That website is pure pain. Even the niche subreddits I used to enjoy are now repulsive.
Reddit files to go public
411–420 of 834 posts
Re: Reddit files to go public
#412The 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…
you know an odd realization I've had lately is that "discoverability" is a two edged sword, communities with their unique flavor built over time are great, however there comes a time when some place (in online or meat space) becomes too "popular" and the stories about the place start taking over the actual environment and behavior of the place, which then draws people expecting the story... basically a feedback loop.
there's a chance I think, that creating more "obscure" spaces might actually be the better option for preserving these kinds of communities, or at least letting them thrive more easily, reddit survived this long I think by being slightly difficult to navigate and having weird communities that could self police and there are still spots on there I enjoy, but none I really socialize in the way I originally did on finding the site.. anyways those are just musings and not really helpful to the question of how to fix it, just more of why I think it's broken...
Re: Reddit files to go public
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
They’re all Bay Area engineers. So switching jobs is an inconvenience with a raise on the other side. The changes aren’t their ideas but it’s not like they can’t refuse. They can just work anywhere else. They probably don’t care.
I mean… browse through HN for the day. According to its users you shouldn’t work at any company that pays well because they are all evil. At a certain point you just don’t care what people are writing on forums.
There's a bunch of them that don't seem too bad: netflix, spotify, discord. Maybe even apple, depending on your definition of evil.
Re: Reddit files to go public
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The capital will be used to redesign Reddit’s famously cluttered homepage, co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman tells Recode. The company also plans to pour more resources into user-uploaded video. Wow, time has not been kind to this paragraph. The redesign is still hated by a large portion of the userbase and the Reddit video player is infamously unreliable. I'm curious what happened behind the scenes here.
Are they going to compete with YouTube?
Can anyone compete with YouTube? Facebook is probably closest to it in scale but it is not a video sharing platform.
Re: Reddit files to go public
#415Earlier quoted context omitted.
But do those marketers pay reddit?
Who knows what's going on behind the scenes? Example: Last time I read /r/funny for a period I noticed a wave of "look at what funny thing I did with these Coke bottles" posts that were so obviously part of a marketing campaign that surely reddit admins noticed it too. I don't think they would allow that if they weren't in on it. In that case they may have even helped with the upvotes so no external service where you…
There's actually a good incentive for moderators to be in on this, as they aren't paid by reddit for their (in sometimes massive) unpaid labour. If a marketing company comes along and says, 'hey, you've done this so long, don't you think you should deserve some money? just let us run our campaign on your subreddit and we'll pay you!' quite a few moderators would agree. Admins might not notice.
Re: Reddit files to go public
#416Good! I‘ll go long on them. Reddit is the ONLY place on the Internet where you can simultaneously watch garbage recycled content from TikTok and visit extremely-niche and highly knowledgeable communities in the same session. Heck, I get my HN updates from Reddit now. Facebook/Instagram/TikTok are nothing like this in that the info you get is wholly dependent on your social graph. Twitter has very high quality content…
> Reddit can fit nicely into the metaverse Why do people keep talking about the metaverse like it already exists and is a huge part of our future? It's vaporware right now. Are we all so susceptible to marketing that we've just accepted that if Meta is going all-in on a thing it must be both real and a guaranteed win?
It does exist in the form of Roblox :)
Re: Reddit files to go public
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reddit is now a rage generating machine outside of the small niche subreddits. The business is built on rage and some stupid investors in WSB who are enjoying a long bull market. Doesn’t mean it won’t do well but its just another flavor of facebook.
> Doesn’t mean it won’t do well but its just another flavor of facebook. No, reddit has threads/subjects. Facebook posts organization almost does not exist, it is unusable to read anything there.
… i said another flavor and im clearly commenting on the driving factor behind engagement. But yeah it has threads.
Re: Reddit files to go public
#418Good! I‘ll go long on them. Reddit is the ONLY place on the Internet where you can simultaneously watch garbage recycled content from TikTok and visit extremely-niche and highly knowledgeable communities in the same session. Heck, I get my HN updates from Reddit now. Facebook/Instagram/TikTok are nothing like this in that the info you get is wholly dependent on your social graph. Twitter has very high quality content…
Tiktok is not really based on your social graph. I think it’s kinda like Reddit in some ways but far less in depth content and actual interaction.
Re: Reddit files to go public
#419Earlier 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.
Fair point. For contrast, here's a list of reasons why I think Reddit's new UI sucks:
1. Stability: videos rarely play for me. Sometimes I break Reddit too (their words, not mine).
2. Slow: if I want to read the comments, I have to wait 3-5 seconds for them to load. I know that the comments could load instantly because the i.reddit.com interface can do it.
3. Unhelpful interface: it is not easy to identify how to expand a comment thread. But more important, the interface often won't tell me that a comment chain keeps going - it looks as if it just ended, even though it keeps going several levels deep. You can keep reading the chain if you click on the last comment, but again, why would you click on it if you don't know whether it keeps going?
3b. In relation to the previous point: I saw your comment because I was scrolling pretty deep into this thread. In the new Reddit UI it would have been cut off.
4. Annoying: if you're not logged in, content is kept from you just because. Again, the i.reddit.com interface shows everything, but the "regular" interface keeps pestering you with "Log in to see this content" or "Open in app". These popups cannot be dismissed.
All of these changes are pro-metrics and anti-user. Sure, the interface itself looks fine (once it rendered, if it renders). But interaction-wise? It sucks.
Re: Reddit files to go public
#420I 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.
I don't use Wikipedia any more, they wouldn't leave me alone with their constant begging. I could just set up a block for the things, but I'd rather just be edgy and never use the site again. The content has been going downhill for years anyway. A lot more fun to find specific resources on cooler websites.