Hmm, I just checked myself, and I was able to read comment threads perfectly fine without being logged in, on both a desktop computer and a smartphone.
Obviously old.reddit.com doesn't have these issues, but I'm pretty sure the session on smartphone used the new site, and that let me keep reading without any interruptions too.
Either way, if Reddit does this, that's it. Not returning to the site. The internet doesn't need all these walled gardens, and it's worrying how this is going to affect how info is preserved for future generations.
Unfortunately the way things are going I can see them getting rid of old.reddit.com and i.reddit.com, at which point I think I'll also stop visiting the website (the mobile website is atrocious and I'm not going to install a dedicated app in order to read a forum).
That will be sad day. If old.reddit.com goes, so do I.
I use Reddit mainly on phone, via browser because I use tabs and old.reddit.com because its the most content dense view and and is the fastest view (no stupid js loading icon thankyou). I'm not there, like I'm not here, for the design. I'm visiting for the content.
Reddit.com front page takes about three seconds to load with stupid blocking js, old takes about second before I can start consuming. Apps are no better.
"And my axe", as PTG used to say. The redesign did nothing positive and the site has less and less interesting content every day. They say the action is in the subs, but I still can't find a decent way to discover which ones are worthwhile. I find I'm just hanging on to the few I settled on years ago, and as my interest wanes, I visit less frequently. The day they pull old.reddit.com, I won't bother with the site at all.
> They say the action is in the subs, but I still can't find a decent way to discover which ones are worthwhile. I find I'm just hanging on to the few I settled on years ago, and as my interest wanes, I visit less frequently.
I believe this is everyone's experience, even some admins'.
Heh, like I stopped visiting Slashdot after the new website was implemented. And it wasn't even like I was especially annoyed at the new interface, I just gradually used it less and less until completely stopping...
>Unfortunately the way things are going I can see them getting rid of old.reddit.com
Well, if they do I'm out. The new is, and always has been, a steaming pile. I mean, people can't even confidently reply to who they think they are and often reply to the OP instead of a comment (I see this every single day in multiple threads) and as a mod I absolutely hate the way new Reddit is set up on the mod side.
New Reddit is also just flat out hideous in appearance. One of the reasons I've paid for Reddit for years is so I could strip custom themes to keep a plain experience not unlike HN. New Reddit is like 'Hey guys!!!!!! We discovered pastels, omg omg omg do you want to see pictures because here are a bunch of pictures loaded rather large that you didn't ask to see, pictures, yay pictures, omg omg pictures!"
The thing about leaving is that I don't know where I would go. As much as I much preferred the way Usenet clients worked the weak moderation made it untenable. Most of the competing sites are overrun with the neo-nazis that were kicked out of Reddit or topics are limited to whatever the news story of the day is. The ability to create long term communities around extremely niche topics is the strength of Reddit. Despite its slogan about being the front page of the Internet, Reddit's front page is almost completely worthless, and the people who chase after the front page are a detriment to the site.
Similar, 65k, but still hanging on. I mod a couple small subs.
My observation is the worst aspect of monetization is on the communities themselves. For the first half, say, it was standard spectrum: some trolls and schmucks but for the most part regular folks with something to say. April Fools projects from the admins wowed us year after year at the creativity and cordiality.
Then came the ads and the apps, no picnic but down in the subs was a new problem: site policy. At some point, subs and posts were getting yanked or even altered by admins. Censorship, astroturfing, shilling, kowtowing to foreign investors, the whole political manipulation thing: you couldn't trust anybody's motivations anymore in a conversation. Most lately, the standard disney/youtube-ification has started.
There are some things on Reddit that I thankfully rarely experience, but that drive me absolutely mad when I do : automatic thread locking after some time and shadow bans.
Both of these violate netiquette!
As a reminder, proper netiquette is to necropost instead of creating a duplicate thread.
And shadow banning is not a tool that most moderators should even have, and should only be used against the most horrible trolls!
I'm not sure I agree about necroposting. I find it tends to increase the noise level more than simply creating a new thread about the topic in some cases, as people see a post with tons of comments and don't realize that many of those comments are out of date and no longer accurate/relevant.
There's obviously a line to draw somewhere. You don't want 50 posts on the same topic clogging the top of the feed, but zombie threads where the first 90% is out of date or irrelevant are also bad. Locking a thread after it has been idle for a week or two seems like a reasonable compromise to me.
And completely unreasonable to me. Even on reddit the cutoff is... 6 months ?
People not realizing that it's a necropost is either a failure of the poster not declaring it as such, or of the forum software - see how Discourse auto-highlights necroposting !
How is a poster supposed to go back to the 5 year old thread starting comment and change it to note that the post is out of date?
Good forum software makes it less of a sin, but that's pretty rare on the Internet. This isn't the Usenet where people's clients could be fully featured on every topic.
Usenet would have it worse, because there you can choose your software yourself (and pick one without that feature)?
BTW, I prefer decentralized protocols like Usenet, there are plenty of features that would be unthinkable to leave out of "modern" clients, this could be one of them !
And I remember what brought me there. Was people spamming about it on slashdot and digg. I have the decss controversy to thank for bringing me to a place that didnt censor a number just cuz it might be illegal in some states. I had heard of it before and checked it when it was linked to, but that was the first time I gave it a chance as my go to page when first logging onto the internet. Reddit has long been replaced as that "first page of the day."
For a while I actually switched to facebook lists, but then facebook got hostile towards allowing people to sort their follows into categories. That one I really cant understand, because it made facebook infinitely more pleasant to use.
Please forgive my pedantry, but I just wanted to note that you’re referring to the AACS (used for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray) decryption key censored on Digg. The DeCSS stuff with Jon Lech Johansen was five years earlier than that. Cheers :)
I’ve been an active member of various communities and forums over the years (excluding reddit), and I never actively left one. It was always just a realization I hadn’t been to the site (or really aging myself, BBS) in a year. Most of them where daily habits at one point.
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.
There is a market for this, and I believe at some point a site like this will probably replace Reddit... but it can't be started on that basis. It'll have to be set up independently of Reddit, grow organically with its own community, then get successful enough that people move over when there's already an established userbase.
That's how communities get big without becoming cesspools or going over the top on the moderation. See recent examples of Discord and Twitch, which started out targeted to gamers, and have gone mainstream from there.
I think if anything, Discord will get a lot of what Reddit had in certain communities. Particularly anything around hobbies. It's a shame because things in discord get lost the moment after they happen, but I can find years old reddit posts about something I'm newly interested in.
I agree with you. The move towards platforms like Slack and Discord where you need to be logged in to see anything at all is a terrible one, and it basically kills discoverability stone dead. Also gonna make for an interesting future for Google if it becomes the norm, since it's also unusable in their search engine.
Alas, it definitely seems to be the direction these services are going in, and (at least in my opinion), seems to be on the verge of outright replacing Reddit for communities about games and media related topics.
Any "Reddit alternative" will have a hard time gathering users as long as Reddit exists (and doesn't alienate a critical mass of their users ala Digg). Dan Olson of the YouTube channel Folding Ideas made a very insightful video about the problem of setting up "alternatives" to popular social media platforms (having lived through several painful platform transitions himself): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3snVCRo_bI
The tl;dw is that if your "alternative" platform doesn't launch with unique and valuable features of its own to attract users away from the original platform then you will only attract toxic people who get kicked off the original platform as the first users of your "alternative" platform (because they are the only ones really in need of an "alternative"). This creates a self-reinforcing pattern where non-toxic users are repulsed from your alternative platform by the toxic users so growth only comes from more toxic users. You can clearly see this in the dynamic between Reddit and Voat.
Isn't that, in itself, a unique and valuable feature? An established player that becomes highly censorious creates the market for a newcomer offering an explicitly free-speech-oriented alternative. I personally value that very highly.
I'd remind you too that a lot of people - including myself - don't see this "toxic" dynamic the way you apparently do. Our stomachs might turn at the sight of much of what is on reddit nowadays just as yours might when you see the front page of Voat.
Maybe userbases are generally dividing as we seek providers with which we are more politically aligned, with decreasing focus on the bells and whistles they have on offer. That's their value.
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!)
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.
Thanks! Wow, Cake looks terrible. I wish someone would just fork reddit and stop trying to make it look cute. Dense text may not be beautiful from afar but it looks so much better from a user's perspective than acres of whitespace and endless scrolling.
edit: just checking out your project. Looks more like what I'm talking about!
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.
I use tildes now, although it’s still growing I like the community so far. Small site, very open to feedback, open source and (most importantly) it’s non-profit.
>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.
> I don't understand your hesitancy in using these enhancements to enrich your user experience.
Not your parent, but I know of no mobile app that allows me certain enhancements that are simply standard on my (mobile) web browser: tabs, ad-blocking, & accessibility.
Tabs: because I multi-task, and I compartmentalise my reading. If all I have is an app, then the app either needs to re-invent tabs within it (none I've found so far) or I am forced to have at-most one post/thread I could be reading. The latter is particularly bad. Extra bad when it happens automatically: say I pause reading a post, go to a different app/website, and click on a reddit link there.
Add Firefox's Containers to the mix and the 'Tabs!' benefit becomes even better.
Ad-blocking: Need I say more? Well, more than blocking ads, the general ability to block annoying (highly so in the case of reddit) elements of a page using uBlock Origin or uMatrix. RES doesn't yet work on the mobile web (likely due to the lack of popularity of mobile browsers that _do_ support add-ons), but if it did, I absolutely would use it.
Accessibility: I can print, copy, link to, search in, or have read aloud any page or part of any page on the web. I haven't yet seen a Ctrl+F equivalent in a reddit app, but my mobile browser has Find In Page.
"reddit is fun" for android has few ads (text only, obvious difference from content) and has an easy way to copy, share, find in page, find on site, etc. And if you have a reddit account, you can save pages ala HN to quickly go back. Not as good as tabs, I get it. RIF is of the few apps I have for content.
This is compared to the Washington Post mobile app, which is essentially a wrapper around the mobile site that prevents copying text, has annoying ads despite being a subscriber, and has no redeeming functionality.
Reddit barely has traditional ads to block. You don’t see them on any mobile client I’ve ever used. The native ads vastly vastly outnumber them anyway, and the only way to get away from those is to leave the entire site.
There is absolutely no reason the website shouldn't also be clean. The only reason not to have a good website sure is to lure people to use the app. It's a shady tactic that many companies use because people like you will just download the app, no questions asked.
>and I'm not going to install a dedicated app in order to read a forum
Even if it's infinitely better? I have been using the 'reddit is fun' app for years, and it's the best experience by far. I hate even using my computer to browse reddit to be honest, I would rather sit and be comfortable with a phone. Can't say that about most sites.
On the opposite end, I hate browsing hackernews on my phone so I almost never do. I can't click anything because it's so small. So I just end up using it on the desktop, which is fine I guess.. but it limits my interaction with this site.
For mobile, I've been using an open source app(RedReader). It's not actively developed anymore, so new "features" like silver and platinum, etc, are left out. I think the last big feature that was added was v.redd.it with sound. If Reddit ever locks down their APIs so third party apps don't work, I'll probably be done.
It's ridiculous how much better old.reddit.com is for a casual reader like me. The way thread hiding works by default, "See Entire Discussion" etc, everything is designed to provoke clicks and actions instead of reading the actual discussion.
I recently browsed reddit after years of abstinence.
The “view discussion” and “view more comments” buttons are just utter, utter shite. It is near impossible to read all of the comments.
It’s clearly designed to satisfy KPIs other than actually reading a post. More like superficially bouncing from one post to the next, dropping an upboat and off you go.
I sincerely hope all these sign in-only forums with great SEO like Quora and Reddit suffocate on their own rot.
> It’s clearly designed to satisfy KPIs other than actually reading a post
I thought / heard from someone that the View more comments button is a technical solution for preventing overfetching or excessively deep queries. Never crossed my mind for a second to connect it to KPIs.
But then I’d expect a “load more” button to expand a new level, and fetch those comments, leaving the rest in tact. Not to go to a new page and only show a subset of the comments yo want to load and hide the comments it displayed just a click away.
Instead the new page is rather short and has a completely different post at the bottom. It’s all about engagement. And more ads. But I hide em, so no idea where these are.
I've been experiencing it either way on my phone this week. As I'm quite judicious about using "private" sessions for everything I suspect its been under a/b test.
Yeah, this feature being part of an A/B test makes sense.
Hopefully the results of said test show enough of a drop in traffic/conversions for the variation with the 'login requirement' that they drop the idea altogether.
There doesn't seem to be any downside to old/ud - it retains users that would otherwise leave whilst being enough of a pain that those who the wouldn't leave just login.
I have personally been extremely bothered by the masked threads for a while now as I often browse reddit unlogged. So I can attest it is real and awful :/
Reddit is, in the short term, driving more external users towards creating user accounts while in the long term removing one of the major value funnels for why they would (i.e. the quality of comments, particularly in certain niche communities/about niche topics).
This will give them a short term "bump" at the cost of the site's long term relevance (as it falls down Google's search results rankings, due to loss of clicks as people stop looking to Reddit as a source of info). Most of the recent moves on Reddit are like this, it feels like the entire site is being turned into a pump and dump scheme.
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.
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 first place, but you can't fight the platform :(
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 embed or via the API. Last year, they removed that option.
It's frustrating that they claim to be explicitly trying to promote educational content, but then they degrade the experience for educational viewers, regardless of the preference of the viewer or creator.
YES. Video recommendations covering the screen while I pause to try and read something. Is it really that niche of a use case that the user is pausing the video to better view something in said video?! How many more places do we need to shove recommendation systems down the users throat.
It makes sense if you consider the possibility that through the anonymity of analytics YT is optimizing it’s website to keep children glued to tablets/smartphones. When a user pauses, show them something else to watch, they might be bored and about to start playing roblox. Also, if they switch videos it gives you more views to give to your creators, and you can lead the next vid with an ad. Need to get more ads to those impressionable little eyes!
It's not mere possibility, it's reality. The service's incentives do not align with the users', they are pursuing engagement as opposed to utility. It is actually counterproductive to YouTube's bottom line for the content to be deep and meaningful, they make more money when it's fleeting and superficial. This is the natural outcome of the attention economy.
Ugh it makes me so sad to see glassy-eyed toddlers glued to their tablets. This has to have some kind of long term cognitive impact on their attention spans. We're basically doing an experiment on an entire generation by turning them into dopamine addicts with the attention span of a goldfish. I know my attention span and ability to focus has absolutely tanked in the last decade because of the modern internet.
I'm not sure if it's YT or the channel creators, but I've noticed a lot videos are popping up the 'Also check out these videos' thing at the end of their videos (as an overlay, not part of the video), and it covers up the actual video content with no way to hide/remove it.
I get more and more frustrated by YouTube's monetization attempts every day. Educational and other serious content creators need to start moving to more quality-focused platforms like Vimeo (which unfortunately isn't free, but at least it doesn't have ads!). Leave YouTube for the teenage influencers and inane children's content.
> A lot of times they're hitting pause because they want to read what I'm typing in the terminal.
In the DOS days the Pause button on your keyboard would actually stop the text being scrolled (if you had a multi-page output). I wonder if Windows (or well any desktop OS) can have a feature where that button would freeze frame the display.
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.
mpv can stream directly from youtube (and tons of other websites) using youtube-dl. Combine that with a browser plugin to play a link or the curent page in mpv. Infinitely better experience than watching in the browser.
YouTube is definitely doing this. If you watch a video without being signed in, it now displays a popover (over the video) that says "You're signed out of YouTube. Sign in to like videos, comment, and subscribe. [GOT IT]"
That's playing with fire. If/when Google figures out what you're doing, they'll nuke your entire Google presence- YouTube, Gmail, everything- with no recourse.
About $90ish after some cursory searching. I wouldn't do it, though, seems like a great way to get a nasty surprise in the future when the bots get terminated.
The sad part about the sub requirement is that many forms of content are valuable but not sub-worthy.
If you create a video on how to fix a ‘93 Hyundai’s brakes and next week how to fix your vintage garage door, I’m not going to sub. It’s not « feedable » content
Maybe I would if it was entertaining in a time-wasting way, but that shouldn’t be a requirement.
ChrisFix isn’t going to make a brake-change video for every car out there.
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 this constant tension between users and what gets allowed to be 'frontpaged' or commented about.
I know people can create spin-off subs but when it starts happening everywhere it becomes a serious problem.
I still am very upset about /r/politics becoming super partisan. Reddit as a whole has always had biases, but there was a time when /r/politics was fairly centrist and genuinely useful as an aggregator with intelligent commentary. It's now a reposting of vox/buzzfeed more or less.
I don't remember this time at all. But I've never found much value in the big subreddits because of the incentives to game them for karma and traffic. The most interesting communities have always seemed like the small ones since there are more people interested in a conversation vs. a popularity contest.
agreed. I have voted Democrat for a long time, but I can't stand how partisan it's become. The comments are always so low-effort too. The top voted comment in almost any thread will be something like, "fuck trump".
Some people mistake catharsis for activism. It burns a lot of energy while not leading to any progress, or even to building a foundation for making progress.
It almost gives me an uncanny valley feeling. There's a certain pattern to every comments thread that makes me feel like I'm watching a 'conversation' between lazy teenagers, vote-manipulation bots and a handful of (paid?) adult political activists. (I know that sounds paranoid, but fwiw if I were an American I would vote Democrat, and if you applied a hundred randomly-chosen negative adjectives to Trump I would strongly agree with most of them. So this isn't a shocked reaction to seeing an echo chamber populated by the wrong team.)
I wouldn't necessarily mind it being partisan, if not for the extremely low quality commenting standard. I'm sure there's a causal link: most of us are less likely to call out bullshit from our own team, and when there's nobody to call you out on your bullshit (so long as it's directed at the correct targets), it's tempting to go ever cheaper and ever dumber in search of easy approval. But it would at least be possible to have a forum where people had a lot of opinions in common, but still cared about truth and intellectual integrity and basic logic.
> 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
While hyper active moderation and power mods pushing their agendas on Reddit is a major issue, a fair amount of moderation is key to maintaining the quality of content. r/MurderedByWords is an example when the mods bend a bit too backwards in allowing content, it delved from legitimate smackdowns to childish name calling on Twitter. The sub's a disgrace lately.
Striking that balance is important, forcing your own views of what the sub should be will antogonize people but at the same time maintaining a bare minimum is also important. Even more so for subs that regularly hit r/all and r/popular. A lot of niche subs hit r/all with a thread or two causing a massive influx of users and the rules are relaxed to accommodate the lowest common denominator. The end result of doing that is usually the older regular content creators lose interest and leave the community.
The moderators are just users though, oftentimes ones who just got there first. If you don't like the vision for any given subreddit you can create your own with more lax moderation. There's plenty of stories where subs split off because of moderation differences and ended up becoming bigger than their parent. See /r/gameofthrones vs /r/freefolk for an example.
Personally I find that the more strictly a subreddit is moderated, the better it tends to be.
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.
Just want to say I cannot agree with these sentiments more.
Google turned a seemingly benign industry into something people now regularly refer to as "weaponized" messaging.
The pen is mightier than the sword. The spoken word is mightier than both. We need to relearn how to talk to one another instead of relying on what used to be a useful heuristic shortcut in our day to day life.
We got drunk on the convenience of industry automating massaging before we even realized tech would lead to automation could scale at such exponential rates.
Our linear thinking in 3d space time is not able to keep up with all the degrees of separation in play anymore.
Marketing is a joke and everyone knows it. This is the real industry that is "too big to fail". And that they pinned it on the penultimate boogey man (aka money) is just more fuel to that fire.
It's possible to migrate software without driving off all your users. It's soft, after all. When the 8-bit wave crested, that didn't mean Apple was done as a company.
Why do we accept that such a short-lived company (less than one human generation) is "a good run", just because it's software? If Tesla turned into a "classic pump and dump scheme", nobody would say "Well, Tesla is 16 years old. They've had a good run."
It makes sense to think of Reddit as an application rather than a company. Reddit the application depends on network effects to grow, and without growth, decay will be inevitable. Facebook the company has been able to create other applications that grow, even while Facebook the application is starting a network effect-triggered death spiral. Reddit Inc. has not created any other growth applications like the Reddit app, so will die.
> It makes sense to think of Reddit as an application rather than a company.
Saying something makes sense doesn't make it make sense. Reddit is not just an application. Reddit is millions of like-minded users exchanging thoughts on a wide variety of subjects. The software or application may affect how those users interact with the other users, but it is the users at the end of the day that define what Reddit (or this site) is.
This ignores astroturfing, abusive mods, user hostile tactics (forcing v.reddit on users and disallowing converting it to gifs - even banning a bot that did it at the website level), and a lot of other serious systemic problems with reddit's "community."
Reddit was once a community, but now it's an attempt to monetize its users - nothing more, nothing less. It's clearly already dying to anybody that isn't inside the echo chamber. It moved away from value creation years ago and is clearly in the death grip of value extraction.
I suspect it actually has a lot to do with their latest investment round 5 years ago, but this is purely speculation on my part.
Perpetual growth is good only in a business sense. Social software has an optimal amount of users. Too few and there isn't enough signal, too many and there's too much noise. Both make people lose interest and leave.
Without researching traffic stats over time, what gives you the impression that reddit is dying? I'm under the impression it's only become bigger and bigger over the years. It's one of the top sites on the internet.
Also,for me, it's still a great social media site that lets me talk anonymously about almost anything.
The beauty of reddit is that serious decline and toxicity only seems to happen within subs. If a sub becomes really bad, you just move on to other subs that are less toxic. Still plenty of great subcommunities there.
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 it was everything I needed so I was fine with it.
But I'm mainly a mobile user so I don't really care.
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.
old.reddit.com, my account is even set up to redirect me to it automatically.
It still wasn't enough to make me stick around. The popups on my phone to use the app on every page load are infuriating. Especially when I use Firefox on my phone, and it tells me to "Continue with Safari." I guess because Google started doing that bullshit on their apps, it's okay for everybody else to copy it.
My presumption is the choice of name ("old.reddit.com") says something about the permanence of the original design (I'd feel better about "classic" or similar)
Echoing this, even just a year or so ago, I'd follow five or six different subreddits and check in on them multiple times a day.
In the past few months, I've found that I only check "Today I Learned", and even that only once every day or so.
I find the discussion here to be much more mature and insightful than any of the tech related subreddits. I had written it off as reddit being a young-persons domain and me getting old, but it could just be that reddit is losing it's edge.
It sounds like you're talking about "channel" subreddits, the ones that just form as arbitrary sets of people gather to—however ephemerally—discuss a topic, without ever really self-identifying as "members" of that place.
I find that the best subreddits are the other kind: real communities with members identifying as "member of community X", not focused on or created "out of" the Reddit community itself, but rather bringing in people from the outside because "the X community" happens to use a subreddit to communicate, rather than using Slack/Discord/Telegram/etc.
In other words, Reddit is IMHO at its best when it's serving as a (shared-infrastructure, shared-registration, shared-administration) host for otherwise-independent forums.
Reddit succeeded at being the thing that e.g. Discourse.org was trying to be—a cloud host for forums—by getting the most attention and virality, by taking advantage of the network effects that come from integrating those forums into one larger meta-forum structure. But that meta-forum, and the random "by Redditors, for Redditors" forums that shoot up out of it, aren't the real value-prop. The individual forums hosted for their own communities' sakes are. The meta-forum is just there so that people are aware that Reddit exists when they're thinking about which cloud forum host to use.
Those independent third-party forums are healthy self-contained communities, because they're planned—they were probably started by a PR effort of a company or nonprofit org, and probably have real, paid "community managers" assigned to moderate them.
Reddit's own random-offshoot forums have none of these advantages. They're just people who wandered into an empty space, sat down, and started talking. Of course they don't have functional moderation. They're cliques!
Next time you're looking at a subreddit, ask yourself: does this subreddit have a website? And could it be said that the website "owns the subreddit" rather than the other way around? If so, then great: it's an independent community that happens to use Reddit to host a forum. If not, maybe don't even bother. (I'd love to see a list of the top subreddits that are left when you apply this filter.)
Yes, but they don't _need_ to do this to stay afloat and relevant. How's their ad revenue? They could keep the stupid app, keep the dumb messages trying to convince me to switch to the app, and I'd still use it. But this is just a slap in the face to the average user.
Does anyone give Discord as a serious answer to that question? I'm really struggling to figure out how a glorified IRC replacement is going to fill the same niche as Reddit.
Hopefully people don't say snapchat/instagram. Ugh I hate those. I hate the suggestion that we can't have proper social websites anymore because people only want to share pictures from their phones lol.
Are they going to get away with keeping all of their google volume by cloaking the google bot and hiding the content from everyone else? Comments make up the vast majority of Reddit’s unique content. I would guess on a word basis it’s over 99%?
That wouldn't help. A significant metric Google uses for ranking is relevance, meaning number of historic clicks for a given search term.
As users learn that Reddit links aren't useful sources of information, they'll click less, which means the relevance between the search term and Reddit goes down. Ultimately reducing Reddit's ranking, regardless of if the Googlebot is allowed to index the content.
People often mix up indexing and ranking. Indexing is if you're even in the results set, but ranking is where. Reddit might, technically, still be in the results set but if it isn't on page 1 for a given search it may have well not be.
lol, reminds me of the image search I did last week to find some earrings for my mom. "celestial earrings threader -amazon -etsy -pinterest -aliexpress -alibaba -dhgate"
The internet is becoming a friggin pain in the ass.
Reminds me of eBay, and how I try to find parts and accessories specific for my old car. I used to be able to just type in the make, model, and year, and BAM, I had tons of results. But eBay has allowed peddlers of low-quality, generic junk to spam their listings. Now I have to search "1981 Honda Accord -fits -turbo -generictrash -etc" and filter out every single part that comes up 1000 times that isn't actually even designed for my car. They just call it a "generic" part and list that it fits every car. I used to search eBay regularly, and now I hardly go on there anymore because I can't find anything.
It isn't a great analogy. Pinterest still provides the content people were after on Image Search (the image). The only thing you cannot do is click it and see related images.
A better analogy might be Expert Exchange. A site that put answers behind a paywall, and fell hard out of Google's search results. Then Stackoverflow came along and took whatever remained.
Google will figure the higher bounce rate of the page (the user quickly went back to the SERP) means it's not as relevant as they thought, so they'll move it down in the search rankings.
Maybe it's not an issue for everyone? Maybe the bounce rates on average aren't that bad and some people are spending lots of time there? It's possible, but I agree they aren't very user-friendly in search results for someone who doesn't have an account. I also avoid them.
I wish Reddit had gone the way of VLC -- keep your core product, the thing people liked, and stop chasing profits. Why do so many of these companies fall to the profit motive and lose their "soul"?
This is why we need to making something like a digital commons co-op, maybe Mozilla, maybe Wikipedia Foundation or maybe Archive but Reddit has replaced usenet, and we need a site run for the people.
Since the web is based around single domains, the source runs behind those domains, this balkanizes what we see and who runs it, creating a winner take all dynamic. Unknowingly, the structure of the web makes it ideal to supplant public protocols for private walled gardens. Sure you can use a "standard" client to connect, but you are relying on the good of the owner, who can _pivot_ at any time.
Right? It's almost as if they have expenses to pay for. They provide value and they're entitled to earn a profit off of it. As a small business owner myself, I'm surprised by the amount of people who expect everything to be free.
reddit was once a small business in 2016 that turned plenty profit. Then someone got it into their head to turn it into a VC company, quintupled the headcount, took $150M investment from China, you know how it goes.
So now you have a whole bunch of people doing a reenactment of Silicon Valley, only the actual site experience for users has basically not changed since 10 years now (except
"corporate innovations" like nagging you to install their app so people playing startup have their hockeystick curve).
It's a common phenomena. Look to Strava or Patreon, perfectly successful businesses that are instead exploding headcount and spending like a cancer, while never actually changing the core experience (except for worse).
God, this one baffles me. I feel like you could write that website and app with 5-10 skilled employees and a handful more for support and administrative overhead, skim your 10% of a good chunk of all Internet microtransactions, and retire early. Then they go and nuke all their goodwill trying to milk every cent they can out of the process[1]. What the fuck? Just make a product people want to use and charge a fair price for it; payment processing with a small blog platform is not rocket science. No part of this requires 60 million dollars and 100+ employees[2].
You're underestimating the abuse, moderation, support, and fraud burden that results from doing so much sheer volume. So that's a lot of support people right there, and those support people will need a fair number of engineers writing the tools they use to do their job.
YEP. Every site that allows user-generated content has to deal with people who want to make stuff near, or past, the boundaries of what is legal and/or moral. If you move money around then you have to start worrying about people scamming each other, using you as a tax dodge or a laundry, and you have a whole bunch of fun new regulations to comply with regarding that sort of stuff as well.
The typical Silicon Valley Disruptor approach is to just wave away all responsibility except the absolute minimum the law compels you to do.
Unfortunately this suffers from the 'Effective Target Audience: Assholes' effect.
It's basically impossible to start a YT or Patreon or Twitter alternative without either accidentally or actively pandering to people who have been kicked out of the main competitor, which mostly happen to be neonazis and/or fascists.
As such, most alternatives will immediately have their main pages full of hate speech and nazi propaganda. Even if there is a part of the user base that just wants an alternative to the Big Thing for other reasons, it quickly gets taken over and drowned out. Finally, after some time, the site just gets labeled as 'The Nazi {Patreon, Twitter, ..}' and every member becomes guilty by association, the community is just pure fash, and sometimes even gets dropped by advertisers/payment processors after public outcry.
See: voat (full of hate speech, basically a shelter for all banned reddit communities), gab (actively pandering to alt-right), subscribestar (paypal dropped them after public outrage), ...
I think the only 'alternative' I've seen not evolve into this is Mastodon, and that's probably because of how openly anti-fascist the first adopters (and developers) were, and because they didn't need to turn any profit.
I wonder if the same company could silo content to address this effect. Essentially have the same staff support multiple sites with identical backends. One which is child friendly, one racists, one for porn, ect. If creators get flagged too much, they just get bumped to a different silo, but you still take their money.
You can already do subscription products, but it's not quite enough to replace Patreon. That's about all I need to start nudging my handful of patrons over.
I tried one, called GameWisp, when a creator I support moved over there, but they skipped the "skilled employee" part. My subscription start date was rendered in their web app as "(null)", which doesn't inspire confidence in a payment processor. The creator shortly moved back to Patreon. Sigh.
The problem with this change is not that Reddit has costs that they are trying to recoup. The problem for me is that much of the user-generated quality content that Reddit is trying to monetize was created, by users, under certain assumptions. Then those assumptions were changed for a short-term monetization gain.
If they initially said that they will be requiring sing-in to read comments, push app over browser, etc. it would be just fine (but then I suspect they would not have any quality content to monetize). Just my 2c.
The problem isn't making profit. The problem is when they see profit, and get greedy and want more and more and more and then become delusional about the "value" provided. Then all these people come out of the woodwork who are only looking to make money and don't care about the rest of it, and it starts going down hill. We're not expecting it to be free, just somewhat reasonable. And you know what? When it becomes unreasonable we quit going and it dies. So maybe they should listen to us a little bit.
Nah, on place like reddit you can easily cover costs by ads. Almost nothing is really free online these days. But greed is never too far away and who doesn't want to have latest yacht, mcmansion etc.
They could have followed the Craig's List model of monetizing just enough to cover all the costs and keep the site running, without overly focusing on revenue growth sacrificing what made the site great in the first place.
I admit this source isn't very reliable, but craigslist does more than just "get by," in fact if you're comparing it to any company besides FAANG it is extremely successful. It does so well the investors didn't even push for an IPO, they happily accept dividends.
Sure, if your only goal is dollars and cents. People should have more, and better, goals than /just/ money. This obsession with only turning a buck is why we can’t have nice things that last.
Let me rephrase it then, if my company made $0 profit, I would be unable to afford my mortgage/bills/insurance, and would have to get a job, taking me away from my company.
That's not entirely true? I mean unless you're not paying yourself then absolutely I agree with you. But we're making it sound like these companies "reddit" back in the day wasn't turning a profit to pay for the mortgage/bills/insurance or hosting. They were it just wasn't to the extent were investors and the owners could buy private jets and mansions. Not sure if that's a bad thing or a good thing but I do believe they were living well off.
It's a for-profit company. Chasing profits is the entire point. If that wasn't the point then they would have an alternative organizational structure and enjoy the various tax benefits that come with it, like VLC does.
The pursuit of profit is not an absolute, though. If you choose a route to profit that ends with the company getting sued out of existence, then you didn't really do a good job. Judiciousness is implicit, by necessity, in the goal; the argument then comes down to what the best sustainable route to profit is.
Unfortunately, VLC is developed by VideoLAN, a non-profit organization whereas Reddit is a for profit company which by definition they will chase for profits.
Quora is arguably worse, it actively incentivized people to post inane and unproductive questions reducing the overall quantity of the content. Language topics are littered which questions such as "What is the colour red in the language X" while topics like Math has stuff like "What is 1+1". I wish I was kidding about that last one, it's an actual question on Quora with 1,078 answers as of this comment. It's insane
Oh yeah, I remember browsing it back in the day. A friend touted it as some platform where your questions get answered by experts in that particular field. For a time it was cool - had NASA astronauts, computer scientists, famous politicians. But later it got filled with random no names and their sob stories, motivational self-help nonsense and just embellished factoids from history. It turned into a glorified r/askreddit
This is just the next logical step in transforming reddit into some sort of not-racist 9gag. A stream of images and videos that encourage scrolling, not 2000s bulletin board discussions.
Stack Overflow is currently engaged in the same kind of transformation. It's sad to see these giants of user participation turning away from what (I believe) made them so wonderful, and towards raw-numbers-growth at all cost. I suppose the folks with the money will be happy, but it diminishes our culture. The pursuit of quality content certainly supports sustainable growth, but it seems that it's just not big and fast enough [to pay the VC piper][0].
What else could you get when these decisions are made by employees who don't own significant amount of stock? The whole incentive model of employmen in modern world isn't built towards long-term thinking. The company you're working for is too big for you to make any impact on the long-term, but your own career depends entirely on the short-term.
I don't think that a co-founder would ever make such a short-sighted decision.
I deleted my Reddit account recently in an effort to curb social media. I've still been checking r/all and some favorite subreddits. Thank you Reddit for further breaking the site and making it easier to ween myself off of. Thank you HN for the addiction block contols on the account screen.
Exactly what I thought! I deleted the Reddit Apollo app when I realized I was using for over 3 hours a day.
Now I catch myself sometimes using the mobile version. But the fact that they keep going out of the way to make it work and worse everyday means I actually get to stay away from it.
What are your favorite alternatives to stay in tune with what's happening now? I browse r/all multiple times daily for a bit. I don't get a lot of need-to-know information from it, but some things I like to see are movie trailers, big tech announcements (Xbox Series X yesterday), and in general, things that everyone seems to be "in the know" of. It's my main pop culture news outlet, but I feel like it shouldn't be.
Sounds ass backwards, and I've been signing up for newsletters in addition to a little more HN to ween off of Reddit. Read some curated headlines in the morning, sure there's usually a "word from our sponsers", but it's a better experience overall than social media imo.
Any newsletter recommendations? I've been thinking of going down an RSS/Email&&Procmail route myself, but haven't done the research on quality sources yet.
i haven't used reddit for a couple years now. I remember r/all being the worst. I just checked it now to verify. Too... soft? feminine? Not to mention the small drip of political propaganda.
Maybe i outgrew the typical user demographic, but i think its just corny (I'm talking about r/all).
Too feminine is an unusual critique for Reddit. Maybe things really are changing fast.
The only social media I really like is Pinterest. It always gets ignored in these conversations and besides a few minor things, there development never seems to bother the base.
Learning lessons? They're making their website worse on purpose! They don't want people to use the Reddit website — they want people to use the app, because that's where all the ads and tracking is.
For example, I open a notification (the only reason I have the apo installed - this could be done with web PNs) and then either click back or the X, both wrongly navigate back one time to the same message, then close the app completely. I often have to kill the app to get out of this.
Why the hell can't we stick to documents for reading stuff, and even posting the occasional comment?
They went close to a decade without making Digg's mistakes. But now that investors are involved, they have to start putting up walls and plastering them with ads.
Yeah, for a while, Digg and Reddit were very similar, so Digg thought, "Hey, let's differentiate ourselves from our competitors." They then proceeded to ruin themselves by trying to become something more like a news aggregator, when what users really wanted was what Reddit remained.
And this was at the same time, or roughly the same time, that slashdot started making 'improvements'. I dumped both slashdot and digg to go to reddit. And now I'm starting to look for somewhere else to go.
You have succeeded, you are on HackerNews. Isn't this why we are all here? HackerNews is kind of like what Slashdot,Digg and Reddit were originally; that is "news for nerds".
Yeah, but I still love dank memes, is the issue. I have just enough childish mess inside me that I want some deep fried memes or somethings like that. For example, one of my most frequented subreddits is r/Im15andthisisyeet.
Absolutely no value for the HN crowd, and it would piss me off to no end if that sort of thing came here, but I still want it occasionally.
Hacker News isn't really comaparable to the different niche subreddits that I am subscribed to. At the same time I am not interested at all in the business-related articles that are also part of this site. That's why I still use reddit: I can subscribe to the topics I like while filtering out others or only viewing them when I'm bored.
Just went to voat, and it keeps redirecting me to the sign in page regardless of where I go, so looks like they've beaten reddit in terms of unfriendly accessibility.
If you have a reddit account and go to the site not logged in the site looks like trash. The articles seem worse than what you see when logged in. Similar to YouTube if you aren't logged in you see the trashiest videos on the "unlogged in" main page.
I don't know if that's on purpose or it's just like that. But there seems to be a big difference in the quality depending on whether you are logged in or not.
As for the reddit site itself I wonder what is the ratio of old.reddit viewers vs reddit viewers are. I've used reddit for over a decade and absolutely hate the new style I only go to old.reddit if that changes and only new reddit is available I'll abandon my account (or sell it to Russians ha! Kidding.).
> As for the reddit site itself I wonder what is the ratio of old.reddit viewers vs reddit viewers are.
I moderate a top 100 sub and if the built-in stats are to be believed, the recent breakdown is something like:
= Pageviews =
40% apps
28% old reddit
17% mobile reddit
15% new reddit
= Unique visits =
41% mobile reddit
27% new reddit
24% apps
8% old reddit
This doesn't really capture the ratio of contributors who use each (or perhaps, more interestingly, number of contributions per platform), but it's hard for me to guess that accurately since new-reddit detractors are a very vocal group.
I moderate a rather popular programming subreddit (whose users you would expect to be more conscious of newreddit vs oldreddit), here's the eyeballed breakdown of our stats:
--- Monthly uniques (200k total):
New Reddit: 55%
Mobile Web: 20%
Reddit Apps: 15%
Old Reddit: 10%
--- Monthly Pageviews (3M total):
New Reddit: 30%
Mobile Web: 10%
Reddit Apps: 30%
Old Reddit: 30%
So in our case, while the ones using Old Reddit are the fewest in number, they are also the most engaged.
I wonder how many of those "new reddit" hits are unintentional (like someone who doesn't want to log into reddit on their work computer, so the setting for "old" reddit doesn't stick)
Edit: Just for comparison, I moderate a medium sized sports subreddit. Traffic waxes and wanes a bit based on when games happen, the memeability of recent events, and the activities of Donald Trump. We see a lot more app traffic, and new reddit is about as rare as people using mobile browsers.
Well it's hard to guess what the admins are planning. They said it would stay around for the foreseeable future but I agree their changes are becoming increasingly adversarial. (EDIT: Though new reddit has brought about a number of good improvements to the moderating experience. Sadly at this point the mod community had already implemented all of them and more via 3rd party browser extensions...)
Our community might have a slight old-reddit bias -- we have a core group that doesn't like change -- but I have a hard time believing it could have a terribly large effect once the numbers are in the millions.
It feels to me like social media has been imploding recently. It seems like I am seeing more and more efforts to overtly force people use an app, associate browsing with an account, and link their account with a real world identity (e.g. via phone number). This in turn makes the platforms less useful and more hostile to users and presumably at some point that will cause users to leave the system.
It also feels like social media platforms are starting to die faster than they can be replaced. In the past MySpace died but people could move to Facebook, Facebook shifted to emphasizing the feed over groups but people could move to Reddit, but I'm not sure what people could move to if Reddit becomes non-viable.
> This in turn makes the platforms less useful and more hostile to users and presumably at some point that will cause users to leave the system.
People always seem to brush off this kind of comment when I see it discussed, usually the argument is "well, you're a software developer / superuser, normal people don't care about these things." It will be interesting to see where the breaking point actually is; I've always felt that platform users deserve a little more respect than that. The linked identity thing is especially frustrating for me.
I stopped posting to facebook in 2010 (still using it to keep in touch via messenger and see event invites, and to avoid alienating extended family), but I used to have an instagram account with a fun theme that I only shared with a few friends. What was fun and relatable for my friends was confusing and obtuse to my family. Even the account username was embarrassing in that context. So I always kept them separate, explicitly saying "no, I don't want to attach this to my facebook account." Then one day, it just sort of happened? I can't remember if I was tricked by a dark pattern or if they just forcibly fused the accounts YouTube-Google style, but that day instagram immediately lost all usefulness to me and I haven't been on since. For me as a user, social media has always kind of felt this way.
I'm curious to see what will happen to reddit and its communities, and even more curious to see whether the next generation sees internet anonymity as a cool feature. When I was growing up, it felt like being able to form an alternate identity online was almost the whole point, but I guess back then there were fewer avenues to cultivating your identity as a personal brand for profit.
> It will be interesting to see where the breaking point actually is; I've always felt that platform users deserve a little more respect than that.
I read your comment as a really strong case for platform co-operativism -- multi-stakeholder democracy for online platforms: not just owners making decisions, but users and maybe employees together with owners. Generally, democratic currents (whether government or corporate) only emerge through changes in our collective sense of "how things should be".
I'm hoping we all start to realize we're serfs on all these platforms, and start wondering "hey, we're generating most of this wealth... why aren't we given a say in decision-making?"
It's the same thing that happens to all "free"/ad-sponsored/VC-backed services. Unless you're FB or Twitter or YouTube, your ads aren't profitable enough to run your business. The business model is unviable unless you get that big. So you lose a bunch of money until you find a way to monetize or close. This always takes the form of user-hostile anti-features. Currently that's forcing users into your special apps, where they can't install an ad-blocker. Historically it's been stuff like increasingly scummy ad behavior, and/or requiring paid accounts to access features that used to be free. Your platform gets less useful and gets replaced by the next "free"/ad-sponsored/VC-backed money loser and the cycle repeats.
It's happening to imgur and Reddit now. Time to find the next big thing.
I call this the dismal equilibrium. Anything free that provides value is, in brute economic terms, mis-priced. Thus, it tends to degrade due to attempts at monetization until a balance is reached between its inherent value and the pain one must endure to use/access it.
This is more a case of non-open-source software trying to force physical-world business models into a world where physicality has no meaning. Most open source development is paid for by paying for the work to be done. In other words, much open source software is not free; rather, it's already been paid for.
Well, not really saying it's bad in a moral sense or making a value judgement (though it does tend to be "bad" from a usability perspective), just noting what I've observed. And it applies even to things that aren't free, but which you pay for via some fixed initial cost.
For example, I bought Words with Friends a long long time ago, and for a while it was great. But now they've added tons of gamification features like powerups that bypass game rules, social, awards, etc... to try to get you to engage more and pay more money. Now, various awards screens pop up and waste seconds of my life after every move.
I just want to play standard Words with Friends with my wife like I have for the last 10 years. But one can see that folks like me aren't making Zynga any (new) money, hence the other inducements.
In your example, it seems the app was not mis-priced for you. In fact, it was the perfect price, until the company decided it was mis-priced for them.
So now they add all these unfriendly features, which now makes the app mis-priced for you.
My point is that mis-pricing can be different depending on who's perspective we look at. So in an economic sense, when we say something is mis-priced, from who's perspective is it?
What if the thing provides maximum value only when it's free? Monetizing via advertising implies losing the speech the advertisers don't approve of. If we had discussion forums that didn't allow free accounts to post, we'd lose the speech of people who can't or won't pay.
Would be interesting if some rich benefactor randomly decided to run such a community.
I just fail to see how old Reddit could not have been a sustainable standalone business. Conde Nast had a huge opportunity once they acquired it as it no longer needed "VC growth" but they failed. I wish I had the opportunity to acquire it for 10-20 million[1].
I'd caveat this very slightly, as sometimes a business model turns out to be existentially viable, but lacks the kind of scale, revenue, or exponential growth that VCs want to see.
If your business model doesn't include paying back your investors, it's not viable. If your business model does pay back investors, or doesn't require them, then congrats! You've avoided the dismal equilibrium and have a successful business that serves its users instead of abuses them :)
I can't comment on the fact that the whole field is imploding, but there is only room for finite growth.
A lot of these platforms seem VC-funded or publicly traded, and they are based on growth. So they probably see growth slowing down, and this is an effort to squeeze more numbers out of it. Hopefully for them, they can pivot their business plan on to something not growth-based.
This is a common pattern: growth is like a drug for tech startups. Cut it, and they will do all they can to have it again, even if they have to alienate their current user-base for this.
As I often browse reddit in private mode, this probably just means that I'll waste less time on that website; I'm not going to bother logging in if I didn't already.
The layperson used to use WordPerfect 5, a non-WYSIWYG word processor which required typing 'codes' using modified function keys to change styles. It came with keyboard templates so you could remember which key did what.
Microsoft Windows 3.1 was released in 1992, selling "over a million copies" in the first two months of the year. That would an annual sales track of ~6 million or so.
In 1980 there were 2 million computers in the US, doubling every 2 years. By 2000, there were 168 million computers, only 6 doublings rather than the 10 the 1980 estimate would have provided. That suggests about 16 million users as of 1990, possibly 24-32 million by 1992.
As of 1995, total worldwide Internet usage (then largely in the US, though also Europe) was 16 millions. As of 2019 it's 4.5 billions.
That would have been the more educated, wealier, and generally professional class of users, for the most part. For better or worse, computer use has democratised tremendously. The capabilities of the typical user have all but certainly fallen correspondingly.
The average WordPerfect user wasn't a layperson, really. WordPerfect proficiency was listed on resumes, and looked for, as a serious differentiator (unlike today, where "Word proficiency" is a meaningless non-differentiator on resumes.) People took courses in WordPerfect to get that proficiency in order to get hired into secretarial roles. There were training courses given to employees who were users of previous technologies, to bring them up to date, rather than assuming they would just catch on. It was a whole "thing." (Even moreso for its companion Lotus 1-2-3: accountants did not just suddenly understand how to use an electronic spreadsheet.)
Just because it was a Commercial-Off-The-Shelf software package with a home-user license that any individual could buy, doesn't really mean that they were targeting the "layperson" market in the way that e.g. Windows Home Editions ever were. They were targeting professionals who had home computers, who had already learned the software due to previous corporate-sponsored training. Big difference.
The equivalent today would be the sort of software used by Hollywood screenwriters to format their scripts. Even if you buy a single-seat license of it, that's not because you're a layperson/hobbyist; that's because you're a freelance professional who works from your home-office.
In the 80s, sure, when everything was more complicated and only techies actually had computers. The "layperson" of the 80s is the poweruser of today. Nowadays, but nobody is going to willingly spend the time to do it when far easier alternatives exist.
Nobody is going to go from Reddit to usenet/IRC. That's a massive UX downgrade and the modern layperson isn't going to deal with that when the next Tiktok or other social media craze is a tap away.
Based on my experience, people who were in university level classes and people in high school. Back then, one could download mIRC and connect to IRC or use any mail/news client like Outlook Express or Netscape Mail & News to connect to usenet and check their email.
I think some of it is just you, and you're right to an extent. Normal users will tolerate a lot of annoyances, including hostile approaches, unfortunately. Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Imgur, LinkedIn have all repeatedly demonstrated that versus their very large user bases. These are not shrinking networks. Instagram's new cut-off on non-logged in viewing is hostile, it won't dent them at all though. These networks know their users will largely tolerate it, because what they're using doesn't cost them actual dollars.
I think the most interesting story in social networks is the collapse of core Facebook as the prime mover. I think there is still a lot of room for more Pinterests and Snapchats yet, which could further diversify the space and dilute core Facebook's mind share. The young people not caring about Facebook thing, has clearly graduated to a permanent setting, it's not going back (the next group are not going to suddenly care about FB). TikTok has demonstrated some of what is possible most recently.
>It also feels like social media platforms are starting to die faster than they can be replaced.
Very well can be. Social media in their current form belong to corporations rather than users. Therefore sooner or later they start making decisions that are hostile to users. To make an analogy, these online societies are not stable because they resemble a monarchy, where a corporation (the monarch) must use its own judgement on how to govern its online society. Which proven to be a rather unsustainable governance model.
Until online societies switch to self-government similar to modern democracies (elected government, elected judges, payment collection, public expense reporting, etc.) they will likely continue to be unsustainable and rather short-term.
The board that shall not be named was very interesting back in the day. There was always garbage, but even a simple battle toads thread could be a lot of fun to follow.
I never knew if the interesting people found a new home, or disbanded, but I sure miss when fun stuff happened there.
lainchan used to be a decent way to avoid the big chans once they got vile, but still find decent people outside of meatspace. A well curated set of subreddits used to be find, but I'm feeling less and less motivated to continue on with keeping it organized. Private discord servers have taken over as the default hangout space for most of my friend groups with telegram and small forums starting to take root now as well.
That's kind of what I figured was happening, but I guess I'm getting too old to keep up with where the action is at on discord. I get why keeping it private has become so popular, but I struggle to find the flavor there. Reddit seems to have successfully killed everything that was fun.
People want to share and be social. It's inherent to our nature. People are now realizing they don't want a down to the bit extremely searchable archive of what they've shared. They see it ruining lives and they do not want to be a part of it. Talk to any kid. Facebook is "old", "creepy", "dead", but they will use tiktok/snap because it's fun and seemingly ephemeral.
The differences that I see between Reddit and, for example, traditional forums are:
- The ability to use one login and interface across multiple boards/subject areas.
- The ease of communicating between different boards either via links, cross posts, or some form of aggregation.
- Features that over time allow a post to become one that can be recognized as well regarded by the community. These could include good support for listing important posts in the subreddit information, the ability to tag posts, and the ability to archive posts.
- The natural support for media and links. Although to be fair, the media support is actually provided by sites that grew up around Reddit like Imgur.
Reddit may not be social in the sense that, as another poster points out, it is built around following topics rather than users. However, the degree to which it allows different topics and communities to interconnect allows relationships to form that function as a society. For example, a post on the Male Fashion Advice subreddit on how to be more presentable might link to a series of posts on the Male Hair Advice subreddit that have become well regarded in the community.
By way of comparison, on conventional forums there is often little interaction even between sub-forums in the same forum let alone between different forums. Support for media also tends to be more limited.
I think there's a distinction between systems where users follow people and systems where they follow topics, I think of the former as social media, not the latter.
Twitter, Instagram - social media. Reddit, Stack Overflow, HN - Not social media.
dictionary.com defines social media as "websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking."
So the common use case of wikipedia, reading about things, is not. But digging deeper into the editors\editing section there is definitely social media happening both in forming networks and creating content for others
I don't think email qualifies. While you can share content and network with it, it seems to be more of a delivery mechanism than a destination that users would seek out.
"AOL" is too ambiguous.
I always though of Compuserve as a service provider but maybe they did have some social media features
BBS might be the original social media
Finger is interesting as you could create a "profile". myspace and other social media seem to be a combination of finger and bbs packaged into an endpoint
I've always thought the key characteristics of social media is sharing to a social network. When I post here or on Reddit I have no idea who it's going to.
Facebook and Twitter are social networks because I share stuff and there's a definite social graph that I'm part of.
In the past, a social platform was replaced by another one that did basically the same thing but better, in the eyes of users. Today, we're seeing real issues with social media, but there's no viable platform which fixes the problems with these platforms we want to leave.
I think the demand is still there. There's a power vacuum just waiting for someone to fill it. But the replacement can't just be "like Facebook but run by people slightly less creepy". You've got to fix some other root issues.
Facebook was always lame, it was a utilitarian communication tool. It's like calling hammers or wall calendars or trash bags lame.
It's similar to the argument you here when people say "they youth arent into facebook anymore, now they use xxxx." That's nice and all, but as long as they get facebook when they graduate high school or go to college, facebook wins. It doesnt need to be hip and cool if its the network gluing everyone together. Did the white pages or yellow pages need to be cool to be useful?
I was on Facebook back when you had to have a college email to be on it. It was were you could go to find out the name of that cute girl in class. It was also when social media was still a new concept. MySpace was a much bigger deal at the time, but Facebook was the first place where I could meet people my age nearby, organize a party, find out what was happening around campus.
I have not doubt Facebook will continue to win for a long time. But I think kids retreated from social media to avoid their parents. Everything is owned by a handful of companies now, so it doesn't really matter where they go I guess.
Facebook wasnt cool. The people on facebook were cool. I believe facebook took off for two reasons. One is the one you mentioned, that it was exclusive. Two was that it was the anti-livejournal/myspace. No css, no glitter, no strobing, no sound, no hard to read colors, no moving elements around the page. IT standardized where and what functions looked like, and acted more like creation software (photoshop) than the output of the document layout tools. Facebook was utilitarian in that you couldnt customize its look, you couldnt express yourself. It took itself as a white pages, not a portfolio.
One of the best features of that era was the network pages - your college email gave you access to an area solely for your college, where events could be organized, had a posting board, I think its own gallery, etc. When it went public-access this was among the first things to go, replaced with the more generic groups.
The hostility of existing large sites towards pseudonymity is also interesting in conjunction with the general insistence that sides really shouldn't implement their own account system, and with the ever-increasing legal overhead required to spin up a new site.
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 most disturbing example is the quarantine of r/the_donald on political grounds.
No there's not, I was recently a member of a harmless subreddit that got banned from someone abusing DMCA who had some vendetta against the subreddit over some nonsense. He sent hundreds of fake copyright claims to posts which he had no ownership but Reddit admins didn't give a shit when we complained. He got our next two subreddits banned even faster since they had little content but plenty of DMCA requests.
We tried every single open or alternative Reddit and they were all garbage. And trust me when I said we tried everything.
They are either awful early-2000s PHP-clone style sites, some stupid fringe political communities which push away mainstream users, or some weird moderation rules.
https://saidit.net/ was the closest clone but they had some bizarre "Pyramid of Debate" [1] moderation thing that seemed culty among their hardcore members, which our sub members got turned off from.
But ultimately it's the lack of good mobile apps for these sites that pushed us away and we never managed to rebuild the community.
Recreating a better Reddit is a project I've long been interested in doing myself.
One solution might be a "federated reddit". Hacker News is essentially just a subreddit run by YC, so getting people/organizations/interest groups to run their own reddit forums is probably a good idea. It would let each community figure out its own income stream and not worry about advertisers running wild or the entire thing being bought out by the Chinese.
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.
>In my opinion quarantining them was basically a slap on the wrist.
I mean, I agree they should have been banned from day one basically.. but to say it's a slap on the wrist is odd because absolutely no one has to read any of their trash unless you specifically go there. Most random reddit users probably don't even know of td, let alone would actually go there voluntarily.
That being said.. I think it's unconscionable that reddit allows that subreddit to exist.. it's literally a breeding ground for violence and hate thought/speech.
There is a lot of difference between “wrongthink” in the 1984 sense and only prohibiting particularly evil ideologies that advocate for violence. These are not subjective view points, violence is universally bad for everyone.
Well... by first trying to point out a little ignorance coming from your comment. Second, maybe add in some hypocrisy from your comment. Third, it is really not about how a community 'behaves' because that is beside the initial point of you advocating for censorship based on political opinions when you're referencing Reddit.
That community does not directly behave in violence, hate, etc. How ridiculous of you to make that assertion. You're likely buying into the bullshit about the excuse Reddit made to censor them to begin with..."Anti police rhetoric" ...it is laughable that you're buying that.
I've noticed that TD has recently stood up a reddit clone of sorts on a separate web site. If that works, it seems like a win all around, both for friends and foes.
Did all of the founders leave Reddit or something?
This is totally backwards. Valuing pure signup rates over the user experience of hundreds of millions, who may already have accounts but dont feel like logging in, or just simply want to read content and sign up another day, is what happens when marketing/business people hijack a business over product/UX people.
This is a very obvious vanity metric issue to anyone who has run a popular website. And most people do it to appease VCs/investors... Reddit is already mature, so there's no justification to artificially increasing growth at the expense of the wider product.
I am not on reddit. But I do read it a lot. I usually spend a couple of years before I make yet another account somewhere. Because most of the time other people have made my point and I do not have anything to add. At this point it has saved me many security breaches. As at some point the company almost always loses control of its password database for some reason.
Time for a new type of social. That FB users do not move for something less slik-polished-and-widely-used is understandible. But I believe a large part of the reddittors is more keen on privacy, openness, ad-free experience, uncensoredness, etc.
But if you pay with ads, don't you need to see a LOT of ads, unless your privacy is compromised and they use trackers about you to give you targeted (i.e. more lucrative) ads?
I don't see why topic-based ads based entirely on on-site participation would be a problem. No need for any user-hostile garbage, bucket your communities into topics, and let advertisers target the topics or the intersections between them. Ads are sold on-site, not via third party networks.
Reddit does this, but no idea how successful it is.
All of the hard work is done for free by the mods of each subreddit. But they have no piece of the pie when Reddit goes IPO. The entire value is predicated on an Army of free workers that get nothing when the site IPOs.
Geocities was first platform that was successful due to this community moderation model - they did however give payout to moderators when they IPO's; I think it was $1,000 USD?
Googles algorithms should penalize them hard for that... but they probably wont. Random users clicking a reddit link in search results, and coming back after two seconds and clicking on another result, should bring their "site score" down.... but considering it's google .. and it's reddit.. it probably wont.
This would be very unfortunate for them since their own inner search system is very rough around the edges. I almost always have to search for a Reddit post via Google instead.
For some definition of "worked" ... sure, you signed up. Then what?
I already had an account when Quora did it, and that made me use it less (wasn't always signed in, wasn't always willing to sign in - e.g. incognito sessions). For a long while, I started going back less and less - was only brought back occasionally by their emails which were still pretty good.
Recently the emails got so bad that I unsubscribed (I kinda expect to stop visiting the site completely). So I'm guessing I'm not alone in reducing my engagement - the quality of the whole site seems to have gone dramatically down.
The thing that slowed my usage of Quora down to basically once every few months is so many of the answers to sincere subjects are promotional for some product someone's pushing—even if it's actually off-topic but some damned keyword aligned!
I liked it before that kind of activity proliferated the space.
Quora is particularly annoying in this regard. I too refuse to sign in oftentimes when they force me to.
When a service puts its core usefulness behind an unnecessary login then they are forcing me to sign in, they are not making me want to. There is a key difference.
A few years ago I deleted the reddit app because I felt I was spending too much time on it. I would then use the web based version when I felt like wasting some time.
A month ago I ended up getting the app again because the web version became essentially unusable (they did some strange change where clicking on a link gave you the top three/five comments and then other posts from the same subreddit, wtf?).
I wonder what short term pipe they're smoking in the product department.
Truth, I remember reddit cratering the active user base there ten years ago, but I've found myself going back again over the past few years again, craving the type of community there vs the lowest common denominator and ad filled garbage that is reddit.
Spam wasn't what killed netnews, big ISPs didn't want to serve it up for free anymore. Perhaps that wasn't what you were implying but in case it was, spam ain't what done her in.
I'm not experiencing this on either desktop or mobile. I'm not a member of reddit so am not signed in. I can view comment threads and other content perfectly fine.
I wonder if this has anything to do with them trying to catalog subs. This thread and what I'll share below lead me to believe they may be attempting to curate content.
For context on them attempting to catalog subs about a month ago a Reddit admin messaged me unsolicited (apparently a lot of people). I have no problem sharing this since they randomly contacted me via the site, I've never done contract work for them, and there was no request to keep it private (and apparently hey just randomly mass messaged people):
>Hey there! I work at Reddit and I’m reaching out because we’re looking for experienced redditors who might be interested in taking on some paid contract work for us. I have no idea if you’d be interested, but I figured I’d drop you a line.
I replied requesting more info
>Great! Essentially, this work would be reviewing lists of subreddits to help categorize what they are about and what content is in them. This would probably be maximum 10h/wk (no minimum) over a couple of weeks, though if it goes well there’s likely to be more. It pays $15/hr.
I said sure and was told this
>Can you send an email to redacted@reddit.com with your resume and your experience on Reddit and we can work on scheduling a time to chat about the opportunity? (No worries if your profession or line of work isn’t related to Reddit. We're looking for reliable people with existing Reddit knowledge; reviewing your resume will help us better understand your background.) Upon reviewing the resumes, we will schedule 30-minute phone calls with selected candidates to share details on the project work and conduct interviews.
I did about 20 minutes later and within an hour got an email saying thanks but no thanks, there were tons of people interested and they're already full.
I guess there will be accounts which are shared just to read the content. Although it requires 1 malicious user to get such account closed, it makes the profiling much more difficult.
That, or impersonate a search engine to access. They wouldn't block that, would they?
It's not a new pattern. And like MySpace, Yahoo, Digg, and so many others, Reddit will eventually fall out of favor and be replaced by a new better, less corporate system.
And that system will also follow the same path (unless it is started by an already-very-rich group of techies who value status more than money).
Just think: if you were fabulously wealthy, then burning a few million a year to have a completely free, non-commercial social site would be perfectly reasonable. Of course, eventually you would die and someone would then begin the usual path with your legacy...
There is activityPub which is used by mastodon (a twitter clone). Some peoples are making reddit clone that federate with activityPub a bit in the same way that emails federate.
For those who enjoy the Reddit format but don’t enjoy Reddit itself, I recommend taking a look at Tildes. It’s a much smaller community, of course, but the discourse is decent and it’s open source and not for profit.
I noticed this occurring on Android Firefox with Ublock Origin enabled. Not sure if that's related, but I'm not about to disable it just to see if that's the distinguishing factor.
(G) Google way to restrict search to signed-in users: If you're on Chrome (biggest market share) and you're signed into Chrome (big share also) then you auto-sign into your google account.
PS: Not sure if they rollback on this change.
Why the (G) way works? Because it's non-obtrusive way to force user to login.
Probably less impactful since we have alternatives that can more or less do the same thing. I think reddit is more impactful bdue to the network effect.
Obviously old.reddit.com doesn't have these issues, but I'm pretty sure the session on smartphone used the new site, and that let me keep reading without any interruptions too.
Either way, if Reddit does this, that's it. Not returning to the site. The internet doesn't need all these walled gardens, and it's worrying how this is going to affect how info is preserved for future generations.