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Reddit’s disrespectful design

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Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#361

Post by wting »

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…

Edit: "reined in" and not "reigned in".

I apologize for the Freudian slip as my edit window has passed.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#362

Post by MomoXenosaga »

erhk wrote: post #304
ethbr0 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Reddit moderation is not unlike what China does only it's not considered onerous because it's self-censorhip.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#363

Post by thih9 »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #113
bluescrn wrote: post #97

Their app nags are the worst. Phones have very capable web browsers these days. Please let us use them! Has anybody written an app-nag-blocker yet?…

I’m confused how many people don’t seem to realize this has nothing to do with experiencing the site. The App gets a ton of personal data they can’t get on a website. That’s all this is. Data collection. They need you to install the App so they can access your advertising ID, better link your IP and location to your account, get you to click permission allowance, etc. Shooting their own experience in the foot is an a…

I wonder how to look at Apple's decision to tighten privacy rules in this light. I guess companies will be less motivated to force their users to use an iOS app. So, a potential loss for Apple; then again, a potential win for Apple users... so overall a win for Apple?

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#364

Post by realce »

marcinzm wrote: post #81

Facebook makes $32 per user per year. That is across all billion+ users worldwide. They make around $170 per user in the US And Canada. No non-advertising monetization strategy will come close to that number. Assuming 10% of users pay (which is a very generous assumption) you'd need to have each user in the US pay $1700 per year!!!!

If I don't have to spend money on advertising engineers, PR to keep my company nice for advertisers, ect, then I don't really need 1700 per user.

Facebook is a database and a UI with ten billion dollars worth of ad exec salaries glued on.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#365

Post by shitlord »

SSLy wrote: post #340
dillondoyle wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's worse with Secret Santa is they didn't have to take it over in the first place. Community / active users ran it. Which is what (feeling like used to) makes Reddit special. AND they aren't giving the keys to the exchange back to the original creator... Now starting over in a new user run sub but it is super sh*ty behavior. They tried the marketplace idea too with reddit gold etc. wasn't that also originally a c…

>gold - wasn't that also originally a co-opted user created joke like silver? From my recollection gold came first, silver was a image macro meme to be pasted as a poor man's gold, and then the expanded rewards system came.

It started on 4chan with the 4chan Gold meme. Users would joke about a non-existent premium subscription that unlocked exclusive content. Reddit went ahead and actually implemented that idea, complete with the /r/lounge subreddit (available only to users with Reddit Gold).

Reddit users created Reddit Silver as another meme, indicating that a post was valuable (but not worth spending real money for Reddit Gold). Then reddit implemented that later on.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#366

Post by KrishnaShripad »

I just stay away from Reddit links as much as possible. The user experience is atrocious and I agree with everything the article says. There is another point that the article missed (or perhaps never encountered because the author primarily focuses on the mobile experience).

In desktop Reddit posts are actually modal dialogs (don't believe me? Open a Reddit post in your desktop browser). I have this bad habit of clicking my mouse on the whitespace of any web page I visit (I guess I am the only one). The Reddit devs, for whatever reason best known to them, have added a click listener on the backdrop of the Reddit post (like I said, the post is a modal dialog). The moment you click it, the post closes to reveal the subreddit homepage that you were on. This has tripped me so many times I have rewired my brain to use my mouse carefully while navigating Reddit. This sort of design anti-pattern is also visible in USA Today. I don't know who first came up with this pattern but it sucks.

Use modal dialogs for what they have to be used for. Don't try to fool the user into thinking it is a page when it is actually a modal dialog.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#367

Post by Ozzie_osman »

wting wrote: post #305
Ozzie_osman wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, golden cohorts can work, but they are really hard to pull off, especially for logged out traffic (which is where you'd use most of these patterns anyway). Good luck tracking me over 6-24 months across different devices and locations. And cross-contamination is hard to prevent (for instance, the golden cohort might suffer from global effects like worse content due to loss of power users or even from stumbling across brand-damaging threads like this). It also just adds a lot of product complexity to keep behavior around that long.

That said, they can work. Twitter famously did something like that for their time-based vs algorithmic feed and I think YouTube does it pretty regularly.

The biggest issue, though, is that by the time you get results from any long-term experiments, most of the decision-makers (PMs, EMs, etc) have probably moved on away having taken credit for the short-term wins they delivered.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#368

Post by MandieD »

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…

“…quit any and all digital activity that’s a bottomless well…”

Thank you for that. The past few weeks, I’ve started asking myself, “am I watching people I don’t know arguing about something, assigning points (likes) and considering jumping in?” to break myself out of the worst time-wasting and pointlessly agitating stuff, but you’ve given me an even better target.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#369

Post by BoorishBears »

RajBhai wrote: post #109
BoorishBears wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is reddit.com mobile optimized? There's a bug where opening a post from a subreddit's main page always results in a weird border, like it's opening the post as a floating dialog. (Just to confirm tried it logged and out, same result: https://imgur.com/a/6yK9D8V ) That results in comments being squished down to a few characters wide and many many lines long I used to think it was a "me" bug, but it's followed me acros…

Looks like the desktop site, but somehow being responsive to the mobile screen. Try m.reddit.com

m.reddit.com redirects to www.reddit.com

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#370

Post by hhjinks »

demux wrote: post #237
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…

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…

> and instead favors trying to get new members who are just marginally interested, or worse, just like endlessly scrolling through a timeline

You can literally see communities go to shit because of this. Actual content is pushed away as low effort content, easy-to-view-in-a-timeline content, claims the frontpage, because of what you said. It infuriates me to no end when communities I've frequented for years literally get supplanted by faceless non-contributing vagrants who never contribute, comment, or post. They just see funny picture, blow air out their nose, and upvote, not knowing that they're incentivizing behaviour that's killing the community that built the space in the first place.

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