Some may claim that laypeople like the new UI better, but anecdotally, among my social circle of non-techy people, that's not the case. In fact it is becoming something of a meme that Reddit is now impractical to use on mobile if you're not registered.
Reddit’s disrespectful design
41–50 of 516 posts
Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design
#42I mostly read reddit on a desktop. Lots of people complain about the new UI, but I don't mind it. What I don't understand is how after all this time basic functionality of the site still doesn't work. Like, at least once a week you get logged out and can't log in or you click on a subreddit or a post and it won't load the content. I just don't understand how this is still going on and they are putting resources into avatar microtransactions and the live streaming. Does anyone use the live streaming stuff on reddit?
Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design
#43> you set your status to “Hiding”. An obvious attempt to effectively shame people into using it.
Or maybe it's just a humorous take. Remember "Anonymous Coward" from Slashdot?
Not against the main take of the article though. But that has more to do with economy. On economic down turn years free sites like this start to crumble. And they take pro-monetizing user hostile steps like this.
Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design
#44Reddit is free to squeeze every last dark pattern in order to monetize, just like we are free to stop browsing Reddit. The past few weeks have been frustrating, enough that I've almost stopped Reddit altogether. Funny though... I feel like I haven't lost anything.
As a startup community, we often talk about services being painkiller vs vitamin, or on a scale between 0 and 10 how sad would we feel if we no longer had access to a service. I've been thinking this the past few weeks, and losing Reddit has made me feel kind of meh.
Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reddit has pathetic ad revenue per user versus every other social media platform. Part of this is likely due to anonymous users that they lack data on for proper targeting. This is their attempt to "fix" that.
What advantages does a user account have over anonymous session ids? User accounts survive users clearing cookies, but I doubt users clear their cookies often enough for that to be a problem.
Mobile browsers wipe cookies, users switch devices, multiple computers, etc.
Facebook has over a decade of data on its users, no session id will match that.
edit: Also knowing users emails will allows advertisers to match the reddit accounts to their own data stores on users.
Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design
#46I don't have a reddit account but some small subreddits are quite good. I use https://teddit.net/ on the desktop and RedReader from F-Droid. Teddit doesn't have infinte scroll and RedReader can be limited to how many are loaded each time and you have to press to load more. This way it's much easier to not doomscroll, there are far fewer dark patterns, it's lighter, less tracking. You can bookmark subreddits on a brow…
> small subreddits are quite good
Sure, there is lots of decent content on it.
Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design
#47Surely the most annoying thing is the endless requests to download the app. So irritating! I refuse to download it just because they insist so hard. Reddit is the most basic site ever, there is absolutely no need for me to have an app.
old.reddit.com is not mobile optimized at all, but still infinitely better than reddit.com. Alternatively, get one of the non-official apps (on Android I use rif).
If you are just a lurker, try http://teddit.net
It works well on mobile and desktop.
Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design
#48Some may claim that laypeople like the new UI better, but anecdotally, among my social circle of non-techy people, that's not the case. In fact it is becoming something of a meme that Reddit is now impractical to use on mobile if you're not registered.
So non-techy non-privacy conscious people do which is what they're looking to accomplish.
That's it'd be interesting in looking at their data.
Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design
#49Not sure I agree with the Marketplace angle. Ads are fine but forcing everyone into the app is odd. Will ios14 change any of that?
Reddit has pathetic ad revenue per user versus every other social media platform. Part of this is likely due to anonymous users that they lack data on for proper targeting. This is their attempt to "fix" that.
Anyone feel like this is their Digg pivot?
Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design
#50Here's how reddit's business model probably works: you have power users which create or submit the content and write the witty comments and then you have the lurkers which just browse. what reddit is trying to monetize is the interaction with the latter user group: comments provide little space to promote ads, so most of them are hidden by default. instead they promote lots of posts with images interspersed with ads.…
Exactly. The lurkers are where their growth is because they likely outnumber posters 10:1.