"Quietly"? No, Reddit users have been screaming about the new layout. More ads, more irrelevant stuff. Much of Reddit seems to be a link farm for Twitter.
Big decline in traffic on technical subjects. I follow mostly subjects related to graphics, such as Vulkan, Rust gamedev, etc., and those subreddits have become very quiet.
The article isn't about the new layout. It's about an apparent difference in the karma system that seems to de-prioritize content from karma farmers and content that comes from off of Reddit.
For specific subreddits it's hard to make a concrete statement about what is going on with traffic. Some subreddits I frequent had traffic decline noticeably due to them shutting down to protest the API changes, while others have lost traffic to other platforms, most notably Discord.
> Much of Reddit seems to be a link farm for Twitter.
And not even just re-publishing of the Tweet text, or links to the tweet, but often it's pictures of Tweets which is the worst of all worlds (searchability, accessibility, language translation, respect for custom text sizes, bandwidth). The only reason I could think of to post an image of a Tweet is if you think the Tweet is going to be taken down later, but you can just copy/paste the text in that case. "Images of Tweets" is such a stupid trend.
If you’re on a phone, it’s infinitely easier to take a screen grab and post it than it is to copy text. And Twitter’s mostly a place people look at on their phones.
Quieter and more dominated by relatively green programmers.
I can't get good entropy about tech anymore from Reddit (e.g. I often look on hackernews or Twitter to find out how the sausage is actually made when it comes to bits of tech stacks and so on)
That's been my experience. Reddit used to be the place to find people who know what they're talking about. Now it's only the confident loudmouths left.
> Reddit closed out its first day on the market up almost 50%, but has since come crashing back down to earth at 30%.
So the price was up 50% from the IPO, and now it's only up 30%? That hardly seems like crashing back to Earth, which would be "up 0% from the IPO", if I understand the metaphor correctly.
> Despite the drop, Reddit is beginning to rethink how it functions now as a public company.
Why "Despite" instead of "Because of"? If the price continued to rise, I would think that would make the owners want to continue doing whatever they were doing, at least for a while longer.
I can use it with a VPN but only if I have an already logged-in session.
Without a logged-in session, I can only see error messages which change randomly. Most of them seem to be either an IP range blocking page or an image with "You broke reddit" message on it.
It started for me some time ago with a “unknown user agent” or something along those lines, now it show a “funny” can we see some id? Message, no reddit i will not disable my VPN to view your everyday-getting-worst content. Good riddance, you’re going the way of “x”.
Same experience here. Also seems that when using `old.reddit.com`, it logs you out a lot sooner than before (or in using `new.reddit.com`. It's just another layer of friction on using it.
Within maybe the last couple weeks, they also seemed to start blocking some Tor exit nodes.
I guess at least 50/50 it's an anti-abuse measure (rather than surveillance capitalism), at probably some human cost of denying reddit as a venue/channel to oppressed people.
Incidentally, if anyone is using Tor in ways that show up as significant abuse to Reddit, that's hurting Tor for those who need it for more legitimate purposes.
Generally speaking, if you're getting blocked (from old.reddit.com or otherwise), the workaround is to login. If you're logged in and still getting blocked (or are getting blocked trying to login, that's a different problem entirely).
old.reddit.com doesn't work for me when I have uBlock Origin enabled. Also, on the narwhal app that I pay for and uses the official API, comments aren't loading at all.
It's not the beginning of the end for reddit, just another stage. I would honestly recommend archiving data on reddit if there's anything you particularly value up there.
So true. Users deleted so much of their data off reddit during the last big exodous... so much value lost. And the irony is that LLMs have all that data and will continue to realize the value from it that Reddit never could, even when they held it
Yeah, that's very valuable information to people trying to solve problems.
But "old content" is maybe not so valuable for engagement-based revenue.
If Reddit wanted to restore the deleted stuff, I suspect that they still have copies of it.
If user sentiment was the barrier to restoring the deleted (say, in non-"sensitive" subs), then waiting until after IPO seems a good idea, so maybe we'll see that now.
As others have noted, technical and more quality content, especially the one found in subreddits that are more composed in nature is becoming more scarce and rapidly declining in quality. Bots, constant reposts and low quality comments and posts in contrast are rewarded and gain more exposure than ever. "It's just another phase" is a very light way of putting it. Reddit is becoming - maybe arguably has become - a former shell of itself more akin to 9gag than what it used to be.
Just in the last week the main page has been changed to aggressively default to "card" size instead of "compact" which blows everything up so that ads can be big videos that get forced on people. Very clear at this point that advertisers are the customers and not the users who generate content in return for points. Still sometimes worth looking through, but less so all the time.
The reason Reddit can't really do this (and they tried) is because people notice and react. If they turn reddit into Facebook they'll lose their "clients", particularly the "productive" ones. I'm not going to use Reddit if old.reddit.com breaks or if I can't sort by new/top. I'm sure there's hundreds of thousands if not millions of users like me. People using the new layouts might "interact" more, but it's a shallow interaction. They don't write long form text, they don't post anything original etc. If they want a link farm they can have it but it'll gradually empty out and turn into a cheap tabloid-esque aggregator that copies twitter's trending. Maybe Reddit can't be very profitable after all and they should scale down their expenses and keep it as it is.
Reddit has released next to no information about how its karma system has changed since it stopped being open-source in 2017.
Karma is a meaningless measure of anything. Increasing your karma is a waste of your time and angst. But ... whatever floats your boat. If you want to waste your limited time on Earth by chasing karma, good for you.
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Big decline in traffic on technical subjects. I follow mostly subjects related to graphics, such as Vulkan, Rust gamedev, etc., and those subreddits have become very quiet.
For specific subreddits it's hard to make a concrete statement about what is going on with traffic. Some subreddits I frequent had traffic decline noticeably due to them shutting down to protest the API changes, while others have lost traffic to other platforms, most notably Discord.
And not even just re-publishing of the Tweet text, or links to the tweet, but often it's pictures of Tweets which is the worst of all worlds (searchability, accessibility, language translation, respect for custom text sizes, bandwidth). The only reason I could think of to post an image of a Tweet is if you think the Tweet is going to be taken down later, but you can just copy/paste the text in that case. "Images of Tweets" is such a stupid trend.
I can't get good entropy about tech anymore from Reddit (e.g. I often look on hackernews or Twitter to find out how the sausage is actually made when it comes to bits of tech stacks and so on)
> Reddit closed out its first day on the market up almost 50%, but has since come crashing back down to earth at 30%.
So the price was up 50% from the IPO, and now it's only up 30%? That hardly seems like crashing back to Earth, which would be "up 0% from the IPO", if I understand the metaphor correctly.
> Despite the drop, Reddit is beginning to rethink how it functions now as a public company.
Why "Despite" instead of "Because of"? If the price continued to rise, I would think that would make the owners want to continue doing whatever they were doing, at least for a while longer.
Deleted Comment
Without a logged-in session, I can only see error messages which change randomly. Most of them seem to be either an IP range blocking page or an image with "You broke reddit" message on it.
What a terrible experience.
I guess at least 50/50 it's an anti-abuse measure (rather than surveillance capitalism), at probably some human cost of denying reddit as a venue/channel to oppressed people.
Incidentally, if anyone is using Tor in ways that show up as significant abuse to Reddit, that's hurting Tor for those who need it for more legitimate purposes.
Generally speaking, if you're getting blocked (from old.reddit.com or otherwise), the workaround is to login. If you're logged in and still getting blocked (or are getting blocked trying to login, that's a different problem entirely).
What makes you think they don't hold that data anymore?
But "old content" is maybe not so valuable for engagement-based revenue.
If Reddit wanted to restore the deleted stuff, I suspect that they still have copies of it.
If user sentiment was the barrier to restoring the deleted (say, in non-"sensitive" subs), then waiting until after IPO seems a good idea, so maybe we'll see that now.
Deleted Comment
Karma is a meaningless measure of anything. Increasing your karma is a waste of your time and angst. But ... whatever floats your boat. If you want to waste your limited time on Earth by chasing karma, good for you.