My main concern is Reddit pulling a Twitter and cracking down on third-party clients/enhancers, such as RES and the Apollo app for iOS (which is excellent)
I've had to start disabling notifications on just about everything due similar tactics across the app-o-system. Facebook spam was getting nuts; phone vibrating at 2AM because somebody I haven't had contact with in years has updated a picture? Google has even been getting really bad with TV show episode availability updates for shows I have never watched or searched for? Or is that some other app? I think the shark is well below us on notifications.
I've come to loathe this about social networking sites. Twitter (which I use for sports buffoonery and hot takes from the community) is the absolute worst about this.
"Hey your friend did a thing, go congratulate them"
"Hey, a friend knows this person. Go follow them too"
"Hey, your friend just posted a picture of spaghetti, go signal your approval"
Hey.
How about I check in and interact with my friends on my time in a manner I want to?
I switched to a Pixel 2 from iPhone a few months ago, and have generally been very happy. At first, though, I would get to the train station and get a notification like "There is a McDonalds 500 Feet Away! Could you review it for us?" Or Starbucks. What the hell? It was some "feature" in Google Maps I guess trying to crowdsource some goddamn thing for "My Places". I had to go through all of the google apps and disable a TON of notifications, tracking, etc.
I switched to FaceSlim App on android a few years ago (when the messenger app switch happened) and am glad I did. I don't need the notifications going off all the time, the constant tracking etc.
When that happens, I will finally be more productive with my life and stop using Reddit. I already hate how much of a walled-garden Facebook is; it would be a shame for Reddit to go in that direction (wrt third party apps)
I do feel vastly more productive with my life without Reddit. Conversations on HN - I feel an odd kind of inclusion I never felt on Reddit, or many other places in real life, internet. More signal than noise, makes it easier for me to feel like I have focus. The design of HN also, I appreciate, seems more thought went into planning the vote system, different ways to think about communities, different values.
Knowing only the individual can see their upvotes for an individual post makes the question - is there a difference between 30 upvotes and 2, if the rank of that post is 1? Which I find simply to be, intellectually resonant (or simulating) in the way Reddit, even Google - used to be. Those places have become so noisy, which is ironic, but that's the problem with success. The problem of finding a metric to measure the thing against.
I was about to type out the comment "I bet most mobile users use third party apps, that would kill them". But then I remembered that same comment surely was typed many times when Twitter announced the same.
Sync is my android choice (they have an ios beta also). Keeps it very clean and simple. If they stop third party apps i will definitely look for alternative communities. The desktop reminders to switch to the new (awful) version are bad enough
I'm surprised that's their only problem with the mobile site. I purposely do not follow Reddit links because they show me a spinner for 7 seconds before showing the text of self posts. I can only assume that this delay to show a kilobyte of text is purposeful and meant to further steer users to the app, and not simply gross engineering incompetence, since the desktop site loads instantly.
(Though, thank you to the OP for posting an explicit desktop link so I didn't have to suffer this pause.)
At least AMP seems mostly dead. Though between cookie notices, "use our app" and "subscribe to our mailing list" popups, fixed navbars, and the damn on-screen keyboard popping up for no reason, I'm lucky to see even a single line of article text on some sites on mobile, though which line it is changes every few seconds as ads on invisible parts of the page pop into and out of existence. And then the article is shitty modern "long-form" journalism that doesn't get to the point until after 10 paragraphs describing the latte the reporter had while giving the interview. I've had better experiences reading click-bait slideshow articles than those from some so-called "professional" outlets. God I hate the modern web. Get off my lawn.
Ironically the mobile site is a full single page app, while the desktop site (or at least the old one) was mostly server rendered. It's not impossible to create a fast mobile client rendered site (Twitter have done well) but it's certainly not as easy as it is with plain old HTML.
The Reddit .compact view is great, and should be how mobile sites work. All server render, and a tiny bit of interactivity. It's miles better than the real mobile view.
Twitter is the other major "use our app" and "please register to continue" abuser. The mobile website shows trimmed comments and the original post that cannot even be followed or scrolled through without a forced register-wall appearing.
Yeah, the operating assuptions of client side rendering seem to be that server-side CPU is expensive while network bandwidth and latency are cheap and the client has a fast CPU which it isn't using. I do wonder how it ever took off.
Forbes literally shows a loading spinner for _minutes_ if you try to opt out, and when it finally completes, you're sent to an empty page asking you to opt back in to tracking.
I used to occasionally read stuff there when an interesting-sounding article was posted to HN, but I'm not visiting that page ever again.
I'm thankful for their new design, actually. After many years of trying, I have now managed to successfully kick my Reddit habit completely and have gained precious hours in my day.
I've been trying to pin down _why_ I've had the same reaction as you, but I really can't put my finger on it.
Something about the new site just somehow puts me off. While I could mindlessly browse the old site endlessly, something about the new actively makes me want to close the tab.
The new design made me leave as well, it had been s long time coming though. Most discussions are dumb, I can’t remember the last time I had a conversation on reddit where I wasn’t the most knowledgeable person in the thread, and that’s just a waste of time.
It’s not that people are stupid, sometimes you’re simply talking to a teenager with no life experience. Often it is because people are kind of stupid. My national (r/Denmark) subreddit has devolved into a vile place for instance, I’d compare it to t_d, it’s the best “quick” comparison there is, but it’s obviously not as bad, at least not yet.
I think /r/space is the only major subreddit that I don’t dislike, and most of the smaller ones have been abandoned.
The new design being horrible was just what tipped the iceberg.
I think what it is is that we associate the old design with good times. We associate it with those deep, late night discussions about something esoteric from back when reddit was a smaller but more knowledgable community. Like any social site, as it grows the average quality decreases. Today reddit is the #10 most popular site worldwide, and largely the discussions are bandwagony / low effort. For me when I see the site under the new design, I don't see any of the nostalgia I have associated with it from a decade of use. I just see all the stuff I dislike about what the site has become.
I think it's because in the new design, you do not get to choose which content to view or click on. All images are auto-expanded, leaving you with a fb-like feed rather than suggested content you can choose to dive into.
1. I can't log in on the new site. If I log out on the new one I get a weird error logging in.
2. Everything is clickable. On a crappy touch pad I misclick so much stuff.
3. Resource usage. I bought a lighter laptop. It sacred me actually because embedded YouTube was lagging on the new site. This was even worse because everything is ckickable problem.
4. It took a lot of clicks to see a content. There might be an expand / collapse but I had a hard time finding it consistently.
I've also been using a lot less of reddit.
All reddit and most sites for that matter need to do is be responsive to screen size. And do away with dedicated apps.
I've been wondering the same thing. For me, I think the new site feels slightly sluggish and the design and/or implementation feels clunky. I switched back to classic though so no productivity gains for me.
I actually switched to Hackernews and forced myself to read at least two paragraphs of any article before I read the comments. I’ve learned so much more from this website and wasted so much less time. I’ve went from several hours a day on reddit to about 30 minutes on HN on various times on the toilet everyday.
After having to click "visit old reddit" a few times, I just got sick of it.
> After many years of trying, I have now managed to successfully kick my Reddit habit completely and have gained precious hours in my day.
It stopped being fun. Reddit has turned into the infowars of the left. It's just spiteful and angry leftist politics 24/7. I suppose it was inevitable when reddit sold itself to a news media company, but still sad to see reddit die a slow and painful death. Was once a great site for open ideas, discussions and jokes.
Same here! After repeatedly getting redirected to an app and mobile version of their site, i began asking myself why i put up with this on Reddit and not elsewhere.
I don't know if you'll see this comment because the thread is off the front page, but I came back to thank you. Your comment set off a lightbulb in my head and really helped me make a positive change to my life. I'd been wallowing in a major (3+ hours a night) reddit addiction and my productivity was way, way down and I wasn't accomplishing stuff I wanted to do (learn another language, work out, clean the house...) because of it. I also HATE the redesign (so ugly, so spaced out, way less "sticky" to me as a user because what I really love about reddit is the discussion subreddits and the conversations. I'd always been turning the "new reddit" off and using old reddit view. When I saw your comment above, it was like an epiphany. A-ha! Just leave the ugly terrible redesign activated on all the time!!
I am so thankful I saw that- I changed all my reddits to the new design and successfully accomplished a ton of stuff I'd been procrastinating on over the last few weeks.
The app doesn't have ad blockers and they can spam notifications, hence the push.
Also I'm sure somewhere "mobile users" is a metric in a company valuation equation. Pinterest is the worst offender of a mobile app that doesn't need to exist since the web counterpart can do 100% of the job. This being a product that leveraged JavaScript in browser bookmarks to get "pins" without an app or extension.
When Reddit stopped allowing non-email-verified signups and conveniently locked everyone out who did have a non-email legacy account, the writing was on the wall. They didn't even have their own mobile app for years after the "mobile first" rhetoric and guess what... It still grew to the #3 website in the world.
>When Reddit stopped allowing non-email-verified signups and conveniently locked everyone out who did have a non-email legacy account, the writing was on the wall.
While I haven't verified it, I recently read a post that they didn't stop allowing email-less account creation, they did add a dark pattern around it. I believe it was someone like an email prompt and next button, but allowing the email field to remain empty.
You got it. Emails are still optional, but the sign up flow plays coy and makes you think it’s required. You can leave the email field blank if you’d like.
Mine can no longer log in and you cannot recover it without an email address. You cannot add an email after this happens. I've had multiple other real-life Reddit users with the same situation recently. The odds that all these passwords were compromised is nearly zero. None of the accounts have posted or done any activity since. This is circa 4 months.
At this point I'm genuinely wondering if they're about to Digg themselves into a amusingly-recursive grave. All it would take is one great, open forum site to absorb the refugees from a terrible management mistep, and they're toast. Just like Digg.
The funny thing is that Reddit completely inadvertently killed one of the possible heirs in Voat. That site had potential to steal the traditional Reddit audience due to Reddit's mismanagement. However Reddit's crackdown on hate on the site caused a big exodus of problem users to Voat. The end result is that Voat is now a vile alt-right wasteland that presents no threat of stealing Reddit's mainstream audience.
That's like how some online games don't entirely ban cheat users but only match them with other cheaters, giving them a taste of their own medicine. There's a tipping point in the evolution of communities. When there are too many acting in an anti-social manner such that fun or business is impaired, people quit. If not addressed the community permanently declines.
There's a term of art in philosophy called universalizability (Kant). Basically, what would happen if everyone followed a principle or strategy. Locke spoke of the social contract - civilization is not compatible with unlimited individual freedom.
Reddit already has an interesting user sorting and self-selection process: sub-reddits. People can more easily congregate around common interests. They don't even have to buy a domain, learn HTML, or pay hosting bills. Which would seem to reduce flame wars. But this can result in groupthink and safe spaces for extreme views.
Oh wow. Last time I looked at voat was when gamergate was in full swing and voat had just started up. Most of the content was fairly similar to reddit, maybe with a slight alt-right bent.
Looking at the front page now, it's just turned into 4chan.
Agreed. When Reddit first started treating their mods with contempt, I swore off the place. I spent a fair while on Voat at that point and it was crude at times but there was still a lot of good content. I gave up on it after a while because toxic Reddit refugees turned it into such a cesspool.
Why can't another site pop up? There was one last year with a 4(?) letter name I forget (Lyme or something?) but it failed and shut down because it's impossible to pay the server bills with only nontoxic content, apparently.
> they're about to Digg themselves into a amusingly-recursive grave
"You'll get over it"
> All it would take is one great, open forum site to absorb the refugees from a terrible management mistep
This is fundamental risk to any business that depends on a social space. The best explanation of the mechanics that create this risk is Joe Peacock's talk[1] at NOTACON 8 about the time fark.com made the same mistake... and then poured gasoline on the fire with the infamous "You'll get over it" comment being the only publicly visible response by fark.com's management.
> All it would take is one great, open forum site to absorb the refugees from a terrible management mistep
This is the goal of https://notabug.io it's a p2p fork of reddit based on GUNdb. Still very early; but my hope is that there will be enough interest in lifeboats that people will be interested in helping to construct one.
notabug is a p2p link aggregator app that is:
distributed: peers backup/serve content
anonymous: but don't trust it to be
immutable: edits are not supported
votes are PoW *voting is CPU heavy*
I think the future of reddit, if it doesn't fix its UX problems, is not being usurped like Digg, but being chewed up by piranhas like Craigslist. There probably won't be a multidisciplinary full-on reddit "replacement", but a bunch of sites that manage to steal large fractions of the userbase. The "long tail" can't spin off a new site for every subreddit, but it can split into several smaller tails. StackExchange is the first and best example. Two categories that seem like they could be targeted by insurgents are games and localities. A lot of subreddits for certain cities and/or certain games are good, but it's an open secret that some games and/or places have absolutely terrible subreddits -- and reddit doesn't have much of a correction mechanism for that, save for the userbase getting fed up and establishing a new one (like when the creator of /r/marijuana started posting a bunch of racist drivel and everyone moved to /r/trees).
The big thing protecting reddit right now, IMO, is that /r/worldnews for all its faults is still a much less awful way to browse international news headlines than the vast majority of news sites. Sure, the headlines are editorialized and the comments are mostly trolls, but at least it won't crash your phone browser and it's not gonna interrupt your unhealthy obsession with foreign affairs to bring you someone else's unhealthy obsession with celebrity gossip. And for all the ads pimping the reddit app, just try to download a recipe from Cookstr or the Food Network or whatever and you'll soon be begging to see fake loading screens that ask you to download an iPhone app. (Serious Eats is good though.)
Reddit is nice as a platform where lots of subforums exist. Going back to maintaining a bunch of logins in a bunch of forums, each with their own security setup, would be a hell of a headache for a lot of people.
The only other ubiquitous logins are Facebook and Google, and I trust neither of them to do Reddit's job better than Reddit does (which is, admittedly, not the highest bar.)
I was telling friends not so long ago that Reddit would NEVER redesign their webpage because of ehat happened to Digg. Then BOOM the redesign happened. Oh boy was I wrong.
HN did introduce a minifier [-] in the wrong side of the comments, but at least the rest is pretty much the same.
Anyone know, who owns the content on reddit? Could the mod/admin of a sub, export all conversations to another framework, or a federated one? Assuming there was an easy way to do so.
> You retain the rights to your copyrighted content or information that you submit to reddit ("user content") except as described below.
> By submitting user content to reddit, you grant us a royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, unrestricted, worldwide license to reproduce, prepare derivative works, distribute copies, perform, or publicly display your user content in any medium and for any purpose, including commercial purposes, and to authorize others to do so.
> You agree that you have the right to submit anything you post, and that your user content does not violate the copyright, trademark, trade secret or any other personal or proprietary right of any other party.
The individual users retain the rights to their comments and posts and so on, Reddit just gets permission to display them.
So, a mod would probably have to gain permission from every user before federating, legally speaking.
>All it would take is one great, open forum site to absorb the refugees from a terrible management mistep, and they're toast
I doubt it. Unlike Digg, Reddit has community lock-in. If your content is generic memes and videos and general-interest news articles, then you can switch without caring too much if everybody else follows right away.
But if you’re in a small city sub or the sub of some niche hobby or interest, then it matters a lot if everybody else agrees to move. You want to be where the other people are and it’s really hard to get an entire community to organize somewhere else. A site that can pull 20% of a small sub’s users isn’t 20% as good. It’s useless.
I disagree. Reddit has done a good job of branching itself out across various diverse communities, and has been experimenting with geographical location based customization among other things which I feel should be enough of a buffer against going down Digg's path.
Things don't always change for the better because you complain.
But things rarely change for the better when you don't complain.
Reddit is trying to build a community too, because otherwise they wouldn't have visitors. It's naive to think that speaking up never makes a difference.
History doesn’t support your comment. People have complained endlessly about ISPs, various video game mechanics, Google and Facebook tracking; no change, because the people complaining don’t leave. People generally don’t complain about ugly interfaces, stores far away, confusing calls to action; they constantly change and improve, because the people who hit these problems often leave.
When speaking up has made a difference, virtually every time, it was coupled with action, or it was speaking up to people who had no reason not to agree.
Reddit’s community is a means to an end, that’s my point. Asking for something that strengthens the community without harming ad views may be reasonable, but asking them to strengthen the community at the direct expense of the reason they want a community is nonsense.
> Asking Reddit to "please stop" grabbing at better attention hooks is like asking McDonald's to "please stop" raising prices.
It's more like asking McDonald's to stop trying to sell / serve me a worse product that I didn't order, halfway through my order. And despite them knowing who I am, repeating this question every time. "Hi, I'd like two McMea- WOULD YOU LIKE A SALAD INSTEAD??"
If they are not making sufficient money on one of their products they should pull it, not try to irritate people into choosing something else.
Also McDonnalds are in fact sensitive to the "please stop raising prices" stuff. It's been their main USP for ages that they are cheaper than most of the competition.
> now it's a floating bar at the bottom when reading comments that for some reason I can't get rid of despite the x button
The x button works for me, but when I load an other page it reappears. So reddit wants me to dismiss the floating bar for every page I visit on the site.
I'm curious to learn about the thinking behind building out such dark patterns. Have the reddit employees tried using the site on mobile while logged out for extended periods of time? If the answer is yes, I would love to know how they justify building out such a feature. Is there pressure to grow the app installs metric? It sometimes feels like reddit is losing touch with the community.
There's another variation of the popup where the button to install the app is huge and the link to proceed to the mobile site is tiny. It's also pretty easy to accidentally click on the button to download the app. Here's an image : https://i.imgur.com/rSS8HoI.png
I mean they probably justify it with “the boss told me to do this, so I will because I live in San Francisco and my rent is $2500 a month and I want to keep my job”. It’s hard to make a stand when someone else will just do it.
I wonder how they use the site. Or if they do. Or if they have some internal tool.
I find it hard to believe that no one prefers the old mobile site. That would be pretty weird that their designers and programmers have such odd tastes that they actually like the app or the Facebook style scroll.
It's kind of fascinating that seems like there is some kind of force that drives popular web sites to eventually self-sabotage themselves out of existence. Reddit seems to be having a good go at it now.
I sort of get how it happens but I can't quite understand how the level of stupidity required by management is achieved in practice to actually do it.
It's a common commercial lifecycle for all sorts of things. You make a new thing. You find a way to make money from the thing. You expand your market for the thing by filling a need and treating your customers well. At some point you want to cash out, and start burning your userbase to make extra money. Eventually this destroys the whole thing.
That's part of it. Another cause is that companies grow and get more employees and those employees need to justify their existence by changing things up. You don't get promoted for not fixing what aint broken.
it's not common. most businesses do not wait years until they capriciously decide to make money. that's because most businesses are not funded by the silicon valley, it's float or die.
Its a disease caused by the unhealthy VC-funded growth model. When major websites don't care about advertising income, the advertisers are left to become scammier and scammier as smaller websites don't have the power to wield positive change for their users.
Readit News
My main concern is Reddit pulling a Twitter and cracking down on third-party clients/enhancers, such as RES and the Apollo app for iOS (which is excellent)
"Hey your friend did a thing, go congratulate them"
"Hey, a friend knows this person. Go follow them too"
"Hey, your friend just posted a picture of spaghetti, go signal your approval"
Hey.
How about I check in and interact with my friends on my time in a manner I want to?
But yeah notifications in general needs a strong enforcement from Google if we don't have to turn them off completely.
Deleted Comment
Knowing only the individual can see their upvotes for an individual post makes the question - is there a difference between 30 upvotes and 2, if the rank of that post is 1? Which I find simply to be, intellectually resonant (or simulating) in the way Reddit, even Google - used to be. Those places have become so noisy, which is ironic, but that's the problem with success. The problem of finding a metric to measure the thing against.
https://redditenhancementsuite.com
It just failed to load that time (it happens) and they've screwed up the refresh somehow (probably a bug).
(Though, thank you to the OP for posting an explicit desktop link so I didn't have to suffer this pause.)
At least AMP seems mostly dead. Though between cookie notices, "use our app" and "subscribe to our mailing list" popups, fixed navbars, and the damn on-screen keyboard popping up for no reason, I'm lucky to see even a single line of article text on some sites on mobile, though which line it is changes every few seconds as ads on invisible parts of the page pop into and out of existence. And then the article is shitty modern "long-form" journalism that doesn't get to the point until after 10 paragraphs describing the latte the reporter had while giving the interview. I've had better experiences reading click-bait slideshow articles than those from some so-called "professional" outlets. God I hate the modern web. Get off my lawn.
Try it yourself at : reddit.com/.compact
Many sites do this with GDPR opt-outs, which ironically are non compliant on multiple accounts.
I used to occasionally read stuff there when an interesting-sounding article was posted to HN, but I'm not visiting that page ever again.
Something about the new site just somehow puts me off. While I could mindlessly browse the old site endlessly, something about the new actively makes me want to close the tab.
Either way, a good thing.
It’s not that people are stupid, sometimes you’re simply talking to a teenager with no life experience. Often it is because people are kind of stupid. My national (r/Denmark) subreddit has devolved into a vile place for instance, I’d compare it to t_d, it’s the best “quick” comparison there is, but it’s obviously not as bad, at least not yet.
I think /r/space is the only major subreddit that I don’t dislike, and most of the smaller ones have been abandoned.
The new design being horrible was just what tipped the iceberg.
2. Everything is clickable. On a crappy touch pad I misclick so much stuff.
3. Resource usage. I bought a lighter laptop. It sacred me actually because embedded YouTube was lagging on the new site. This was even worse because everything is ckickable problem.
4. It took a lot of clicks to see a content. There might be an expand / collapse but I had a hard time finding it consistently.
After having to click "visit old reddit" a few times, I just got sick of it.
> After many years of trying, I have now managed to successfully kick my Reddit habit completely and have gained precious hours in my day.
It stopped being fun. Reddit has turned into the infowars of the left. It's just spiteful and angry leftist politics 24/7. I suppose it was inevitable when reddit sold itself to a news media company, but still sad to see reddit die a slow and painful death. Was once a great site for open ideas, discussions and jokes.
Unless you're specifically visiting r/politics, r/latestagecapitalism, r/socialism, or similar subreddits, this just isn't true.
I don't know if you'll see this comment because the thread is off the front page, but I came back to thank you. Your comment set off a lightbulb in my head and really helped me make a positive change to my life. I'd been wallowing in a major (3+ hours a night) reddit addiction and my productivity was way, way down and I wasn't accomplishing stuff I wanted to do (learn another language, work out, clean the house...) because of it. I also HATE the redesign (so ugly, so spaced out, way less "sticky" to me as a user because what I really love about reddit is the discussion subreddits and the conversations. I'd always been turning the "new reddit" off and using old reddit view. When I saw your comment above, it was like an epiphany. A-ha! Just leave the ugly terrible redesign activated on all the time!!
I am so thankful I saw that- I changed all my reddits to the new design and successfully accomplished a ton of stuff I'd been procrastinating on over the last few weeks.
Cheers and thanks so much for the great idea.
Also I'm sure somewhere "mobile users" is a metric in a company valuation equation. Pinterest is the worst offender of a mobile app that doesn't need to exist since the web counterpart can do 100% of the job. This being a product that leveraged JavaScript in browser bookmarks to get "pins" without an app or extension.
When Reddit stopped allowing non-email-verified signups and conveniently locked everyone out who did have a non-email legacy account, the writing was on the wall. They didn't even have their own mobile app for years after the "mobile first" rhetoric and guess what... It still grew to the #3 website in the world.
While I haven't verified it, I recently read a post that they didn't stop allowing email-less account creation, they did add a dark pattern around it. I believe it was someone like an email prompt and next button, but allowing the email field to remain empty.
Deleted Comment
There's a term of art in philosophy called universalizability (Kant). Basically, what would happen if everyone followed a principle or strategy. Locke spoke of the social contract - civilization is not compatible with unlimited individual freedom.
Reddit already has an interesting user sorting and self-selection process: sub-reddits. People can more easily congregate around common interests. They don't even have to buy a domain, learn HTML, or pay hosting bills. Which would seem to reduce flame wars. But this can result in groupthink and safe spaces for extreme views.
Looking at the front page now, it's just turned into 4chan.
Right now it is very closely editorialized, but conversation level is at a good point.
"You'll get over it"
> All it would take is one great, open forum site to absorb the refugees from a terrible management mistep
This is fundamental risk to any business that depends on a social space. The best explanation of the mechanics that create this risk is Joe Peacock's talk[1] at NOTACON 8 about the time fark.com made the same mistake... and then poured gasoline on the fire with the infamous "You'll get over it" comment being the only publicly visible response by fark.com's management.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnVeysllPDI
This is the goal of https://notabug.io it's a p2p fork of reddit based on GUNdb. Still very early; but my hope is that there will be enough interest in lifeboats that people will be interested in helping to construct one.
The big thing protecting reddit right now, IMO, is that /r/worldnews for all its faults is still a much less awful way to browse international news headlines than the vast majority of news sites. Sure, the headlines are editorialized and the comments are mostly trolls, but at least it won't crash your phone browser and it's not gonna interrupt your unhealthy obsession with foreign affairs to bring you someone else's unhealthy obsession with celebrity gossip. And for all the ads pimping the reddit app, just try to download a recipe from Cookstr or the Food Network or whatever and you'll soon be begging to see fake loading screens that ask you to download an iPhone app. (Serious Eats is good though.)
So it'll be a while.
The only other ubiquitous logins are Facebook and Google, and I trust neither of them to do Reddit's job better than Reddit does (which is, admittedly, not the highest bar.)
HN did introduce a minifier [-] in the wrong side of the comments, but at least the rest is pretty much the same.
> You retain the rights to your copyrighted content or information that you submit to reddit ("user content") except as described below.
> By submitting user content to reddit, you grant us a royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, unrestricted, worldwide license to reproduce, prepare derivative works, distribute copies, perform, or publicly display your user content in any medium and for any purpose, including commercial purposes, and to authorize others to do so.
> You agree that you have the right to submit anything you post, and that your user content does not violate the copyright, trademark, trade secret or any other personal or proprietary right of any other party.
The individual users retain the rights to their comments and posts and so on, Reddit just gets permission to display them.
So, a mod would probably have to gain permission from every user before federating, legally speaking.
I doubt it. Unlike Digg, Reddit has community lock-in. If your content is generic memes and videos and general-interest news articles, then you can switch without caring too much if everybody else follows right away.
But if you’re in a small city sub or the sub of some niche hobby or interest, then it matters a lot if everybody else agrees to move. You want to be where the other people are and it’s really hard to get an entire community to organize somewhere else. A site that can pull 20% of a small sub’s users isn’t 20% as good. It’s useless.
Reddit is an ad company. It's not an effort to build you a nice website, it's a machine for taking your time and attention from you then selling it.
Asking Reddit to "please stop" grabbing at better attention hooks is like asking McDonald's to "please stop" raising prices.
The right way to say this is timeless: refuse to make the trade. If Reddit goes too far, close the tab. That, in bulk, is how you get a response.
But things rarely change for the better when you don't complain.
Reddit is trying to build a community too, because otherwise they wouldn't have visitors. It's naive to think that speaking up never makes a difference.
When speaking up has made a difference, virtually every time, it was coupled with action, or it was speaking up to people who had no reason not to agree.
Reddit’s community is a means to an end, that’s my point. Asking for something that strengthens the community without harming ad views may be reasonable, but asking them to strengthen the community at the direct expense of the reason they want a community is nonsense.
However, often people complain and do nothing, or complain and keep buying the company's product. (e.g. games with microtransactions)
It's more like asking McDonald's to stop trying to sell / serve me a worse product that I didn't order, halfway through my order. And despite them knowing who I am, repeating this question every time. "Hi, I'd like two McMea- WOULD YOU LIKE A SALAD INSTEAD??"
If they are not making sufficient money on one of their products they should pull it, not try to irritate people into choosing something else.
The x button works for me, but when I load an other page it reappears. So reddit wants me to dismiss the floating bar for every page I visit on the site.
I'm curious to learn about the thinking behind building out such dark patterns. Have the reddit employees tried using the site on mobile while logged out for extended periods of time? If the answer is yes, I would love to know how they justify building out such a feature. Is there pressure to grow the app installs metric? It sometimes feels like reddit is losing touch with the community.
There's another variation of the popup where the button to install the app is huge and the link to proceed to the mobile site is tiny. It's also pretty easy to accidentally click on the button to download the app. Here's an image : https://i.imgur.com/rSS8HoI.png
I find it hard to believe that no one prefers the old mobile site. That would be pretty weird that their designers and programmers have such odd tastes that they actually like the app or the Facebook style scroll.
I sort of get how it happens but I can't quite understand how the level of stupidity required by management is achieved in practice to actually do it.
It's a common commercial lifecycle for all sorts of things. You make a new thing. You find a way to make money from the thing. You expand your market for the thing by filling a need and treating your customers well. At some point you want to cash out, and start burning your userbase to make extra money. Eventually this destroys the whole thing.