>Reddit seems like an example of a successful acquisition
For whom? For people who uses it since the beginning it isn’t even the same place anymore. It’s UX (and I’m not talking about the aesthetics of the new design, I don’t mind those) is legitimately the worst I’ve ever experienced and the quality of discussion has went down the drain. Even if you find a tightly controlled community dedicated to a topic you’re interested in it’s either one extreme to another or doesn’t last long.
That doesn’t even get into the constant rolling out for Facebook-tier features that no Reddit user ever wanted. I stopped using Reddit last month after ~12 years and I’ve since realized I was getting nothing but regurgitated memes and anger from a dozen people replying to my every comment who aren’t even addressing what I was saying just arguing for arguments sake.
It’s basically what Facebook groups were in 2016 at this point. I’m sure it’s a great acquisition for those who bought it, but for the old power users it’s anything but.
> Reddit has always struck me as a company with no creativity
I thought reddit was really clever for the first ~7 years of operations. They replaced forums, fostered communities, gained a reputation as a place to get real people's takes, and attracted people willing to have interesting conversations. The upvote/downvote system that is now so common was made popular from reddit. They brought awareness to important political topics surrounding net neutrality. They were leaders in early Web2.0, where each user saw content that appealed to them, because everyone could choose which subreddits were in their homepage. It was highly social and highly engaging.
After a certain point in 201X the dark patterns began to appear. I was almost fully disengaged by the start of 2013. I can't remember the details, but I remember being increasing disappointed with reddit every time I returned for a brief visit.
> I see reddit less as a website and more as a collection of communities.
I’d say that Reddit used to be like that, but that they’ve been actively undermining that, because that’s not what they want to be any more. New Reddit (2018, I think) showed that they really don’t care about that aspect.
New Reddit forces post lists to be massive space-wasting and thumbnailed stuff. On my laptop’s screen, it tends to fit about one and a half items per screen, and is clearly oriented around doom scrolling: consuming content. When you view a post, you can see about six comments at once, mostly only top-level ones with occasional second-level ones. Actually, it seems they might have improved it recently: last time I tried it, I think you couldn’t get it to display beyond third-level, and it would only expand one level at a time, whereas now it seems to expand more at once (though it’s still way too aggressive in its collapsing) and go up to fourth-level before going deeper takes you to a single comment thread view with hopelessly bad history management that makes anything but always opening in new tabs just about completely broken. Anyway, they’ve severely hobbled the threaded comments system, because they’re optimising for massive subreddits where comments average vapid. Basically, anti-community.
By contrast, Old Reddit fit about a dozen items per screen, and required action to see an item at anything but a tiny size (70×70 or so), because it cared more about the comments thread. And it tends to fit about a dozen comments on my screen, and you can actually view nested comment threads meaningfully, and it all just works way better. Because it cared more about community.
Communities depend on a much better commenting system than New Reddit wants to let you have. HN and Old Reddit are both way better.
I’m fairly involved in r/rust. If Old Reddit ever disappears, so does my remaining use of Reddit, because I don’t think you can maintain a decent community without it.
Reddit are forsaking their link discovery and community discussion roots, and becoming just mass social media and memes, and they’re making major technical decisions which enforce this, even for the subreddits that want things the way they used to be.
>>but the vast majority of the userbase is on the mobile website or app.
proving that the world truly is insane, I use old reddit on mobile as well as new reddit is more or less unusable on a mobile browser they hard force you in to their terrible app. If I need a mobile app I use a 3rd party app as the offical app is TERRIBLE
When/if they kill old.reddit is the say I stop using reddit, I would say my usage is already down 80% since the launch of reddit, as I pretty much only use the technical subreddits for news now, staying away for all other area;s of reddit.
> Reddit’s redesign is so unusably sluggish that I don’t stay on it long enough to run into any other problems
I agree with everything you said, but allow me to reiterate this point. Reddit's redesign is the most hostile thing I've ever seen. It explicitly blocks me from reading the discussion. What's the point, then? It's absolutely unusable. If they ever remove old.reddit.com, I'm not following a Reddit link ever again.
> The day old.reddit goes away is the day I stop using reddit, period.
Me too! I'll be super happy about it, though. Will break my reddit addiction and principal time sink once and for all. The new design is just so visually disgusting to me I get a palpably negative reaction to it. So cartoony and spaced out, so much less information, even the concise views make everything look like it was obviously designed for mobile and to be like instagram. It's gross. The whole reason I read reddit is for the good discussion and comments. Part of the reason I like HN and craigslist is they're simple and not a visual overload.
>Hacker News has like 1% of the number of users that Reddit has, and it's already better.
Exactly. I went on reddit for years until the redesign. Now I can’t stand that site. The reddit redesign is so astoundingly bad and nonfunctional it shocks me to this day.
> I also stopped using reddit on the phone after my chosen reddit client was closed down (which I'm grateful for, thanks reddit).
Same here, very grateful for Reddit’s API changes. It made me realize how little value Reddit actually provided vs time spent. I refuse to use their dumpster fire of an app so I quit altogether and deleted my very old account + comments. Good riddance after all, for each “niche” subreddit I was on, I have found very active forums and communities to replace these subreddits. And they’re independent forums that are very old (in internet terms) with lots of passionate people sharing very valuable information.
Turns out I didn’t really need Reddit at all but it took their shortsighted hara-kiri for me to realize.
After ~2014, nothing. Reddit drove off it's original user base and replaced them with the exodus of people who want to use Facebook but think Facebook is bad for various reasons. Reddit corporate has obliged them.
> Reddit is the next thing I am contemplating my usage. It sucks up way too much time for the reward of fake internet points.
I would agree if Reddit were only the inane collection of memes and squabbles that many people assume it is from a cursory glance. The problem is that Reddit subreddits are replacing many independent forums for various hobbies and interests. Message board websites are often dying, they might only have a handful of posts each month or year while the relevant subreddit has informative or useful content several times a week. Reddit is often criticized as a toxic environment, but a dying forum website where only a few cantankerous old grouches are left can feel even more toxic.
> This is where most of the conflict lies. Reddit the community and Reddit the business don't have the same goals in mind.
And this is the part about Reddit that I just don't get. A few years ago their users were a rather homogeneous group of nerds that had a lot of trust in the reddit management. Why on earth didn't they capitalize on that?
By doing all the latest actions that aim at getting rid of people that are now unwanted they try to get once again a somewhat homogeneous (albeit different) group of people. So maybe soon they are structurally exactly where they were some years ago except for the huge lost of trust of their users.
How is this going to help increasing their profit?
>I am quite okay with the planned API costs, timeline, and communication. How were you affected by the changes?
Every app of choice I'd use for reddit is shutting down in a week. I don't like the supposedly official app.
I already disdained reddit for several reasons over the years and this is the camel that broke the straw. I have no issues paying for good service (I bought a SomethingAwful account over a decade ago, and I donate to Tildes) and I don't think reddit is a good service, in its platform, its community, nor its general paradigms. It is not moving in a direction that I want to support. If that means a lonely migration to a new community, so be it. Not the first time, won't be the last.
>but the reality is that he had built a very, very profitable business serving Reddit's content to the masses.
and reddit didn't benefit from that free labor at all.
This is always such a weird angle to take. That some dude paid 2 other people part time and hes stealing from a billion dollar coporation who employs 2000 people as is. Shocker that one is profitable and the other struggles.
>uch as updating CSS flair based on a remote set of changing assets
yeah, remember when reddit said it would implement native flairing? Glad you did that work for them (likely built on the work of others' free labor).
>They also decided to do presumably costly ui rollouts that a lot of their most veteran community members opt out of.
The original UI works well, and it's great they kept old.reddit. Everything since has been horrible, along with the dark patterns pushing their mobile client. It reminds me of all the craigslist UI redesign posts on hacker news many years ago that completely missed the point.
Reddit has definite value (really important as Google quality declines IMO), and I'd love if they could find a way to sustain without destroying the community... but I'm not optimistic.
> the changes you need to make will drive away many more users than it ever attracts, because the "good" potential users are already turned off by Reddit, and the existing users will be alienated.
That's an assumption. Based on no data. I know plenty of people, myself included, that have no interest in Reddit as it is today. I know a few interesting sub-Reddits but I don't want to deal with that community right now.
If the community changes I would be more interested. I'm not going to spend my time contributing to a sub-Reddit if it's the kind of place that is shitty to people I'm friends with.
> API restrictions effectively killed alternative frontends, so I simply don't look at Reddit posts anymore.
They recently did a poll to users, asking which UI you use most. I put old reddit because it is. I cannot understand how in what? 6+ years they developed new reddit and still don't have true feature parity? This tells me they don't have their priorities in line, and they want to IPO to boot.
Personally I think some websites don't really have any need to become publicly traded companies, I rather they become profitable and not controllable by the whims of tech illiterate investors.
> Reddit the site (and now app) is such a fundamentally useful thing that it's almost unkillable.
Looking forward to see how true this is. The communities I used to frequent, have maybe 20% of the activity they used to, before the API fiasco, even though they're "back online". I also stopped using reddit on the phone after my chosen reddit client was closed down (which I'm grateful for, thanks reddit).
My reddit activity probably dropped way below half compared to before, as the communities I used to be in are now shells of their former glory.
>Reddit is dead and no one I know uses it anymore.
It's not dead, and I say thankfully because it not being dead retains its state as a containment mechanism of what is easily the worst group of internet users in internet history.
I fear for the day Reddit falls and its userbase spills out looking for another avenue to be comforted with groupthink, newspeak and feel goods for the Brands We Love.
> I feel like facebookization killed many online communities. What used to be an independent phpbb board with a logical structure, room for customization and some tools for admins to manage it, became an FB group that is impossible to navigate and manage sensibly, with posts ordered by an algorithm, and which spams me with notifications at the least convenient times.
To be honest, I think Reddit is to blame more for that. It killed so many specialized communities and forums.
For whom? For people who uses it since the beginning it isn’t even the same place anymore. It’s UX (and I’m not talking about the aesthetics of the new design, I don’t mind those) is legitimately the worst I’ve ever experienced and the quality of discussion has went down the drain. Even if you find a tightly controlled community dedicated to a topic you’re interested in it’s either one extreme to another or doesn’t last long.
That doesn’t even get into the constant rolling out for Facebook-tier features that no Reddit user ever wanted. I stopped using Reddit last month after ~12 years and I’ve since realized I was getting nothing but regurgitated memes and anger from a dozen people replying to my every comment who aren’t even addressing what I was saying just arguing for arguments sake.
It’s basically what Facebook groups were in 2016 at this point. I’m sure it’s a great acquisition for those who bought it, but for the old power users it’s anything but.
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