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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?

#301

Post by digikazi »

asdfman123 wrote: post #285
dyingkneepad wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not parent, but the very fact that they keep degrading the UI and implementing dark patterns and doing crap like requiring login to read comments is exactly what gives the impression that reddit is dying. It is hard to assume that people on top care about their users when every single news about any kind of change looks like to a downgrade to my Reddit experience.

I'm still baffled about the UI "improvement." It's comically bad. It's so busy and I can't find anything I want. I have never, ever seen a site anywhere near as big as Reddit with such a bad redesign. It seems they could have hired one UX guy and one graphic guy... I could probably pay some people on Fiverr $100 total to create a better design for the entirety of Reddit. The old design was boring and out of date, but…

I'm mainly a desktop user, so for me the new design is, how shall I put it politely, utter shite?

One of the things the new design has made much harder is the discovery of new subs; in the old reddit you could generally speaking find a list of related subreddits on the right side of the screen. Not anymore (sometimes they're buried in the wiki, but not always). It's a shame, because discovering new and interesting (and weird) topics was one of the best things about it. Also, to echo many users here, my usage of the site has dropped right down after the redesign. It's a shame because it was for many years one of my favourite places on the Internet.

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

#303

Post by butterfi »

butterfi wrote: post #302

Is anybody else actually seeing this? I'm looking at Reddit right now and see comments just fine.

on second pass, I'm thinking they mean the mobile app now requires you to login, not the website. Thats a slightly different scenario.

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

#304

Post by Deimorz »

kissickas wrote: post #130
lghh wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The first one you're referencing is voat.co. I can't remember the name of the second, but I do remember cute-looking dinosaurs all over the place and I think that's the one you're talking about. Side note - I thought Victoria Taylor (/u/chooter) left for that competitor, but it appears that she was at WeWork and now at LinkedIn (as of August - just in time!)

The cute dinosaur one you're talking about was Imzy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imzy

Victoria never worked at Imzy though (and didn't leave for anything - she was fired). She was at Cake (https://cake.co/) for a while, I think that was between WeWork and LinkedIn.

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

#305

Post by stevehawk »

asdfman123 wrote: post #285
dyingkneepad wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not parent, but the very fact that they keep degrading the UI and implementing dark patterns and doing crap like requiring login to read comments is exactly what gives the impression that reddit is dying. It is hard to assume that people on top care about their users when every single news about any kind of change looks like to a downgrade to my Reddit experience.

I'm still baffled about the UI "improvement." It's comically bad. It's so busy and I can't find anything I want. I have never, ever seen a site anywhere near as big as Reddit with such a bad redesign. It seems they could have hired one UX guy and one graphic guy... I could probably pay some people on Fiverr $100 total to create a better design for the entirety of Reddit. The old design was boring and out of date, but…

The only thing I can find in my reddit feed is a bunch of annoying ass TripleByte ads.

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

#306

Post by bluecalm »

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #254
Chirael wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube is starting to do this as well. For example they've made it so that accounts with less than 1000 subscribers can't do live streams any more. Not coincidentally, 1000 subscribers is the threshold for monetization (i.e., when ads start getting shown on all the account's videos). A lot of smaller channels are upset about it, since live streams were one of the ways they were /getting/ to 1000 subscribers in the f…

Another YT issue I personally find annoying as someone who has recorded a LOT of programming tutorials is all the garbage that pops up on the lower part of the screen whenever the viewer presses pause. A lot of times they're hitting pause because they want to read what I'm typing in the terminal . In the past, YT allowed creators to prevent this behavior and recommended videos in general by appending a ?rel=0 to an e…

Yeah that's one of the reasons I download most content I intend to study from YouTube and watch it with a decent media player. Another major reason is ability to go frame-by-frame forward and back which is implemented in the YouTube player but doesn't work reliably.

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

#307

Post by mturmon »

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.

Seconded. Apollo is fantastic.

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

#308

Post by aphextim »

lghh wrote: post #227
kissickas wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first one you're referencing is voat.co. I can't remember the name of the second, but I do remember cute-looking dinosaurs all over the place and I think that's the one you're talking about. Side note - I thought Victoria Taylor (/u/chooter) left for that competitor, but it appears that she was at WeWork and now at LinkedIn (as of August - just in time!)

Yep, voat is the one. It was... not ideal.

Fun fact, before it was re-branded to voat it was called whoaverse and wasn't a giant trove of nationalist and racist posts. It actually had decent discussions. Over time as more and more of the people were banned from posting on Reddit they had to migrate somewhere, and eventually overtook whoaverse at which point putt re-branded it to voat.

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

#309

Post by Starkus »

trianglem wrote: post #232
eric_cc wrote: post #147

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 mos…

r/the_donald has many many posts advocating for violence against certain groups in clear violation of policy. These posts would stay up for days or weeks. In my opinion quarantining them was basically a slap on the wrist.

That is mostly false to say. That sub gets bad actors all over it all the time. It is a controversial, political sub. There are many who have been working to remove it for years.

They should have never been censored, it was a politically inspired move, and a disgusting one to have made.

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

#310

Post by s1artibartfast »

dmix wrote: post #144
Cephalopterus wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 thi…

I think /r/PoliticalDiscussion is a great example of this. Up until 2016 there was a lot of active debate and ~50k subscribers. Now there are ~750k subscribers and only ~2 posts allowed per day. Must be exhausting for the mods.
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