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Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit?

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Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit?

#131

Post by usrn »

hnuser847 wrote: post #29

Honestly, despite the UX changes, Reddit has stayed remarkably consistent over the past decade or so I've used it. Big, generic subreddits are trash and always have been, but small, focused subreddits are great. Reddit is still hands down the best place on the internet for product recommendations, candid product reviews, niche hobbies, and discussions about TV shows, movies, and games. Edit - to prove my point furthe…

>small, focused subreddits are great.

No, not in my experience. Not compared to small focused forums on any moderately complex or interesting topic anyway. The whole format is designed for quick throwaway content and not for having long nuanced discussions and so the subreddit will be oriented towards just that. Worse still I think it might even poison the brains of the Redditors into thinking that the subreddit is all their is to the topic.

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit?

#133

Post by kortheo »

hyperbovine wrote: post #88
kelseyfrog wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UX redesign is also clearly part of a mobile-first strategy. The mobile site funnels users into the mobile app, and the desktop site clearly echos the mobile design principles. Mobile users fundamentally engage with the platform in different ways. For one, they form a different demographic segment than older users, and secondly the mobile app frames and filters content in uniquely mobile ways. High-signal content…

I must be using Reddit differently than the typical user. It's almost hilarious how much worse the new UX is compared to browsing the exact same content on old.reddit.com. Like, I literally cannot believe that serious money, time, and effort were invested in designing this product, though presumably that is true. The same applies particularly to their video player, it is just amazingly bad compared to similar offerin…

Using old.reddit.com + Reddit Enhancement Suite extension, and subscribing to subreddits focused on high quality discussion (usually signalled by "Discussion" or "True" in the subreddit name) gives the best experience of the site IMO. But even so I feel that version reddit is slowly fading over time. I'm half expecting to wakeup one day to find that old.reddit.com is no longer available.

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit?

#134

Post by nunez »

The big communities have always been susceptible to lower content quality and mis/disinformation campaigns. Every forum that gets huge is like this. Facebook descended into this. Slashdot was not panacea before Hacker News and (ironically) Reddit stole much of their traffic.

Hacker News is _still_ not like this because:

1. Their subscriber count is relatively low compared to, say, /r/pics 2. dang and co are basically benevolent tyrants and are ultra quick about removing low-quality discussion 3. The topics are more-or-less consistent, largely due to (2) but also community response that has been shaped by (2) over time

Many of the less popular subs and all of the SUPER-well-moderated large subs (/r/History, /r/askscience) are like this. /r/COVID19 was an extremely important component in the race towards the vaccine, for example, while /r/coronavirus was doomscrolling on tap with lots of disinformation. Both are large communities.

New Reddit aside (old Reddit is safe for now), I don't think much about Reddit has changed in the 10 years I've been on it.

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit?

#135

Post by Rochus »

barrysteve wrote: post #125
Rochus wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very often people seem to just pick up the title and to tell the world how they relate to some key words without even having a look at the article. Since a couple of weeks I regularly check the HN RSS feed to see what was posted; I would consider myself part of the original target audience of HN but find more interesting stuff in the RSS feed than on the front page; from that I conclude that the audience has changed.

You're right. A lot of articles are paywalled, extermely padded advertising vehicles which people come to the comments to avoid. The audience might be reacting accordingly. The better and more readable articles linked on HN could demonstrate this phenomena, if the audience shows better comments underneath them. I haven't looked for the correlation before.

The interesting articles which I find in the RSS feed but not on the frontpage nor elsewhere on HN are neither paywalled nor padded with advertisments; either they got lost in the flood of irrelevant articles or did not receive points for other reasons; the one point I can award does little to change that.

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit?

#136

Post by denimnerd42 »

ajmurmann wrote: post #110
xhrpost wrote: post #81

I find searching reddit for niche things to be at least useful enough to point me in the right direction on some topics. But wow, discussion, even the small subs can be pretty toxic. It's sad as I'd love to have better discussion around various topics but every post feels like I'm walking on egg shells. My theory is just that if anyone can join, and everything is anonymous and there is no barrier to entry [1], qualit…

I am curious on what type of smaller subreddits you've seen toxicity. I find that smaller, hobby-related communities are really great and I rarely to never see toxicity. Looking at anything that has potential to be even remotely be related to politics immediately turns hostile. For example r/f1 usually is quite friendly, but when the topic shifts to how races should take place in different countries, it gets a lot mo…

f1 is pretty toxic imo. it’s worse than nfl or nba. has to do with the nature of the sport being intricately rules based and it’s current high popularity I think.

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit?

#137

Post by nunez »

TameAntelope wrote: post #13

You call it degradation, Reddit calls it "explosive growth". The UX redesign was hugely successful in attracting new users, users who could then be monetized. The "useless answers" are wildly popular responses because people generally prefer to meme, not solve problems. Your complaint essentially boils down to, "Why do people not behave how I want them to?" and that, my friend, is a question as old as time itself. Fr…

Agreed. You can't endlessly dumbscroll on old reddit and engage with other Redditors while you can, easily, on new Reddit. Lots of people like dumbscrolling.

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit?

#138

Post by NonNefarious »

butterfi wrote: post #74
TameAntelope wrote: post #13

You call it degradation, Reddit calls it "explosive growth". The UX redesign was hugely successful in attracting new users, users who could then be monetized. The "useless answers" are wildly popular responses because people generally prefer to meme, not solve problems. Your complaint essentially boils down to, "Why do people not behave how I want them to?" and that, my friend, is a question as old as time itself. Fr…

It also depends on what sub-reddit you're in. Some are really good, some are BS echo-chambers. It can't all be BS considering how many people are using Google Site search to get "better" answers from sub-reddits as opposed to generic google search results.

A lot of subs are useless because they're moderated by infantile admins who delete posts and ban users for no legitimate (or even stated) reason. I received a permanent ban for asking (politely) why a bunch of on-topic comments (most of them not mine) had been deleted in a thread discussing a technical topic.

These asshole admins then followed me to another, related sub where they permanently banned me for answering another user's question about a product; again with no excuse. This reveals the depressing fact that Reddit is an inbred community of inbred moderators who bully users for fun and render the entire platform a waste of effort. You spend a bunch of time helping people, only to have your work deleted and being made to feel like you're the bad guy. Just typing this out, I'm getting pissed-off and tense, for having done nothing offensive at all. Who needs that in his day?

I discovered Reddit after Digg sold out and became a spam aggregator, and everyone abandoned it in favor of Reddit. I see that someone below also referred to this incident, and marked it as the beginning of the decline of Reddit. I find it odd to blame the Digg ex-pats because Digg was (in its heyday) a tech-news site not too different from this one.

But not long after arriving at Reddit, I did notice that the technical content soon diminished and was replaced by an endless stream of cutesy "This little guy followed me home" posts about stray animals or other pleasant but wholly useless content.

Sad.

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit?

#139

Post by nowahe »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #11

> Terrible UX If you're browsing on a desktop, configure your account to always use the old reddit experience. If you lurk without an account, use old.reddit.com. If you can, install RES, it's a game-changer. If you're browsing on mobile, don't use the official reddit app. It's garbage. Use one of the many 3rd party apps. Personally, I use Bacon Reader. Don't bother ever browsing /r/all. Tailor your subscriptions to…

On a (sad) related note, a few month ago[1] the devs announced the end of active development on RES, and from now on will only receive bugfixes, if any at all.

Which is understandable considering that since the redesign, they have been more and more working against a black box, with the Reddit staff actively trying to prevent access to certain functionalities outside of their clients.

I'm still worried about Reddit turning off old.reddit.com one day, or making some major breaking change crippling RES. Tho it could be a good way to quit using it, as the friction of the new design overpowering by far my desire to go on it.

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/RESAnnouncements/comments/sh83gx/an...

Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit?

#140

Post by blueblob »

SoftTalker wrote: post #89
blueblob wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are ads in the old version too. They show up as sponsored posts though I don't know if they are as egregious because I also use old. The only thing that I feel I miss out on in using old.reddit.com is the predictions. The /r/muaythai has a predictions tournament that's pretty fun but there's no way to get notifications that there are new predictions to be made with the old interface (as far as I know).

Use an ad blocker. I use ublock origin and don't see any ads on old.reddit.

I also use ublock origin, but it doesn't imply that there are not ads.
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