One of the hallmarks of recent Reddit growth has been its mobile redesign. It aggressively nudges you to download their mobile app and it takes a few seconds longer to open any page (used to be instant with the old design). I presume they're doing this because their app has better user tracking (hard to disable tracking inside an app) and far less people are using ad blockers that work for apps too.
The Growth of Reddit
131–140 of 209 posts
Re: The Growth of Reddit
#132Reddit was great, many years ago, although there are many sub-reddits that are still excellent today. Moves they've made in the recent years, like hiding vote counts, were to improve growth, but it has also enabled more astroturfing and censorship (widespread). More recently, they started injected tracking into outbound link clicks and introduced the terrible redesign to help with growth/monetization also. As they've…
it never occurred to me before, but seeing it in a chart like this it really seems like Reddit has basically just turned into Gamers and their side interests, politics, and a few vestiges of old Reddit, like AskReddit, which at this point might as well be their own separate site for what all they have to do with the main demographic. The Video Game sphere takes up a huge chunk of it. Then many of the other subs are b…
this is a very weird take. I've been on Reddit for 6+ years and if anything it's gotten way way more diverse than just "gaming".
Re: The Growth of Reddit
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's interesting that it peaked at 1.5m comments/mo in late 2016 and it's shrunk to 820k comments/mo. That's a huge drop. It sort of makes sense, seeing as the election ended, but that activity decrease is far larger than any other subreddit, even political ones.
r/the_Donald was "quarantined" by the admins, so it cannot be discovered by users in the same way as other subreddits. That cut off a lot of the organic growth that you would normally see, and it cut off users who might normally see r/the_Donald on the r/all or r/popular wander in to comment/argue. People who are not already subscribers just no longer even see anything at all from r/the_Donald.
I don't think r/the_donald is quarantined.
There was some issue with sticky threads not rising as much to the r/all that impacted r/the_donald, but otherwise, I can still see posts from that sub on the front page though I do have to scroll quite a bit.
Re: The Growth of Reddit
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree The obvious way out of that is to join bubbles that are aligned with your interests rather than political views. If your interest is politics then find a better interest :)
100%. Having a "passion" for politics was abrasive to my relationships with friends throughout high-school and returned very little value to me (save the short-lived energy I got from stupid internet debates).
Some people don't have the ability to not be concerned with politics.
Re: The Growth of Reddit
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
100%. Having a "passion" for politics was abrasive to my relationships with friends throughout high-school and returned very little value to me (save the short-lived energy I got from stupid internet debates).
Some people don't have the ability to not be concerned with politics.
If you mean like a bad habbit i agree.
Re: The Growth of Reddit
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
When it's gone, the "old internet" will be gone
Well, it might not be "normie compatible", but there still is 4chan, which is a lot "old internet". I can understand that people do not like it and why it is that way though. But the point is: There are still sites out there which are like the old internet. They are obviously just not mainstream. They never were really (except reddit maybe). You just gotta find your little niche place and maybe look around every now…
/pol/ may be the most salient and influential political forum on the internet (a recent study showed /pol/ produces the most reposted content seen elsewhere online). To describe it as “right wing” is like saying YouTube comments are right wing. It’s unmoderated, not right wing, there’s a big difference (see /r/the_donald if you want right wing). That said, these days it’s full of shills shilling shills. I prefer to hang out on the other, more apolitical and better moderated 4chan forums like g, tv, and o.
Addendum: to say /pol/ isn’t 4chan is both true and false but it’s kind of weird and unfortunate you felt obligated to apologize for using 4chan because /pol/ exists. Just because /pol/ tolerates witches doesn’t mean 4chan’s a witch site for witches populated entirely by witches.
Re: The Growth of Reddit
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me I've moved from Reddit back to Digg, Reddit seems to be the worst parts of Facebook combined with the worst parts of Twitter. The redesign is horrendously busy, the comments are trite or vicious, and the v.reddit videos either autoplay or never play when you click on them.
I'm in the same boat, but I didn't go to digging, but came back here. The new redesign, coupled with the realization that I spent far too much time with the same arguments showed me that Reddit is broken now. Why can't I just have a nice link aggregator with decent discussion? HN is great, but it doesn't have as much content as other platforms. I just want to discuss politics, hobbies, and lifestyles with the same le…
> "...why is that too much to ask? "
because it's bloody hard to create civil, thoughtful communities. HN is interesting since the general user base seems to have learned to self-moderate, buuuut, it has made HN a pretty dry place (boring maybe?).
I have found some absolute hilarious gems on Reddit. The wit and humor of some users really catches me off guard sometimes, but the issue with Reddit is that there is just so much low effort garbage to sift through to find anything interesting/funny. Reddit seems to have converged on to a low effort meme-fest for the most part. I've gone to the effort to customise my sub-reddits to match my interests, but each community seems to very quickly become a repetitive echo chamber, so there are not many new/unique POV to explore. For example I sub to /r/Australia and it's basically the same content re hashed over and over (NBN sucks, Libs suck, House prices suck, magpies are annoying, here's a picture of a Kookaburra etc.)
So Reddit isn't really for me any more and I spend little time there. Maybe I'm just getting old, but I find that I get more out of just sitting in the sun and letting my mind wander.
Re: The Growth of Reddit
#138Sometimes when I lurk on Reddit it appears that "the internet" is giving helpful and respectful comments to someone who, say, alleges that her husband had been sexually assaulting her. When I start digging down into the lower quality comments those comments are obviously lower quality. But here's the thing-- within the lower quality comments is the OP responding to the low quality comments! In other words, an OP (pro…
These days it feels more and more like <50% of the downvoted comments are trolls/jerks, and the majority are just people who might disagree with the hivemind.
Re: The Growth of Reddit
#139Reddit was great, many years ago, although there are many sub-reddits that are still excellent today. Moves they've made in the recent years, like hiding vote counts, were to improve growth, but it has also enabled more astroturfing and censorship (widespread). More recently, they started injected tracking into outbound link clicks and introduced the terrible redesign to help with growth/monetization also. As they've…
I deleted my account out of frustration early this year.
Discussion is simply not important. Demonizing opposing opinions is very important though. Very much an anti libertarian echo chamber.
Re: The Growth of Reddit
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
it never occurred to me before, but seeing it in a chart like this it really seems like Reddit has basically just turned into Gamers and their side interests, politics, and a few vestiges of old Reddit, like AskReddit, which at this point might as well be their own separate site for what all they have to do with the main demographic. The Video Game sphere takes up a huge chunk of it. Then many of the other subs are b…
I don't know how you draw the conclusion that Reddit is all gaming and gaming-adjacent unless you dilute the definition of "gaming-adjacent" past all meaning. There's never been greater diversity in defiance of the gamer/geek persona on Reddit than there is today, and I say that as someone who's been a regular user for more than a decade.
"site:reddit.com " is still useful and bypasses most garbage.