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Comment by flukus | Hacker News Reader

> I get the idea of mobile first design, but the new design is actively hostile to anyone using a screen larger than a tablet.

Don't worry their mobile design is actively hostile to users too, you're getting the full experience. The mobile design also wastes a huge chunk of space pestering you to install the app. And the official app seems to have been built by the same clueless designers, so you need third party apps just to get a decent experience.

I'm starting to think I may have Stockholm syndrome, I shouldn't have to jump through so many hoops to get a usable experience, I'm probably better off voting with my feet.

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For the last year or so I've just pulled a few niche subreddits into Inoreader via RSS so I can still get the value of the smaller subreddits without falling in to /all when bored.

It's not as hard to leave as you think. Just stop using it for a week. Once you look at it with fresh eyes you'll realize it for the cesspool that it is.

Just choose the Subreddits you chhose more carefully, and it won't be. I subscribe to a number of cheerful, friendly and useful subreddits, and that's it.

The only issue being that there are a number of small, focused subs that contain the best information and discussion on certain topics on the interwebs. I don't give a fuck about the site itself, but the people active in say r/machinelearning and a number of other subs are incredibly valuable to me.

There would have to be a mass exodus of entire subs for this to change. Which probably won't happen until the situation becomes untenable. I don't believe reddit's leadership, despite the harebrained ideas they have shown so far, would Digg themselves into such a hole.

Reddit offers three advantages over a traditional message board: voting, post previews, and a good search experience. All of those could be replicated elsewhere.

Their main advantage is the community, that's the hard part to replicate.

I don't think we're talking about the same reddit, in my experience their search engine has consistently been awful! On different occasions I was unable to retrieve a post I almost remembered the exact title of via the reddit search engine, but found it quickly through google with the "inurl:reddit.com/r/subreddit" option

Something must have changed in the last 2yrs or so since I was last active on the site. The search experience used to be notoriously bad and even non-existent ( If I remember correctly for a while the search box was just a link to a filtered google search). I've also come to look at voting as a negative feature. Nowadays I mostly use twitter for what I used to use reddit for - to keep up with current news. Twitter has its faults but one of its better features imo is being able to read tweets of every different kind of point of view with equal weight, without the filter of upvotes/downvotes by the majority mob.

*edit - I should say, without the filter of downvotes, since twitter has likes which is the equivalent of upvotes.

search has sucked from inception until now, if you want to find anything on reddit, even a post from today that dropped of the front page, you are better off using google and "site:reddit.com" to find it.

I still haven’t found a subreddit that’s better than the other existing communities for that topic. Can you list some examples of subtedddits that are _the_ forum to go to for their domain?

/r/celiac, /r/achalasia, /r/citypop, /r/deathgrips, /r/denver (and Portland, Austin, Santa Fe, Albuquerque... possibly some of these cities have bigger forums on FB, but it depends on your demographic. I can talk to 70 year olds about Albuquerque in the 60s on Facebook, but not necessarily what’s happening at Meow Wolf or with car thefts around Nob Hill or the electronic music show next week).

Reddit is the primary forum for obscure topics that don’t have large enough followings to support other communities, or have a demographic that overlaps enough with reddit that everyone just uses reddit.

Don't worry, they're also starting to limit third party apps to force you to use their lovely app.

That would solve the Stockholm syndrome and make it easy to go cold turkey.

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