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Comment by baby | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why they're doing this:

1. Why are they forcing me to use their app so much? it's just not practical: for example if I quit the app and come back it doesn't return me to the page I was looking at; worse it often doesn't display comments for me (infinite loading).

2. Why is the web redesign so bad? Who are they trying to cater for? There's just so much friction in reading comments from multiple posts now, when I click on a post to read the comments an then outside it scroll back up to the beginning. Why can't I read comments if I'm not signed in?

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I prefer old reddit for the same reason as you, I like to read and comment. But I can tell you who they are catering to: People who scroll through subreddits scanning photos. If you go to meme focused subreddit, the new version is pretty good. If you go to a discussion focused subreddit, the old version is better.

Try https://www.reddit.com/r/Watches/ in an incognito window to see it in the new Reddit, then try it old reddit.

I fucking hate it. The redesign is actively harmful to the quality of subreddits. It makes the subscribers the ones who dictate the content, not the community members. The vast majority of subs don’t participate in any meaningful way, they just upvote the funny picture in their feed, haha, while the people who frequent the subreddit and dictated most of the content prior to the redesign are completely disenfrachised. I’ve seen a bunch of subreddits go down the shitter because low effort memes and blog posts-like pictures conquered the front page after the redesign.

I understand it in the sense that I can conceptualize it. I just have a hard time believing it is really best for business. They determine how much money they make per user and find that signed in users make more money. Signed in users on their mobile app (users inside of their walled garden) make the most money. If they lose a couple users trying to convert everyone to using their mobile app, so be it.

Having an account and using their mobile app makes it easier to track you, easier to show you ads and likely worth more per advertisement.

> There's just so much friction in reading comments from multiple posts now, when I click on a post to read the comments an then outside it scroll back up to the beginning.

It's much more bearable if you always open posts in a new tab (I'm talking on desktop; on mobile use a third-party app). You can configure it in the feed settings. Then the view is very similar to old Reddit, and you keep the posts list unchanged.

Metrics: It is easy for them to keep track of metrics, including the following:

* did someone pause on a post, mark it * time on page, * whatever other crazy metric you can show to advertisers * in-line advertisements

Also, the walled garden makes it so you get the endorphin hit of clicking the button and it can algorithmically entice you back with notifications and other engagements.

They are catering to children, literally. I've been using the site for a few years and have noticed more often than not when a set of comments seems especially naive its because I've been talking to teenager.

I can't tell you the number of times I thought I was having a meaningful conversation only to find out, after asking, that the user was a kid.

it's fair to say that if you thought that you were having a meaningful conversation, that indeed it was a meaningful conversation regardless of their age

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