Terrible UX, mostly useless answers (most replies to posts are either poorly sarcastic or not replying to the actual point). Before it wasn't like this. Did the Reddit board voluntarily or involuntarily cause this via technical decisions, or it's just unavoidable to get this degradation after the userbase grows too much?
Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit?
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Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit?
#2I’d argue the latter.
Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit?
#3I first started using Reddit around 2009 when I was in college and use it more today.
I browse old.reddit.com because I think that text feel is better.
I think it probably depends on your subreddit or area of interest? For my making hobbies I find it to be the best forum out there. Extremely good for my sports and television discussion as well.
Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit?
#4A bit of both. It's clear Reddit hasn't made the best technical decisions via the redesign, and the constant drive to get people to use the app has likely driven away some veteran users.
But it's also because Reddit is growing more and more popular, and eventually the demographics will to match the population as a whole rather than a self selecting, more dedicated sample of it. Hence ypu get the same idiocy as in other situations and on other large social media services.
Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit?
#5It's hard to generalize about Reddit because each subreddit is kind of its own world. If you want good discussion, go to where the good discussion is. What is terrible about the UX? Are you not using old.reddit.com?
If you're judging by /r/all, sure, it's not much better than YouTube comments. As much as I hate this word, it's mostly "normies" with "normie" views. The cream rarely rises to the top, except on humor threads.
But other than that, I don't think Reddit has changed too much for the worse in the 14 or so years since I've used it. The demographic has gotten more mainstream, and arguably dumber, but that's just a microcosm of the Internet. It's still better on Reddit than many other places.
Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit?
#6There was a thread the other day about how every community is bound to lose its identity once it gets big enough, and it likely can be applied to this. Once Reddit caught the attention of the advertising world to the point where people with high karma were being asked to sell their accounts, the entire platform devolved into people reposting each other's content to farm karma.
In the last couple of months people have even been spotting "organized bot groups" that not only repost old popular content, but also immediately populate said reposts with the popular comments of the previous thread.
Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit?
#7This is subjective, no? I have no clue which subreddits you frequent. I work in IT and as such follow a bunch of related subs. Those subs are perfectly fine if not helpful in a lot of cases. It depends on what you're consuming like..most things.
Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit?
#8It's hard to generalize about Reddit because each subreddit is kind of its own world. If you want good discussion, go to where the good discussion is. What is terrible about the UX? Are you not using old.reddit.com? If you're judging by /r/all, sure, it's not much better than YouTube comments. As much as I hate this word, it's mostly "normies" with "normie" views. The cream rarely rises to the top, except on humor th…
The UI of the site itself certainly has went down a lot, in favor of ‘engagement’ tricks like ‘this image hasn’t been approved, use the app to look at it’
Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit?
#9The leaders, managers, engineers need to do something to justify their promotions. They are growing because the internet is centralizing. It's succeeding despite all the bad user decisions being made, but at some point it will catch up with them.
Reminds me of Meg Whitman running ebay into the ground while collecting billions and eventually getting wrecked by Amazon. They're still around but a shell of their former relevance.
Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit?
#10It's hard to generalize about Reddit because each subreddit is kind of its own world. If you want good discussion, go to where the good discussion is. What is terrible about the UX? Are you not using old.reddit.com? If you're judging by /r/all, sure, it's not much better than YouTube comments. As much as I hate this word, it's mostly "normies" with "normie" views. The cream rarely rises to the top, except on humor th…
/r/all is heavily manipulated and it's quite obvious a small cadre of power users and power mods are responsible for the content and character of what gets shown. I would not be surprised at all if there is dark money behind all of this, especially considering the political nature of it all.