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Comment by kangaroozach | Hacker News Reader

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kangaroozach

How did DIGG miss this boat?

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They rolled out a catastrophically bad redesign of the site, resulting in a mass exodus of users directly to Reddit

Maybe we'll see the same thing in reverse now that Reddit's pulled the same move ;)

Reddit's redesign is visual for the most part.

Digg fundamentally changed the way their site worked to highlight content from power users.

What is crazy is that they just didn't roll back. Even if they had lost a ton of users surely they could have kept at least 30% and built on that for the next few years.

I actually like the new look. The old one was way too messy for my taste. I just don't like dealing with all the bugs of the new one.

It’s been years. With that said Reddit’s UX is /terrible,/ a subtle touch to the navbar scrolls to the top of the page which is a daily frustration when reading comments halfway down a huge page on my tablet. Videos on their site is another one, it doesn’t matter if I mute them when I scroll down and back up it unmutes. I wish their was an alternative I would love to never use Reddit again at this point, but all my obscure communities for TV shows, movies and stock trading are on there.

I find old.reddit.com to be the better experience on tablet/desktop, especially with the custom subreddit themes disabled.

i.reddit.com works nicely on Mobiles.

And having to constantly click on "Continue this thread" to read another comment or two (or maybe even 0). I understand that they wanted to stop endless threads from polluting the comment section, but they should make it possible to easily disable this behavior.

It's getting worse. On mobile they put the "load more comments" button behind a login wall a couple of months ago (i.reddit.com still works, but has other limitations).

That’s another thing, on my own profile the “load more comments” doesn’t work and hasn’t (not one time) since they rolled out this new design.

The amount of traffic both sites had at the time was minuscule to what Reddit has now.

When you become huge, inertia is incredibly strong.

It's all about enthusiasts and early adopters (who are very fickle) and late adopters and laggards (who are very much the opposite of fickle). Crossing the chasm. Reddit has crossed the chasm.

Reddit has also been burning plenty of bridges with its more conservative user base. It’s a smaller subset but they’re looking for an alternative.

One thing you have to remember with Reddit (and Facebook & co.) is that they're international. I think for Reddit about half the audience is American. A small subset of those are willing to leave Reddit for political problem, say, 5%.

Even though the rest of the world is literally flooded with US political news (less so now that Trump is gone), most of the rest of the world doesn't really care about those things Americans are super passionate about.

Reddit can remain huge even if half its US userbase leaves it.

This point is even more salient for Facebook outrage, BTW.

They dodged that bullet by leaving the old UI around effectively forever. The minute they pull it, they risk a serious exodus.

Someone is going to do to Reddit what Reddit did to Digg, and we'll all be saying "How did REDDIT miss this boat?" in 10 years...

not possible anymore. a platform that has reddit-tier moderation policy from the get-go would never gain traction

For the record, reddit had more traffic than Digg before "the exodus". We had about double their traffic. There was a slight jump at that time, but for the most part most Digg users were already reddit users, they just became more active.

Fair, "what Reddit did to Digg" is probably a multi-year user migration rather than the Digg 4.0 rollout specifically.

I doubt that it will happen exactly like this. Reddit has become a behemoth that caters more to the average consumer of social media than to the original tech crowd that represented its first members.

The only way a new platform can compete with them is by having the individual communities of reddit move to it with individual governance and then, allowing these communities to interact with each other in some way. The alternatives that look promising today are based on ActivityPub, but they fall into the same trap that reddit has: they want to appeal and attract as many users as possible without regard for suitability or community building. I'm hoping that the ting I'm working on will be better, but I'm not there just yet.

Sold out too early.

Kevin Rose

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