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Reddit’s disrespectful design

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Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#321

Post by dredmorbius »

Tildes.net (https://tildes.net) has been a refreshingly sane, well-designed, and well-administered alternative.

I all but completely gave up on Reddit for my own posting a couple of years ago, following an early set of "features" that I'd categorise more as "contemptuous" than "disprespectful". More deeply, Reddit simply isn't very good at fostering conversations. It does have depth, and there are communities which I'll still visit, very occasionally.

That said, it's been a slow death for most of the past decade, no matter what the KPI stats are claiming.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#322

Post by Santosh83 »

diminish wrote: post #143
tbrake wrote: post #54

I've long thought about making a thread like this so I'm happy to see it. Fed up with this actively user-hostile web experience to try and drive people to the app. My main gripe is definitely expanding comments - > First of all, only the top comment will be shown. Then you can tap view more which will load another two. But you cannot open all the comments. Because the "create an account to continue" toast pictured is…

Reddit has become another VC invested company where crippling features, dark patterns on forced "adoption" and dark "growth" hacks du jours are the norms. I'm a very early and long term user, and I slowly moved away after "the" investment. HN on the other hand is still safe, as the huge success of YC and their aim of gathering talent and readers gives more financial freedom. What if some investor now invests in HN, g…

HN is too niche to milk for profitability like Reddit. Only relatively technical people hang out here and will probably move to, or setup, an alternative if HN gets sold out.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#323

Post by pkamb »

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 am responsible for ... AMP pages

Why does Reddit use AMP pages and a mobile site that look exactly the same? For speed/SEO benefits? Disabling AMP would still look mostly the same for normal Reddit users but would make "old." users much happier.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#324

Post by srik »

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…

> power users complain—and still continue using the site—but the casual user does not.

This was the exact situation digg just before the mass migration to reddit happened.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#325

Post by PragmaticPulp »

zozbot234 wrote: post #261
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But when looking specifically at the dark patterns that power users are most likely to complain about, it's unclear that they would help DAU/MAU much, if at all. Casual users might not complain overtly all that much, but they're almost certainly discouraged by many such practices. Power users of sites like Reddit are already hooked. They’re already logged in, already have an app installed, and they don’t see all of…

> It’s the unregistered users and those who aren’t logged in who have to suffer the nags and pop-ups and limitations. The problem with this strategy is that it's easy to add so many nags that many more users will bounce away from the site than will install the app, or otherwise engage at all. Given what we know about user behavior on the Internet, Reddit is almost certainly on the downward slope of this weird Laffer…

> Given what we know about user behavior on the Internet, Reddit is almost certainly on the downward slope of this weird Laffer curve, well beyond the point of "optimally effective" nagging.

If your internet bubble is largely composed of power users who have such a deep disdain for pop-ups that they will refuse to engage with this sites, you might think that.

But looking at Reddit's growth numbers lately, it appears their gamble has clearly paid off.

The key to understanding this is this: Mass-market, advertising-supported websites don't cater to picky power users. They cater to whoever they can get to sign up. If someone refuses to use a site because they refuse to sign up or install the app, then that's a positive, not a negative, for their numbers. They only want the users who will accept the conditions of the website.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#326

Post by PostThisTooFast »

LeftHandPath wrote: post #303
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 unle…

Really? Hacker News is even worse. This POS site lets you type out an answer to something or a comment, only to reject it with "YOU'RE POSTING TOO FAST." Really? Anything beyond two comments an hour is "too fast?" Then why do you let us even bring up the commenting window and waste our time?

FUCK YOU, HACKER NEWS.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#327

Post by orthoxerox »

DangitBobby wrote: post #125
wongarsu wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I'm surprised that there isn't a version of the Reddit Enhancement Suite extension for old.reddit.com. Especially now that they had to trim features to support the redesign.

I have RES and it works with the old design.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#328

Post by dorfsmay »

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…

Have you tried https://old.reddit.com ?

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#329

Post by wdr1 »

wdr1 wrote: post #112

The closing off subreddits is particularly annoying. The Reddit mobile has a longstanding bug in how handle it handles GIFs. I have a bot (u/CalvinBot) that posts the official Calvin & Hobbes strip to /r/calvinandhobbes each day. GoComics, the copyright holder, only publishes it as a GIF, so that's how it's submitted to Reddit. However, because of the bug in the app, people can view the GIF properly. The advice used…

> However, because of the bug in the app, people can view the GIF properly

*can't

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#330

Post by jerrygoyal »

Reddit app is not that good either. Only good thing left from old era of reddit is access to reddit api so that third party devs can build a better frontend on top of it. I don't think new reddit management is in favour of that decision anymore. An anecdote is Reddit chat (which came much later) is not part of the 3rd party api access so that users would stick to the official Reddit app. I wouldn't be too surprised if reddit decide one day to kill the api switch.
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