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Reddit’s disrespectful design

ognjen.io

311–320 of 516 posts

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#311

Reddit has completely jumped the shark in its UI design, the 'direction' its taken, and its basically complete capitulation to censorship at a corporate level. Its interesting to that they haven't IPO'd yet, because in my view, its a zombie carcass waiting for its replacement to find its way onto the net. There has always been a place, a need, and a demand for anonymous, free form discussions on the internet. Craigsl…

>complete capitulation to censorship at a corporate level. sigh I would still use Reddit and put up with all the bad UI design and dark patterns if it wasn't for the censorship. I miss the pre-2016 election reddit when it was still full of pedantic types who would have long debates in comment threads where they would break each other's arguments down line by line. I wasn't strongly in favor of one belief or another,…

I once spent an entire weekend collecting and aggregating data to create a bunch of charts that revealed some really interesting statistics for a subreddit and earned about 100 karma.

I made a one-line "zinger" comment on some random thread in r/pics and pulled in 1,800 karma.

That's when I realized I was casting pearl before swine by spending real effort on Reddit, and I should instead be directing my efforts on real quality content elsewhere.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#312
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Well the old interface is ugly. But the new interface is ugly and less ergonomic.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#313

Why aren’t they pivoting into a marketplace instead? I'm just gonna guess this is because "supporting and policing a marketplace" is its own special kind of hell; supporting and policing a discussion forum is bad enough without adding on all the way monetary transactions can go awry.

Honestly, all suggestions from the original post is the epitome of "If everyone is stupid, then why aren’t you rich". The moment he suggested OnlyFans model on Reddit, all of his suggestions lost value. Do you know that OnlyFans even doesn't want to be OnlyFans anymore?

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#314
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…

There's a sucker born every minute. When I was 10 I bought Pokemon cards, which looking back on, was a huge waste of money, but at least it wasn't all that much money in the end. I was a newbie to the scene, and I got taken advantage of. Lesson learned. 10 years later when phones were just coming into everyone's pockets, a whole new wave of gamers emerged. Game companies could either develop for the previous wave, by…

Meh Reddit brings me a lot of value still. I enjoy it a lot. On the other hand I've never bothered with mobile games and have never paid for a microtransaction.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#315
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the changes are driven by their investor's desire to somehow monetise it, then this must be part of a longer term plan. So two questions: 1. How well is this working for them 2. If the answer to 1. is "not very", how long will they stick to this strategy. They've been going at it for a couple of years now, so I imagine they're approaching the moment when they have to reassess how well things are going. I wonder if…

I downloaded the app alright. Just not theirs. Apollo for iOS is such a pleasure to use compared to the Reddit app. They can’t even get the app experience right.

Apollo is probably one of the highest quality iOS and iPadOS apps around, Reddit or otherwise. The developer is super responsive to requests or criticism, and the app just works insanely well. It doesn’t have quite the same feature set as some of the other 3rd party android Reddit apps, like Sync, but everything on the app is exceptionally well designed and thought out.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#316
post #237
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…

You say power users complain but the casual user does not (as a result of these features) - this sort of position ruins reddit's community as it suggests that reddit doesn't really care about the members who have contributed all kinds of content over the years and instead favors trying to get new members who are just marginally interested, or worse, just like endlessly scrolling through a timeline. This thread has me…

I think reddit did a rather clever thing in keeping around old.reddit.com. So power users got mad but they had a fallback, meanwhile the default experience is SPA dark pattern hell

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All those things suck at reddit, but to me the fundamental issue with reddit is upvoting/downvoting + a massive user base. Subreddits get too large and are dominated by lowest common denominator quips and memes to the point that the content is junk food for echo chambers. Every so often some bit of insight can rise, but by and large that's the problem and it's fundamental to reddit's DNA and no UX fixes would solve t…

I disagree that UX can't play a role in this aspect of Reddit. Old reddit was a lot more insightful and had higher quality content and discussions, because the UX was geared towards that. Now the UX is heavily geared towards mindless scrolling of a feed on your phone, and so that is the kind of content you get. Just look at Hacker News, it is upvote/downvote-based, but it has way better quality discussion than anywhe…

> Just look at Hacker News, it is upvote/downvote-based, but it has way better quality discussion than anywhere on (new) Reddit. Maybe comparable to some of the best subs 10 years ago, and that's because Hacker News has the same UI reddit had 10 years ago.

HN has paid moderators, which is unheard of for a community this small (~12k comments per day last time dang shared stats)

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non obvious? It’s deliberately hidden. Its utterly dishonest. Thanks for mentioning it I’m just annoyed by user interfaces copying human choice and manipulating people. It goes way beyond “disrespectful” and should be illegal

Sorry but I have to side with reddit here. He said it's aimed at power users for whom it doesn't matter that it's hidden because they know how to use this feature. It's advantageous for Reddit to have accounts with emails, why shouldn't they incentivise users to supply them during the registration process? It's their website nonetheless.

yeah that particular one seems a bit weird to complain about when basically every other website has mandatory emails

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not Reddit per se but I find it hard to wrap my head around the app thing for Reddit or similar. HTML5/CSS3 is so sufficient for this... The web gave birth to an economy going away from itself. And. Ow everything is there twice or thrice. Surely there's some good economical or political reason it. Maybe systemic (any large market will create redundancies.. I don't know) Yay to old.reddit.com

> Surely there's some good economical or political reason it. Location tracking

And Android Advertising ID.

Probably other tracking capabilities as well.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#320

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…

The AMP page is mostly the same as the normal "new." Reddit mobile page... except worse in the AMP-specific ways.

So why does Reddit use AMP at all? I can only understand AMP being good for some news site where it gives you them a mobile site design "for free".

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