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Reddit’s disrespectful design

ognjen.io

341–350 of 516 posts

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#341
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 co…

How are cloudflare workers relevant? The tech of reddit has always been pretty simple to replicate. I think the code was open sourced at some point? I remember creating a reddit-clone for France a long time ago but bringing users in didn’t work. It was not a tech problem.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#342
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…

The best solution I’ve found is buying Apollo and Opener so then the flow is.

Long press link, tap share, tap open in Apollo.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#343
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…

Pokemon cards were pretty awesome. What are you talking about.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#345
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RedReader is a fantastic reddit mobile client for Android - they are rolling out a new version right now with a ton of community contributions (both bugfixes and new features). https://old.reddit.com/r/RedReader/comments/o7oxdu/version_1...

There is also Slide for Reddit: https://github.com/ccrama/Slide Available under GPLv3 ever since I remember, and always had fantastic UX (assuming RedReader has reached parity with latest update)

Android and iOS have a lot of fantastic reddit clients – those mentioned above, but also Apollo, Boost, Sync…

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#346
post #295
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This happens with any social media. The great Digg exodus happened, and Reddit boomed. Reddit’s content and community grew healthily, then Reddit blew up exponentially, and now the content and community have grown sure, but very unhealthily. Actually, unhealthily for what Reddit used to be (long form content and discussion), healthily for what it’s becoming (social media a la infinite scroll, chat, and notifications…

> notifications galore

This is so annoying. The bell has a number on it and you think "Oh, somebody answered me or sent a DM" ... but no. Some post is trending on XY sub.

I think Reddit doesn't realize how much they lose in the longterm from hollow 'engagement'.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot has been written about the social and legal difficulties of running such a site (how much do you enjoy looking at child porn all day so you can ban the people posting it? How many mass-shooters would you like to have post their manifesto on your site?) But I think the real issue is just money. Even if you keep things pretty stripped down, as 4chan or the original reddit did, hosting still costs money. And if yo…

There was in fact a time where Reddit’s front page included a progress bar showing how much Gold needed to be bought/gifted that day to pay off that day’s server time, and shortly after it was introduced the bar was overfilled every single day and eventually set to a more arbitrary goal than actual server bills. I’m assuming that didn’t include salaries and other overhead, but it does indicate the userbase could basi…

This is actually one of the more troubling aspects of Reddit's decline IMO. The user-funded model WORKED but so much tracking data was getting left behind that someone chose to make the switch.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#348
Reddit should just launch a coin, buy back the shares from investors and stop doing these shady things. 90% of the coins on the 100 marketcap are shitcoins and are still worth billions. Reddit with its massive userbase can easily make it to the top 100.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#349
post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was my take at one point, but a lot of actions made it clear that's no longer the case, and it's now more of a social media site/app that also has porn.

Maybe more like porn ads, its like all attention seeking to direct people to only fans.

What bothers me about OF is that it has turned authentic communities into billboards. "Why are you entitled to free porn?" OFs defenders will ask as they completely miss the point of the communities they have hijacked.

As the saying goes: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#350
What’s interesting to me is that “old.reddit.com” continues to work on mobile in these cases. They must have found that users really don’t know about the original site, or that not enough care.

Still, if “old.reddit.com” ever goes away I will be 100% cured of Reddit. It is literally unusable in any other way and it would not be worth the frustration.

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