I know the person who was in charge of the redesign. This may sound unbelievable, but she was not a reddit user prior to working at reddit or being put in charge of the redesign. Really nice person, but they did a terrible job.
Everyone here is shitting on it, but to me it looks like it accomplished exactly what reddit wanted, and was wildly successful at doing so.
Reddit very successfully moved away from being the techy nerd basement dweller site to becoming a trendy young "normie" people site. Dumb everything down to shoot for the lowest common denominator, maximizing the size of your target demographic.
So hiring someone who probably loved instagram, facebook, pinterest, tumblr, but never used reddit (but had likely been to the site perhaps a few times before) is exactly who they wanted to redesign the site.
IIRC something like 95% of users are using the official app and/or the new website. And reddit has exploded in popularity in recent years.
I think it does what Reddit wants, doom-scrolling. Long interactions with a single post isn't good for revenue.
Personally I don't understand how people can use the new design. My opinion that it's terrible is one thing, but it doesn't even work. For the first few years I repeatably made bug reports, then I just gave up. The "new" design is slow as all hell, the video player doesn't work and if you want to read more than a few comments... well to bad, because 80% of them are buried and you don't get to read them. The redesign is five years old, it has been worked on for longer, and it still doesn't work.
Maybe it has attracted more people, if so, it's the wrong kind, because Reddit has developed into a cesspit of negativity. Everyone appears to have be depressed, poor, angry, hostile towards people not who thinks differently and most seems to be medicated. It not a good place to visit, if you want to keep your sanity. I'd rather debate politics on /b/ on 4chan.
I'm not convinced, but that's anecdotal from being a millennial and frequent Reddit user myself, and seeing lots of "As a 40/50/60/70 some year old" comments.
> Reddit very successfully moved away from being the techy nerd basement dweller site to becoming a trendy young "normie" people site.
Didn't that transition happen in the early 2010s? When I was in grad school a decade ago basically everyone I knew (which included many "normies") was scrolling through reddit when they were bored. I don't think the dumbing down really started until new reddit was introduced, which was 5-6 years ago IIRC.
I don't like the phrase normie but that makes sense.
I feel the topics on their have gotten less interesting. Especially in stuff like travel and cooking. I used to really like the travel content on their but it feels useless lately. It just seems to basic and low effort.
That goes for practically any low-barrier-to-entry common interest topic.
Reddit lives and dies by the moderation. Communities with very strict moderation often get a lot of flack for not allowing the low effort drivel. Communities that "let the votes decide" are overrun with low effort memes, waves of "DAE <super common opinion>?" and repost after repost. Often times to have a truly unique and useful experience with the site you need to manage your own content moderation with blocks/filters/etc. This is why there's a lot of inertia to the 3rd party apps and plugins we use, because seeing those as on the chopping block means we're going back to a wild forest of low effort dredge.
If Reddit Is Fun, RES, or old. gets killed off I'm going to leave the site. It will absolutely be difficult, but it will be for the best. I avoid certain subs that are massively popular because they mostly play on the ragebait engagement or outright ignore core issues solved by the moderation. Having that put back to the forefront of my experience will feel like re-opening Facebook or signing up for Twitter. No thanks.
At work a newly hired (and newly graduated) developer got the responsibility to completely redesign some core functionality in our application. Of course he had no experience with the system or how it was being used, but he was still rewriting it and designing future use-cases.
This was also done with as far as I can tell no code reviews, tests or supervision, only vague directions of "this sounds good, do it!".
It's been years since he left for greener pastures, and we're still reeling from the consequences.
This happened to me. Uber-qualified graduate came in as a decision maker, fucked a load of stuff up, then left. Then the tenured devs gradually started leaving in revolt. Then the product died.
Sounds familiar. I worked at a bank once that had the brilliant idea of swapping out Angular with Polymer, because an early 30s guy with Google in his CV became the new CTO and Decided that it should be Polymer / web components.
They were just about finished with making their Polymer 1.x components ready for Polymer 2 when the Polymer project once again did an overhaul and split off to lit-html or whatever.
I mean they picked an experimental / in development project that was best known for running McDonalds menu displays. We had to fix basics like memory leaks because it didn't have proper routing - it wasn't a web application framework, but they tried to use it as such.
Oof, my condolences. As someone who was a junior somewhat recently I narrowly avoided a couple of projects like that. The desire to push off important work to cheap labor blows my mind.
Ha! I’m a staff engineer now, but many many years ago when I was a junior I got the same type of project. It was the CTOs pet project to reimagine the core processing framework. I still feel bad for the folks maintaining it now. I was an expert in the kind of thing that the CTO wanted so it was a good project for me, but I should have had a senior to guide the process and tests and things like that.
I briefly worked at a web dev shop that was stuck building a project that a mid level PHP developer started in 2014 using a framework he built himself. I thank god often I wasn’t the one tasked with learning this spaghetti framework with no documentation
Credible, from which facts are known. Still unbelievable because it plays into my suspicions too perfectly.
There exists this entire class of business theory now based on the principle of hatred towards the users. Think about the products you actually like and purchase/use... how many of those companies' behaviors are completely inexplicable unless they hate you and want to punish you for buying their stuff?
