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Reddit’s disrespectful design

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Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#171

Post by makotech222 »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #104
BusTrainBus wrote: post #74

Reddit is an absolutely grotesque website, both for these UI issues and the toxic hate it engenders on all the subreddits. It’s magnitudes worse than any other social network. I have a genuine question: do people openly say they work for this company or is it workplace where people have to hide that they are part of it?

> the toxic hate it engenders on all the subreddits. I always see people saying this and I have to wonder what subreddits they're subscribed to. My experience is basically fine, sure there's some shitty discussions or a few hostile idiots lurking about, but it's no worse than message boards generally, and most conversations seem rather good. Part of me wonders whether some posters are just extraordinarily sensitive,…

[dead]

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#172

Post by dmix »

Their UX is as incompetent as their modding censorship policies which makes me think this rot goes to the top. It’s not just a bad marketing division, it’s the whole company.

I remember Reddit being a whimsical fun place, now I see it as a corporation run by a robot lawyer without a sense of humour where raw mobile user impression numbers as the only valuable metric.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#173

Post by ergot_vacation »

Reddit is the perfect case example of what happened to the 07-08 web as time went on. Initially, the Internet was a big exciting place and people just built stuff to see if they could, and maybe they could sell it later (a lot of communities never even considered huge commercial success, it was just about mucking around in a space that was cheap and exciting.)

As time went on, everything rotted. The chill sites struggled to keep the lights on, and many eventually shuttered. The "we'll sell it off some day" ones sold it off, and the buyers ALWAYS ran the site into the ground.

So now we get an Internet that resembles a b-movie graveyard. There are a lot of corpses, and a lot of shambling zombies. The few souls still alive are holed up somewhere with a shotgun, awaiting the end.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#174

Post by thanatos519 »

afterburner wrote: post #167
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconded. The old.reddit.com UI is still pretty bad on mobile, but it's the only remotely usable one. The default mobile site goes out of its way to make it difficult to read the thread, while also confusingly merging other threads into the page.

Try i.reddit.com

i.reddit.com FTW!

I would give you gold for this comment if this was reddit.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#175

Post by streamofdigits »

the reddit experience is unbelievably crappy.

yet its huge popularity seems to suggest that it has gotten something right. the other social media and privacy sinkholes (facebook, twitter, linkedin etc) and in particular their uncontrollable "timeline" concept seem to have some design (as opposed to execution) issue.

btw there is an open source fediverse version called lemmy. Build the future you want to live in and all that...

[0] https://join-lemmy.org/

[1] https://github.com/LemmyNet

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#176

Post by newsclues »

jcfrei wrote: post #32

Here'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.…

They sell ads and DATA, and probably pull in major dollars from a tiny group of whales that spend on digital stickers.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#177

Post by Havoc »

Disrespectful is putting it mildly.

Worse than the bad UI is how obviously calculated it is. It's not like they just built something bad, no they're actively worsening it to force the app on the user. Each month or three they cripple the web interface a bit more.

Says a lot about the company culture when the entire UI design process is a giant dark pattern

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#178

Post by Terretta »

arcturus17 wrote: post #155

Yea, fuck all this noise. I've been meaning to quit any and all digital activity that's a bottomless well (ie, you can get more content ad infinitum). This includes social networks, Youtube, Netflix, etc. Of these, Reddit was probably my worst vice, as I could just pop up my phone and endlessly read mind-numbing crap, no matter the place and time. My monkey brain has been completely addicted to this motion for well o…

> not r/programming or other communities from which to derive some enlightenment

Some obscure subreddits remain a source of emerging thinking on esoteric areas of focus.

The trick is an app that lets you exclude everything else, fully under your editorial control, with no dark patterns.

On iOS, I use Apollo (RIP Alien Blue).

> quit any and all digital activity that's a bottomless well

I’d add “short form ‘content’” to that.

At least once a quarter try to not pick up or browse any short form content until you’ve read 1 - 5 books, however many it takes to get past any agitation pulling you out of the reading flow, till you can again read for hours at a go.

It may be easier to start with one or two fiction, then switch to two or three non-fiction. Something like:

  - airport novel
  - philosophical fiction / literature
  - pop non-fiction
  - topical non-fiction
  - textbook or research book
You can pick back up short form once your brain is willing to absorb an entire research book.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#179

Post by 0x00000000 »

tfsh wrote: post #108

It constantly amazes me how bad Reddit's interface is, videos either don't play or randomly start playing despite them not being in the viewport. They run random A|B experiments which add unnecessary components such as avatars next to peoples comments. Random acts of monetization are shoved down my throat at every turn. I honestly think the Reddit team are on a purpose built mission to design the most user hostile fo…

If it is an Imgur link there are additional steps. It shows you a microscopic image that is compressed to hell and refuses to respect “show desktop site”. The only way to see the full size image is to manually edit the url to “i.imgur.com/.” where is one of jpg, jpeg, or webp but you have to guess. It’s astounding just how hostile the entire experience is.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#180

Post by trainsplanes »

GordonS wrote: post #118

Fully agree with everything in TFA. I'm an occasional Reddit user, and almost exclusively a lurker. But over the past few years they have been making it more and more intolerable to use, especially on mobile. The most recent things have been blocking you completely from subreddits, and blocking you completely from threads below the second level (you hit "read more", and get a popup). And beside the many dark patterns…

It truly is incredible how a site that was perfectly usable over a decade ago has been massively updated to become unusable and with zero desirable features.

I guess now there’s video embedding, but it’s the worst embedded video I’ve come across on a major site by far.

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