Wiht the new user interface, Reddit is trying really hard to go the way of Digg. I used to browse it on my phone but the popups asking me to install their app block my screen. And no-- no fucking way I am going to install an app to view a webpage.
I don't really understand how a site worth billions has such bad programmers. Everything about it is bad. It's slow, it crashes frequently, basic things go missing like the image you were trying to view, you frequently get "whoops that page no longer exists" simply reopening your browser on a thread you were viewing the previous day.
But go to the desktop version, and it all works fine.
They even inexplicably implemented AMP, even though the whole point of the site is up-to-date comments, not a cached one sitting on google.
The only competent part of their team seems to be ops, as it has finally stopped falling over.
Even that I'd disagree with. I still get "You broke reddit!" screens every few days or so
Maybe I’ve just worked for companies where developers have a lot of say in what and how gets built.
that's probably closer to the truth.
if you're large enough to have multiple teams of multiple people, in most cases, they don't all have a full view of what's going on (priorities, roadmap, feedback, etc). even if someone said "I ain't doing this!" and quits, there's no real impact. If an entire team dug in their heels on something, that might have influence, but you're getting to a situation that doesn't often happen.
Throwing the keyboard across the room and yelling "I QUIT!" is one way to give feedback to the management, but usually I've found that raising your hand and bringing concerns about performance or stability is enough to get people to listen since they also want to build a great product.
Look at the bottom of the screen here: https://imgur.com/a/n59XcKQ
The "Open Reddit App" button covers a large portion of the "Next >" button. Argh.
There's only a few ways to monetize a site like this, and selling sensor, identity, and behavioral data from phones is one of them. Maximizing their bean count would dictate not leaving that money on the table.
This app has access to:
Identity
find accounts on the device
add or remove accounts
Contacts
find accounts on the device
Location
approximate location (network-based)
Photos/Media/Files
read the contents of your USB storage
modify or delete the contents of your USB storage
Storage
read the contents of your USB storage
modify or delete the contents of your USB storage
Device & app history
read sensitive log data
Other
receive data from Internet
view network connections
create accounts and set passwords
full network access
read sync settings
draw over other apps
use accounts on the device
prevent device from sleeping
toggle sync on and off
install shortcuts
view network connections
create accounts and set passwords
full network access
read sync settings
use accounts on the device
prevent device from sleeping
toggle sync on and off1. The annoying popup that comes up every other click asking you to install the iOS app
2. If you are not logged in and accidentally click the comment button it brings up the login modal. After dismissing the modal, if you close the comment box, it brings up the login modal again. I'm gonna assume this one is a bug.
Other than those two issues, I think it's a great mobile web app, especially when you consider just how terrible most web apps are.
eg https://www.reddit.com/r/backpacking vs https://i.reddit.com/r/backpacking
Helpful for bookmarks.
Replacing it with a similar site seems as likely as replacing YouTube.
Anyone have any ideas on what could cause a mass shift?
I have a few, but basically if you keep the UI simple, support multiple communication paradigms (e.g. not just reddit/hn style, but also live optionally-threaded conversations, more forum-like approaches, blogs+comments, microblogging, etc), and make it highly configurable (e.g. voting rules, moderation rules, threading rules, etc) I think people will come running. Bonus points if it's easily self-hostable, can be federated, can be encrypted, and/or can self-delete/rollover old messages.
That filter is inexplicably gone in the new version, even though it's a feature that's less than 2 years old ...
The subreddits still get filtered, so I go on old.r to add new entries (I'm up to over a hundred). If this goes away, I'll just stop regular visits. Not worth the hassle.
But yeah, I really miss Reddit not being full of vile shit. Does seem to be somewhat inevitable when a community grows. And the site has grown massively. Which means all the subreddits that existed back then grew massively. So new ones are created, and for a while those don't suck as much... but they grow as a function of the site's growth. And the bigger the site, the faster "fresh new subreddits" grow, and end up being atrocious.
They're in beta mode right now, I have a few invites if anyone is interested.
Vote manipulation on reddit in 2018 is way worse than vote manipulation on Digg ever was. Due to the centralized categories of Digg, the userbase was unable to hide away from content they didn't like and that brought the community together to collectively take part in rejecting the influencers. On reddit, there isn't that same sense of a cohesive single community. In the past, there might have been a sort of collective identity of "redditors", but that's gone away as the site has grown. Nobody says, "Oh yeah, I go on reddit" anymore, they say that they are are active on a particular sub.
I wonder if reddit could have done anything differently to maintain that "redditor" identity among their userbase, is it just a function of their growth? I think it's mostly just their growth, but they accelerated it by not being more careful with what subreddits were defaults and their responsibility to curate them. I remember when the frontpage of reddit transitioned from generally being longform content, to generally being shitty image-macro memes. I also remember when /r/politics used to be a relatively balanced source of news.
If you do something that makes your happy and heavy users rescind from being globally active to just being active in their tiny niche subreddit, you can't expect your global sense of community to be maintained.
The shared subreddits are indeed trash. I wonder if banning commonly astroturfed topics would help and directing people to moderated subreddits for that content. As a long time redditor (since 2007 or so), the identity has been decohering (or transforming) since the beginning and at this point I don’t see much of value left to lose. The culture centers around memes (I don’t mean this in a pejorative sense), not shared values or interests.
A common joke used to be: reddit’s been going downhill since they added comments. Now I doubt most remember at one point it lacked them. At this point I just view comments bemoanings its fresh demise as reactionary: reddit’s not going anywhere, and you can’t change its direction at all. It’s just not easy accepting the direction it is going.
I think I logged into the "new digg" 3 or 4 times before completely abandoning it for reddit, and never looking back - this was as a daily user of several years at the time.
I really dislike the "new reddit" as well - if they hadn't kept the option to use their old site, I would have stopped using reddit too.
Which leaves a few gems and the draconianly moderated subs like /r/science etc.
Frankly it got to be far to much work to get some signal in with the noise. The new UI and needing to stick with old.reddit.com is just icing on the cake.
edits: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re... just redirects to old subdomain, it doesn't block the annoying messages.
Really poor form.
Thankfully, 3rd party reddit clients aren't hobbled... Yet.