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Reddit’s disrespectful design

ognjen.io

431–440 of 516 posts

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"dark patterns work" surprised pikachu face Did they think people use dark patterns for the fun of it...?

Yeah, it's a business, not a charity. People don't start businesses because it's cute and fun. Reddit needs to turn a profit or demonstrate ridiculous growth, and it seems to be working.

Straw man.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#433
post #108

It constantly amazes me how bad Reddit's interface is, videos either don't play or randomly start playing despite them not being in the viewport. They run random A|B experiments which add unnecessary components such as avatars next to peoples comments. Random acts of monetization are shoved down my throat at every turn. I honestly think the Reddit team are on a purpose built mission to design the most user hostile fo…

Seconded. The old.reddit.com UI is still pretty bad on mobile, but it's the only remotely usable one. The default mobile site goes out of its way to make it difficult to read the thread, while also confusingly merging other threads into the page.

The default mobile site feels like it's so over-engineered to the point of being broken, even typing a comment on iOS the keyboard makes a weird echo key sound as if multiple keypress events are firing with each press or it's somehow running so much code with each press its making the whole OS choke.

Utterly bizarre.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#434
post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 st…

Same here.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#436

I run into a problem on Reddit all the time with Chrome on Android: the videos won't load and just stay frozen or black. The only fix seems to be restarting Chrome. Do any hackers here know a permanent solution? Please don't say use another browser, I like Chrome :)

buy new phone

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#437
post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think reddit did a rather clever thing in keeping around old.reddit.com. So power users got mad but they had a fallback, meanwhile the default experience is SPA dark pattern hell

For desktop, sure. I've tried a few mobile apps but the UI was worse than the mobile site in my opinion. I can deal with the UI of their mobile site, but all of the UX issues that OP mentioned keeps me away from it, so I never browse reddit on mobile devices. I just noticed a few users below mentioning that i.reddit.com exists, which seems to be a similar UI to old.reddit, but for mobile. From the couple minutes I've…

I just put my phone browser on Desktop Mode and use old.reddit.com anyways. Then I pinch and zoom like a mad man.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#438
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'.

Yeah or “your comment got 5 upvotes”

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've been fairly clever having their cake and eating it too with old/new reddit UI. They're basically cultivating a whole new userbase that only knows the new UI, while still keeping the old userbase around. I can imagine that once the new one because large enough to be self-sustainable, they'll kill the old interface and the mass exodus won't fully kill reddit since they still have the other half who won't care.

It's a dangerous game they're playing. They don't create original content, so if someone clones or creates a site with the old user-friendly interface then the switch might flip on them as abruptly as it did for digg.

I hope so, I’ve come to seriously hate Reddit. I never used Facebook or Twitter as a replacement for the forums of the 2000s internet so it didn’t bother me as much that they were gamified and had low quality content. Reddit pivoting to a social media site breaks my heart and the fact that people who work there come to HN and say, “we don’t care what you or power users think because we have record engagement,” just infuriates me.

Reddit killed the old Internet forums but was a good replacement for them to an extent, and now they’ve destroyed and stopped trying to be that replacement leaving the internet with a serious lack of niche communities for discussion. I’ve tried putting together ideas for something that could fill that niche and not be susceptible to becoming overran with low quality meme content but I don’t really have the time to work on such a thing with the attention it deserves right now; and it isn’t a trivial problem to solve.

Re: Reddit’s disrespectful design

#440

To paraphrase Bjarne Stroustrup, there are two kinds of social network platforms, the ones people complain about and the ones no one uses. I bet you can go back 10 years and find Redditors bitching about the state of the site back then.

That's a false dichotomy though. There are popular platforms that no one bitches about the UX such as Twitter. Yes, I'm sure there are people complaining about some of the stuff (like having no edit feature etc) but I'm sure it's not remotely close to Reddit-level.
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