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Ask HN: Why is Reddit so awful?

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Ask HN: Why is Reddit so awful?

#1
The website itself, not the content.

Although I'm just a casual user of Reddit, it's hard to avoid the fact that Reddit is absolute garbage. It seems to me as everything they've done in the past few years is to the detriment of users; especially with them following the trend of writing it all in a shiny SPA (that doesn't work half the time).

Apart from constant connection errors, lots of the time the site "forgets" I'm logged in, then all a sudden remembers, actively bombards users on mobile to install their app (even though the site could work fine on mobile, alas they are probably trying to crank their app install numbers up), uses dark patterns all over the place and is just generally unpleasant to use.

Thank goodness for old.reddit.com but I don't know what all of the users who have starting using the old subdomain are going to do when they eventually shut it off.

Really makes me wonder as a small time dev what's went wrong in Reddit the company to produce this absolute garbage site.

Just my 2c of course, and this was just a small list of the problems, I'm sure if you really wanted too you could spend all day listing them.

Interested to find out what others feel.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Reddit so awful?

#3
They stopped being open source, added far more telemetry, changed the gold system to incentivize purchases, changed the design to the new one (slower, far more js), etc.

Personally I stopped browsing reddit a few years ago. It used to be amazing.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Reddit so awful?

#6
Monetization without restraint. (Gold sub was one thing, the awards are just out of fucking control.)

Growth at the expense of usability.

Redesigning to appeal to Social Media/Web 2.5 types.

Hijacking the status quo to provide inadequate me-too integration. (Reddit self hosted images and video over Imgur and Youtube, for example)

Add that to the existing problems that Reddit has always had that were never addressed, such as the powermod system... and you basically have a toxic environment that caters to the lowest common denominator.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Reddit so awful?

#8
post #3

They stopped being open source, added far more telemetry, changed the gold system to incentivize purchases, changed the design to the new one (slower, far more js), etc. Personally I stopped browsing reddit a few years ago. It used to be amazing.

what do you use now? i find that there are almost no alternatives to niche communities.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Reddit so awful?

#9
Reddit used to have an absolutely flawless mobile browser experience, which after they launched the app they're slowly making worse and worse (now with UI elements missing seemingly only provided by API/app UI).

I understand that Reddit needed to monetize (e.g. ads, better engagement, etc) but a lot of these UI/design changes don't really seem aimed at that goal, they just seem like change for changes sake.

When old.reddit.com finally goes dark, I'm leaving. I highly doubt Reddit will notice or care, but I don't think I'll be alone and ultimately a lot of people who leave are the first-mover types that made Reddit popular to begin with.

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