Yeah. I old.Reddit into specifics subs. Other than that it is too radicalized nowadays. Once you are starting out you care about user experience, but once you are too big to fail then you pretty much don’t care - see Facebook, Twitter, YouTube they all designed UI around how THEY want the user to use the platform instead of how user would actually want to use it.
I suspect that the people who “matter” (frequent, registered, trackable users) are using third party apps or scripts over the service itself, so there hasn’t been a reason to invest in the interface.
It feels like Reddit is in the same place Twitter was pre-Musk. Kind of lost in terms of purpose/trajectory for monetization. Or maybe it’s the other way around: it’s where Twitter will be in a few years, stagnated because it was bought to be part of a larger portfolio, a bauble that sits on the shelf and doesn’t really have anything innovative going for it.
To me there isn’t anything interesting about Reddit anymore. I only use it to hear from people who claim to live in a place I’m living or visiting, or to get very specific troubleshooting advice, where I find a specific post using an external search engine. Mostly I think the culture of the site itself is annoying. Any time I stray outside of regional or technical subreddits it feels like I’ve accidentally landed in a middle school cafeteria.
This I think, is the truth of it. Reddit is becoming a lower and lower quality platform, providing less value to users. However each of these moves reduce the barrier to entry (thus increasing user base) or provide value to those who pay them. Often both.
Reddit as a business does not want to be a discussion platform.
In my opinion it will succeed, but it does so whilst providing mixed value to me, it has destroyed many small communities by amalgamation and then normalising them.
Subreddits related to my core interests are useless. Overrun by an endless stream of amateurs and the lack of a consistent user base makes it draining to use and fails to reward involvement at a high skill level (where you need to make repeated connections with others at a high skill level and break the norm).
However subreddits related to passing interests are brilliant, the provision of novice level instruction is very common and normally of high quality (due to catering to a constant stream of newcomers and a tendency towards the norm).
The problem is that one platform with one ideology cannot scale to effectively service such a large range of users, functionality, and individual utility needs.
When reddit was smaller and more tight knit it was better because smaller groups are easier to accommodate and moderate.
As reddit grew, they began to reduce features that kept users happy and in control of content. As reddit grew to encompass hackers, media attention, politics, and so many other aspects , the pressure for moderation overwhelmed them and they also needed to balance moderation with profit to fund the mass they grew into. This drives businesses to do shady things to keep the lights on, which also drives away core supporters and OC creators.
Perhaps every major app/site has a shelf life, and perhaps we need to just embrace that. Also it's an opportunity to build several new local communities and to put the user community first over growth into a monopolistic machine that gets you onto TV news.
This would be true even if they had a decent UI. They should allow people to innovate on top of their platform if they want to grow their user base.
Cutting off their own path to growth that tells me they're in cash-cow mode, so the business strategy is to auger their way into profitability by squeezing money from an ever-shrinking user base.
If that's the case, they should also be laying off people to juice margins... checks... yep.
Well, that was fun while it lasted. Are there any good reddit alternatives out there yet?
It's just a victim of the times we live in. Reddit, like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, simply grew too much outside of its original intention. It was a place to form anonymous communities around niche interests, but these interests started to spread into the dark elements of hate speech, child pornography, etc. When profitability comes into question, as any company wants to strive for, it has to appease.
Reddit was a nice idea, but it just got too big. Either it has to take responsibility for its users' content, and act as an editor/publisher, or it has to find a revenue stream outside of pursuing advertising revenue.
Speaking as a long-time reddit user - yes, I remember when it was originally catering to the developer/coder/sysadmin community.
But I also knew that those interests are held by only a fraction of users on the internet. I completely understood that if the reddit team wanted to turn their site into a money making endeavor, they'd have to start catering to the lowest common denominator. And hell - even the original design of the site was going to cause that: It's social news, as dictated by the user base.
All it took was time for enough non-dev types to find the site and then poof the majority of the news would be nothing like when reddit started.
But you know where reddit succeeded? Sub-reddits.
I can customize my frontpage view to be a combination of all the hot / recent content contained only by the sub-reddits that I'm a member of.
Want to improve your reddit experience? Unsubscribe from the reddit.com (main) sub-reddit.
And I add new sub-reddits all the time. Because of this wonderful system, I can "turn off the stupid" and ignore the sub-reddits where the lolcats/etc. are being posted (or, if you like them, you can subscribe to /r/lolcats).
Every now and again I log out and check what the reddit.com main page looks like without an account - shake my head - then log back in again.
I still love the site. I just consider the other users a necessary evil for reddit to get the funding to keep adding new devs, features, and hardware to make it bigger and better than it ever was.
facebook is one of the worst platforms I can think of. Trying to find anything in facebook is pretty much impossible, even your own posts.
Reddit is more like digg used to be, but you can more easily filter out all the crap.
I'm not sure how reddit can improve itself, unless some genius has an idea of how to expand what it offers to more people. Its more likely they will end up driving their core away with any radical changes.
Or perhaps the problem is that Reddit did not grow into its current userbase (with whatever problems that base brings with it) by being an advertiser friendly platform, which is what its current owner wants to try and mold it into.
I can understand that the community may not be as appealing due to its growing popularity, but what has Reddit done company-wise that conflicts with users' wishes? The interface is still as minimal and the advertising virtually non-existent
While that is true the current state of reddit UX allows them to succeed by virtue of critical mass gained before they went nuts. If you created a new site with that UX you would get nowhere.
The simple truth is people are drawn to websites for what they get out of them.
I've always thought Reddit as a community and platform was massively under-leveraged. So what other problems do Redditors have?
My Reddit experience these days seems to be nothing more than using RES to scroll through images. I miss the good old days of in-depth discussions that were across the site and not just pushed into subreddits.
I think it’s mostly just due to scale. Adding more humans to a platform almost certainly starts to make the platform worse at some order of magnitude. Subreddits were a great idea and they are kind of fighting against it but eventually all subreddits succumb to their own popularity and become groupthink meme trash.
From a market, not engineering pov: It's easy and effective to iteratively improve a website, to suit its present users. But once you've got most of that type of user, you're approaching a local maxima, and your growth slows.
When you want to grow beyond that, you have to appeal to a larger, broader, different segment - though hopefully a superset, not (too) disjoint.
For me, reddit is much less interesting than it used to be (HN also). Perhaps, if they alter it to become more like it was? e.g. subreddits partially achieved this.
I'm not sure even that Reddit has a genuine value prop beyond being a new walled garden to gather data and serve ads. But it might be too big to truly fail, now, because newer generations of internet users have only experienced the feudal internet.
Once upon a time this was all served by RSS, forums, and niche websites. Reddit converted those communities to subreddits, Facebook took another slice of those. Discord and Slack portioned away other groups as did Tumblr and each one has attempted to establish a moat not just to keep competitors away, but to keep their users inside.
Reddit is wildly popular where many other competitors have failed. The reddit of today is the result of many years of change and trying to think of ways to manage the size in a better way is pointless without considering the entire journey.
Part of what made reddit successful was exactly the subreddit individualism you're trying to remove. It's why so many people were upset when they removed custom stylesheets for subreddits. It felt like that individualism was being stripped away.
Communities don't just spring up from nowhere. They need common interests to bring the people to them.
As decade-plus Redditor with such an invite: If I had the opportunity to buy Reddit stock five years ago, I might have taken it. But not today.
Reddit has aggressively moved further and further away from a product I would actually want to use myself or recommended to my friends, and many of those changes involve inconveniencing existing users and communities, in order to trap and extract value from them.
In other words, it doesn't look like a growth opportunity anymore, and instead a company making unsustainable short-term decisions... Which reminds me of what happened to rival Digg, where its focus on being "a collection of cool stuff you can put ads next to" collapsed when they cannibalized the not-so-secondary community behind it.
Yeah, when they follow Twitter and lock down third party apps will end half my Reddit usage and turning off old Reddit the other half.
I would have said in the past that users like me who are resistant to introducing engagement mechanics/monetisation are why they're valued less than the likes of Twitter but recent stats I saw indicated old Reddit was like 15% of desktop users and the official app also had the majority of mobile users so looks like their plan to wait our the dilution of the long term user base is working so maybe that all changes in a few years.
The unbundling suggestions seem like it'd hurt the long tail, a lot of the value that Reddit has to me is the smaller specialised communities which are able to get users because people can eventually get introduced to smaller subreddits from larger subreddits. Cut off that traffic growth path and many of these communities have a much reduced reason to set up on Reddit Vs elsewhere.
The suggestions to move the focus from subreddits to users - it's something Reddit are subtly trying with redesigned profiles and more emphasis on people posting to profiles or following them, but to me it seems counter productive to what I like about Reddit. A subreddit can be kept on topic in a way a user cannot, and actually in many social circles there are pressures on people to make their views known on e.g. politics in twitter, where staying on whatever topic is actually discouraged
The cynic in me has to guess that too much of their development efforts are geared around disrupting and managing viewpoints that their users and corporate sponsors find problematic.
To give a small example: back when a certain subreddit used to frequently appear in /r/all Reddit apparently wrote code to prevent it from ever appearing there again.
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