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.
Such a shame, I've used reddit for over a decade and enjoyed it for the most part. There's a lot of value in the communities and discussions on reddit, but I think the writings on the wall for this one. Hopefully someone can build something that captures the reddit experience and pulls in the communities
reddit is almost entirely in existence due to its community/userbase. it's all it had when digg imploded, and it's pulled them through from dark to the traffic heights they are at now.
thing missing from reddit, despite the forum-like discussion thread part, is that it isn't social. it doesn't promote following users or anything of that nature or has little of those features (one thing that digg has/had)
thing is, currently, the way reddit is/is going -- there's not much that needs to be changed. it covers alot of use cases for alot of its userbase (i.e. I use it solely for submission and upvoting/link popularity tracking, and hardly for anything discussion/forum related)
It's because the Reddit users that are actually bothered by this are unmonetizable and everyone knows it. nobody is eager to jump into that sink hole and Reddit itself is happy to be free of it.
A Reddit alternative is something every developer on here thinks they can crank out in a weekend and surely countless of them are actually trying that right now. But the reality is that reddit is a mess and nobody in their right mind wants to try to run a site like that.
I don't think Reddit will ever scale as well as something like Facebook . The bigger Reddit gets, the less usable it becomes due to subs becoming too crowded.
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.
Reddit had 2,000 employees? What on Earth were they all doing when all the content and all of the moderation is done entirely by their user base?
The fundamental structure of the product hasn't changed in a decade, except to add some superfluous UI garbage that everyone who knows better avoids by using the old UI anyway, or until recently the API.
Reddit is a top ten site in the US, but is valued at a fraction of its competitors. The main worry I have for reddit moving forward is how do you monetize a userbase that is HIGHLY resistant to change. They're pushing heavily into their new mobile app, which is a solid start as an ad platform, but the old crowd on reddit all came from Digg after Digg tried to change their model to support more revenue. Their users will jump ship if they push too hard / too quick. I love reddit and use it heavily, but I don't see how they become profitable without alienating their userbase.
I hope we get a good alternative to Reddit. Their governance issues aside, their disdain for web and open systems have made me not use the platform anymore. It has been sad to see the platform become worse.
It’s troubling that Reddit doesn’t really have a lot of competition, and the new user hostile UI on mobile shows their leadership knows it. I still remember when Digg made those big changes that caused a bunch of people to migrate over. But there isn’t a credible alternative to Reddit. It feels like most of them focus on anti-censorship or little moderation which means they get taken over by fringe groups.
We have old.reddit.com for now, but I feel like that’s just temporary sugar for the medicine to go down while people get used to getting pushed to the mobile app. If they took that away, and there’s really no guarantee it’ll always be there, I don’t know what else I’d use. There’s Discord but it’s such a different interaction model that it doesn’t feel like a valid alternative.
Har har har. But in all seriousness Reddit become the phenomenon it is because of its users, and the many hours, days, weeks, and months they each individually put in to build communities. To create something with value, larger than themselves. Who's going to rufund that time investment?
I've written a bit about this before, but fundamentally Reddit has a misalignment between the needs of the user and the needs of the platform[1].
There's a great list of alternatives here, https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/yttdlc/... though if you are choosing one, I'd highly encourage you to find / try one that relies on a federated or a paid model. A free model will eventually end up in the same situation we're in today.
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 struggle to see any successful path for reddit that doesn’t devolve into being more like Facebook. Godspeed to the new CEO and I look forward to hearing their vision for the company.
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.
Why doesn't reddit try to roll out an enterprise product?
I'm sure a lot of companies would be willing to pay to have an interface like reddit internally. Most current solutions for this problem aren't very good and I feel like reddit could be a good alternative. (not the redesign though, loading times on that would make it basically unusable)
Everything of value related to reddit comes from the users. The users create the content, they organize by voting on it and creating subreddits, the users even moderate the content. Even good ideas come from the users. Reddit, meanwhile, just adds on more and more bizarre features. They have avatars now? How about a chat system that nobody uses? Want us to email you a hundred times a day? etc.
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.
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.
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