Would help if they dumped the AMP pages too. Landing there results in a useless "not logged in" and "partial content" page. AMP is just a terrible fit for Reddit pages.
But the AMP pages give them preferential treatment in Google search results. I doubt they'd want to give that up.
So you are saying Google is blackmailing websites into having a terrible user-experience?
I guess everbody sucks on this new, modern and JS-USB-enabled (thanks again Google!) web.
It might soon be time for The Oatmeal to add a new panel to his famous "Digg vs. Reddit" cartoon: https://theoatmeal.com/pl/state_web_winter_2012/reddit_digg I love Reddit and have no problem with this move in principle, though I do wish there was at least one social platform that would try to follow the Craigslist ethos and stay "proudly independent." I'm not a big believer in crypto, but Reddit seems like one of th…
> I do wish there was at least one social platform that would try to follow the Craigslist ethos and stay "proudly independent." I worked at reddit for 4 years, but quit in 2016, largely because they were clearly beginning to switch from a small, fairly independent company (despite being owned by Advance/Conde) to one that was going to become completely dependent on venture capital and I knew what that would end up d…
Love what I've read so far and have sent an invite request. Thank you for your work, I was beginning to lament that all social media would fall into the toxic shitpost aggregator turned VC cash machine role.
I've been a fan of Reddit for a very long time (as the amount of data science work I've done with their data can attest to), but lately it seems like the incentives between Reddit as a business and Reddit as a community leader are not aligned, and that is a problem. The increasing amount of dark patterns Reddit has been employing lately is concerning. (recent example: Reddit now gates content in mobile Safari to push…
2 things about Reddit's "use our app instead!" buttons: 1. They cycle through a couple of different messages, and the buttons get switched around 2. The wording is such that you read it twice and still aren't sure which button will just take you to the damn website I don't mind them promoting their app, but these dark patterns truely rile me
When combined with an AMP result page you might get when coming from Google, it's sometimes just impossible to view the actual content of a post without getting kicked to the app, or out to another browsing context... Reddit on mobile is a purpose-built nightmare.
Re: "Download the app!" gates, banners, etc. Medium does this too. Why? What's the business reason? What does a native app provide the business that a mobile website doesn't?
The prevailing "business person" thought is that app users are more loyal (high value) while web users are temporary users that Google will eventually steal away from you when they decide they want to be in your market and want to stop putting you at the top of search result pages. See Yelp's decline as Google started putting their own local results above Yelp and the resulting lawsuits. As a result, most Silicon Val…
Yep. Another more recent example is Venmo. Since Paypal acquired them, they've been steadily removing functionality from the website to force users onto the app.
> I can be immediately connected with the most knowledgeable and enthusiastic people on virtually any subject I care about. Politics on Reddit seems to fall into either The_Donald or "Orange man bad" with very little objectivity in the middle in my experience.
/r/politics is fairly left-leaning by US standards, while The_Donald and /r/conservative are hardly about politics anymore. Furthermore, I'd say on a global scale /r/politics is pretty much dead middle, while subreddits like /r/latestagecapitalism represent the far left. Frankly, Democrats are being pulled to the left by the progressives and Republicans went hard right years ago with the tea party, so the reason ther…
>Furthermore, I'd say on a global scale /r/politics is pretty much dead middle
I know these things are terribly subjective but that subreddit seems more to the left. [1]
Go read r/politics comments for 5 minutes and then go read r/the_donald comments for 5 minutes, then come back and tell me which subreddit has the most hate speech. Also let's not forget that r/politics mods sold the subreddit to Shareblue for $2 million.
Challenge accepted. The current top comment on the current top post on /r/politics [1]: >David Frum said it best this morning on NPR, his call for unity isn't actually a call for unity, he's demanding that everyone to support him and his policies. The current top comment on the current top post on /r/The_Donald [2]: >Schumer looked disgusting. Glasses at the end of his nose. Very disrespectful. The politics comment m…
I've been a fan of Reddit for a very long time (as the amount of data science work I've done with their data can attest to), but lately it seems like the incentives between Reddit as a business and Reddit as a community leader are not aligned, and that is a problem. The increasing amount of dark patterns Reddit has been employing lately is concerning. (recent example: Reddit now gates content in mobile Safari to push…
It’s funny you say dark patterns. Reddit has been full of dark patterns long before that, between censorship and shilling. It doesn’t surprise me at all that they’re lining up to cash out, just like Facebook. They are positioned, more than likely, as good as they are ever going to be, without a serious financial transformation. Maybe once sold, Reddit will hang onto the limelight another 10 years. As it stands, I see a new Reddit clone about every 4-6 months or so. It’s not a guarded or protected model, like Facebook was. The supposed anonaminity of Reddit is nice, but anyone who knows about browser fingerprinting knows that’s basically a farce. The people paying for your data with Reddit are the same ones paying for it with Facebook. It’s hard for me to envision the data APIs getting any more secure, simply because that’s the thriving business model. But Powered by Reddit instead of Facebook. It’s gone from sociopath founded, to stolen by sociopaths. Slight improvement.
There are so many more issues with Reddit, I'm surprised they haven't been digg'd or myspace'd yet.
As soon as a viable alternative pops up that doesn't seem tailor made for racists, I'm there. So far every competitor I've seen pop up seems to think Reddit's biggest problem is their (rather weak) stance against hate speech and user harassment, and not all the actual problems being discussed here.
There was an attempt a few years ago to do just this. Remember Imzy? If the answer is "no," you're probably not alone; it shut down after only two years of operation. They didn't have any of the problems that we're discussing here, as far as I remember. (Personally, I suspect its extremely weird and confusing UX design was at least part of what did it in; I found its navigation so baffling I gave up pretty quickly.)
Something about Reddit that has been really irking me lately is the decline in quality of the comment threads, which is arguably one of the only reasons to visit the site nowadays since link aggregators are so common.
People seem to treat commenting like a game instead of a forum for discussion. I often see the same patterns from Twitter there (i.e., inciting outrage to get upvotes, virtue signaling, or just pointless jokes on serious articles). The introduction of Reddit Gold has made this substantially worse, as now there’s an additional point system which awards single comments instead of points of discussion.