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Reddit files to go public

reuters.com

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Re: Reddit files to go public

#281

Post by axguscbklp »

mightyquacks wrote: post #210

Reddit used to be amazing Now it's like a red flag in your resume if you worked for reddit Then they made a whole mess on the homepage. This is what happens when you hire mediocre engineers. Its like junior engineers who cant write code. Reddit mobile is not bad, but stop trying to make me install it. There are people who only wants to use web. But your web engineers are garbage their ads is incredibly bad. there are…

I hope that no single organization replaces Reddit. Let a billion independent forums bloom. For the sake of discoverability, it would be nice if a decent subset of them implemented more or less the same API that search engines could call from the outside and that their UIs could expose to users so that users could easily move from forum to forum. But discoverability is double-edged - it builds size but it also brings Eternal September and homogeneity.

As for structure, I think that forums and image boards that are basically just chronologically ordered items of text where each item of text can have either implicit or explicit links to previous items of text are in a sense superior to tree-based forums like Reddit anyway because directed acyclic graphs are a superset of trees.

As for upvote/downvote mechanisms, I have never seen a forum that was improved by them. Such mechanisms are probably good for driving engagement but from the point of view of stimulating thought, I think that as opposed to having an outside algorithm preference certain comments over others, it is better when users have to either manually go through a flat chronologically ordered list of comments or implement their own search functionality on top of that list in order to find comments that they want to engage with. If a forum provides advanced tools to search and sort comments, that is good, but I would prefer that a forum not build any given sorting other than chronological into its default UI.

Reddit, at least, still allows users to sort in ways other than by "best". In my experience and according to my taste, large subreddits usually are often pretty useless unless I sort by "new" or "controversial". Sorting by "best" all too often - not always, but all too often - just brings the least common denominator up to the top. Another good method for using Reddit is to make note of any individual users whose writings you find interesting and to then just read through their Reddit histories - this can also be a good way to find interesting subreddits that you might not have come upon otherwise.

Re: Reddit files to go public

#282

Post by 14 »

There has been some recent changes to reddit and it is becoming aggressively annoying. Trying to make me look back on my top posts and comments and flashy buttons on the top. They are aiming for that dopamine hit by showing you your top posts so you can reminisce in all the likes you got that day. On top of that they have a banner across the bottom you can close but it forever comes back nagging you to verify your account. The whole reason I do kind of use reddit is because I am anonymous to others and can speak freely. I can create burner accounts and say one thing and never go back to it. It feels very facebooky with the big push for engagement happening right now but I guess this public offering is why the big push.

Re: Reddit files to go public

#283

Post by NineStarPoint »

kingcharles wrote: post #95
greenknight wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the thing, i hate their new ui... and if ever they get rid of their 'old' ui I would leave reddit. Their "New UI" was brought in in 2018, and to me was like a digg moment. To me, Hackernews is what Reddit was 10 years ago, just without subreddits. Clean top quality content.

It's weird. I was a huge user of Reddit from its launch to 2013 when I fell off the Internet. I didn't use it again until 2021, so I had a big jump in UI. As a UX designer I really don't get all the hate about the current interface. It works great for me.

The content density of old reddit is much higher than new Reddit. Additionally, I've always been deeply unhappy with endless scroll. Pagination just feels much more stable to me.

Re: Reddit files to go public

#284

Post by Ekaros »

GhettoComputers wrote: post #248
sneak wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> now they're trying to get into everything, and can barely execute I feel like this happens to a lot of organizations/products that start off being really neat. Fast forward 10 years, and most/all of the people responsible for the good stuff have moved on. The brand ambles on like a relative with dementia. The lights are on, but you know nobody's home.

Amazon is the only one I know that didn’t.

Honestly, I think their webstore-side is surprisingly weak. As experience that is. Ofc, logistics and so on and AWS is still moving.

Re: Reddit files to go public

#285

Post by ZephyrBlu »

Brybry wrote: post #181
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a lot lower than I expected. I can't stand the new UI. I guess most traffic is from people without accounts though.

If it's only showing old.reddit.com traffic then it might not reflect everyone who is using the old UI. You can have the old UI with the base site given the correct settings/cookies.

That's how I browse, but I think you need to have an account to be able to set the old theme. I was assuming that scenario was included in old.reddit.com traffic. If it's not, then 10-15% of traffic hitting the old.reddit.com domain seems really high.

Re: Reddit files to go public

#286

Post by greiskul »

gibbonsrcool wrote: post #231
IgorPartola wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok I’ll bite. How would you fix Reddit? I have been using online forums for the past 20+ years and I know what you mean about communities like Reddit going from nerd heavy topics to primarily being the free advertising platform for onlyfans accounts and political hacks. But how would Reddit at this point stuff the genie back into the bottle? For that matter, if you don’t believe in Reddit’s long term success, there a…

Get rid of the current moderators and pay professionals. Automate the universal rules and use these folks to steer content back to when it was most meaningful. Also dedicate as many resources as possible to identify and prevent astroturfing and shills.

Ok, one of my favorite subreddits is about an specific American book series based on a modern genre of Chinese fiction. Do you think that Reddit can scale to manage that kind of content without volunteer mods?

It's the same thing as people used to say about Wikipedia. Oh, they shouldn't take volunteers and just pay for encyclopedia editors. But if you want content at scale, you need to provide power to people so they can say what they want, and they are going to abuse it. But the alternative as never worked, and in fact, people get really mad here when people try to implement the alternative.

Re: Reddit files to go public

#287

Post by JCharante »

IgorPartola wrote: post #217
henning wrote: post #200

The Reddit of 2006 where tutorials on generating HTML in Lisp rocket to the top of the homepage is long gone. I can't imagine investing in an ad company that is fueled by clickbait and outrage the way Reddit is. Plus, some percentage of the userbase will always run aggressive ad blockers and be impossible to effectvely monetize. However, my brain works very differently from other people's, so I could be wrong.

Ok I’ll bite. How would you fix Reddit? I have been using online forums for the past 20+ years and I know what you mean about communities like Reddit going from nerd heavy topics to primarily being the free advertising platform for onlyfans accounts and political hacks. But how would Reddit at this point stuff the genie back into the bottle? For that matter, if you don’t believe in Reddit’s long term success, there a…

- Reddit should not be a company to grow 1000x & exit with all employees being millionaires, it should earn enough to pay the staff hefty six fig salaries and that's enough

- Stop being like quora and restricting content if you're not logged in

- fix the video player on the new site

- support the native video player on the old site & polls

- remove the supermod system, where senior mods control half the site, old mods should not be able to invite new mods past a certain point but they'll just create sockpuppet accounts so

- remove more subreddits from the default list

- remove the "influencer" aspects of the site. People don't need a profile with a custom picture, don't need to post to their /u/ board when they should be posting on a subreddit.

- go back to reddit gold, get rid of the 50+ awards

- custom comment backgrounds from certain awards are fine, let people purchase colored borders or something

- go back to showing the progress bar for how close the site is to earning enough to pay for servers that day from gold purchases

- when you end up hiring extremely controversial staff, avoid auto deleting criticism about them

- don't edit other user's comments

- integrate more of RES's features into reddit

- bring back live threads

- RPAN is a fine way to try to introduce more social stuff (imagine r/games hosting a pov stream of blizzcon) but the current users are weird

- bring back AMAs with famous people, not B or C list actors that are promoting their new book (so bring back someone in Victoria's role)

- get rid of the moon currency feature

- encourage mods to delete threads with inaccurate titles / clickbait until a link is submitted with an accurate name

Re: Reddit files to go public

#288

Post by greiskul »

GhettoComputers wrote: post #238
IgorPartola wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok I’ll bite. How would you fix Reddit? I have been using online forums for the past 20+ years and I know what you mean about communities like Reddit going from nerd heavy topics to primarily being the free advertising platform for onlyfans accounts and political hacks. But how would Reddit at this point stuff the genie back into the bottle? For that matter, if you don’t believe in Reddit’s long term success, there a…

Split the site. Forums were good because they had culture. Reddit’s subreddits leak into other ones. They will split it to one that is NSFW and SFW soon for advertising reasons. Make a minimum requirement of 1000 characters, all spammers evaders are banned. Make blocking hide the person you blocked’s posts. Bring back visible downvotes. Ban politics. It will not actually work and they’ll do it covertly but it would s…

> Ban politics.

That's a political statement.

Re: Reddit files to go public

#289

Post by raydev »

Shared404 wrote: post #274
cyberge99 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found reddit from the great digg.com exodus. They didn’t learn.

Which raises the question. Where will people head from the reddit exodus?

Nowhere. People comparing it to Digg more than a decade later are wildly out of touch with the current state of the internet.

Re: Reddit files to go public

#290

Post by ankit219 »

eljimmy wrote: post #160

I can’t help but think this is the end for that site. It started off with a very old school minimalist designed forum vibe and has been devolving into dark patterns and advertisements as of late. I guess good things can’t stay free forever and the bills need to be paid somehow. Wish they went to a donation model like Wikipedia instead.

They have been touting MAUs and DAUs a lot over the last one year. Turns out their numbers are very very public.

Whenever a new user creates an account, she automatically gets added to r/announcements. It's not a choice, they dont even show it as an option.

The current subs of r/announcements is 127M. It was 124M at the start of this month. Just shows that reddit - with newer design or not - has not found much acceptance in the upcoming generations. They tend to visit the site, yet are hesitant to create an account. For reference, their MAUs for month of Dec 19 alone were 430M. They got a lot of help from SEO for everyone of their threads being indexed, and hence the high traffic, but regular users and personalized ads isnt there. Likely low ARPU.

Edit: This is probably the reason for those dark patterns too. If I can see that low conversion rate, so can people inside, and they would try and improve that via different UX patterns. Because it seems like a low hanging fruit when it is not really one.

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