Hmm, I just checked myself, and I was able to read comment threads perfectly fine without being logged in, on both a desktop computer and a smartphone.
Obviously old.reddit.com doesn't have these issues, but I'm pretty sure the session on smartphone used the new site, and that let me keep reading without any interruptions too.
Either way, if Reddit does this, that's it. Not returning to the site. The internet doesn't need all these walled gardens, and it's worrying how this is going to affect how info is preserved for future generations.
Unfortunately the way things are going I can see them getting rid of old.reddit.com and i.reddit.com, at which point I think I'll also stop visiting the website (the mobile website is atrocious and I'm not going to install a dedicated app in order to read a forum).
That will be sad day. If old.reddit.com goes, so do I.
I use Reddit mainly on phone, via browser because I use tabs and old.reddit.com because its the most content dense view and and is the fastest view (no stupid js loading icon thankyou). I'm not there, like I'm not here, for the design. I'm visiting for the content.
Reddit.com front page takes about three seconds to load with stupid blocking js, old takes about second before I can start consuming. Apps are no better.
Heh, like I stopped visiting Slashdot after the new website was implemented. And it wasn't even like I was especially annoyed at the new interface, I just gradually used it less and less until completely stopping...
>Unfortunately the way things are going I can see them getting rid of old.reddit.com
Well, if they do I'm out. The new is, and always has been, a steaming pile. I mean, people can't even confidently reply to who they think they are and often reply to the OP instead of a comment (I see this every single day in multiple threads) and as a mod I absolutely hate the way new Reddit is set up on the mod side.
New Reddit is also just flat out hideous in appearance. One of the reasons I've paid for Reddit for years is so I could strip custom themes to keep a plain experience not unlike HN. New Reddit is like 'Hey guys!!!!!! We discovered pastels, omg omg omg do you want to see pictures because here are a bunch of pictures loaded rather large that you didn't ask to see, pictures, yay pictures, omg omg pictures!"
>I'm not going to install a dedicated app in order to read a forum
Apollo (iOS) provides a nice and clean design, as does Joey (Android) which copies the style of the former. Even on the desktop, the experience is smooth and manageable, by using uMatrix and RES, whether you are browsing old.reddit or not. I don't understand the hesitancy in using these enhancements to enrich your user experience.
>and I'm not going to install a dedicated app in order to read a forum
Even if it's infinitely better? I have been using the 'reddit is fun' app for years, and it's the best experience by far. I hate even using my computer to browse reddit to be honest, I would rather sit and be comfortable with a phone. Can't say that about most sites.
On the opposite end, I hate browsing hackernews on my phone so I almost never do. I can't click anything because it's so small. So I just end up using it on the desktop, which is fine I guess.. but it limits my interaction with this site.
For mobile, I've been using an open source app(RedReader). It's not actively developed anymore, so new "features" like silver and platinum, etc, are left out. I think the last big feature that was added was v.redd.it with sound. If Reddit ever locks down their APIs so third party apps don't work, I'll probably be done.
It's ridiculous how much better old.reddit.com is for a casual reader like me. The way thread hiding works by default, "See Entire Discussion" etc, everything is designed to provoke clicks and actions instead of reading the actual discussion.
I recently browsed reddit after years of abstinence.
The “view discussion” and “view more comments” buttons are just utter, utter shite. It is near impossible to read all of the comments.
It’s clearly designed to satisfy KPIs other than actually reading a post. More like superficially bouncing from one post to the next, dropping an upboat and off you go.
I sincerely hope all these sign in-only forums with great SEO like Quora and Reddit suffocate on their own rot.
I've been experiencing it either way on my phone this week. As I'm quite judicious about using "private" sessions for everything I suspect its been under a/b test.
Yeah, this feature being part of an A/B test makes sense.
Hopefully the results of said test show enough of a drop in traffic/conversions for the variation with the 'login requirement' that they drop the idea altogether.
I have personally been extremely bothered by the masked threads for a while now as I often browse reddit unlogged. So I can attest it is real and awful :/
Reddit is, in the short term, driving more external users towards creating user accounts while in the long term removing one of the major value funnels for why they would (i.e. the quality of comments, particularly in certain niche communities/about niche topics).
This will give them a short term "bump" at the cost of the site's long term relevance (as it falls down Google's search results rankings, due to loss of clicks as people stop looking to Reddit as a source of info). Most of the recent moves on Reddit are like this, it feels like the entire site is being turned into a pump and dump scheme.
AKA the fate of every site that is a collection of usergenerated content with an ad based business model. If you want to get serious about monetization then you need to actively curtail any content that is not "advertiser friendly" which in most cases means alienating your core content generators, case in point, Tumblr.
It's possible to migrate software without driving off all your users. It's soft, after all. When the 8-bit wave crested, that didn't mean Apple was done as a company.
Why do we accept that such a short-lived company (less than one human generation) is "a good run", just because it's software? If Tesla turned into a "classic pump and dump scheme", nobody would say "Well, Tesla is 16 years old. They've had a good run."
Without researching traffic stats over time, what gives you the impression that reddit is dying? I'm under the impression it's only become bigger and bigger over the years. It's one of the top sites on the internet.
Also,for me, it's still a great social media site that lets me talk anonymously about almost anything.
The beauty of reddit is that serious decline and toxicity only seems to happen within subs. If a sub becomes really bad, you just move on to other subs that are less toxic. Still plenty of great subcommunities there.
Echoing this, even just a year or so ago, I'd follow five or six different subreddits and check in on them multiple times a day.
In the past few months, I've found that I only check "Today I Learned", and even that only once every day or so.
I find the discussion here to be much more mature and insightful than any of the tech related subreddits. I had written it off as reddit being a young-persons domain and me getting old, but it could just be that reddit is losing it's edge.
Yes, but they don't _need_ to do this to stay afloat and relevant. How's their ad revenue? They could keep the stupid app, keep the dumb messages trying to convince me to switch to the app, and I'd still use it. But this is just a slap in the face to the average user.
Are they going to get away with keeping all of their google volume by cloaking the google bot and hiding the content from everyone else? Comments make up the vast majority of Reddit’s unique content. I would guess on a word basis it’s over 99%?
That wouldn't help. A significant metric Google uses for ranking is relevance, meaning number of historic clicks for a given search term.
As users learn that Reddit links aren't useful sources of information, they'll click less, which means the relevance between the search term and Reddit goes down. Ultimately reducing Reddit's ranking, regardless of if the Googlebot is allowed to index the content.
People often mix up indexing and ranking. Indexing is if you're even in the results set, but ranking is where. Reddit might, technically, still be in the results set but if it isn't on page 1 for a given search it may have well not be.
Google will figure the higher bounce rate of the page (the user quickly went back to the SERP) means it's not as relevant as they thought, so they'll move it down in the search rankings.
I wish Reddit had gone the way of VLC -- keep your core product, the thing people liked, and stop chasing profits. Why do so many of these companies fall to the profit motive and lose their "soul"?
This is why we need to making something like a digital commons co-op, maybe Mozilla, maybe Wikipedia Foundation or maybe Archive but Reddit has replaced usenet, and we need a site run for the people.
Since the web is based around single domains, the source runs behind those domains, this balkanizes what we see and who runs it, creating a winner take all dynamic. Unknowingly, the structure of the web makes it ideal to supplant public protocols for private walled gardens. Sure you can use a "standard" client to connect, but you are relying on the good of the owner, who can _pivot_ at any time.
It's a for-profit company. Chasing profits is the entire point. If that wasn't the point then they would have an alternative organizational structure and enjoy the various tax benefits that come with it, like VLC does.
Unfortunately, VLC is developed by VideoLAN, a non-profit organization whereas Reddit is a for profit company which by definition they will chase for profits.
Quora is arguably worse, it actively incentivized people to post inane and unproductive questions reducing the overall quantity of the content. Language topics are littered which questions such as "What is the colour red in the language X" while topics like Math has stuff like "What is 1+1". I wish I was kidding about that last one, it's an actual question on Quora with 1,078 answers as of this comment. It's insane
Oh yeah, I remember browsing it back in the day. A friend touted it as some platform where your questions get answered by experts in that particular field. For a time it was cool - had NASA astronauts, computer scientists, famous politicians. But later it got filled with random no names and their sob stories, motivational self-help nonsense and just embellished factoids from history. It turned into a glorified r/askreddit
This is just the next logical step in transforming reddit into some sort of not-racist 9gag. A stream of images and videos that encourage scrolling, not 2000s bulletin board discussions.
Stack Overflow is currently engaged in the same kind of transformation. It's sad to see these giants of user participation turning away from what (I believe) made them so wonderful, and towards raw-numbers-growth at all cost. I suppose the folks with the money will be happy, but it diminishes our culture. The pursuit of quality content certainly supports sustainable growth, but it seems that it's just not big and fast enough [to pay the VC piper][0].
What else could you get when these decisions are made by employees who don't own significant amount of stock? The whole incentive model of employmen in modern world isn't built towards long-term thinking. The company you're working for is too big for you to make any impact on the long-term, but your own career depends entirely on the short-term.
I don't think that a co-founder would ever make such a short-sighted decision.
I deleted my Reddit account recently in an effort to curb social media. I've still been checking r/all and some favorite subreddits. Thank you Reddit for further breaking the site and making it easier to ween myself off of. Thank you HN for the addiction block contols on the account screen.
Exactly what I thought! I deleted the Reddit Apollo app when I realized I was using for over 3 hours a day.
Now I catch myself sometimes using the mobile version. But the fact that they keep going out of the way to make it work and worse everyday means I actually get to stay away from it.
What are your favorite alternatives to stay in tune with what's happening now? I browse r/all multiple times daily for a bit. I don't get a lot of need-to-know information from it, but some things I like to see are movie trailers, big tech announcements (Xbox Series X yesterday), and in general, things that everyone seems to be "in the know" of. It's my main pop culture news outlet, but I feel like it shouldn't be.
Sounds ass backwards, and I've been signing up for newsletters in addition to a little more HN to ween off of Reddit. Read some curated headlines in the morning, sure there's usually a "word from our sponsers", but it's a better experience overall than social media imo.
Any newsletter recommendations? I've been thinking of going down an RSS/Email&&Procmail route myself, but haven't done the research on quality sources yet.
i haven't used reddit for a couple years now. I remember r/all being the worst. I just checked it now to verify. Too... soft? feminine? Not to mention the small drip of political propaganda.
Maybe i outgrew the typical user demographic, but i think its just corny (I'm talking about r/all).
Too feminine is an unusual critique for Reddit. Maybe things really are changing fast.
The only social media I really like is Pinterest. It always gets ignored in these conversations and besides a few minor things, there development never seems to bother the base.
Learning lessons? They're making their website worse on purpose! They don't want people to use the Reddit website — they want people to use the app, because that's where all the ads and tracking is.
They went close to a decade without making Digg's mistakes. But now that investors are involved, they have to start putting up walls and plastering them with ads.
If you have a reddit account and go to the site not logged in the site looks like trash. The articles seem worse than what you see when logged in. Similar to YouTube if you aren't logged in you see the trashiest videos on the "unlogged in" main page.
I don't know if that's on purpose or it's just like that. But there seems to be a big difference in the quality depending on whether you are logged in or not.
As for the reddit site itself I wonder what is the ratio of old.reddit viewers vs reddit viewers are. I've used reddit for over a decade and absolutely hate the new style I only go to old.reddit if that changes and only new reddit is available I'll abandon my account (or sell it to Russians ha! Kidding.).
> As for the reddit site itself I wonder what is the ratio of old.reddit viewers vs reddit viewers are.
I moderate a top 100 sub and if the built-in stats are to be believed, the recent breakdown is something like:
= Pageviews =
40% apps
28% old reddit
17% mobile reddit
15% new reddit
= Unique visits =
41% mobile reddit
27% new reddit
24% apps
8% old reddit
This doesn't really capture the ratio of contributors who use each (or perhaps, more interestingly, number of contributions per platform), but it's hard for me to guess that accurately since new-reddit detractors are a very vocal group.
I moderate a rather popular programming subreddit (whose users you would expect to be more conscious of newreddit vs oldreddit), here's the eyeballed breakdown of our stats:
--- Monthly uniques (200k total):
New Reddit: 55%
Mobile Web: 20%
Reddit Apps: 15%
Old Reddit: 10%
--- Monthly Pageviews (3M total):
New Reddit: 30%
Mobile Web: 10%
Reddit Apps: 30%
Old Reddit: 30%
So in our case, while the ones using Old Reddit are the fewest in number, they are also the most engaged.
It feels to me like social media has been imploding recently. It seems like I am seeing more and more efforts to overtly force people use an app, associate browsing with an account, and link their account with a real world identity (e.g. via phone number). This in turn makes the platforms less useful and more hostile to users and presumably at some point that will cause users to leave the system.
It also feels like social media platforms are starting to die faster than they can be replaced. In the past MySpace died but people could move to Facebook, Facebook shifted to emphasizing the feed over groups but people could move to Reddit, but I'm not sure what people could move to if Reddit becomes non-viable.
> This in turn makes the platforms less useful and more hostile to users and presumably at some point that will cause users to leave the system.
People always seem to brush off this kind of comment when I see it discussed, usually the argument is "well, you're a software developer / superuser, normal people don't care about these things." It will be interesting to see where the breaking point actually is; I've always felt that platform users deserve a little more respect than that. The linked identity thing is especially frustrating for me.
I stopped posting to facebook in 2010 (still using it to keep in touch via messenger and see event invites, and to avoid alienating extended family), but I used to have an instagram account with a fun theme that I only shared with a few friends. What was fun and relatable for my friends was confusing and obtuse to my family. Even the account username was embarrassing in that context. So I always kept them separate, explicitly saying "no, I don't want to attach this to my facebook account." Then one day, it just sort of happened? I can't remember if I was tricked by a dark pattern or if they just forcibly fused the accounts YouTube-Google style, but that day instagram immediately lost all usefulness to me and I haven't been on since. For me as a user, social media has always kind of felt this way.
I'm curious to see what will happen to reddit and its communities, and even more curious to see whether the next generation sees internet anonymity as a cool feature. When I was growing up, it felt like being able to form an alternate identity online was almost the whole point, but I guess back then there were fewer avenues to cultivating your identity as a personal brand for profit.
> It will be interesting to see where the breaking point actually is; I've always felt that platform users deserve a little more respect than that.
I read your comment as a really strong case for platform co-operativism -- multi-stakeholder democracy for online platforms: not just owners making decisions, but users and maybe employees together with owners. Generally, democratic currents (whether government or corporate) only emerge through changes in our collective sense of "how things should be".
I'm hoping we all start to realize we're serfs on all these platforms, and start wondering "hey, we're generating most of this wealth... why aren't we given a say in decision-making?"
It's the same thing that happens to all "free"/ad-sponsored/VC-backed services. Unless you're FB or Twitter or YouTube, your ads aren't profitable enough to run your business. The business model is unviable unless you get that big. So you lose a bunch of money until you find a way to monetize or close. This always takes the form of user-hostile anti-features. Currently that's forcing users into your special apps, where they can't install an ad-blocker. Historically it's been stuff like increasingly scummy ad behavior, and/or requiring paid accounts to access features that used to be free. Your platform gets less useful and gets replaced by the next "free"/ad-sponsored/VC-backed money loser and the cycle repeats.
It's happening to imgur and Reddit now. Time to find the next big thing.
I call this the dismal equilibrium. Anything free that provides value is, in brute economic terms, mis-priced. Thus, it tends to degrade due to attempts at monetization until a balance is reached between its inherent value and the pain one must endure to use/access it.
I just fail to see how old Reddit could not have been a sustainable standalone business. Conde Nast had a huge opportunity once they acquired it as it no longer needed "VC growth" but they failed. I wish I had the opportunity to acquire it for 10-20 million[1].
I'd caveat this very slightly, as sometimes a business model turns out to be existentially viable, but lacks the kind of scale, revenue, or exponential growth that VCs want to see.
I can't comment on the fact that the whole field is imploding, but there is only room for finite growth.
A lot of these platforms seem VC-funded or publicly traded, and they are based on growth. So they probably see growth slowing down, and this is an effort to squeeze more numbers out of it. Hopefully for them, they can pivot their business plan on to something not growth-based.
This is a common pattern: growth is like a drug for tech startups. Cut it, and they will do all they can to have it again, even if they have to alienate their current user-base for this.
As I often browse reddit in private mode, this probably just means that I'll waste less time on that website; I'm not going to bother logging in if I didn't already.
I think some of it is just you, and you're right to an extent. Normal users will tolerate a lot of annoyances, including hostile approaches, unfortunately. Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Imgur, LinkedIn have all repeatedly demonstrated that versus their very large user bases. These are not shrinking networks. Instagram's new cut-off on non-logged in viewing is hostile, it won't dent them at all though. These networks know their users will largely tolerate it, because what they're using doesn't cost them actual dollars.
I think the most interesting story in social networks is the collapse of core Facebook as the prime mover. I think there is still a lot of room for more Pinterests and Snapchats yet, which could further diversify the space and dilute core Facebook's mind share. The young people not caring about Facebook thing, has clearly graduated to a permanent setting, it's not going back (the next group are not going to suddenly care about FB). TikTok has demonstrated some of what is possible most recently.
>It also feels like social media platforms are starting to die faster than they can be replaced.
Very well can be. Social media in their current form belong to corporations rather than users. Therefore sooner or later they start making decisions that are hostile to users. To make an analogy, these online societies are not stable because they resemble a monarchy, where a corporation (the monarch) must use its own judgement on how to govern its online society. Which proven to be a rather unsustainable governance model.
Until online societies switch to self-government similar to modern democracies (elected government, elected judges, payment collection, public expense reporting, etc.) they will likely continue to be unsustainable and rather short-term.
The board that shall not be named was very interesting back in the day. There was always garbage, but even a simple battle toads thread could be a lot of fun to follow.
I never knew if the interesting people found a new home, or disbanded, but I sure miss when fun stuff happened there.
People want to share and be social. It's inherent to our nature. People are now realizing they don't want a down to the bit extremely searchable archive of what they've shared. They see it ruining lives and they do not want to be a part of it. Talk to any kid. Facebook is "old", "creepy", "dead", but they will use tiktok/snap because it's fun and seemingly ephemeral.
The differences that I see between Reddit and, for example, traditional forums are:
- The ability to use one login and interface across multiple boards/subject areas.
- The ease of communicating between different boards either via links, cross posts, or some form of aggregation.
- Features that over time allow a post to become one that can be recognized as well regarded by the community. These could include good support for listing important posts in the subreddit information, the ability to tag posts, and the ability to archive posts.
- The natural support for media and links. Although to be fair, the media support is actually provided by sites that grew up around Reddit like Imgur.
Reddit may not be social in the sense that, as another poster points out, it is built around following topics rather than users. However, the degree to which it allows different topics and communities to interconnect allows relationships to form that function as a society. For example, a post on the Male Fashion Advice subreddit on how to be more presentable might link to a series of posts on the Male Hair Advice subreddit that have become well regarded in the community.
By way of comparison, on conventional forums there is often little interaction even between sub-forums in the same forum let alone between different forums. Support for media also tends to be more limited.
In the past, a social platform was replaced by another one that did basically the same thing but better, in the eyes of users. Today, we're seeing real issues with social media, but there's no viable platform which fixes the problems with these platforms we want to leave.
I think the demand is still there. There's a power vacuum just waiting for someone to fill it. But the replacement can't just be "like Facebook but run by people slightly less creepy". You've got to fix some other root issues.
Facebook was always lame, it was a utilitarian communication tool. It's like calling hammers or wall calendars or trash bags lame.
It's similar to the argument you here when people say "they youth arent into facebook anymore, now they use xxxx." That's nice and all, but as long as they get facebook when they graduate high school or go to college, facebook wins. It doesnt need to be hip and cool if its the network gluing everyone together. Did the white pages or yellow pages need to be cool to be useful?
The hostility of existing large sites towards pseudonymity is also interesting in conjunction with the general insistence that sides really shouldn't implement their own account system, and with the ever-increasing legal overhead required to spin up a new site.
Are there any good alternatives to the reddit platform?
I've been a user since 2006. When reddit blew up in popularity, many subs massively declined in quality as is to be expected. Niche subs, however, remained pretty great.
But reddit as an organization is beyond repair at this point. Changes like this are now par for the course.
Worse even, reddit is now engaged in censoring subs. The most obvious and possibly most disturbing example is the quarantine of r/the_donald on political grounds.
No there's not, I was recently a member of a harmless subreddit that got banned from someone abusing DMCA who had some vendetta against the subreddit over some nonsense. He sent hundreds of fake copyright claims to posts which he had no ownership but Reddit admins didn't give a shit when we complained. He got our next two subreddits banned even faster since they had little content but plenty of DMCA requests.
We tried every single open or alternative Reddit and they were all garbage. And trust me when I said we tried everything.
They are either awful early-2000s PHP-clone style sites, some stupid fringe political communities which push away mainstream users, or some weird moderation rules.
https://saidit.net/ was the closest clone but they had some bizarre "Pyramid of Debate" [1] moderation thing that seemed culty among their hardcore members, which our sub members got turned off from.
But ultimately it's the lack of good mobile apps for these sites that pushed us away and we never managed to rebuild the community.
Recreating a better Reddit is a project I've long been interested in doing myself.
One solution might be a "federated reddit". Hacker News is essentially just a subreddit run by YC, so getting people/organizations/interest groups to run their own reddit forums is probably a good idea. It would let each community figure out its own income stream and not worry about advertisers running wild or the entire thing being bought out by the Chinese.
r/the_donald has many many posts advocating for violence against certain groups in clear violation of policy. These posts would stay up for days or weeks. In my opinion quarantining them was basically a slap on the wrist.
That is mostly false to say. That sub gets bad actors all over it all the time. It is a controversial, political sub. There are many who have been working to remove it for years.
They should have never been censored, it was a politically inspired move, and a disgusting one to have made.
>In my opinion quarantining them was basically a slap on the wrist.
I mean, I agree they should have been banned from day one basically.. but to say it's a slap on the wrist is odd because absolutely no one has to read any of their trash unless you specifically go there. Most random reddit users probably don't even know of td, let alone would actually go there voluntarily.
That being said.. I think it's unconscionable that reddit allows that subreddit to exist.. it's literally a breeding ground for violence and hate thought/speech.
I've noticed that TD has recently stood up a reddit clone of sorts on a separate web site. If that works, it seems like a win all around, both for friends and foes.
Did all of the founders leave Reddit or something?
This is totally backwards. Valuing pure signup rates over the user experience of hundreds of millions, who may already have accounts but dont feel like logging in, or just simply want to read content and sign up another day, is what happens when marketing/business people hijack a business over product/UX people.
This is a very obvious vanity metric issue to anyone who has run a popular website. And most people do it to appease VCs/investors... Reddit is already mature, so there's no justification to artificially increasing growth at the expense of the wider product.
Readit News
Obviously old.reddit.com doesn't have these issues, but I'm pretty sure the session on smartphone used the new site, and that let me keep reading without any interruptions too.
Either way, if Reddit does this, that's it. Not returning to the site. The internet doesn't need all these walled gardens, and it's worrying how this is going to affect how info is preserved for future generations.
Maybe they were testing something? or did this as a trial balloon? or canceled it because of backlash?
I use Reddit mainly on phone, via browser because I use tabs and old.reddit.com because its the most content dense view and and is the fastest view (no stupid js loading icon thankyou). I'm not there, like I'm not here, for the design. I'm visiting for the content.
Reddit.com front page takes about three seconds to load with stupid blocking js, old takes about second before I can start consuming. Apps are no better.
Well, if they do I'm out. The new is, and always has been, a steaming pile. I mean, people can't even confidently reply to who they think they are and often reply to the OP instead of a comment (I see this every single day in multiple threads) and as a mod I absolutely hate the way new Reddit is set up on the mod side.
New Reddit is also just flat out hideous in appearance. One of the reasons I've paid for Reddit for years is so I could strip custom themes to keep a plain experience not unlike HN. New Reddit is like 'Hey guys!!!!!! We discovered pastels, omg omg omg do you want to see pictures because here are a bunch of pictures loaded rather large that you didn't ask to see, pictures, yay pictures, omg omg pictures!"
Apollo (iOS) provides a nice and clean design, as does Joey (Android) which copies the style of the former. Even on the desktop, the experience is smooth and manageable, by using uMatrix and RES, whether you are browsing old.reddit or not. I don't understand the hesitancy in using these enhancements to enrich your user experience.
Even if it's infinitely better? I have been using the 'reddit is fun' app for years, and it's the best experience by far. I hate even using my computer to browse reddit to be honest, I would rather sit and be comfortable with a phone. Can't say that about most sites.
On the opposite end, I hate browsing hackernews on my phone so I almost never do. I can't click anything because it's so small. So I just end up using it on the desktop, which is fine I guess.. but it limits my interaction with this site.
The “view discussion” and “view more comments” buttons are just utter, utter shite. It is near impossible to read all of the comments.
It’s clearly designed to satisfy KPIs other than actually reading a post. More like superficially bouncing from one post to the next, dropping an upboat and off you go.
I sincerely hope all these sign in-only forums with great SEO like Quora and Reddit suffocate on their own rot.
As you say, its not present on ud. or old.
Hopefully the results of said test show enough of a drop in traffic/conversions for the variation with the 'login requirement' that they drop the idea altogether.
Perhaps they are testing it with a subset of users?
Reddit is, in the short term, driving more external users towards creating user accounts while in the long term removing one of the major value funnels for why they would (i.e. the quality of comments, particularly in certain niche communities/about niche topics).
This will give them a short term "bump" at the cost of the site's long term relevance (as it falls down Google's search results rankings, due to loss of clicks as people stop looking to Reddit as a source of info). Most of the recent moves on Reddit are like this, it feels like the entire site is being turned into a pump and dump scheme.
I think there is a general trend away from user-generated content as a business model, because that content can be a bit salty.
Reddit might just be cashing out because the wave they rode has already crested.
AKA the fate of every site that is a collection of usergenerated content with an ad based business model. If you want to get serious about monetization then you need to actively curtail any content that is not "advertiser friendly" which in most cases means alienating your core content generators, case in point, Tumblr.
Why do we accept that such a short-lived company (less than one human generation) is "a good run", just because it's software? If Tesla turned into a "classic pump and dump scheme", nobody would say "Well, Tesla is 16 years old. They've had a good run."
Also,for me, it's still a great social media site that lets me talk anonymously about almost anything.
The beauty of reddit is that serious decline and toxicity only seems to happen within subs. If a sub becomes really bad, you just move on to other subs that are less toxic. Still plenty of great subcommunities there.
In the past few months, I've found that I only check "Today I Learned", and even that only once every day or so.
I find the discussion here to be much more mature and insightful than any of the tech related subreddits. I had written it off as reddit being a young-persons domain and me getting old, but it could just be that reddit is losing it's edge.
You say that but... what is an alternative? I literally don't know where to go.
Like sports? /r/nfl /r/nba /r/insertsporthere
Like vr? /r/oculus /r/vive /r/insertothervrhere
And then just all the random stuff that is somewhat interesting...
I have such a love/hate relationship with reddit but I don't see any alternative.. especially if you like to actually discuss about topics.
As users learn that Reddit links aren't useful sources of information, they'll click less, which means the relevance between the search term and Reddit goes down. Ultimately reducing Reddit's ranking, regardless of if the Googlebot is allowed to index the content.
People often mix up indexing and ranking. Indexing is if you're even in the results set, but ranking is where. Reddit might, technically, still be in the results set but if it isn't on page 1 for a given search it may have well not be.
Since the web is based around single domains, the source runs behind those domains, this balkanizes what we see and who runs it, creating a winner take all dynamic. Unknowingly, the structure of the web makes it ideal to supplant public protocols for private walled gardens. Sure you can use a "standard" client to connect, but you are relying on the good of the owner, who can _pivot_ at any time.
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[0]:https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/340250
I don't think that a co-founder would ever make such a short-sighted decision.
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Several people I know (me included) refuse to use Pinterest because you can't browse without an account.
#NotMyInternet
Maybe i outgrew the typical user demographic, but i think its just corny (I'm talking about r/all).
The only social media I really like is Pinterest. It always gets ignored in these conversations and besides a few minor things, there development never seems to bother the base.
Digg lessons weren't apparently not learned
I don't know if that's on purpose or it's just like that. But there seems to be a big difference in the quality depending on whether you are logged in or not.
As for the reddit site itself I wonder what is the ratio of old.reddit viewers vs reddit viewers are. I've used reddit for over a decade and absolutely hate the new style I only go to old.reddit if that changes and only new reddit is available I'll abandon my account (or sell it to Russians ha! Kidding.).
I moderate a top 100 sub and if the built-in stats are to be believed, the recent breakdown is something like:
= Pageviews =
40% apps
28% old reddit
17% mobile reddit
15% new reddit
= Unique visits =
41% mobile reddit
27% new reddit
24% apps
8% old reddit
This doesn't really capture the ratio of contributors who use each (or perhaps, more interestingly, number of contributions per platform), but it's hard for me to guess that accurately since new-reddit detractors are a very vocal group.
--- Monthly uniques (200k total):
New Reddit: 55%
Mobile Web: 20%
Reddit Apps: 15%
Old Reddit: 10%
--- Monthly Pageviews (3M total):
New Reddit: 30%
Mobile Web: 10%
Reddit Apps: 30%
Old Reddit: 30%
So in our case, while the ones using Old Reddit are the fewest in number, they are also the most engaged.
I guess I shouldn't be so afraid of old going away soon then :)
I'm using old Reddit, on mobile.
I just checked one of my subreddits and for the Pageviews stats I see graphs for old reddit 3,500 vs new reddit 15,000.
Unique visits: old 1,200 vs new 9,370
I find that much of a difference surprising.
It also feels like social media platforms are starting to die faster than they can be replaced. In the past MySpace died but people could move to Facebook, Facebook shifted to emphasizing the feed over groups but people could move to Reddit, but I'm not sure what people could move to if Reddit becomes non-viable.
Is this just me?
People always seem to brush off this kind of comment when I see it discussed, usually the argument is "well, you're a software developer / superuser, normal people don't care about these things." It will be interesting to see where the breaking point actually is; I've always felt that platform users deserve a little more respect than that. The linked identity thing is especially frustrating for me.
I stopped posting to facebook in 2010 (still using it to keep in touch via messenger and see event invites, and to avoid alienating extended family), but I used to have an instagram account with a fun theme that I only shared with a few friends. What was fun and relatable for my friends was confusing and obtuse to my family. Even the account username was embarrassing in that context. So I always kept them separate, explicitly saying "no, I don't want to attach this to my facebook account." Then one day, it just sort of happened? I can't remember if I was tricked by a dark pattern or if they just forcibly fused the accounts YouTube-Google style, but that day instagram immediately lost all usefulness to me and I haven't been on since. For me as a user, social media has always kind of felt this way.
I'm curious to see what will happen to reddit and its communities, and even more curious to see whether the next generation sees internet anonymity as a cool feature. When I was growing up, it felt like being able to form an alternate identity online was almost the whole point, but I guess back then there were fewer avenues to cultivating your identity as a personal brand for profit.
I read your comment as a really strong case for platform co-operativism -- multi-stakeholder democracy for online platforms: not just owners making decisions, but users and maybe employees together with owners. Generally, democratic currents (whether government or corporate) only emerge through changes in our collective sense of "how things should be".
I'm hoping we all start to realize we're serfs on all these platforms, and start wondering "hey, we're generating most of this wealth... why aren't we given a say in decision-making?"
It's happening to imgur and Reddit now. Time to find the next big thing.
And Stack Overflow: [Why is StackOverflow trying to start audio?](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20288768) [Ads on Stack Overflow are increasingly \[terrible\]](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/329547/ads-on-se-si...)
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/25/the-1st-thing-alexis-ohanian...
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A lot of these platforms seem VC-funded or publicly traded, and they are based on growth. So they probably see growth slowing down, and this is an effort to squeeze more numbers out of it. Hopefully for them, they can pivot their business plan on to something not growth-based.
This is a common pattern: growth is like a drug for tech startups. Cut it, and they will do all they can to have it again, even if they have to alienate their current user-base for this.
As I often browse reddit in private mode, this probably just means that I'll waste less time on that website; I'm not going to bother logging in if I didn't already.
My $0.02 is that it is a shift from ad-driven approaches (as in showing ads) to consensus shaping approaches that focus on data mining.
The huge quantities of bad actors -- idiots, assholes, paid trolls, blatant propagandists -- also requires mitigation.
We've had locks and walled gardens for hundreds of years, and human nature hasn't changed. No surprise the same thing is happening on the intrawebs.
In the past, a lot of non-technical people posted to usenet newsgroups and connected to IRC for online chat.
I think the most interesting story in social networks is the collapse of core Facebook as the prime mover. I think there is still a lot of room for more Pinterests and Snapchats yet, which could further diversify the space and dilute core Facebook's mind share. The young people not caring about Facebook thing, has clearly graduated to a permanent setting, it's not going back (the next group are not going to suddenly care about FB). TikTok has demonstrated some of what is possible most recently.
Very well can be. Social media in their current form belong to corporations rather than users. Therefore sooner or later they start making decisions that are hostile to users. To make an analogy, these online societies are not stable because they resemble a monarchy, where a corporation (the monarch) must use its own judgement on how to govern its online society. Which proven to be a rather unsustainable governance model.
Until online societies switch to self-government similar to modern democracies (elected government, elected judges, payment collection, public expense reporting, etc.) they will likely continue to be unsustainable and rather short-term.
I never knew if the interesting people found a new home, or disbanded, but I sure miss when fun stuff happened there.
- The ability to use one login and interface across multiple boards/subject areas.
- The ease of communicating between different boards either via links, cross posts, or some form of aggregation.
- Features that over time allow a post to become one that can be recognized as well regarded by the community. These could include good support for listing important posts in the subreddit information, the ability to tag posts, and the ability to archive posts.
- The natural support for media and links. Although to be fair, the media support is actually provided by sites that grew up around Reddit like Imgur.
Reddit may not be social in the sense that, as another poster points out, it is built around following topics rather than users. However, the degree to which it allows different topics and communities to interconnect allows relationships to form that function as a society. For example, a post on the Male Fashion Advice subreddit on how to be more presentable might link to a series of posts on the Male Hair Advice subreddit that have become well regarded in the community.
By way of comparison, on conventional forums there is often little interaction even between sub-forums in the same forum let alone between different forums. Support for media also tends to be more limited.
And HN is social media too.
I think the demand is still there. There's a power vacuum just waiting for someone to fill it. But the replacement can't just be "like Facebook but run by people slightly less creepy". You've got to fix some other root issues.
It's similar to the argument you here when people say "they youth arent into facebook anymore, now they use xxxx." That's nice and all, but as long as they get facebook when they graduate high school or go to college, facebook wins. It doesnt need to be hip and cool if its the network gluing everyone together. Did the white pages or yellow pages need to be cool to be useful?
I've been a user since 2006. When reddit blew up in popularity, many subs massively declined in quality as is to be expected. Niche subs, however, remained pretty great.
But reddit as an organization is beyond repair at this point. Changes like this are now par for the course.
Worse even, reddit is now engaged in censoring subs. The most obvious and possibly most disturbing example is the quarantine of r/the_donald on political grounds.
We tried every single open or alternative Reddit and they were all garbage. And trust me when I said we tried everything.
They are either awful early-2000s PHP-clone style sites, some stupid fringe political communities which push away mainstream users, or some weird moderation rules.
https://saidit.net/ was the closest clone but they had some bizarre "Pyramid of Debate" [1] moderation thing that seemed culty among their hardcore members, which our sub members got turned off from.
But ultimately it's the lack of good mobile apps for these sites that pushed us away and we never managed to rebuild the community.
Recreating a better Reddit is a project I've long been interested in doing myself.
[1] https://infogalactic.com/w/images/thumb/e/ef/The_Pyramid_Of_...
[1]: https://yaddu.pw/c/general
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They should have never been censored, it was a politically inspired move, and a disgusting one to have made.
I mean, I agree they should have been banned from day one basically.. but to say it's a slap on the wrist is odd because absolutely no one has to read any of their trash unless you specifically go there. Most random reddit users probably don't even know of td, let alone would actually go there voluntarily.
That being said.. I think it's unconscionable that reddit allows that subreddit to exist.. it's literally a breeding ground for violence and hate thought/speech.
Perhaps we will see a diaspora of such clones?
This is totally backwards. Valuing pure signup rates over the user experience of hundreds of millions, who may already have accounts but dont feel like logging in, or just simply want to read content and sign up another day, is what happens when marketing/business people hijack a business over product/UX people.
This is a very obvious vanity metric issue to anyone who has run a popular website. And most people do it to appease VCs/investors... Reddit is already mature, so there's no justification to artificially increasing growth at the expense of the wider product.