I think reddit has run its course for me, and I don't think they're losing anything of value when I stop browsing. I've been using old. for years, and always been pretty strict about blocking ads. In the past few years, it's been getting less and less enjoyable for me, and since I stopped visiting on Monday, I've been feeling better, and I don't think I'll be going back.
Reddit is saving a little on bandwidth since I stopped, and I've gained some time and energy. Seems like a win-win.
Reddit has built a reputation for being "not social media", but in my opinion it has come to embody most of what people say they hate about social media. If I visit Reddit without logging in, the content on the home page is disastrously bad: Videos of fights with comments from people cheering on the violence. Screenshots of exaggerated Tweets taken out of context. 10 different stories about the latest tragedy somewhere in the world and editorialization about how it's a sign the world is coming to an end. Ragebait videos taken from TikTok and other social medias for the express purpose of getting Redditors riled up and angry.
I know the story goes that you can avoid it by carefully selecting the right subreddits, but in my experience the trash content bleeds into everything. Even the technical subreddits I followed have become inundated with low-effort posts and people who just want to pick fights.
> I don't think they're losing anything of value when I stop browsing. I've been using old. for years, and always been pretty strict about blocking ads.
Thanks for being honest about it. I suspect Reddit is well aware that the average user (who views ads) is not likely to be among the angrier power users who are pulling the strings. If anything, I'm starting to get a sense that the non-commenters and casual users are getting sick of the mods using their power to shut the conversation down. The average user doesn't use Apollo and doesn't care about this drama. I think it's easy to forget this when the vocal minority of power users are upvoting angry topics and mods are shutting down subreddits.
100% agreed, yet the average user is incredibly fickle. Without the power users reddit will fizzle; a little bit at a time, then all at once (as we may see soon).
Last year after I posted a innocuous, benign comment on a certain subreddit I was permanently banned from that subreddit because I was allegedly "ban evading" (I wasn't, I have a single account). I contacted the mod from that subreddit saying I wasn't ban evading, and they replied "Sure" and blocked me from messaging mods for a year.
An hour later (without doing anything else) I got banned site wide for 3 days for "ban evading".
That really pissed me off and I haven't used reddit ever since (except for google search results). I'm definitely happier without reddit.
They also often use the invented word "brigading" to justify any and all bans. Like you can write literally anything in the subreddit and it can can be considered "brigading" because the threshold doesn't exist for that. Especially tokenbro snowflakes like to do that.
And another popular imaginary reason for bans is the crosspost feature. If you ever crosspost anything from the snowflake sub they will automatically ban you with a script, for using this stock Reddit feature.
Since Monday I've stopped visiting Reddit to try to get less addicted to mindless reading. I've caught myself opening the app like 5 times already, but so far experiment was mostly a success. Need to keep up for a month more I think.
> In the past few years, it's been getting less and less enjoyable for me, and since I stopped visiting on Monday, I've been feeling better, and I don't think I'll be going back.
The reddit experience I've had in the last few days is actually the best I've had since I signed up 12-13 years ago. All the smaller niche subreddits I forgot about are back to front and center, all the community interaction is on AskReddit, answers, etc again and the overall communal aspect is back. It reminds me of how much the site has really changed and, like you, I'll probably be gone once it goes back to normal.
Wow that brings me back. I remember being on AskReddit when it was relatively small (maybe a few hundred thousand subscribers).
My favorite contribution to that subreddit was one of the first logos. They held a contest and my submission was a drawing of Snoo with his bum facing the viewer with a dollar in between his cheeks. Ass Credit.
I can't believe people voted for it lol, but that was when the subreddit was a lot less serious.
You can still see the remnants of that work by going to old.reddit.com/r/askreddit: Hover over the Snoo's talking and wait for the tooltip.
Why will Reddit going back to normal stop you from enjoying the smaller subreddits? I use Reddit all the time and literally never see anything from those monstrous multi million user subreddits.
It's like some people don't understand Reddit. You get to choose what you want to follow, you can create a multireddit with a subset of them, you can create a new account and hide all the big subs to let the little ones filter through. The world was always your oyster and yet people act like it took subs going dark to do that, it didn't.
If someone says they only see crap on Reddit it's their own fault. It doesn't take a ton of effort to cultivate what you want.
While I’m familiar with many of those tricks, I haven’t even thought about them in probably, literally years.
The current Reddit UX does not encourage and maybe doesn’t even support that view. If that’s something you’re doing, I can say with some level of confidence that you’re a Reddit Poweruser. The only time I ever really thought about tricks like that is when I used the Reddit Enhancement Suite, which, as far as I know, is not a part of New Reddit, at all.
And despite what anyone’s insular, private group of friends may say, I strongly suspect that New Reddit is the one that the vast, vast majority of users user.
> I strongly suspect that New Reddit is the one that the vast, vast majority of users user.
No doubt, those people are masochists, either knowingly or not, same with the people that use the official app. Old.reddit and/or third party apps made a huge difference in usability of Reddit, there is a reason so many people are up in arms over this change.
If it took subs going dark for you to see what was available to you all along that's yet another massive failing on reddit's part to provide value. To people who have been living that dream via third party apps, that was a normal Tuesday. I don't know a better way to put it, I constantly hear people say "I've been using the app, it's fine" and then also saying things like you did, the truth is the app is not fine, discoverability is shit, the features are limited, etc. Apollo is a power tool for reddit similar to how RES was, I won't wade through the reddit BS to use it without an app like Apollo.
> Visit a community that you’d like to include in a custom feed. On the right-hand side of the page, you’ll see a Community Details box. Click the overflow menu (⋯) in the top right of the box.
> Select Add To Custom Feed then choose Create A Custom Feed.
These show up when you use the drop down for subscribed and favorited subreddits or on the sidebar (if that is expanded).
(VERY late edit)
The other thing about multis - you can make them public and allow other people subscribe to them.
The default front page is like reading gossip magazines. A lot of those subs appeal to base instincts (rage bait, etc) and are worth making a strong effort to avoid and ignore.
Similar for me. I exclusively used reddit via old. or apollo, and mostly just lurked. I have some good memories of some communities there but by and large it's not something I enjoy anymore. For community I'm on discord, for being in the loop I'm on twitter and HN.
I am giving it the same treatment that facebook and twitter get. No more contributions, Redirector entry to a libreddit instance in case I land on a link.
A decade or so ago Reddit used to be a great place with some very high quality communities that I'd visit often.
But as time went on a one or two of the communities I liked got banned and others were forced to tone down discussions. Although I have an interest in controversial communities though so this may not be a universal experience.
But what finally made me leave was that the quality of every community I like just kept dropping and at the same time I was receiving an increasing (and significant) number of hateful messages.
I guess I don't play the Reddit game very well. I generally aim to be controversial since I believe the most productive type of speech is speech that is both highly controversial and well reasoned. Agreeing may earn upvotes and social goodwill, but if all you ever do is agree with those around you using new words you may as well not contribute anything.
I think Reddit's incentivisation of agreeableness, it's clamp down on controversial subreddits and its popularity basically guarantees conversations on Reddit today are maximally unproductive. If someone has a new opinion they are downvoted, and if that opinion is also hard to refute downing is often paired with abuse.
I know this isn't really on topic – I have nothing interesting to say about their childish CEO or narrow-sighted push for monetisation. I guess I'm kinda just sad about what Reddit as become. I like HN because discussion here are rich – there's generally a wide and interesting range of views for any given topic. But HN is fundamentally limited since topics are generally tech / business related. And this is the gap I wish Reddit could have filled.
Can't quite find the link right now but there was a well upvoted post there that was simply, "god I hate men."
They're not even interested in discussion at all. It's such a toxic misandristic subreddit, under a paper-thin pretense of being about female empowerment.
I'm really not a person who clutches pearls often, I think what gets me is the silencing of any dissent.
Posters shouldn't be getting banned for simply expressing an alternative opinion with no rudeness.
Rule 3 on there is "no tactless posts generalizing gender". But every third post is about how all men do x...
Subreddit rules mean nothing when interpreted by rabidly terrible mods, so coming into any new subreddit I don't feel comfortable to post anymore, lest another such mod should ban me for having an opinion.
I definitely think it has gotten much worse overall in the last couple of years.
That's why HN is so great... I often see opposing worldviews expressed here without animosity between posters.
> reddit has a lot of cash. Monetization isn't a short-term concern of ours. Yes, we will continue to experiment with different efforts so that when time is right we know what works and what does not.
So it was always about money. Guess their "experiments" have concluded that pissing off your entire user base is a strategy which works.
The whole thing can be summed up as such: Reddit has continued to expand its business and increase costs while failing to innovate in any meaningful way.
In a bubble, the business is ultimately a failure and it deserves to die. It's just sad given the quality of the content is so high in contrast to the platform and the lack of an outstanding of alternative for people to congregate around, as Reddit once was for digg users.
I would say Wikipedia has been overly aggressive in their fundraising
But it hasn't enshittified
I would be really happy if Reddit ended up like Wikipedia. You can argue that Wikipedia could make better use of their funds (you can always argue that), but look at what Reddit did with their funds
They basically dug a big hole and are ruining the product to get out of it. I'd rather Wikipedia have extra cash than be in the hole, and desperate
Well I think this is a bit reductionistic. Every business is a business, but just about every business also won't cross certainly highly-profitable morally-dubious or long-term damaging paths.
A car company could maximize short-term profits by reducing quality. Reddit could sell your location data to the highest bidder. Apple could threaten to delete all your pictures unless you buy a super-pro account.
And generally companies don't do this, because the backlash. The backlash is good. Often the backlash is even good for the long-term health of the company/world.
I think to say that short-term-profit-oriented behavior from companies is inevitable isn't true, the backlash often wins, and long-term strategic thinking is actually the norm.
You could run a company that sustains itself and its employees, maybe makes a modest profit. You could just make something valuable that people like and want to use, and have that mostly be the end goal.
Then fire all the management team, the board, the VC's and everybody related to that site. That company is almost 20 years old, they aren't profitable because Silicon Valley reasons, either way if they can't make that god damn site break even they are not just incompetent but a complete waste of space.
On a more "suave" note, they are a Dodo but this is the XXI century.
It was "fine" in your opinion, for doing the kinds of things you liked to do with it. But that wasn't leading to TikTok-level profits.
They may be wasting money, or maybe not. If they chase away all the people like you, and end up with a userbase of vapid morons who just watch idiotic TikTok-style videos on it, and this makes the company billions in profit, then that money wouldn't be "wasted".
I mean, it sucks (IMO) if running a discussion board service for people to have intelligent conversations about various niche topics is financially undesirable compared to running a social media site for people to share and make moronic comments about moronic 1-minute videos, but that seems to be just how humans are.
Yeah. If you want to build a lifestyle business then you can't take VC money. The grassroots approach is not an easy one and can take a very long time to grow! But in the end you retain complete control over the business.
what you’re describing isn’t all that compatible with vc funding. reddit is what, 10 rounds and $1.3b deep?
they certainly cannot say, “hey board, we decided we’d like to just be a modest profit company”. spez would be out of a job.
the other option would be not taking funding and building a business organically. would reddit have been able to become reddit if they hadn’t taken all that vc money? i’d say probably not but i don’t know anything about anything.
Yes, in fact the most successful social media companies do just that. Reddit doesn't seem to be aligning its interests with the interest of power users unlike other social media companies. Reddit is really putting itself in a position of getting what it pays for, which it doesn't pay for moderators while at the same time is taking their tools away and also seems to be insulting them too. Treating major contributors as slaves hasn't exactly been shown to be the key to social media riches but the alternative has. Different solutions work for different companies, but one way or the other you have to align your interests with your users - especially power users - or else you'll just limp along, which this would seem especially true for social media companies.
> it doesn't pay for moderators while at the same time is taking their tools away
The mods mainly were protesting because they relied on these tools. Reddit responded by making exceptions for these tools, and threw in exceptions for accessibility-focused tools to boot. (Taking the "think of the blind and deaf people" argument off the table.)
The only people that are still upset are the people who just want to continue to use ad-free readers, without paying money.
Reddit is a digital drug dealer that just raised prices on its addicts. The power users you describe are the least likely to delete their accounts and leave. Their rage over something relatively trivial is just a testament to their addiction.
They have given us no reason to believe that their half-assed, last second, poorly defined exceptions will be honored in any meaningful and reasonable way.
If there's a bunch of openings for moderators as a result of this blackout, I'm thinking I might like to try it out, especially on a high-traffic sub if I can. Of course, as an unpaid volunteer with so much power, I'm not going to use it the way they want me to. Instead, I'll just randomly ban people I don't like, and then get them banned sitewide whenever they question my ban. (This seems to be normal behavior in many subs already...) Then I'll continue banning people, targeting the most productive users on that sub, until the sub is nothing more than a wasteland. This probably wouldn't be good for Reddit, but they'll be getting what they paid for.
Most CEOs would have figured out after eight years to deflect and absorb downward pressure from investors while incorporating feedback from Reddit's key resource: users, who provide content for free.
It's a damn shame that Huffman didn't get the sort of guidance and counseling to walk that wire.
"Are there any specific plans for the Alien Blue app that you can share?"
> "I have lots of ideas! But, I'm sad to say, I don't want to publicize them here until I've got more support internally. It's shitty if you're on a product/dev team to come into work and find everything's been upended without any of your input."
Can you summarize your other feeds? I actually created an account here on HN during the blackout for my tech info but constant tech info gets exhausting after a while.
It's fascinating to see how his responses have changed to be more out-of-touch so dramatically since he did this AMA and now. Not knowing too much about how Reddit has changed over the years, I wonder what the timeline is for his change.
My guess is that with massive communities like that, good feedback is lost in the ocean of shitty users overreacting. At some point you build up a shield and can't really have meaningful interactions with your users. I bet this is what happened with Facebook.
This also happens frequently with celebrities and pop stars. I'm impressed by the likes of Taylor Swift who at least appear to have a genuine love for their fans despite what must be a lot of pretty crazy behavior on the part of the most extreme fans.
He surely did. It’s usually part of comp packages for any member of the C suite.
I was the second engineering hire at a lifestyle business turned VC funded startup. After we went public and I could see disclosures including how many shares were paid out to the C Suite. The board and some first time C Suite members got the same level of equity in their comp package that I had received over six years of working there.
Some replacement/new C Suite positions that had been in the C Suite prior received a few times what I received to start and received additional packages every year.
It's interesting to see this comment[1] from him that users should still be able to see content from a deleted post or comment if they want to. It used to be possible to do this by searching for it in Pushshift, but for as long as I've been aware of Pushshift it seems the admins have hated this. I've seen comments that this is a violation of privacy and can be used for targeted harassment. I understand the complaints Reddit has had recently about Pushshift being used to sell Reddit's content, but it seems that's not the only thing that's changed.
Isn't the third-party API access issue all about preventing Reddit from being overrun by AI/LLM robots? I suppose nothing is stopping them from using web interfaces but it does seem a bit harder than just using APIs
Not necessarily. The conversation with the Apollo dev was about the missed opportunity cost of having the user on the official platform. The $20m/year number was referring to opportunity cost, not the actual cost.
To me that unpacks to a mix of lost potential value on having the user on the official client for data harvesting + advertising purposes + having full control over user experience, and subtly trying to get rid of 3rd party clients without just shutting the APIs down.
Reddit is saving a little on bandwidth since I stopped, and I've gained some time and energy. Seems like a win-win.