Reddit is a top 20 globally ranked site that does not come anywhere close to performing at the level of other sites that share a similar popularity.
In my mind, they fail their users in three distinct and pretty basic ways:
1. Site reliability is still a regular issue (my perception is this is due to both infrastructure problem and show stopping application bugs).
2. Bad UX practices that get implemented that are documented all over this thread. This is a mostly new thing that seems to have started in the past few years.
3. Continuously underdeveloping or cutting back moderator tools and 3rd party integrations/applications.
I am not judging the individuals that work at reddit, but the sum of their parts do not meet the expectations that most other sites of their popularity meet.
This is, of course, from the eyes of someone who uses reddit - not someone selling ads on reddit.
I’m pretty convinced that given the userbase, there exists a small team of exceptional marketers, engineers, and product designers who could come up with a “classic” reddit which could operate at a profit. A combination of ads, API limiting, and a monthly premium charge for some super turbo user features.
The product itself is _done_. The code has been _written_, one can host their own open source reddit this very moment. Image/video storage has long been a problem for reddit, so perhaps users will have to get used to YouTube and Imgur again.
I think people are making too many excuses for Reddit when they act as if the product itself is unmonetizable. It’s not, they largely just hired too aggressively and made some design decisions which have been broadly poorly received.
They’ve effectively owned the space since 2008. I think in another world with different leadership Reddit could be in a much healthier position than it is right now.
Reddit must just have terrible developers. Like they havent paid them enough and it shows in the product. But its the most popular forum on the internet, so people use it anyways.
Reddit, from a business perspective, baffles me. During the Yishan Wong/Ellen Pao era, we had Reddit-Made and Reddit TV, both of which bombed especially. Under Alexis Ohanian, we had Upvoted and Formative which as the article notes were killed silently.
Reddit released a native app and an image host years too late. (I just checked the data and it is not killing Imgur: Reddit image usage was 18% in the top image subreddits at beginning of June, today it is 25%).
The biggest fundamental change Reddit has made in the time since is...making self-posts count for karma. And tracking outbound links.
It really shouldn't be that impossible to have a successful business with hundreds of millions of users. Especially with the wealth of data available to Reddit.
Among the mega high-traffic websites reddit seems to be the slowest and most unreliable. Many times it simply won't load, or log you out for no reason. Why do you think reddit never manages to improve its infrastructure?
Why would you possibly assume reddit's leadership team isn't completely inept? I would need extremely strong evidence to think anything but.
reddit got lucky - right place, right time, and locked in a strong enough network effect to stay alive despite the best efforts of their leadership. Look at their atrocious UI. The clumsy desperate attempts to drive users to an app. The boneheaded copycat features that never quite work, or are just downright baffling.
In an alternate world a smaller team would have focused on site reliability, mod tools, and a small set of features that made sense. Use third party ad tools until, or if, you get a better homegrown solution. With this route reddit would have been profitable and probably good. Instead...
Reddit has allowed the third-party app system go too far and now they are struggling to contain it.
I remember when Twitter did the same thing, but they realized it early and did it when there were not too many apps that users were used to.
I feel Reddit will come out fine from this. A minor hiccup. Mods will be replaced, apps will be forgotten and users will talk about this whole thing in some AskReddit thread.
The sad fact of the matter is there are no viable alternatives to Reddit for the average redditor.
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.
If nothing else, I think your conclusion that the product team is incompetent (or displays a lot of incompetency) is debatable. That seems very uncharitable. Reddit isn't flush with money the same way Google, Facebook, Amazon and Netflix are. They can't throw wild amounts of cash at a problem to solve it or attract the talent who can.
I think your characterization of Reddit's infrastructure challenges - which basically considers the problems as solved versus unsolved - is the wrong one. In my opinion, a better characterization would be whether or not Reddit has:
1) the money required to attract talent or buy infra, in order to 2) scale the website to extremely high availability under extreme load, while also 3) doing feature engineering and turning a profit.
This seems like a highly nontrivial problem. Do you know of another website with Reddit's daily active users and revenue profile, but significantly higher availability?
Note that performance is a related but distinct problem from the Reddit UX and advertising. I think that they are probably introducing these kinds of user-hostile changes because they are precisely in the position I've described, and can't find a way to improve performance in the way you're describing.
Does anyone know why Reddit seems to be alone among the world’s most popular sites in having so many outages and frequent periods of slowness? I’ve been on it for more than a decade and its unreliability has been fairly constant. Is the engineering team more resource constrained than others or held back by unusual amounts of legacy code, or is it simply confirmation bias resulting from earlier experiences?
Reddit is simultaneously the most usable and most incompetently run (now that tumblr is dead) social media website on the internet. My hunch is that both phenomena are connected.
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The incompetent UI rehaul has meant that most users continue staying on old.reddit.com, which makes it impossible to sunset. This means that old.reddit.com works in the most familiar manner of early-2000s forums without much in its way. The incredibly late and terrible 1st party app, has meant that significantly superior 3rd party apps (without the same large scale profit motives) have gained prominence and cannot be pushed out. The ads are bad enough, that they don't have a large variety of advertisers to specifically target compatible subreddits. Imagine having simultaneously the most most engaged users and the worst ads. The censorship is amateurish, and gets beaten by a motivated bunch of idiots on a regular basis. The fear of a competitor being just around the corner (due to their own digg origin story) makes them too scared to censor beyond an unperceivable breaking point, lest they face mass exodus. Good teams are analytically user obsessed. They know their target audience very well. To be fair, worse teams ban users for what used to be the central purpose of their platform cough tumblr cough.
Its public perception is tied to the Boston marathon, pedophile-defending employees and the rise of Trump. So, there isn't sufficient adoption among 'normies'. While that's bad for monetization it slows down the rate of decline in content quality and keeps it far away enough from the public eye, that you can get away with 'better' content.
Every feature they attempt to release (Chat, live stream, video hosting) is done so badly that users refuse to bulge on previous user flows. Thus, it maintains a certain purity.
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Reddit is the most ironic victor due to the 'don't fix what's not broken' rule.
Reddit in 2015 was a pretty good website. The devs have been unable to get adoption for any new feature past 2015. Thus, they never fixed what was not broken.
Facebook frequently messes with user flows to maximize earnings. Most successful social media websites have figured out how to guide their users down an 'intended' user flow such that they can maximally profit without losing any users. Reddit doesn't know how to do either.
With that, I hope that Reddit's leaders never wisen up and start making real money. The day reddit figures out monetization, will be the day that I set forth looking for a new badly-monetized platform.
There's a problem with the fundamental underlying argument here, which rests on the notion that all the value of Reddit actually comes from the moderators and the users posting content. The problem is, if Reddit itself has no value, why does every other option suck?
During the blackout I made an honest to god attempt to use other things. I tried Lemmy. I tried Discord. I tried Mastodon. I hated them all. It's definitely partly just critical mass - the communities just aren't there - but it's not only that. Nobody has managed to replicate the classic / old Reddit UI/UX either. I hate all the new UIs. I don't know what's so hard about it. It's a list of links with some upvote / downvote buttons.
I'll be more ready to believe there's no value in Reddit when I see that somebody has actually successfully cloned it and made a place for these communities to go to that's anything like as good as what Reddit offers.
The interface on Reddit is garbage, a huge chunk of the existing users are garbage, people brigade into subreddits, the admins have the final word over you; and, finally, Reddit has no features for specific communities (e.g. image tools for art).
IMO, Reddit is valuable. It has the necessary scale in terms of footfall or eyeballs [whatever metric is appropriate]. Where they have failed is to evolve and deliver on customer promises. Not having sufficient mod tools, suboptimal experience on official apps are just few issues that get the majority of limelight. Inability to build enterprise products or tiered data API for businesses and education are also missing, that they could have leveraged.
Reddit is literally NOTHING (absolutely nothing, zero zilch nada, is None) without the people that use it and without the content from other website they submit.
Don't get me wrong, reddit is very useful and nice. I absolutely hate Reddit the company but I still find some subs super interesting and useful. Remember, this has nothing to do with Reddit the company it self. Reddit the company it self is absolute garbage. The idea that they feel entitled enough to tell people who made the bulk of it what they should want (new design, block mobile browse, push app, and now ban download bots) is a comical.
People who work for reddit are wasting their talents, that is if they have any. I'm sure engineering wise there are talented people there, but business/design wise I'm almost certain that their value is abysmal. Reddit management is just a combination of entitled, dumb, and inexperienced.
Reddit's end is going to be like another 9gag site. At least 9gag acknowledges what they really are, but Reddit pretends as if they're fucking archive.org while they're 4chan's inferior brother but they just don't know it.
Seriously, trash company. Reddit the company and their management/strategy/design team should be a case taught in class. An exemplary case for Garbage-zero-valued-high-horse tech companies.
I think sites like reddit just want engagement, even over quality. It's been known forever that reddit's algorithm leaves much to be desired but it's too risky to change.
The poor showing of migrated communities - both low volume of migrations, and poor performance of the servers running them, isn’t helping the cause.
Like, I look at that list and the broken-overloaded lemmys running them and I can’t help but think this is why Reddit is successful and will continue to be successful. Because very, very few will put up with such a poor experience the alternatives offer.
Of course, if there’s some serious effort put in asap into the usability, stability and overall experience of the decentralised communities approach, then Reddit may falter. I’m not optimistic.
You've managed to say a lot without really saying anything.
You make plenty of baseless assumptions about my background and ambitions... but I'm not even going to try to address my professional experience (or lack thereof) because it doesn't matter, since you're just using it as a straw man to deflect criticism.
The facts are as follows:
1. Reddit is one of the highest visited websites in the world.
2. Throughout nearly their entire history, they've struggled to put together a way to make money.
3. They have notorious uptime.
Of course they have talented engineers... it would be a surprise if one of the worlds most popular websites didn't.
That doesn't change the facts that they continue to look and function like they're straight out of 2005 (does their search even work yet?), lack a semi decent mobile experience, and have contributed essentially nothing to the technical community in their entire history.
I don’t think Reddit has the strong position it thinks it has. Ultimately, Reddit is a waste of time for many people. Sure, there are helpful aspects of the product, but ultimately engagement is mainly driven by smartphone addiction and peoples’ impulsive nature to consume content. The helpful aspects of Reddit are being increasingly served by Discord communities. If Reddit is going to be so user-hostile, why not switch to a more user-friendly platform? Is that not how Reddit gained popularity over Digg?
As a side note from someone who has developed nascent products: a user is a precious thing. Having even a single individual spend their time using your product should be considered an honor. Nothing good comes from disrespecting that.
In my mind, they fail their users in three distinct and pretty basic ways:
1. Site reliability is still a regular issue (my perception is this is due to both infrastructure problem and show stopping application bugs).
2. Bad UX practices that get implemented that are documented all over this thread. This is a mostly new thing that seems to have started in the past few years.
3. Continuously underdeveloping or cutting back moderator tools and 3rd party integrations/applications.
I am not judging the individuals that work at reddit, but the sum of their parts do not meet the expectations that most other sites of their popularity meet.
This is, of course, from the eyes of someone who uses reddit - not someone selling ads on reddit.
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