Reddit is buying TikTok rival Dubsmash • Hacker News Board

Re: Reddit is buying TikTok rival Dubsmash

#81

Post by snarfy » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 5:40 PM UTC

mskslal wrote: post #54

saurik wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, a sizable enough number of us continue to use old.reddit.com that it seems like they realize they can't force us onto the new design and are relegated to maintaining the old one for essentially forever... which to me says something incredible about just how badly their design failed.

The redesign was a massive success. The goal was to turn reddit into a typical social media property, and it worked. Real conversation was pushed aside into niche subreddits, and was replaced by typical social media filler crap, like r/funny and pics and wholesomememes, etc. It was bad before, but I just feel like the redesign made it 100x worse. Try opening the reddit homepage, new design, no account, and tell me wi…

It would be interesting to sort the highest rated comments and group them based on if they originated from old reddit or new.

I suspect all of the high quality content comes from old.reddit.com.

Re: Reddit is buying TikTok rival Dubsmash

#82

Post by CyberDildonics » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 5:41 PM UTC

sorenjan wrote: post #22

Reddit is searching for something, but I don't think they've introduced a single feature that makes it better since they added subreddits. They've added and removed community chat rooms [0], they still have some other kind of chat that I don't know if anyone uses, when I happen to visit new Reddit there's some kind of streaming broadcasts that I don't see anyone liking. And of course the redesign, but I suspect that…

Don't forget very awkward video clip hosting.

Re: Reddit is buying TikTok rival Dubsmash

#83

Post by Abishek_Muthian » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 5:42 PM UTC

This is my theory - Dubsmash buyout by Reddit could be purely a bet on short form video content in Indian market. After TikTok was vacated forcibly, Dubsmash and other homegrown alternatives grew 155% in just 3 weeks[1] and with 30.4M users India is likely the largest market for it.

Reddit might even be able to get its ROI on Dubsmash from just the Indian market.

[1]https://sensortower.com/blog/tiktok-alternatives-growth-indi...

Re: Reddit is buying TikTok rival Dubsmash

#84

Post by arabelladonna » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 5:44 PM UTC

somehnguy wrote: post #55

notyourwork wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> forever I suspect a Reddit PM is watching a usage of old.reddit.com metric and waiting for it to hit a certain threshold before canning it. Perhaps the migration has taken longer than they planned but I have no doubt in time old.reddit.com will be retired.

The day reddit drops old.reddit.com is the last day I ever visit. The redesign is that horrible for anything but mindless scrolling watching clip videos.

To be frank, everyone complains about the design of new Reddit, but my biggest problem is just how incredibly slow it is.

Plus, it feels like I get CDN inaccessible or server busy errors daily.

Re: Reddit is buying TikTok rival Dubsmash

#85

Post by fastball » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 5:44 PM UTC

isoprophlex wrote: post #8

Reddit has always been shit since the redesign: broken scroll, broken video hosting, dark patterns up the wazoo. I wonder if/how soon we'll see a degradation to similar poor usability in dubsmash, or if the people working there can manage to hang on to their product as it is...

Reddit's entire experience was always gonna be shit, it just takes a lot of users for that to become obvious.

Echo chambers, flame wars, brigading, etc. – all were inevitable results of the way the entire platform is structured, and are far worse than the UI having more whitespace.

Re: Reddit is buying TikTok rival Dubsmash

#86

Post by CyberDildonics » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 5:49 PM UTC

zucked wrote: post #69

dageshi wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The general public are reddits audience now not "early internet adopters". I know from running a geographically based small niche subreddit that users and post volume have gone up dramatically in the past 1-2 years. The people who hate new reddit are a tiny minority I'm afraid to say, the majority of users on the site probably never even saw the old reddit design.

The "old" Reddit we loved is precisely what kept a lot of people away - it was walls of text with basic, minimalist design language. I personally loved it (hence why HN appeals to me) but I understand why lots of folks wouldn't "get it". I introduced my S/O to Reddit ~6 years ago. It took a long time for the site to stick. What finally did it was having the iOS application.

Even if some people actually like the new design it is bloated and dog slow even on modern computers.

Re: Reddit is buying TikTok rival Dubsmash

#87

Post by deeblering4 » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 5:55 PM UTC

I wonder if the thinking is to extend RPAN into a bigger aspect of the site?

I'm a fan of RPAN, but I do wish that Reddit would stop messing with the formula. They had a great thing, and over time have been eroding it with the various re-designs and awkward app and sign-in requirements.

Re: Reddit is buying TikTok rival Dubsmash

#88

Post by CyberDildonics » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 5:56 PM UTC

eznzt wrote: post #19

Wasn't Reddit in severe money troubles, to the point where they were struggling to find good engineers?

I don't understand how a site with massive amounts of traffic for mostly text pages can end up having money troubles. There are so many ways both clean and dirty to monetize a site like that.

Re: Reddit is buying TikTok rival Dubsmash

#89

Post by conradfr » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 5:57 PM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #70

conradfr wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multireddits is a good feature that has been introduced after subreddits, because there is a limit of how many different subreddits you get on your frontpage (wich goes up with gold IIRC). On of the worst thing they did (excluding the new design obviously) was removing the upvote/downvote counter.

Fun fact, multireddits existed very early on after publicly created subreddit launched, they just didn't have a UI for a very long time. But you could always do multiple reddits with a + between them. That's how we constructed your front page on the backend, we just didn't expose the URL.

Oh yeah I forgot about that, it still works!

Re: Reddit is buying TikTok rival Dubsmash

#90

Post by jackson1442 » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 5:58 PM UTC

saurik wrote: post #26

sorenjan wrote: post #22

Reddit is searching for something, but I don't think they've introduced a single feature that makes it better since they added subreddits. They've added and removed community chat rooms [0], they still have some other kind of chat that I don't know if anyone uses, when I happen to visit new Reddit there's some kind of streaming broadcasts that I don't see anyone liking. And of course the redesign, but I suspect that…

I mean, a sizable enough number of us continue to use old.reddit.com that it seems like they realize they can't force us onto the new design and are relegated to maintaining the old one for essentially forever... which to me says something incredible about just how badly their design failed.

I think the redesign worked exactly as well as it was supposed to. Looking at this graph for a subreddit with approx. 4 million subscribers, the unique pageviews are quite high on the redesign. The official mobile app, however, blows them both out of the water.

https://i.imgur.com/o80v09J.png