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An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?

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Re: An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?

#141

Post by streb-lo »

lghh wrote: post #98
AJ007 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you using now? I’ve been an active member of various communities and forums over the years (excluding reddit), and I never actively left one. It was always just a realization I hadn’t been to the site (or really aging myself, BBS) in a year. Most of them where daily habits at one point.

I wonder if there is a market for a Reddit alternative that is somehow treads the line between being a cesspool like that one site that tried to replace Reddit when they banned a lot of fascist stuff was and that other site that infantilized everyone. Is there a middle ground? I feel like treading it would be useful.

tildes

Re: An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?

#142

Post by WhiskeyJack55 »

dougmwne wrote: post #69

I deleted my Reddit account recently in an effort to curb social media. I've still been checking r/all and some favorite subreddits. Thank you Reddit for further breaking the site and making it easier to ween myself off of. Thank you HN for the addiction block contols on the account screen.

Sounds ass backwards, and I've been signing up for newsletters in addition to a little more HN to ween off of Reddit. Read some curated headlines in the morning, sure there's usually a "word from our sponsers", but it's a better experience overall than social media imo.

Re: An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?

#143

Post by thedaemon »

Loughla wrote: post #96
dariusj18 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, for a while, Digg and Reddit were very similar, so Digg thought, "Hey, let's differentiate ourselves from our competitors." They then proceeded to ruin themselves by trying to become something more like a news aggregator, when what users really wanted was what Reddit remained.

And this was at the same time, or roughly the same time, that slashdot started making 'improvements'. I dumped both slashdot and digg to go to reddit. And now I'm starting to look for somewhere else to go.

You have succeeded, you are on HackerNews. Isn't this why we are all here? HackerNews is kind of like what Slashdot,Digg and Reddit were originally; that is "news for nerds".

Re: An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?

#144

Post by dmix »

Cephalopterus wrote: post #124
jackcosgrove wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing lasts forever. Reddit is 14 years old. They've had a good run. I think there is a general trend away from user-generated content as a business model, because that content can be a bit salty. Reddit might just be cashing out because the wave they rode has already crested.

> because that content can be a bit salty. AKA the fate of every site that is a collection of usergenerated content with an ad based business model. If you want to get serious about monetization then you need to actively curtail any content that is not "advertiser friendly" which in most cases means alienating your core content generators, case in point, Tumblr.

I do believe Reddit admins heavily influence the culture of the hyper-modding but at the same time tons of subreddits go way beyond just moderating out the bad stuff and act like full blown newspaper editors who delete 75%+ of organically upvoted submitted content because it doesn't fit their view of what the subreddit should be.

They really aren't legitimately user-generated subreddits anymore and there's always this constant tension between users and what gets allowed to be 'frontpaged' or commented about.

I know people can create spin-off subs but when it starts happening everywhere it becomes a serious problem.

Re: An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?

#145

Post by jermaustin1 »

voxic11 wrote: post #123
jermaustin1 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying staff? Hosting costs? Recouping money for the time they spent on it?

They already were keeping up with hosting costs at least with the old Reddit gold donations. Also profits pay for non of the things you listed, profits pay for investors.

Profits pay for owners (not just investors). If my company made $0 profit I’d be better off working at McDonald’s.

Re: An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?

#146

Post by johnnycab »

Tokiin wrote: post #42
johnnycab wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm not going to install a dedicated app in order to read a forum Apollo (iOS) provides a nice and clean design, as does Joey (Android) which copies the style of the former. Even on the desktop, the experience is smooth and manageable, by using uMatrix and RES, whether you are browsing old.reddit or not. I don't understand the hesitancy in using these enhancements to enrich your user experience.

Thank you for the Apollo recommendation! I was getting tired of the official Reddit app constantly changing the buttons under the posts.

You are welcome. I have zero affiliation with the project; in my humble opnion, the dev is an all-round nice person.

https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/cfmlca/i_build_the_a...

Re: An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?

#147

Post by eric_cc »

Are there any good alternatives to the reddit platform?

I've been a user since 2006. When reddit blew up in popularity, many subs massively declined in quality as is to be expected. Niche subs, however, remained pretty great.

But reddit as an organization is beyond repair at this point. Changes like this are now par for the course.

Worse even, reddit is now engaged in censoring subs. The most obvious and possibly most disturbing example is the quarantine of r/the_donald on political grounds.

Re: An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?

#148

Post by coldpie »

stefan_ wrote: post #135
MentallyRetired wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right? It's almost as if they have expenses to pay for. They provide value and they're entitled to earn a profit off of it. As a small business owner myself, I'm surprised by the amount of people who expect everything to be free.

reddit was once a small business in 2016 that turned plenty profit. Then someone got it into their head to turn it into a VC company, quintupled the headcount, took $150M investment from China, you know how it goes. So now you have a whole bunch of people doing a reenactment of Silicon Valley, only the actual site experience for users has basically not changed since 10 years now (except "corporate innovations" like n…

> Look to Patreon

God, this one baffles me. I feel like you could write that website and app with 5-10 skilled employees and a handful more for support and administrative overhead, skim your 10% of a good chunk of all Internet microtransactions, and retire early. Then they go and nuke all their goodwill trying to milk every cent they can out of the process[1]. What the fuck? Just make a product people want to use and charge a fair price for it; payment processing with a small blog platform is not rocket science. No part of this requires 60 million dollars and 100+ employees[2].

[1] https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2017/12/08/patreon-fees-con...

[2] https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/58231-45

Re: An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?

#149

Post by remote_phone »

Reddit is the Uber of social media.

All of the hard work is done for free by the mods of each subreddit. But they have no piece of the pie when Reddit goes IPO. The entire value is predicated on an Army of free workers that get nothing when the site IPOs.

Re: An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?

#150

Post by dmix »

Did all of the founders leave Reddit or something?

This is totally backwards. Valuing pure signup rates over the user experience of hundreds of millions, who may already have accounts but dont feel like logging in, or just simply want to read content and sign up another day, is what happens when marketing/business people hijack a business over product/UX people.

This is a very obvious vanity metric issue to anyone who has run a popular website. And most people do it to appease VCs/investors... Reddit is already mature, so there's no justification to artificially increasing growth at the expense of the wider product.

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