bounce away from the site than will install the app, or otherwise engage at all. Given what we know about user behavior on the Internet, Reddit is almost certainly on the downward slope of this weird Laffer curve, well beyond the point of "optimally effective" nagging. Add even more, and you become just another Experts-Exchange that no one cares about all that much.
> Given what we know about user behavior on the Internet, Reddit is almost certainly on the downward slope of this weird Laffer curve, well beyond the point of "optimally effective" nagging.
If your internet bubble is largely composed of power users who have such a deep disdain for pop-ups that they will refuse to engage with this sites, you might think that.
But looking at Reddit's growth numbers lately, it appears their gamble has clearly paid off.
The key to understanding this is this: Mass-market, advertising-supported websites don't cater to picky power users. They cater to whoever they can get to sign up. If someone refuses to use a site because they refuse to sign up or install the app, then that's a positive, not a negative, for their numbers. They only want the users who will accept the conditions of the website.
Features are only launched after running a successful experiment.
We try to appeal to power users when possible. For example with the current signup flow has optional emails, though intentionally non-obvious.
This means new users sign up with an email which means we can reduce churn through digests and also reset passwords / prevent account takeovers, a large burden for Reddit's anti spam teams.
Yep. People, even power users, are generally surprised when I say you don’t need an email after making a comment like “reddit went downhill when they started requiring an email address.”
Non obvious? It’s deliberately hidden. Its utterly dishonest. Thanks for mentioning it I’m just annoyed by user interfaces copying human choice and manipulating people. It goes way beyond “disrespectful” and should be illegal
Sorry but I have to side with reddit here. He said it's aimed at power users for whom it doesn't matter that it's hidden because they know how to use this feature.
It's advantageous for Reddit to have accounts with emails, why shouldn't they incentivise users to supply them during the registration process? It's their website nonetheless.
There is an artificial delay on mobile page loads to steer you into using the app. You are bombarded with deceptive popups to install the app. They supposedly run a website. They should focus on that and stop acting like it's 2010.
> They changed it so I would report to the product lead, which is odd for an EM to report into a product chain and the only instance within the company ever.
This screams of power play. Good on you for moving your neck before the axe came down.
The fact your engineering higher-ups didn’t push back or failed to push back is really scary.
Why does Reddit use AMP pages and a mobile site that look exactly the same? For speed/SEO benefits? Disabling AMP would still look mostly the same for normal Reddit users but would make "old." users much happier.
When I was 10 I bought Pokemon cards, which looking back on, was a huge waste of money, but at least it wasn't all that much money in the end. I was a newbie to the scene, and I got taken advantage of. Lesson learned.
10 years later when phones were just coming into everyone's pockets, a whole new wave of gamers emerged. Game companies could either develop for the previous wave, by building games like Starcraft II, or they could build for the current wave, and build games like Candy Crush.
Gamers who prefer games like Starcraft want to pay once for a game that lasts years and expect perfection. Candy Crush, like the Pokemon cards before it, expected nothing and were willing to spend a bunch of money for ultimately nothing. The business should clearly move to making Candy Crushes. The ROI is insane.
But the more you bleed the users, the more they get fleeced, the more they start to learn, the more they regret. Yesterday's Pokemon cards buyers were todays Starcraft gamers, and today's Candy Crush players are tomorrows expert gamers. You want to build your platform to grow with them. Build a Candy Crush, then build it slightly more complex. In 10 years, they will be ready for Starcraft.
You can continue to seek the bottom of the skill zone, but we had that one wave where adults of all ages were getting new phones and experiencing things that they had never done before. We had that one time where kids were able to ask their parents and their parents were not skilled and did not regret so they did not say no. Using a peak oil metaphor, we've reach peak sucker. We'll never have this opportunity again.
So cutting back to Reddit - Reddit, like Digg and Slashdot and Usenet before it, released to the Starcraft level of the social commentors. They are hard to deal with, they expect everything for nothing, but the quality of their content brought along with it the slightly less expert commentators. Eventually that filtered down and the entire internet was on Reddit. The entire internet was incredible for their ROI.
Digg was ruined because they abandoned the Starcraft commentors. When they left, everyone left with them. Reddit has been smart in this regard, as the old features and the old API still exists, the power users can use power user tools and keep the same experience. But understand, that if given the opportunity to move elsewhere, even somewhere that has less features like say... Hacker News, they will do so. They have done so. If Reddit keeps chasing the bottom of the market, when someone does show up with actual innovations like what Reddit had over Digg, you need to be afraid because just like Digg the site will be dead over-night.
When you should be looking at bringing those casual users into moderate users, you keep trying the dark patterns. But each time you go back to the dark patterns they get weaker and weaker. That strong dark pattern that used to get you millions of dollars now only get you hundreds of thousands. Next week it will be tens of thousands. Your users are developing dark pattern tolerance. You don't yet have a valid competitor, this is exactly when you should be experimenting to disrupt yourself.
Meh Reddit brings me a lot of value still. I enjoy it a lot. On the other hand I've never bothered with mobile games and have never paid for a microtransaction.
It was an analogy. You don't need to have played mobile games to see the connection OP is trying to make between "junk food" mobile games and "junk food" social media.
"Yes, power users complain—and still continue using the site" I wonder what would happen after you removed old.reddit.com and api access for reddit apps. For icing on the cake, use creative class names to f*ck with RES and ad blockers. My guess, if you do all of this, reddit's gonna crash on the ground pretty quickly.
So some of his ideas were dark patterns that you protested, and others were dark patterns that you supported, and in retrospect are happy that you implemented, due to revenue growth? Did you receive any pushback from engineers, and if so, how did you handle that?
True. And reddit is now a much worse place than most people remember. I remember r/atheism being in the defaults and not a FP full of pictures and brainless memes :(
I don't think it's accurate that "lay-users" prefer the new UI. Perhaps the metrics have improved, but in my experience I have heard nothing but frustration from my non-technical peers when it comes to the new dark patterns which Reddit has been implementing.
It constantly amazes me how bad Reddit's interface is, videos either don't play or randomly start playing despite them not being in the viewport. They run random A|B experiments which add unnecessary components such as avatars next to peoples comments. Random acts of monetization are shoved down my throat at every turn. I honestly think the Reddit team are on a purpose built mission to design the most user hostile forum.
I've tried browsing Reddit in incognito on my phone before and it wouldn't let me without installing their app, thankfully old.reddit.com exists. From clicking on a search result to viewing an image post took ~8 clicks. The flow was analogous to:
-> Click on search result
-> ending on an AMP page and clicking the bottom sheet exit button to view the post in the browser rather than the app
-> clicking on the title to view the actual post in the non AMP format
-> ending up on the actual post and being told I need to view it in the app (which completely removes the point of using incognito)
-> changing the URL to old.reddit.com which is tedious with a phone keyboard
-> finally load the page and click on the image
Both old. and i.reddit.com are slowly being left behind by new features and such things. It breaks conversation when new reddit can use one syntax for code blocks and old reddit can't see it like it's supposed to look.
The default mobile site feels like it's so over-engineered to the point of being broken, even typing a comment on iOS the keyboard makes a weird echo key sound as if multiple keypress events are firing with each press or it's somehow running so much code with each press its making the whole OS choke.
Yes (about old version on mobile). It has annoyances like how, on iOS, double-tap-to-zoom only occasionally works.
And as for videos, if you scroll down, it will hog precious real estate at the top to keep showing the video with only a tiny X at the corner that's hard to click (because iOS will misinterpret it as asking to show the URL bar and options).
And I really don't think any UX designer has even looked at any of the mobile versions in landscape mode (haven't checked if the app even allows it). I suspect they haven't looked at the torrent of modals assaulting you either.
Oh and I was opted out of the old design like three times yesterday.
Edit: For an example of something even worse, Quora (on iOS safari) has been stuck on a permanent "something went wrong" for months. I have to view it on desktop.
Edit2: Sorry, one more update. Even on the old design, when you try to report a comment, it's somehow inserted a new style for picking the reason for reporting ... which breaks my extention's (Tridacty's) ability to pick it up as a clickable link from the keyboard. Why??? You just had to leave it alone!
on mobile just use a custom app, all the web interfaces are utter shit, and the google links take you to AMP all the time. I just use rif, has worked flawlessly for a decade and has all the features, even mod stuff.
If it is an Imgur link there are additional steps. It shows you a microscopic image that is compressed to hell and refuses to respect “show desktop site”. The only way to see the full size image is to manually edit the url to “i.imgur.com/<id>.<extension>” where <extension> is one of jpg, jpeg, or webp but you have to guess.
It’s astounding just how hostile the entire experience is.
I've long thought about making a thread like this so I'm happy to see it. Fed up with this actively user-hostile web experience to try and drive people to the app.
My main gripe is definitely expanding comments -
> First of all, only the top comment will be shown. Then you can tap view more which will load another two. But you cannot open all the comments.
Because the "create an account to continue" toast pictured is unclosable on my phone. Meaning not only can I not expand any more comments, but I can't even go back see other un-expanded comments. I need to refresh.
Reddit has become another VC invested company where crippling features, dark patterns on forced "adoption" and dark "growth" hacks du jours are the norms.
I'm a very early and long term user, and I slowly moved away after "the" investment.
HN on the other hand is still safe, as the huge success of YC and their aim of gathering talent and readers gives more financial freedom. What if some investor now invests in HN, gathers a board, assigns a CEO with the profitability and "growth" target? I'm afraid to ask this, but the same could happen.
The value of HN to YCombinator is keeping a large community of plugged-in and knowledgeable people on-tap. If there were any hint of commercializing HN, it would be clear as day that Ycombinator was now run by idiots. Everyone would flee faster than a jackrabbit from a pack of wolves.
HN is too niche to milk for profitability like Reddit. Only relatively technical people hang out here and will probably move to, or setup, an alternative if HN gets sold out.
Not grandparent commenter, but I don’t. I switched to the logged out, default experience recently. It’s so user hostile it’s been pretty effective at curbing my Reddit addiction and making me waste less time on that site.
you’re not alone and it’s a common complaint. along with the complaint that toggling “opt out of redesign” is constantly coming untoggled randomly and without warning. This doesn’t even happen between browser sessions where one would think a cookie got dropped, it can happen simply between pages. one moment you’re using old reddit, click a comment link, boom..you’re back on the redesign and having to change the setting again.
Reddit has completely jumped the shark in its UI design, the 'direction' its taken, and its basically complete capitulation to censorship at a corporate level. Its interesting to that they haven't IPO'd yet, because in my view, its a zombie carcass waiting for its replacement to find its way onto the net.
There has always been a place, a need, and a demand for anonymous, free form discussions on the internet. Craigslist community posts (those are still a thing too), Fark, SomethingAwful, Digg, Reddit, and yes, Hackernews. I get that there are difficulties in managing an anonymous community, especially in a world where things can go so toxic. But reddit is a walking corpse waiting to be taken over by a better product. Everything about the site, the community, the company is hot garbage, but there is no better alternative, so it walks on.
>complete capitulation to censorship at a corporate level.
sigh
I would still use Reddit and put up with all the bad UI design and dark patterns if it wasn't for the censorship. I miss the pre-2016 election reddit when it was still full of pedantic types who would have long debates in comment threads where they would break each other's arguments down line by line. I wasn't strongly in favor of one belief or another, but it taught me a lot about forming arguments and persuasive writing that English classes never taught me. Back in those days you would still see productive debates between left-wing and libertarian types. Now with all the gold and comment badges discussion has devolved down to who can make the wittiest, snarkiest one liner that will get them rewarded.
I once spent an entire weekend collecting and aggregating data to create a bunch of charts that revealed some really interesting statistics for a subreddit and earned about 100 karma.
I made a one-line "zinger" comment on some random thread in r/pics and pulled in 1,800 karma.
That's when I realized I was casting pearl before swine by spending real effort on Reddit, and I should instead be directing my efforts on real quality content elsewhere.
The concept of lowest common denominator isn't really exclusive to Reddit, communicating through any medium there will always be more people able / willing to understand (or just to spend the time getting through) something short and simple than something long and complex.
All those things suck at reddit, but to me the fundamental issue with reddit is upvoting/downvoting + a massive user base. Subreddits get too large and are dominated by lowest common denominator quips and memes to the point that the content is junk food for echo chambers. Every so often some bit of insight can rise, but by and large that's the problem and it's fundamental to reddit's DNA and no UX fixes would solve that.
I disagree that UX can't play a role in this aspect of Reddit. Old reddit was a lot more insightful and had higher quality content and discussions, because the UX was geared towards that. Now the UX is heavily geared towards mindless scrolling of a feed on your phone, and so that is the kind of content you get.
Just look at Hacker News, it is upvote/downvote-based, but it has way better quality discussion than anywhere on (new) Reddit. Maybe comparable to some of the best subs 10 years ago, and that's because Hacker News has the same UI reddit had 10 years ago.
> Just look at Hacker News, it is upvote/downvote-based, but it has way better quality discussion than anywhere on (new) Reddit. Maybe comparable to some of the best subs 10 years ago, and that's because Hacker News has the same UI reddit had 10 years ago.
HN has paid moderators, which is unheard of for a community this small (~12k comments per day last time dang shared stats)
>Reddit has completely jumped the shark in its UI design, the 'direction' its taken, and its basically complete capitulation to censorship at a corporate level. Its interesting to that they haven't IPO'd yet, because in my view, its a zombie carcass waiting for its replacement to find its way onto the net.
They're never going to IPO, because they're owned by Advance Publications. Reddit hasn't been a startup for like a decade.
> There has always been a place, a need, and a demand for anonymous, free form discussions on the internet.
With the EU terreg and other countries like UK's online safety bill, owners will have to censor content on request or become liable.
Free speech internet is going to be a pipe dream in a year or so.
There is never going to be alternative to Reddit and remaining free speech sites will have to close or become compliant.
A lot has been written about the social and legal difficulties of running such a site (how much do you enjoy looking at child porn all day so you can ban the people posting it? How many mass-shooters would you like to have post their manifesto on your site?) But I think the real issue is just money. Even if you keep things pretty stripped down, as 4chan or the original reddit did, hosting still costs money. And if you ever catch on, it's going to cost a LOT of money. Where is that money going to come from? Your users? You don't have a commercial product people are willing to pay for. Advertisers? Not in a post ad-pocalypse era; they don't want to be anywhere near a free, anonymous platform. And keep in mind that eventually you'll have to pay for ddoss protection, a security and moderation team, and probably legal as well. So unless you're wealthy enough to just pay for the site out of pocket indefinitely, any reddit or image board clone is doomed to failure from the beginning. It has a ticking death clock that will expire when the owners finally realize they can no longer afford it.
There was in fact a time where Reddit’s front page included a progress bar showing how much Gold needed to be bought/gifted that day to pay off that day’s server time, and shortly after it was introduced the bar was overfilled every single day and eventually set to a more arbitrary goal than actual server bills. I’m assuming that didn’t include salaries and other overhead, but it does indicate the userbase could basically sponsor the hosting fees. That was also before Reddit directly hosted images and videos, so those bills have presumably gone up quite a bit.
This is actually one of the more troubling aspects of Reddit's decline IMO. The user-funded model WORKED but so much tracking data was getting left behind that someone chose to make the switch.
It will be difficult if not impossible to find a payment platform to service donations. If you accept crypto, exchanges may block you if user pays with stolen coins.
Does anyone else want to rant about Reddit’s AMP pages that show up on Google? Oh I could go on about it…
The managers at Reddit, in their infinite wisdom, decided that the preferred experience of a Google user searching for content on reddit should redirected to their wonky app. And if they don’t have the app, they should be punished with modals upon modals. “Reddit looks better in the app!” Oh, you disagree? Well press this tiny button to indicate your unsaved preference and we will allow you to view a preview of the thread you came for. But…if you can find the illusive button which shows the whole thread, we will grant you full access — after asking you to install the app again!
It’s enough to make the designers of the Get Smart door scene collapse in embarrassment knowing that their parody has become the reality of every unsuspecting person who just wants to browse Reddit.
And while I have you here, please tell me what’s going on with the Reddit’s scroll positioning when navigating out of the site. Just by clicking a external link in a thread, you’ve not only lost your position, navigating back to Reddit will tease you with the last version of the page before everything refreshes back to the top.
And God forbid if you keep a tab open up for too long, encountering the most obnoxious error screen imaginable. “Ouch! Something went wrong. Refresh!” Yeah, something did go wrong. You broke your site. You killed the golden goose. You were the Chosen One! It was said that you would destroy Digg, not join them. Bring balance to the force, not leave it in darkness.
The Reddit mobile web experience is so obviously bad that I can only assume it's intentional.
There must be some huge incentive for Reddit to push users toward the mobile app. Most likely, the app allows for higher or more accurate monthly active user counts and enables more targeted advertising, both of which are critical to increasing advertising revenues.
Reddit is in a difficult spot because they're mostly an ad-supported business but their users are vehemently opposed to advertising and any forms of tracking. They have to tip-toe around all of the advertising and user tracking that they do. Strangely, their users mostly seem to give them a pass on the tracking. Their users are relatively trustworth, viewing Reddit as far more trustworthy of a company than Facbeook, despite the two companies having largely similar business models.
"Reddit, the investors who bought the product" are in a difficult spot. And certainly haven't shown an overabundance of creativity in monetization approaches.
Suffice to say, you probably don't deserve a "front page of the Internet" tagline if your first display is a redirect request to your app.
Reddit is a potential B Corp or non profit masquerading as a VC backed tech startup with exit or ad revenue potential. Bag holders get tired eventually.
Reddit is building the best content moderation tools for humans - by blundering in every possible direction, often in direct opposition to potential progress.
Mod tools and the data on what works is the untapped resource.
Every other major data or tool set for moderation is behind an NDA.
This was my take at one point, but a lot of actions made it clear that's no longer the case, and it's now more of a social media site/app that also has porn.
What bothers me about OF is that it has turned authentic communities into billboards. "Why are you entitled to free porn?" OFs defenders will ask as they completely miss the point of the communities they have hijacked.
As the saying goes: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
As a dev who works with telemetry in my day job I HATE when "better metrics" gets in the way of a feature or product improving.
(I also hate the pervasiveness of identifiable tracking but that's a whole different rant.)
You don't need to perfectly A:B test your two different offerings if that means preventing users from using the product in a way that best suits them. Stop putting shit behind "read more" buttons just because you want to see if people are actually reading your articles. Stop breaking things into multiple screens just so you can track your damn funnels. Better MAU _tracking_ (not even better MAU) does nothing for user experience and pursuing that at the expense of everything else is just plain foolish.
Yeah, it becomes just about getting a "better metric" which is in fact a number that sounds better to others instead of using metrics to improve user experience.
I downloaded the app alright. Just not theirs. Apollo for iOS is such a pleasure to use compared to the Reddit app. They can’t even get the app experience right.
Apollo is probably one of the highest quality iOS and iPadOS apps around, Reddit or otherwise. The developer is super responsive to requests or criticism, and the app just works insanely well. It doesn’t have quite the same feature set as some of the other 3rd party android Reddit apps, like Sync, but everything on the app is exceptionally well designed and thought out.
> There must be some huge incentive for Reddit to push users toward the mobile app.
From what we hear, the app isn't even that well designed. It seems that many users are still using unofficial clients because the app can feel heavy and sluggish, with only a barely acceptable UX.
RedReader user here, can confirm. I don't even know what half of the complaints in the link are talking about, as they're largely problems with the "official" mobile experience.
It’s much easier to track user and adds they see on mobile apps then mobile web... So more money from advertising and selling people usage patterns and info would be my guess...
Which is why I think alternatives like Lemmy[0] ought to up their UX/UI and mobile applications because on the backend, they offer much respectful design and since they are not after money, operate under less duress. Such alternatives offer real possibilities to challenge Reddit but they have a long way to go on user interface.
There is also a bug with the AMP pages such that the submission dates for the threads are often wrong. For example you're searching for threads that have been posted in the last month, some of the results will say something like "7 days ago" until you click and see it is actually 5 years old.
Reddit has a MASSIVE security vulnerability with their AMP pages and I really hope they get in trouble for it because of how much they shove it down people's throats.
It's possible to visible quarantined or even banned subreddits through their AMP pages. From there you can still view deleted videos and other content through the autoplay "previews".
speaking of their google results, let's also draw attention to the fact that they lie about post dates in google results to get you to click on a result from this week, only to click through and find that it's a post 7 years old
Every time I get annoyed by something like this, I go to the front page if Reddit, see that 90% of the posts are political advertisements disguised as viral content, and realize it’s a minor problem in the grand scheme. I just wish communities would make their own message boards again instead of coalescing on subreddits that they have zero control of.
Reddit's design is what actively pushed me to Hacker News, the Risks Digest, and a healthy mix of paid news (WSJ, FT, Bloomberg, etc). The site is really being redesigned to enable astroturfing and user manipulation on a commercial level. Ads are made to look like posts, and sometimes the posts themselves are just ads.
I've come to the opinion that it's impossible for any free social media platform to avoid this unless the people running it are doing it as an act of charity. If you want to make money, you either make users pay or you sell access to / information from the userbase itself.
Not defending Reddit, but it's the same with Facebook, and have you seen the Google Search results in a "developed country"? First full screen on mobile is ads that look like search results. Thankfully there's a small "ad" in the corner that no one can see.
The day old reddit dies is the day I stop using reddit entirely. The desktop version is every bit as awful as the mobile version. For some reason they seem to think that seeing a few more posts or comments on the screen at page load is too much information to process, but taking up 1/4 of my screen with some pictures or videos is a better use of the space. Everything is so obfuscated and difficult to find. I can't stand it.
Kinda afraid of this at this point. I honestly have no idea how they can get away with the non-old version of the website which is one of the most unstable pieces of shit I've ever seen.
old.reddit.com is great, but it has nothing to do with what's described above, which is google results. At least on mobile I think you're automatically sent to the stupid AMP page regardless.
Yes this is the way. What reddit has done to its own mobile experience is incredibly disrespectful, I couldn’t agree with this article more. Just... let me see your fucking ads?
Does anyone know a way on ios to forcibly redirect all reddit links to old.reddit.com?
What annoys me even more is that they kinda block the ability to read more /all comments when you're not logged in, at least this has been my experience so far.
I've tried alternatives, and I keep going back to i.reddit.com for mobile. I've also installed extensions to deal with the bullshit on desktop.
My number one gripe right now is when using Google to search for stuff on reddit and use the time filter ("last week"), Reddit does not accurately report dates, and you get 4 year old threads showing up as "last week".
Regarding desktop, and even mobile. old.reddit.com still points to the previous version of the site. It's less than ideal for mobile but you can set this as the default site in your account settings. It's under beta section, need to uncheck box for using the new reddit site.
Reddit is literally the worst use of AMP I've ever seen, and honestly probably plays a great part in why a lot of people dislike AMP. It honestly has no place using AMP in the first place since it isn't really a static page.
Do yourself a favor and install a third-party app: Apollo, RIF, Boost, Infinity whatever. A few are available on F-Droid. No ads or other bullshit, web links open in the app, which loads must faster than the website.
As long as Reddit maintain their API and keep it free, I'll keep using Reddit. If they ever drop it, there's not much chance I will.
Fully agree with everything in TFA. I'm an occasional Reddit user, and almost exclusively a lurker. But over the past few years they have been making it more and more intolerable to use, especially on mobile.
The most recent things have been blocking you completely from subreddits, and blocking you completely from threads below the second level (you hit "read more", and get a popup).
And beside the many dark patterns, there are also "stupid patterns" - for example, in a thread of only 20 comments or so, it only load about 4 by default. And if you want to load more from below a thread, it does a full page reload, now showing you only that subthread!
It really is an absolutely maddening experience, that must surely serve to drive users away and make them hate it?! For one of the biggest sites in the world, I just can't fathom how unbelievably bad the whole design is - every part of it!
And as only an occasional user, I don't want to install their shitty app (which requires a Reddit account).
Years back I used to actually like Reddit - now, I fucking hate it :-/
It truly is incredible how a site that was perfectly usable over a decade ago has been massively updated to become unusable and with zero desirable features.
I guess now there’s video embedding, but it’s the worst embedded video I’ve come across on a major site by far.
I just don't understand reddit's UI. I'd probably use the subreddit's I join a lot more if their forum features were more like HN & lobsters.
> ...it does a full page reload, now showing you only that subthread!
Some times expands in place, some times link to new page. Since I can't predict what will happen, I rarely drill down into threads.
I lurk on r/awww and the like. (Mental therapy during the apocolypse.) I have no idea why OC is shown or not. Further, the UI for submitting posts is turrible. I legit have no idea what will happen. So I've stopped trying.
I wouldn't mind using a native or 3rd party client. Shit, I cut my teeth on CompuServe, BIX, FidoNet, etc. They had thriving ecosystem of offline clients. But the reddit clients I've tried just haven't gelled with me. (Didn't care enough to think about it too much.)
Now that I'm using Firefox regularly again, I may try Reddit Enhancement Suite again.
> Some times expands in place, some times link to new page
Yes, you're right actually, and in a way it's worse than always loading a new page, simply because it's so unpredictable. I mean... who the hell thinks this stuff up?
Hadn't heard of the Reddit Enhancement Suite - if it drops some of the bullshit, I'll happily give it a try.
As an aside, I also started out on CompuServe, towards the late 90s! I was on dialup of course, but I actually used to love the CompuServe UI! When Netscape Navigator showed up and the World Wide Web was just starting to become a thing, I remember thinking it was a bit shit: "wtf is going to want this when CompuServe is available?!". Didn't I turn out to be so, so wrong!
If it's any consolation, I have always hated HTML and adjacent. Initially, it was such a huge leap backwards, like giving yourself a lobotomy. I just didn't get the appeal. As a better gopher, absolutely, sign me up. But the next hypertext & multimedia platform? HA! We already had awesome multimedia and hypertext. I expected the Next Thing, not some punk's brain dead IMG tag, blink, and marque scroll.
Shows what I know.
My very first "web" project, in 1998, was dual publishing product catalogs to CD-ROM and online. What the kids today call "static site generators." (Wrestling with Netscape App Server and JRunner cemented my hatred of the web.) I treated URLs as just another UNC; pathnames are pathnames, right? I just didn't grasp the impact domain names would have.
I eventually concluded that the magic sauce was URLs, built on top of DNS, begating "the web".
That took me a really long time to appreciate. Its failings -- broken links, one-way links, link rot -- were also its strengths.
I've been run over time and again by "worse is better." So many times, that I can't help but conclude I'm impaired somehow. Like I really thought Jini, JXTA, tuplespaces, grid computing were going to transform everything. Instead we got REST, serverless, and JavaScript. Like going to a fancy restaurant, ordering a medium rare porterhouse steak, and being served whatever they scrapped off the rat infested dirt floor. And then when you protest, even so much as raise an eyebrow, you're the idiot.
HTTP isn't so bad. I really wish I had thought about HTML and HTTP separately, from the beginning. I actually kinda like HTTP 1.1 & 2.0. (The successors continue to befuddle me.)
Thanks for listening. I'll be out front, yelling at kids and dogs.
PS- I was totally right about Java. Too bad Sun let Captain IMG Tag sabotage it on the client.
Thanks, this does seem to work! It's a PITA to change the URL every time I click a Google search result that hits Reddit, but it's better than dealing with all the bullshit Reddit throws at me.
Surely the most annoying thing is the endless requests to download the app. So irritating! I refuse to download it just because they insist so hard. Reddit is the most basic site ever, there is absolutely no need for me to have an app.
old.reddit.com is not mobile optimized at all, but still infinitely better than reddit.com. Alternatively, get one of the non-official apps (on Android I use rif).
Teddit supports multisub URLs. I am not sure if the effect is the exact same as the front page, but it looks similar enough. Just create a multisub and save it in your bookmarks. Like this:
I prefer old Reddit because it isn’t mobile optimized. Most mobile optimized experiences are ugly, waste space, neutered experiences. My phone does a great job of rendering a desktop page. We don’t have shitty toy browsers anymore on mobile. Stop giving me the shitty toy experience.
Once upon a time, links from .compact would always refer to other .compact links. That has slowly been going away, however. I think they are trying to slowly kill it off.
Just this week they changed "visit old reddit" to be under a "more" item in the menu. I am concerned that this is the first step to removing it for good. I don't know how to get my interaction data except on old reddit.
Do you need a Reddit account to use the unofficial apps? Also, I prefer to search Reddit content from Google - will Reddit links open in one of those apps, instead of giving me the usual shitty Reddit Web UX?
I'm surprised that there isn't a version of the Reddit Enhancement Suite extension for old.reddit.com. Especially now that they had to trim features to support the redesign.
I just found that there is setting checked in the menu (for anonymous and authenticated users) called "Ask to Open in App." I find it kind of curious that they would offer an option. Who would actually want this setting to be enabled? Maybe some developers snuck it in so they could use their own site without contracting cancer.
Not Reddit per se but I find it hard to wrap my head around the app thing for Reddit or similar. HTML5/CSS3 is so sufficient for this... The web gave birth to an economy going away from itself. And. Ow everything is there twice or thrice.
Surely there's some good economical or political reason it. Maybe systemic (any large market will create redundancies.. I don't know)
While not disclosing that e-mail is optional is a dark pattern, it's still better than what almost every other site does, which is making it a hard requirement.
Another dark pattern on Reddit is that the web version only allows you to open content in their app. If you already have a compatible third party reddit app installed, "open in app" just sends you to the Play store. (Normal behavior is that if you have an app that can open those links, that app opens).
I think Reddit has realized that they have more savvy users who would flee if forced the official app, risking the same fate as Digg, but they're trying to push every other user into their ad-infested app.
Ironically, the harder a company tries to push their app, the more obvious it is to me that I cannot under any circumstance allow it to be installed on my phone. They're clearly trying to do something (almost certainly against my interest) that they can't do without the app.
From what I know, reddit is not entirely to blame on its own on this. Apple's policy only lets the first party app open certain domains, like YouTube (please correct me if I'm mistaken) and Twitter. Overall, a decent workaround is an app called Opener (link to follow) which lets you switch to specific apps from the share sheet. Apollo also has this feature for reddit links specifically.
However, I do agree that reddit's behavior beyond that is obnoxious.
That's a tough cookie to solve. So here's the hypothetical. I create a trashware game app. Typical low-hanging fruit. I set it as a handler for amazon.com links. Then in my app I handle these links in a convincing web container.
And obvious, mangle the links with my referrer URL in the process.
I call this a hypothetical, but the only reason it is, is that apple wouldn't allow me to register as a handler for amazon.com.
Incidentally this is also one of the arguments that people point to for App Store lockdown. Otherwise, they claim that there would be nothing stopping you from making such a "trashware game app" and injecting referral links.
The only way I can stomach using Reddit is via Reddit Sync.
I firmly believe that soon Reddit will prevent third party clients from using their API. Perhaps there'll be a subscription service where paid accounts can still use it with their client of choice, or maybe they'll just kill the ecosystem in an attempt to get people on the official app. Either way, that's me done with it.
The hostility makes it somewhere I'm just unenthusiastic about visiting. It's a Facebook-style manouvre.
The percentage of people who would pay for it, probably wouldn't make up for the dev time to implement it.
Once upon a time the HN userbase and the reddit user base weren't a million miles apart, those days are long gone, reddit is mainstream and mainstream consumers don't care that much about ads, the new UI or everything else this thread is up in arms about, it's still the defacto internet forum and nothing I've seen looks likely to replace it.
Edit: apparently I’m misreading the traffic page and third party apps are not included. So disregard this paragraph. I really doubt they’ll kill API access. From the stats on my (medium sized) sub a full third of uniques (desktop and mobile combined) are from unofficial clients.
And that’s not to mention the number of near-essential bots used by many subs for community management.
Now, what they are doing is not putting new non-core features into the API, like chat and RPAN. But while that’s still irritating, it is a bit different than killing API access.
Here's how reddit's business model probably works: you have power users which create or submit the content and write the witty comments and then you have the lurkers which just browse. what reddit is trying to monetize is the interaction with the latter user group: comments provide little space to promote ads, so most of them are hidden by default. instead they promote lots of posts with images interspersed with ads. the power users on the other hand use dedicated apps and have a custom interface anyway. they are (so far) not really bothered by the changes and continue to create and submit content.
You left out the moderators. Some of what they do is useful tending of communities, but some of what they do is provide free labor that addresses a hard problem.
Indeed, content moderation is the single hardest problem on the internet right now, and every big tech company is struggling with it. From Youtube to Twitch to Twitter to Facebook, etc. Reddit, while not perfect, has done relatively well, but as you mention it's all on the back of volunteer unpaid moderators. I'm surprised they haven't yet setup any sort of revenue sharing with large popular subs.
As a moderator of a decently sized sub (215k+ or so): we're suffering. I feel like its a lot of work and not a lot of support. We're not allowed to make any money off of it and the users just throw shit at us at every oportunity.
Reddit bought Dubsmash last year, too. I imagine the app will eventually operate almost similar to TikTok: funny picture, advertisement, cat video, person live-streaming.
Whether or not they can attract more of these power users to use the official app to upload short videos and livestream remains to be seen. I don’t think they’re able to on third-party apps. I’m not able to on Apollo, at least.
Lurkers will always outnumber posters on any forum I think, but I have to believe Reddit has a worse ratio than most because the echo chambers are so strong and anything outside of them is downvoted to oblivion.
And it's easy to feel engaged by just reading threads mindlessly upvoting or downvoting endlessly.
I've been meaning to quit any and all digital activity that's a bottomless well (ie, you can get more content ad infinitum). This includes social networks, Youtube, Netflix, etc.
Of these, Reddit was probably my worst vice, as I could just pop up my phone and endlessly read mind-numbing crap, no matter the place and time. My monkey brain has been completely addicted to this motion for well over a decade now, and I always made excuses for myself because I thought it actually had some intellectual value (when I was really mostly browsing r/games and r/soccer, not r/programming or other communities from which to derive some enlightenment).
Now I can't do that even if I wanted to, b/c their new site is a UX abomination. They're very close to hiding everything behind login, and they place all kinds of crap to herd you to the mobile app (no thanks!)
So a big thank you to Reddit management, I guess?
To anyone who may have even a mild digital addiction or bad habit, call it what you will, which you're suspecting is making you unhappy or limiting your potential: JUST QUIT.
You won't miss it and you'll observe amazing results.
In my case, I've seen the following in the last weeks (and other times I've done this in the past):
a. Increased focus
b. Longer, deeper sleep
c. Better relationships
d. Increased productivity at work and hobbies
e. Improved mood
f. Greatly increased control over my time
g. Much more time spent reading
This was at virtually zero cost, since I wasn't getting any value from about 98% of my browsing - maybe an enlightening Reddit post or Youtube vid here and there, but I think I can easily make it up with reading.
Your results may vary of course, but there are good chances you will experience some or all of the above.
I know full well it's not as easy as it sounds but give it a shot - you won't regret it.
> not r/programming or other communities from which to derive some enlightenment
Some obscure subreddits remain a source of emerging thinking on esoteric areas of focus.
The trick is an app that lets you exclude everything else, fully under your editorial control, with no dark patterns.
On iOS, I use Apollo (RIP Alien Blue).
> quit any and all digital activity that's a bottomless well
I’d add “short form ‘content’” to that.
At least once a quarter try to not pick up or browse any short form content until you’ve read 1 - 5 books, however many it takes to get past any agitation pulling you out of the reading flow, till you can again read for hours at a go.
It may be easier to start with one or two fiction, then switch to two or three non-fiction. Something like:
- airport novel
- philosophical fiction / literature
- pop non-fiction
- topical non-fiction
- textbook or research book
You can pick back up short form once your brain is willing to absorb an entire research book.
Yeah I stopped using Reddit a couple of months ago and I’m way less stressed out and I’ve just went back to finding forums to post at for discussion the way I did before Reddit. There was a time when I think I did get some intellectual discussion from Reddit and this is why it overtook my forum use and replaced it. Those days are gone, it’s now just a shitty Facebook clone with extra steps and every sub, even r/programming, is a bunch of people who are just memeing 90% of the time.
I only begrudgingly got a smartphone last year - after watching everyone else get addicted to them "from the outside" and I've fallen right into the trap with them. Finally made an account to ask, can you be more specific about what qualifies as a bottomless well? I have Messenger for talking to my family but never use the rest of Facebook. Does that disqualify it? What about only using Youtube for channels like Techmoan or Mark Felton?
So what do you do when you don't really feel like thinking about anything, like after a long meeting or while drinking your coffe after lunch, or waiting for a build to finish?
I feel like this is my main problem. Sometimes I just want to turn off my brain a bit or I have to do something boring and then I pick up my phone but get stuck on it for too long.
“…quit any and all digital activity that’s a bottomless well…”
Thank you for that. The past few weeks, I’ve started asking myself, “am I watching people I don’t know arguing about something, assigning points (likes) and considering jumping in?” to break myself out of the worst time-wasting and pointlessly agitating stuff, but you’ve given me an even better target.
* More and better work (I work for myself, so this is actually great)
* Movies (I don't consider these to be part of the bottomless well. I would very rarely watch more than one in one sitting).
* Actively listening to music and singing (used to sing in a metal band, if I'm bored, instead of going on Youtube, I'll just growl Metallica or Megadeth around the house like back in the day)
* Hanging out with friends
I've done significantly more of all of the above since I quit.
I'm also feeling more creative and entrepreneurial thanks to the feeling of mastery over my time, and the frequent boredom that comes with not having a quick digital fix that ends up turning into hours of infinite scrolling.
My biggest drains were Youtube, Reddit, and news media. I've easily reclaimed anywhere between 10-15h just from quitting those.
The most disrespectful pattern I encounter regularly on reddit is that it forgets that I want the nicer, more compact interface. There will come a day when they remove it entirely, clearly, and that will be the end of my reddit usage, more or less.
This is an assumption that I'd had until I read feedback from users who joined reddit after introduction of the new reddit design, that old reddit web interface is ugly. Well, I think reddit knows better than us. They have the data!
That's the whole plan, keep the old interface around (along with power users) until the new user population (who only knows the new interface) grows large enough to be able to get rid of the old interface without getting a full Digg-like exodus.
Then Mozilla had to go and fuck up extensions on mobile firefox, so now I simply avoid Reddit from phone. On totally unrelated note, I suddenly find myself with extra free time!
The "full extension" I linked is 800 bytes of JS, and thanks to being an extension it can redirect network requests before the page even loads (useful because sometimes Reddit can be quite sluggish to respond, and also because it's good nettiquette to not make spurious requests).
Besides which, applying a UserScript requires a much larger "full extension". I'd much rather have a small purpose-built extension which is, via browser-enforced policy, only allowed to run on the specific domains for which it is required.
I audited the code, installed it, turned off updates, and it has faithfully served me for a while now.
It keeps forgetting for me too. That is to say, in my mobile browser and desktop browser I opt out of the redesign in favor of the old.reddit.com design, but about once per month it'll just revert back to the redesign. I don't think my cookies are being cleared because I'll stay logged in and I've never found any other setting that flips in the same way, it is only the Redesign opt-out that does this.
I don't know how to explain why many people say "this never happens to me" and other people say "this happens frequently."
While I'm on the subject, another grey pattern the article missed is the button to opt out of the redesign on mobile. When clicking the hamburger menu there used to be a button at the bottom called (iirc) "Opt out of Redesign." The same option exists today except they've moved it into a Settings submenu and renamed it "Request desktop site" which implies it's a temporary change.
Lastly, if you search you'll find threads where people say the web pages are sometimes rendered without any opt out button. I just opened an incognito window to test this and I simply cannot find a button to revert to the old design, even when using my mobile browser's Desktop Mode. So unless a visitor knows about old.reddit.com they are forced to use the new design.
This started happening to me only a few weeks ago. I’ve noticed it happens every Monday for me, so presumably some setting is being erased weekly to get users to move to the new design.
By 'compact', do you mean i.reddit.com, or old.reddit.com?
I've found that the former does sometimes redirect me to the garbage mobile version when I click on a thread (even while logged in), but the latter persists as long as the setting is enabled in my account.
Reddit is an absolutely grotesque website, both for these UI issues and the toxic hate it engenders on all the subreddits. It’s magnitudes worse than any other social network. I have a genuine question: do people openly say they work for this company or is it workplace where people have to hide that they are part of it?
> the toxic hate it engenders on all the subreddits.
I always see people saying this and I have to wonder what subreddits they're subscribed to. My experience is basically fine, sure there's some shitty discussions or a few hostile idiots lurking about, but it's no worse than message boards generally, and most conversations seem rather good.
Part of me wonders whether some posters are just extraordinarily sensitive, and intentionally dive into the most downvoted top level comments so they can get their daily dose of outrage at the things trollS say.
I guess the specialized subreddits are okayish, but I am always shocked when looking at the frontpage. The amount of hate and misery that appears in the most liked posts (posts and comments) is disconcerting. Just checked: Cringetopia, IdiotsInCars, MurderedByWords, JusticeServed, facepalm, PublicFreakout, iamverysmart, ChoosingBeggars...
I know that most reddit visitors are teenagers or young adults and that controversal topics get more clicks etc. etc. That's what people want to see? It's so...how should I say it?...sad.
Specialised subs with good moderation, dedicated to topics that are positive things, are pretty much always fun experiences. Those subreddits you mention though - I think I've filtered every single one of them from my feed because they are just inherently negative
- You would prefer not to make your creation frustrating to use. (Of course, the team may think that their changes are better, but let’s assume that’s not the case)
- The board cares about ARPU and ARPU growth
- You’re stuck in the middle, and believe that you’re implementing it less terribly than your replacement would. So far, your biggest win here has been preserving old.reddit.com and API access, which consumed most of your political capital.
So, if you were Steve, what strategy would you propose and why?
As a product manager, here is what I would do if I was in Steve’s shoes. Instead of employing dark patterns that take advantage of casual user’s trust, I would actually listen to users and evolve the site in the direction users are asking for.
Reddit just killed their Santa Program, this year will be it’s last. The Secret Santa program was amazingly popular but perhaps complicated to manage so instead of improving it, they killed it - favoring dark patters to drive mobile adoption, lol.
Why not double down on the things the community has already indicated it wants. My analysis says they should evolve into a marketplace to drive more peer-to-peer activity between users while enabling monetization that could scale significantly.
Reddit seems to be mentally stuck in the Advertising model and lacks vision. Encourage more peer-to-peer interaction, make it a marketplace, drive real economic activity between users, adopt cryptocurrencies as well as conventional payment mechanisms to enable commerce between users. Think different.
What's worse with Secret Santa is they didn't have to take it over in the first place. Community / active users ran it. Which is what (feeling like used to) makes Reddit special. AND they aren't giving the keys to the exchange back to the original creator...
Now starting over in a new user run sub but it is super sh*ty behavior.
They tried the marketplace idea too with reddit gold etc. wasn't that also originally a co-opted user created joke like silver? and they seem to be changing that too? though I can't find the mod post so maybe I'm not remembering correct?
It started on 4chan with the 4chan Gold meme. Users would joke about a non-existent premium subscription that unlocked exclusive content. Reddit went ahead and actually implemented that idea, complete with the /r/lounge subreddit (available only to users with Reddit Gold).
Reddit users created Reddit Silver as another meme, indicating that a post was valuable (but not worth spending real money for Reddit Gold). Then reddit implemented that later on.
What? More peer to peer activity and make it a marketplace? Then you add in crypto for good measure…
They added chat, and everyone hated it. People aren’t on there to build up yet another social network. What would this marketplace even sell? Is it like a less localized Craigslist?
Peer to peer exchange of goods and services backed by reputations established in Subreddits sounds like it has potential worth exploring to me. A similar model has worked out very well for Facebook.
Also, please note Reddit is already another social network so that train has left the station.
As for crypto, well I am a big fan of crypto currencies and I see a compelling use case here. Perhaps you disagree? Fine, ignore the crypto suggestion and comment on my others.
Their Secret Santa program is a great example of a successful peer to peer marketplace already. Reddit Gold’s success is a good indicator of the potential for virtual currencies, stable coins, traditional payment systems, or yes even crypto.
Their desperation to monetize through Ads alone is a dangerous strategy. It leaves the site vulnerable because it separates the needs of the Advertiser (Reddit’s real customer) from the community (Reddit’s users) when ever a company decouples users from customers it makes it easy to compromise the user in favor of the business model and customer.
In the short run the metrics go up. In the long run you end up with another Digg.
So, of course my suggestion might seem naive given I don't have access to the numbers or knowing exactly the stack or employee numbers, etc. but it's a good exercise.
So:
I would basically copy Patreon in service of getting content creators paid.
In support of that:
1. A lot of the structure already exists so it shouldn't be a lot of work. For instance, there are already personal subreddits, there is already a payment gateway, there are coins that can be used for microtransactions, etc. I need to implement sub-only features and paying for individual content.
2. I can cite Patreon/OnlyFans etc revenue and MAU.
3. I can cite how many users have links to their Patreon/OnlyFans in their profiles. Beyond individual users I can make the case that organizations might want a piece of this too.
4. I believe in this vision which means I can sell it to the team, to the users and to the public better. It's also a positive vision around which people can rally.
5. Then I expend the rest of my political capital pushing this through and stake my job on it. I'd be OK doing that since I'd be doing something I really believe in.
6. If it doesn't work, there's two possibilities. Either it didn't work in a suitable
time frame but there is traction in which case I can demonstrate that we are making progress and perhaps buy more time. Or it didn't work at all in which case I've failed at doing something I believed in.
7. If it does work then I've regained all my capital and much more. At which point I can go further into becoming a platform where content creators can get paid. Think Gumroad, TeeSpring, Etsy, etc.
Come up with some innovative ways to monetize, beyond just the usual ads and tracking and dirty tricks to boost engagement. The article has a few decent directions.
I'd start with adding an option to set up paid private subreddits. Like, the creator specifies that you have to subscribe to that sub for some monthly cost in order to see / interact with the content, with a percentage skimmed off the top. It seems like it'd be really easy to implement the most basic version of it and see what users do.
There's already a ton of stuff kind of like that. Tons of people pay for a creator's content on Patreon and various special-purpose copycats, and many of them include access to a private Discord in that. No reason why Reddit couldn't take over a chunk of that, since it's convenient to have all of the content and all of the community discussion features on the same platform.
Lots of ways to expand if it catches on, like multiple subscription levels, different levels of permissions for different subscription levels, etc.
* Use the Reddit Enhancement Suite browser extension, and customize to your liking.
* Set it to permanent old.reddit.com mode, so all reddit links immediately go there.
* Only browse reddit on mobile using one of several third-party apps, like Relay (my preference), Boost, or Apollo.
* Extensively tailor your subreddit selection to weed out the garbage. Most if not all of the default subreddits are terrible, but anything devoted to a niche interest is likely to be a welcoming and respectful community.
I don't have avatars, autoplay videos, or inline "promoted" threads. I see 10 levels of nested comments with 1000 comments loaded by default. Additional levels of nesting are tap to open. I have keyboard navigation on desktop and swipe navigation (from link to comments back to home page) on mobile.
Pretty much all of the complaints that folks have in here are solved problems.
I think this is the way Reddit supposes their power users to have the old reddit experience. If they didn't care about power users, they'd completely decimate old.reddit.com months after deployment of the new design, just shove it all 'em mouth. They always leave ways for power users to have the most authentic reddit experience.
Recently, Reddit has changed their algorithm to filter out contents of pornographic subreddits from the front page r/all. They didn't touch the communities. But they made it much harder for average users and new users to accidentally discover porn contents on Reddit. They didn't want to do another 'tumblr'. But this, consequently, has impact on promotion and expansion of those subreddits. This is a smart move (that other platforms have the same trouble should learn). Change hurts, but it is barely felt.
They've recently (1-2 weeks) changed it so that you can't reject non-essential cookies from the new (non-old) reddit. So you go there, you say no I don't want your damn tracking crap, and then 2 days later you mysteriously get the prompt again; every 2 days.
Been on reddit for over 11 years, but I'm reaching the end of my patience for this shit too.
Not a power Reddit user here. I only stumble upon random posts that search engines throw my way when I'm looking things up so I might very well be missing something.
The main questions:
Considering all the bad practices, why people keep using Reddit and what makes it so great? Why people make custom clients instead of looking for a full-fledged alternative?
The questions are genuine, not a sarcasm. The following is just a rant and emotions, feel free to ignore.
My questions mostly come from these thoughts:
- As far as I'm concerned, it's people that bring value to online forums, not the other way around. Established communities must have no issues moving wherever.
- Creating a huge online forum (even from scratch) has it's challenges, but ultimately isn't the most complex engineering task.
As we live we learn to accept the fact that everything we love eventually dies. Not being an active user I might see it differently, but to me it looks like the forum (the technical part of it!) that people knew and loved is dead.
Why workarounds? Isn't it the time to move on to creating/finding something new instead of feeding the corpse-milkers and digesting whatever they spit back? It's a glorified database client, not a secret non-replicable alien technology.
Edit: reading the other comments I came to realization that Reddit must mostly serve community leaders (who most likely use alternative clients) as a discovery mechanism. And content-consumers would do whatever it takes to consume however inconvenient. I can see how that keeps people there, but don't clearly see why there is no popular alternatives. I guess it's really hard to gain the critical mass in the online-forum market.
> The main questions: Considering all the bad practices, why people keep using Reddit and what makes it so great? Why people make custom clients instead of looking for a full-fledged alternative?
Critical mass, and inertia. Reddit has already captured by far the largest share of foum users, and that isn't going to change any time soon.
I'm only an occasional user, generally arriving via a Google search, and it's the sheer quantity of posts that keep my searches hitting Reddit. Doesn't mean I like the UI/UX or their dark patterns tho - I can't bloody stand them!
They have good content and good comments. Funny junk is interspersed with news and occasional trivia and life stories. The thoughtful comments really are great and have helped me understand some POVs and hear about other people’s lives.
This just does not happen on Facebook for example. Most groups and posts are run into the ground by junk comments that make discussion impossible because there’s no downvote that eventually hides them. In a way Facebook is more equal but unfortunately not every commenter is equally decent.
It just has the most users of all link aggregators. If you want to discuss subject A, or news story B, or product C, it's the best place--because of the users, and despite the increasingly trash design. It got those users by being best-in-class a long time ago when things like Digg were futzing and fumbling around the same way Reddit is now.
As soon as some non-user-hostile site gets enough people Reddit will go away.
I'd assume that savvy people determined to set up a user account, and not aware they can avoid providing an email address, would just set up a throwaway email account on some free service
Everything about Reddit's (visible) engineering is terrible these days.
The new React app UI is probably one of the least performant React apps I've ever seen / experienced. Turn on the re-render track in React DevTools and watch as simply upvoting a single post on your page causes every component to re-render.
However they're delivering video/images to clients is the worst I've seen in a long time. Videos constantly buffer in ridiculous ways, you can barely scrobble, and images load in more slowly than anywhere else on the web. Honestly browsing Reddit in 2021 makes me feel like I'm back on dial-up.
Sorry anyone here that's a Reddit engineer but something is going terribly wrong over there.
> Sorry anyone here that's a Reddit engineer but something is going terribly wrong over there.
You shouldn't need to apologize to the Reddit engineers. They are the ones building it this way! I wish a Reddit engineer would respond here to help people understand why on earth the site's quality is so poor, but we know they can't/won't due to confidentiality. Whenever I browse the non-old Reddit, I can't help but think it's impossible to have such bad quality accidentally. They must be deliberately making it this bad. It would be fascinating to get a glimpse at their bug tracker, to see what tickets they prioritize and which ones they ignore.
I don't have a reddit account but some small subreddits are quite good. I use https://teddit.net/ on the desktop and RedReader from F-Droid. Teddit doesn't have infinte scroll and RedReader can be limited to how many are loaded each time and you have to press to load more. This way it's much easier to not doomscroll, there are far fewer dark patterns, it's lighter, less tracking. You can bookmark subreddits on a browser and pin them in RedReader. Subreddits also have RSS feeds although I wouldn't advise it for popular ones because of the amount of hits you'll get.
RedReader is a fantastic reddit mobile client for Android - they are rolling out a new version right now with a ton of community contributions (both bugfixes and new features).
Hostile design either makes the user login (a user reddit can monetize) or makes the user to close the site (a user reddit can't monetize, thus no need to waste resources), both scenarios is a win for reddit.
Third scenario: People keep using it in anger until something better shows up, and by that time there will be enough unhappy people to spark a growing community in the New Place.
If that were true, it would've happened long ago. Say what you will about reddit's questionably/shitty policies, but they do a pretty decent job of keeping the extremists/racists/crazies/etc contained.
Nearly every attempt at a reddit alternative over the years has been flooded by those types of people. Even if you ignore the fact that advertisers will avoid that community like a plague, the average person will want to avoid it too.
> Nearly every attempt at a reddit alternative over the years has been flooded by those types of people
Yes, most of the time because they have advertised themselves as a "free-speech place". Of course the people these places attract are the "5G is a Jewish conspiracy to vaccinate everybody" kinda people
It would be interesting if it turns out reddit has a team to flood new competitors with unsavory accounts. It's exactly what they did when they started reddit, just with positive fake accounts instead of negative.
"Huffman said one other strategy proved crucial to Reddit’s early success, which most people are unaware of: The team submitted a ridiculous amount of content under fake user accounts to give the appearance of popularity."
...
“The first thing it did was it set the tone,” by the activity it displayed to visitors, Huffman said. “We were submitting content that we would have been interested in seeing. That meant the content on Reddit … was good. And when you show up , you know exactly what the site is about.”
Absolutely. Aside from programming problems, “product/service reddit” is probably my most commonly used Google search query.
Whenever I’m looking for information about a product, service, restaurant, etc. one of the first things I look for is a discussion on Reddit. As much as I hate what Reddit has become, it still is the best place I’ve found for discussion from locals or enthusiasts that provide a much more accurate description of a product/restaurant/etc. than user reviews or ad filled blogs.
I use Google for this since Reddit’s search is garbage.
If you're adding "reddit" to the search query that's a bit different, in that case you're explicitly looking for results on reddit. Penalizing reddit in the rankings shouldn't change this use case.
I was more thinking about generic search queries that have reddit in the results. In my experience that doesn't happen very often.
I just don't think reddit gets a significant amount of traffic from search results so penalizing it in the rankings won't have a big effect.
Yes, I only end up on Reddit via Google searches, looking for the answer to a question.
Then when looking at the discussion from the search result, I'll sometimes see other topics that look interesting.
Unfortunately the web experience is so offputting, and so weirdly discontinuous, that it's hard to stick around and enjoy it. It's high friction and reminds me how much time I'm wasting by it being so clunky. Other interesting places are easier to get into without the same feeling.
The way the other topics shown (that aren't the answer to my question) are the most recent ones is offputting as well. It means no context around the time of the discussion I was looking at, no chance of seeing related discussions from the tine, and if I land in the same subreddit from multiple searches, no variety to show me why the subreddit is interesting.
So I've never felt interested enough to stick around and create a Reddit account, and my only visits are from Google searches that occasionally land on Reddit.
I just stay away from Reddit links as much as possible. The user experience is atrocious and I agree with everything the article says. There is another point that the article missed (or perhaps never encountered because the author primarily focuses on the mobile experience).
In desktop Reddit posts are actually modal dialogs (don't believe me? Open a Reddit post in your desktop browser). I have this bad habit of clicking my mouse on the whitespace of any web page I visit (I guess I am the only one). The Reddit devs, for whatever reason best known to them, have added a click listener on the backdrop of the Reddit post (like I said, the post is a modal dialog). The moment you click it, the post closes to reveal the subreddit homepage that you were on. This has tripped me so many times I have rewired my brain to use my mouse carefully while navigating Reddit. This sort of design anti-pattern is also visible in USA Today. I don't know who first came up with this pattern but it sucks.
Use modal dialogs for what they have to be used for. Don't try to fool the user into thinking it is a page when it is actually a modal dialog.
> I have this bad habit of clicking my mouse on the whitespace of any web page I visit (I guess I am the only one).
That makes two of us.
I agree but don't stay away, I use old.reddit w/reddit enhancement suite, doesn't fix incognito for me as I don't let addons run there, but using containers on firefox instead helps.
They make it very difficult to be a contributor as well, a lot of subreddits focus on showcasing/bragging rather than discussions now. I've had a DIY question I've posted to the three biggest home improvement/diy subreddits and it was deleted from one, downvoted to oblivion in another one without replies and downvoted to 0 in the last one with the only comment proposing a solution so overkill grotesque that I didn't bother to reply.
Downvotes would be fine if I ever managed to post anything. Most subs have automated post removal when the post doesn’t follow whatever requirement they have but you only know this requirement after you’re done making your post. Thanks a lot for letting me talk to a wall, Reddit.
What’s interesting to me is that “old.reddit.com” continues to work on mobile in these cases. They must have found that users really don’t know about the original site, or that not enough care.
Still, if “old.reddit.com” ever goes away I will be 100% cured of Reddit. It is literally unusable in any other way and it would not be worth the frustration.
The closing off subreddits is particularly annoying.
The Reddit mobile has a longstanding bug in how handle it handles GIFs. I have a bot (u/CalvinBot) that posts the official Calvin & Hobbes strip to /r/calvinandhobbes each day. GoComics, the copyright holder, only publishes it as a GIF, so that's how it's submitted to Reddit.
However, because of the bug in the app, people can view the GIF properly. The advice used to be just switch to your browser, but because of Reddit now breaking that, even that workaround doesn't work now.
Why aren’t they pivoting into a marketplace instead?
I'm just gonna guess this is because "supporting and policing a marketplace" is its own special kind of hell; supporting and policing a discussion forum is bad enough without adding on all the way monetary transactions can go awry.
Honestly, all suggestions from the original post is the epitome of "If everyone is stupid, then why aren’t you rich". The moment he suggested OnlyFans model on Reddit, all of his suggestions lost value. Do you know that OnlyFans even doesn't want to be OnlyFans anymore?
Reddit's biggest dark pattern is showing your removed comments as if they are not removed when you are logged in. You can try and see it for yourself here [0]. I built a site primarily with this issue in mind [1].
Some may claim that laypeople like the new UI better, but anecdotally, among my social circle of non-techy people, that's not the case. In fact it is becoming something of a meme that Reddit is now impractical to use on mobile if you're not registered.
That's a false dichotomy though. There are popular platforms that no one bitches about the UX such as Twitter. Yes, I'm sure there are people complaining about some of the stuff (like having no edit feature etc) but I'm sure it's not remotely close to Reddit-level.
Facebook makes $32 per user per year. That is across all billion+ users worldwide. They make around $170 per user in the US And Canada. No non-advertising monetization strategy will come close to that number. Assuming 10% of users pay (which is a very generous assumption) you'd need to have each user in the US pay $1700 per year!!!!
> Reddit has lots of competent people. So, surely they have the data to back up their decisions. And the data must be saying that these changes are working.
Sadly this is not as much of a truism as one might expect. Even competent people tend to design experiments that are biased towards the desired results, and even competent people tend to interpret their experimental results in a favourable light. And even competent people get in a feedback loop where their metrics are chasing a local minima, and they don't have the political capital within the organisation to convince management to take a short-term hit to the metrics for a prospective global improvement in the future...
The ads team at Amazon who thinks the #1 performing ad strategy is to show you ads for the blender you just purchased - they have data too, after all.
On top of these design issues, I'm surprised by how buggy the core experience can be. The home page repeatedly failing to load on many different occasions. The site suddenly acting like you're logged out and needing a refresh. It's very surprising.
I mostly read reddit on a desktop. Lots of people complain about the new UI, but I don't mind it. What I don't understand is how after all this time basic functionality of the site still doesn't work. Like, at least once a week you get logged out and can't log in or you click on a subreddit or a post and it won't load the content. I just don't understand how this is still going on and they are putting resources into avatar microtransactions and the live streaming. Does anyone use the live streaming stuff on reddit?
I’m confused how many people don’t seem to realize this has nothing to do with experiencing the site.
The App gets a ton of personal data they can’t get on a website.
That’s all this is. Data collection. They need you to install the App so they can access your advertising ID, better link your IP and location to your account, get you to click permission allowance, etc.
Shooting their own experience in the foot is an acceptable sacrifice.
I wonder how to look at Apple's decision to tighten privacy rules in this light. I guess companies will be less motivated to force their users to use an iOS app. So, a potential loss for Apple; then again, a potential win for Apple users... so overall a win for Apple?
As an Apple user, I can zero percent complain about their actions even if they’re 1/2 real and 1/2 marketing. At least Apple is saying the right things and even that is a win right now.
This whole rant post is about reddit requiring users to register to use their (free) service.
I don't find it a problem at all. If you wish to use it, register. If you don't, don't.
Nail on the head about marketplace feature. Reddit doesn’t want to build hard products, they want to build easy dark features which aims for more profiling and resultant ad dollars.
One thing I've found is that when I bookmark an old.reddit.com page on my phone it somehow bookmarks www.reddit.com - super annoying.
Anyway, try my Reddit clone (no pop-ups, no smartphone app, no JavaScript, no AMP, no up or down voting, no content algorithm, no images or videos, open source):
> you set your status to “Hiding”. An obvious attempt to effectively shame people into using it.
Or maybe it's just a humorous take. Remember "Anonymous Coward" from Slashdot?
Not against the main take of the article though. But that has more to do with economy. On economic down turn years free sites like this start to crumble. And they take pro-monetizing user hostile steps like this.
I run into a problem on Reddit all the time with Chrome on Android: the videos won't load and just stay frozen or black. The only fix seems to be restarting Chrome.
Do any hackers here know a permanent solution? Please don't say use another browser, I like Chrome :)
Whenever someone builds a reddit competitor it is instantly filled with FBI trolls who post hate speech, spam, and malware to poison the well. Competition is bad for intelligence agencies which already have pipes from the major social media providers.
I once encountered an online streaming employee who was told by their manager to post organic submissions to a movie related subreddit. They were open to their activity when challenged.
I think Reddit knows that it's basically a huge marketing platform . To them they are the real users, even if these users are not paying them.
The stealth marketing is good enough that other users don't mind or actually like them, creating the content for paid advertisements. Indeed when challenged about this activity with clear proof, most users still see nothing wrong.
Way back in the 1990s i worked in a company that did the same thing in the early web so it's clear the industry is bigger than ever.
Twitter is like this also. I want to reduce my Twitter usage so I delete the app and sometimes I just want to see what Elon or somebody like that has been up to. Can I go use their website without logging in? Hell no I can’t. Just sucks
Imho twitter is a far bigger problem for hiding things. A) tweets often get embedded in news articles - meaning sometimes context is left out of an article
and you can't even tell if it's click bait or maybe the article is being harsh /vicious B) reddit is supposedly about community discussion so it would actually make sense if individual subs had the power to only show content to logged in permitted accounts only - that way banned accounts can't snoop on users?
If I couldn’t use the old reddit interface I would have stopped using reddit entirely a year or two ago. Not only because the new interface is even worse than the old one, but also using the old one allows you to dodge most of the issues listed in the article. I could list another 1/2 a dozen annoying changes or limitations, including massive functionality downgrades on mobile web. Once old reddit isn’t usable, I suppose I’ll be entirely done with the site which is a shame after 13 years.
Reddit went from being simple, bare-bones and friendly to overwrought, baffling and user hostile.
All of these things used to annoy me as well. Then I downloaded the app and subscribed monthly to get rid of the ads. Now my reddit experience is awesome.
Reddit isn't a public service. It's a private company trying to increase their profits. The native app experience is way better than the website. Undoubtedly they see higher engagement from folks using the app, so want as many people as possible to use it.
Ads looking like posts? Sounds like they are trying to monetize their traffic. If you don't want to see the ads, pay for the service.
I only use Reddit via third party apps because the website is so awful. First it was Narwhal now it’s Apollo, both for iOS. Apollo is fantastic and has a desktop client in the works…well worth the money.
Reddit is free to squeeze every last dark pattern in order to monetize, just like we are free to stop browsing Reddit. The past few weeks have been frustrating, enough that I've almost stopped Reddit altogether. Funny though... I feel like I haven't lost anything.
As a startup community, we often talk about services being painkiller vs vitamin, or on a scale between 0 and 10 how sad would we feel if we no longer had access to a service. I've been thinking this the past few weeks, and losing Reddit has made me feel kind of meh.
Reddit app is not that good either.
Only good thing left from old era of reddit is access to reddit api so that third party devs can build a better frontend on top of it. I don't think new reddit management is in favour of that decision anymore. An anecdote is Reddit chat (which came much later) is not part of the 3rd party api access so that users would stick to the official Reddit app.
I wouldn't be too surprised if reddit decide one day to kill the api switch.
There is that barebone, weird and non-pretentious, especially the feeling that "I don't do this for money and growth!!" of old internet that modern corporate-y site cannot replicate (hell, and I'm just 35)
Also, all those too much flairs and awards and stuffs somehow push me out of Reddit instead of bring me in. Maybe it's fun for younger generation though... I knew Reddit just about 5 years ago, and it feels more fun back then...
Their UX is as incompetent as their modding censorship policies which makes me think this rot goes to the top. It’s not just a bad marketing division, it’s the whole company.
I remember Reddit being a whimsical fun place, now I see it as a corporation run by a robot lawyer without a sense of humour where raw mobile user impression numbers as the only valuable metric.
Reddit has pathetic ad revenue per user versus every other social media platform. Part of this is likely due to anonymous users that they lack data on for proper targeting. This is their attempt to "fix" that.
I would think that Reddit would have an advantage here in some ways. As an advertiser, instead of trying to pick interests of a general population, you can just pick specific subreddits.
If a store sells geeky/sci-fi clothing and gifts then I found it is way better to just target anyone that visits /r/startrek and some other relevant subreddits. No need to build profiles on users.
I found Facebook to be a lot harder to accurately target users as you are relying on Facebook's profile of a user. I got a lot more reach, but much less conversion.
It makes sense - there will be greater revenue for a few years maybe, in which time the team/product VP responsible would have been promoted. By the time the site culture/userbase dies (maybe in 5 years) these people would be long gone. Maybe even the higher management don't care about a timeline longer than 5 years tbh.
The true management (ie: stock holders) wants to exist at some point. There's talk of an IPO this year in which case they just want to pump up the numbers and hold things stable for another year before they can sell their stock.
What advantages does a user account have over anonymous session ids? User accounts survive users clearing cookies, but I doubt users clear their cookies often enough for that to be a problem.
I really hate that Reddit insists on you using an app. I tried to share a Reddit post with some friends recently who aren’t on that platform. To my dismay they reported that they couldn’t see the post at all because of the GET THE REDDIT APP in your face bull feathers they were presented with. Reddit, you are a website. I want to use my normal browser tabs to use you, not your app. Please make it web-first.
I think you kind of answer your own question. Social media is just a gossip page on steroids. None of their features are worth paying for; at least, not enough people are willing to pay for it. They realized given showing ads and charging customers, showing ads probably generates 10x revenue for them. Plus, what's to stop another person to offer a free reddit clone?
People pay for junk food all the time. Maybe internet companies are being too greedy and they are pricing themselves incorrectly.
Would you pay $2 USD for all of reddit for a year?
How many users does reddit have? It'd probably be a lot of money, but not super profitable. Hence they use adds because they won't shift on price.
The alternative monetization model is usually subscriptions / freemium features. These don't usually work out for social media sites as people are not willing to pay for user generated content, and the main draw is the content itself so freemium features are usually not high-value enough. Thus, the only remaining viable model is ads.
Reddit's model is based on unpaid moderators managing most of the site. There's already controversy around a few moderators controlling all the large communities, karma farming and behind the scenes deals. Introducing money into the mix will just result in even more abuse as moderators try to take their own cut. It's a very messy eco-system that money will just make even messier.
If you think moderators won't take advantage of their position to get a cut of that money then you're living in fantasy land. Or just sell their accounts to others who will do that.
I found myself several times this morning to reach a search result on Reddit (from ddg, mind you), only to immediately change the address to reddit.net after being unable to view nested comments at best (get the app or log in to view!) or be unable to browse the page outright at worst (“please browse anonymously with the app to view this page!)
Worse than the bad UI is how obviously calculated it is. It's not like they just built something bad, no they're actively worsening it to force the app on the user. Each month or three they cripple the web interface a bit more.
Says a lot about the company culture when the entire UI design process is a giant dark pattern
I clicked the link expecting to agree with the author but to be honest, I don't think those are dark patterns. Pushy? Yes. Annoying? Sure. But still not what I would call dark patterns.
Try booking a cheap airline ticket on RyanAir or something, there you'll find some real dark patterns
I can't be alone in just pretending Reddit doesn't exist on mobile. It's weird, I like Reddit a lot, on desktop I post and comment, but on mobile it is so shabby that I just ignore it instead of seeing if it can be made bearable by being logged in to an app.
Why do all this complaining and ignoring instead of just downloading an app like "rif is fun", logging in once, and then having great reddit experience on mobile?
Everyone here is aware of the dark patterns on reddit. We know they're not going anywhere. We continue to read reddit posts every day, so why not make it easy on yourself instead of endless misery and complaining about things that you know won't change?
That's a fair comment. I don't think my comment reflects a fully rational decision and I could just use an app and log in. I don't need to have Reddit on my phone, it's entertainment I could take or leave.
However I do have sympathy for people who don't have any interest in becoming engaged users, and just want to see a useful comment thread for some particular info without all the hassle. The web is full of gates, walls and popups, and we don't all want to download the app and create an account for every site.
Yep, Reddit is basically a junk site at the moment and it gets worse by the day. Just this month they started restricting “potentially NSFW” posts from being opened unless you login.
This is their direction now, soon enough we’ll have popunders like TripAdvisor, other successful junk site.
Old Reddit and RES were the only things that kept Reddit tolerable. Even then, I still got bored of the community in the subreddits I was subscribed to and left. Perhaps I ought to spend the rest of my Gold credits I bought in 2014 before actually deleting my account.
yet its huge popularity seems to suggest that it has gotten something right. the other social media and privacy sinkholes (facebook, twitter, linkedin etc) and in particular their uncontrollable "timeline" concept seem to have some design (as opposed to execution) issue.
btw there is an open source fediverse version called lemmy. Build the future you want to live in and all that...
Don't forget about open hostility toward mobile browser users. If you don't want to use their app they treat you like the scum of the earth. That goes for Reddit-originating sites like Imgur as well.
For me even the desktop experience is pretty buggy. Has anyone else noticed that sometimes reddit divs jitter up and down like crazy? Seems to be an issue caused by scrolling
There is just zero chance I’ll use the current web version of Reddit in its current form. I use Apollo on mobile (And Tweetbot for Twitter) and I’m happy.
Tildes.net (https://tildes.net) has been a refreshingly sane, well-designed, and well-administered alternative.
I all but completely gave up on Reddit for my own posting a couple of years ago, following an early set of "features" that I'd categorise more as "contemptuous" than "disprespectful". More deeply, Reddit simply isn't very good at fostering conversations. It does have depth, and there are communities which I'll still visit, very occasionally.
That said, it's been a slow death for most of the past decade, no matter what the KPI stats are claiming.
Friendly reminder that the entire site is a bait & switch scam:
>We want to democratize the traditional model by giving editorial control to the people who use the site, not those who run it.
>— Reddit FAQ 2005
>We've always benefited from a policy of not censoring content
>— u/kn0thing 2008
>A bastion of free speech on the World Wide Web? I bet they would like it," he replies. [reddit]'s the digital form of political pamplets.
>— u/kn0thing 2012
>We will tirelessly defend the right to freely share information on reddit in any way we can, even if it is offensive or discusses something that may be illegal.
>— u/reddit 2012
>We stand for free speech. This means we are not going to ban distasteful subreddits. We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it. Not because that's the law in the United States - because as many people have pointed out, privately-owned forums are under no obligation to uphold it - but because we believe in that ideal independently, and that's what we want to promote on our platform. We are clarifying that now because in the past it wasn't clear, and (to be honest) in the past we were not completely independent and there were other pressures acting on reddit. Now it's just reddit, and we serve the community, we serve the ideals of free speech, and we hope to ultimately be a universal platform for human discourse (cat pictures are a form of discourse).
>— u/yishan 2012
>Neither Alexis [u/kn0thing] nor I created Reddit to be a bastion of free speech
>— u/spez 2015
And I currently have this gem of a notification sitting in my inbox:
>Important notification about your account
>Your account has been suspended from Reddit for breaking the rules. The suspension will last 3 day(s).
>You recently upvoted a post or comment that was determined to be against our policies. Abusive content is not acceptable on reddit, nor is engaging with it. Please be thoughtful about the content you interact with.
>This is an automated message; responses will not be received by Reddit admins.
Note that they don't tell you what the content was. They clearly want you to become fearful about expressing yourself, or even using the site, and engage in self censorship. They're one of the most dishonest and awful companies in America. Who the fuck knows what the content even was. Probably some edgy meme from PoliticalCompassMemes, which thankfully has a backup here: https://ruqqus.com/+PoliticalCompassMemes
For anyone that wants a good iOS client, Apollo is the one to beat (and the spiritual successor to Alien Blue, the OG best Reddit app which was acquired by Reddit).
That being said, I stopped using Reddit consistently (go on a few times a week now, used to browse daily / on my phone / etc) a few years ago, and I feel that decision has been a major contributing factor in improving my mental health.
So if you're finding the Reddit experience garbage, maybe just... stop using Reddit. No amount of UX fixes provided by a 3rd party app can compensate for how toxic interactions on Reddit trend.
I feel like one of the few people on HN who prefers apps over websites. Websites always flicker/drop frames, too easy to accidentally mistap links on phone, etc.
This is certainly disrespectful design, but I experience none of it.
I was expecting something about user accessibility, eg like how impossible it is to tap the Upvote button in HN on smartphone and tablet. If UI is indicative of culture HN hates people not using a mouse.
Well, I mean I get what you're saying but that's my whole point. Reddit isn't (yet) providing a service worth paying for and I suggest things that I might pay for.
Secondly, there's plenty of free (as in money) things we complain about.
TL;DR: Condé Nast will take every nice thing they acquire or own and try to covertly (at first) focus on short term gains with dark patterns. And I mean dark patterns even outside of websites.
Reddit is the perfect case example of what happened to the 07-08 web as time went on. Initially, the Internet was a big exciting place and people just built stuff to see if they could, and maybe they could sell it later (a lot of communities never even considered huge commercial success, it was just about mucking around in a space that was cheap and exciting.)
As time went on, everything rotted. The chill sites struggled to keep the lights on, and many eventually shuttered. The "we'll sell it off some day" ones sold it off, and the buyers ALWAYS ran the site into the ground.
So now we get an Internet that resembles a b-movie graveyard. There are a lot of corpses, and a lot of shambling zombies. The few souls still alive are holed up somewhere with a shotgun, awaiting the end.
Reddit should just launch a coin, buy back the shares from investors and stop doing these shady things. 90% of the coins on the 100 marketcap are shitcoins and are still worth billions. Reddit with its massive userbase can easily make it to the top 100.
There was a new product lead who joined with many good ideas, but some of them were dark patterns that I heavily protested. After a few months of this, it was obvious that I was going to be reigned in or let go[0]; I immediately transferred to a different org.
Now let me explain the other side of the story. 4 years later, Reddit's DAU, MAU, and revenue have all grown at ridiculous rates[1]. Yes, power users complain—and still continue using the site—but the casual user does not. These dark patterns have been normalized on other websites.
These practices are done because it works.
_____
0: They changed it so I would report to the product lead, which is odd for an EM to report into a product chain and the only instance within the company ever.
1: Many friends are startup founders and I've been at a few startups myself—a byproduct of being in the Bay Area—and Reddit's growth numbers are impressive. As a former employee, I am quite happy about my equity growth.