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Reddit’s disrespectful design

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Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#301

Post by throwaway64643 »

jffry wrote: post #91
randallsquared wrote: post #13

The most disrespectful pattern I encounter regularly on reddit is that it forgets that I want the nicer, more compact interface. There will come a day when they remove it entirely, clearly, and that will be the end of my reddit usage, more or less.

If you access Reddit via https://old.reddit.com it's always the better UI. Bonus is that this works even if you're not signed in. There's a handy browser extension for automatically redirecting you if you click a link to Reddit's other domains: https://github.com/tom-james-watson/old-reddit-redirect If you'd like to disable custom subreddit styles even if you're not signed in, you can add these custom filters to uBlo…

> If you access Reddit via https://old.reddit.com it's always the better UI

This is an assumption that I'd had until I read feedback from users who joined reddit after introduction of the new reddit design, that old reddit web interface is ugly. Well, I think reddit knows better than us. They have the data!

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#302

Post by arcturus17 »

peanutbutter_ wrote: post #287
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…

For someone who has completely quit the endless “dopamine drip” of digital content, what have you replaced it with?

* Reading

* More and better work (I work for myself, so this is actually great)

* Movies (I don't consider these to be part of the bottomless well. I would very rarely watch more than one in one sitting).

* Actively listening to music and singing (used to sing in a metal band, if I'm bored, instead of going on Youtube, I'll just growl Metallica or Megadeth around the house like back in the day)

* Hanging out with friends

I've done significantly more of all of the above since I quit.

I'm also feeling more creative and entrepreneurial thanks to the feeling of mastery over my time, and the frequent boredom that comes with not having a quick digital fix that ends up turning into hours of infinite scrolling.

My biggest drains were Youtube, Reddit, and news media. I've easily reclaimed anywhere between 10-15h just from quitting those.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#303

Post by LeftHandPath »

throwaway284534 wrote: post #82

Does anyone else want to rant about Reddit’s AMP pages that show up on Google? Oh I could go on about it… The managers at Reddit, in their infinite wisdom, decided that the preferred experience of a Google user searching for content on reddit should redirected to their wonky app. And if they don’t have the app, they should be punished with modals upon modals. “Reddit looks better in the app!” Oh, you disagree? Well p…

Reddit's design is what actively pushed me to Hacker News, the Risks Digest, and a healthy mix of paid news (WSJ, FT, Bloomberg, etc). The site is really being redesigned to enable astroturfing and user manipulation on a commercial level. Ads are made to look like posts, and sometimes the posts themselves are just ads.

I've come to the opinion that it's impossible for any free social media platform to avoid this unless the people running it are doing it as an act of charity. If you want to make money, you either make users pay or you sell access to / information from the userbase itself.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#304

Post by erhk »

ethbr0 wrote: post #150
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Reddit mobile web experience is so obviously bad that I can only assume it's intentional. There must be some huge incentive for Reddit to push users toward the mobile app. Most likely, the app allows for higher or more accurate monthly active user counts and enables more targeted advertising, both of which are critical to increasing advertising revenues. Reddit is in a difficult spot because they're mostly an ad-…

I'd phrase it as "Reddit, the product" is fine. "Reddit, the investors who bought the product" are in a difficult spot. And certainly haven't shown an overabundance of creativity in monetization approaches. Suffice to say, you probably don't deserve a "front page of the Internet" tagline if your first display is a redirect request to your app.

Owning reddit allows ypu to own public opinion through censorship,thats a pretty important bit of value and im sure tencent would agree

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#305

Post by wting »

Ozzie_osman wrote: post #283
wting wrote: post #207

I was the EM for Reddit's Growth team around this time. I am responsible for / contributed to a few features like the current signup flow, AMP pages, push notifications, email digests, app download interstitials, etc. There was a new product lead who joined with many good ideas, but some of them were dark patterns that I heavily protested. After a few months of this, it was obvious that I was going to be reigned in o…

I ran Product Engineering at a competing startup (hundreds of millions of MAUs) that tested/employed similar flows. And yes, they work in the short-term, and unless you are very principled, it's hard to avoid them. I'm glad you heavily protested them. But I'd like to further the argument for why they should be avoided. First, yes they do work in the short-term. You run an A/B test with some adversarial flow that bloc…

One of the ways to measure long term impact is through the use of a golden cohort that is never opted into experiments. Unsurprisingly, I could not get this work prioritized on the roadmap.

We also worked with growth consultants (read: Bay Area B2C product leads) in scoping out some of these ideas. We accrued what I call "product debt" where we launch the MVP but never followed up to polish the feature[0] as they don't improve KPIs.

I assume this is the same with Growth teams everywhere but am happy to be corrected.

Regarding long term impact, we measured this through various dimensions in marketing, recruiting, and user research. The outcomes are largely positive.

______

0: One feature I argued for was an opt out of the mobile app interstitial. It makes sense to show it once or twice, but users aren't going to download the app just because they saw it 50x.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#306

Post by donmcronald »

wting wrote: post #207

I was the EM for Reddit's Growth team around this time. I am responsible for / contributed to a few features like the current signup flow, AMP pages, push notifications, email digests, app download interstitials, etc. There was a new product lead who joined with many good ideas, but some of them were dark patterns that I heavily protested. After a few months of this, it was obvious that I was going to be reigned in o…

I always think that by building products that treat the consumer like an enemy to be conquered will eventually result in someone building a better product and stealing the market. It never happens though.

I wonder if some of the tech like Cloudflare Workers will eventually allow someone to build competing products that crush the existing platforms. IMO it’s dangerous (business wise) to get addicted to revenue that comes from treating your users very badly. I think we’ll eventually see companies like Facebook and Reddit get conquered. At least I hope so.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#307

Post by throwaway64643 »

cecilpl2 wrote: post #260

My solution for good reddit browsing: * Use the Reddit Enhancement Suite browser extension, and customize to your liking. * Set it to permanent old.reddit.com mode, so all reddit links immediately go there. * Only browse reddit on mobile using one of several third-party apps, like Relay (my preference), Boost, or Apollo. * Extensively tailor your subreddit selection to weed out the garbage. Most if not all of the def…

I think this is the way Reddit supposes their power users to have the old reddit experience. If they didn't care about power users, they'd completely decimate old.reddit.com months after deployment of the new design, just shove it all 'em mouth. They always leave ways for power users to have the most authentic reddit experience.

Recently, Reddit has changed their algorithm to filter out contents of pornographic subreddits from the front page r/all. They didn't touch the communities. But they made it much harder for average users and new users to accidentally discover porn contents on Reddit. They didn't want to do another 'tumblr'. But this, consequently, has impact on promotion and expansion of those subreddits. This is a smart move (that other platforms have the same trouble should learn). Change hurts, but it is barely felt.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#308

Post by donmcronald »

Dreako wrote: post #222
wting wrote: post #207

I was the EM for Reddit's Growth team around this time. I am responsible for / contributed to a few features like the current signup flow, AMP pages, push notifications, email digests, app download interstitials, etc. There was a new product lead who joined with many good ideas, but some of them were dark patterns that I heavily protested. After a few months of this, it was obvious that I was going to be reigned in o…

makes sense. Also if anyone doesnt like the new mobile redesign they should probably try using "i.reddit.com" (which is a light mobile client)

I simply quit using it on my phone. No big loss IMO.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#309

Post by ufmace »

troydavis wrote: post #200

Imagine you’re Steve Huffman, Reddit’s CEO and co-founder ( https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3cxedn/i_am_steve_huf... ). What strategy would you propose to your board? For the sake of argument, assume that: - You would prefer not to make your creation frustrating to use. (Of course, the team may think that their changes are better, but let’s assume that’s not the case) - The board cares about ARPU and ARPU grow…

Come up with some innovative ways to monetize, beyond just the usual ads and tracking and dirty tricks to boost engagement. The article has a few decent directions.

I'd start with adding an option to set up paid private subreddits. Like, the creator specifies that you have to subscribe to that sub for some monthly cost in order to see / interact with the content, with a percentage skimmed off the top. It seems like it'd be really easy to implement the most basic version of it and see what users do.

There's already a ton of stuff kind of like that. Tons of people pay for a creator's content on Patreon and various special-purpose copycats, and many of them include access to a private Discord in that. No reason why Reddit couldn't take over a chunk of that, since it's convenient to have all of the content and all of the community discussion features on the same platform.

Lots of ways to expand if it catches on, like multiple subscription levels, different levels of permissions for different subscription levels, etc.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#310

Post by mhasbini »

raspyberr wrote: post #39

I 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…

I forked old reddit redirect plugin to redirect to teddit.net: https://github.com/0xbsec/teddit-redirect
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