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Reddit’s disrespectful design

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Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#371

Post by Seattle3503 »

baby wrote: post #341
donmcronald wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always think that by building products that treat the consumer like an enemy to be conquered will eventually result in someone building a better product and stealing the market. It never happens though. I wonder if some of the tech like Cloudflare Workers will eventually allow someone to build competing products that crush the existing platforms. IMO it’s dangerous (business wise) to get addicted to revenue that co…

How are cloudflare workers relevant? The tech of reddit has always been pretty simple to replicate. I think the code was open sourced at some point? I remember creating a reddit-clone for France a long time ago but bringing users in didn’t work. It was not a tech problem.

This is an important point. It isn't the tech that makes reddit successful, it is the user base.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#372

Post by ozcanberkciftci »

cecilpl2 wrote: post #260

My solution for good reddit browsing: * Use the Reddit Enhancement Suite browser extension, and customize to your liking. * Set it to permanent old.reddit.com mode, so all reddit links immediately go there. * Only browse reddit on mobile using one of several third-party apps, like Relay (my preference), Boost, or Apollo. * Extensively tailor your subreddit selection to weed out the garbage. Most if not all of the def…

redreader is awesome as an android reddit client

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#373

Post by Seattle3503 »

nightski wrote: post #314
ItsMonkk wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a sucker born every minute. When I was 10 I bought Pokemon cards, which looking back on, was a huge waste of money, but at least it wasn't all that much money in the end. I was a newbie to the scene, and I got taken advantage of. Lesson learned. 10 years later when phones were just coming into everyone's pockets, a whole new wave of gamers emerged. Game companies could either develop for the previous wave, by…

Meh Reddit brings me a lot of value still. I enjoy it a lot. On the other hand I've never bothered with mobile games and have never paid for a microtransaction.

It was an analogy. You don't need to have played mobile games to see the connection OP is trying to make between "junk food" mobile games and "junk food" social media.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#374

Post by gunapologist99 »

rightbyte wrote: post #346
rd wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happens with any social media. The great Digg exodus happened, and Reddit boomed. Reddit’s content and community grew healthily, then Reddit blew up exponentially, and now the content and community have grown sure, but very unhealthily. Actually, unhealthily for what Reddit used to be (long form content and discussion), healthily for what it’s becoming (social media a la infinite scroll, chat, and notifications…

> notifications galore This is so annoying. The bell has a number on it and you think "Oh, somebody answered me or sent a DM" ... but no. Some post is trending on XY sub. I think Reddit doesn't realize how much they lose in the longterm from hollow 'engagement'.

ditto from Twitter. and then they ignore your "do not notify me about anything ever" setting. Now I never use Twitter anymore. The short-term boost is not worth the long-term loss of trust.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#375

Post by swiley »

throwaway284534 wrote: post #82

Does anyone else want to rant about Reddit’s AMP pages that show up on Google? Oh I could go on about it… The managers at Reddit, in their infinite wisdom, decided that the preferred experience of a Google user searching for content on reddit should redirected to their wonky app. And if they don’t have the app, they should be punished with modals upon modals. “Reddit looks better in the app!” Oh, you disagree? Well p…

I should write a thank you email to the guy who did the redesign, I know he's on HN somewhere. Nothing worked for my reddit addiction like that did.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#376

Post by swiftcoder »

> Reddit has lots of competent people. So, surely they have the data to back up their decisions. And the data must be saying that these changes are working.

Sadly this is not as much of a truism as one might expect. Even competent people tend to design experiments that are biased towards the desired results, and even competent people tend to interpret their experimental results in a favourable light. And even competent people get in a feedback loop where their metrics are chasing a local minima, and they don't have the political capital within the organisation to convince management to take a short-term hit to the metrics for a prospective global improvement in the future...

The ads team at Amazon who thinks the #1 performing ad strategy is to show you ads for the blender you just purchased - they have data too, after all.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#377

Post by sickmartian »

KrishnaShripad wrote: post #366

I just stay away from Reddit links as much as possible. The user experience is atrocious and I agree with everything the article says. There is another point that the article missed (or perhaps never encountered because the author primarily focuses on the mobile experience). In desktop Reddit posts are actually modal dialogs (don't believe me? Open a Reddit post in your desktop browser). I have this bad habit of clic…

> I have this bad habit of clicking my mouse on the whitespace of any web page I visit (I guess I am the only one).

That makes two of us. I agree but don't stay away, I use old.reddit w/reddit enhancement suite, doesn't fix incognito for me as I don't let addons run there, but using containers on firefox instead helps.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#378

Post by Tijdreiziger »

petepete wrote: post #22

The only way I can stomach using Reddit is via Reddit Sync. I firmly believe that soon Reddit will prevent third party clients from using their API. Perhaps there'll be a subscription service where paid accounts can still use it with their client of choice, or maybe they'll just kill the ecosystem in an attempt to get people on the official app. Either way, that's me done with it. The hostility makes it somewhere I'm…

The fact that their new features (RPAN and chat) aren't available via the API is telling enough in my eyes.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#379

Post by freebuju »

erhk wrote: post #304
ethbr0 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd phrase it as "Reddit, the product" is fine. "Reddit, the investors who bought the product" are in a difficult spot. And certainly haven't shown an overabundance of creativity in monetization approaches. Suffice to say, you probably don't deserve a "front page of the Internet" tagline if your first display is a redirect request to your app.

Owning reddit allows ypu to own public opinion through censorship,thats a pretty important bit of value and im sure tencent would agree

Hate to break it to ya but the court of public opinion is strongly held by other platforms, most notably Twitter.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#380

Post by tmh88j »

dorfsmay wrote: post #328
throwaway284534 wrote: post #82

Does anyone else want to rant about Reddit’s AMP pages that show up on Google? Oh I could go on about it… The managers at Reddit, in their infinite wisdom, decided that the preferred experience of a Google user searching for content on reddit should redirected to their wonky app. And if they don’t have the app, they should be punished with modals upon modals. “Reddit looks better in the app!” Oh, you disagree? Well p…

Have you tried https://old.reddit.com ?

The day old reddit dies is the day I stop using reddit entirely. The desktop version is every bit as awful as the mobile version. For some reason they seem to think that seeing a few more posts or comments on the screen at page load is too much information to process, but taking up 1/4 of my screen with some pictures or videos is a better use of the space. Everything is so obfuscated and difficult to find. I can't stand it.
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