Reddit: Online Presence Indicators
old.reddit.com
old.reddit.com
If you use old.reddit you will be able to opt-out of this feature by following the below instructions:
Click on Preferences>Privacy Options> uncheck "Let other users see my online status"*edit: From that thread: "Apologies for not being more clear about this point in our announcement. When a user has toggled their status to "Hiding" it means they have disabled the feature. Once you are “Hiding” the presence indicator is turned off and no one will be able to see your online status anywhere on the site. This will not change unless you change it, regardless of what device you use to browse Reddit. .
Why did we choose "Hiding" vs "Offline?" Well, you're not really offline even if you've disabled this feature, and we wanted that to be clear in the broader sense of the term.
We will have an explanation published in our Help Center detailing all of this before we publicly roll this feature out to everyone."
"The intent of this feature is to drive greater engagement amongst our users" => smells bad!
Fuck this and everything about it. This is like Venmo's public-by-default payment history.
What's the end-game here? Just indoctrinating everyone into being comfortable with surveillance?
I understand the benefit this has for very specific Reddit communities. But to turn it on my default is mind-bendingly wrong. If anything, each sub should have to turn it on individually for that sub, and users should have to opt-in on that particular sub.
Turned off.
So, they want to generate more posts and content, as if it'd be a good thing in and by itself. What happens when people generate billions of useless shitposts ? Ah yes, the engagement metric goes up, the ad networks are happy, investors are happy. OKay.
But then again:
> During this initial phase, users will only be able to see their own personal status indicator. No other user will be able to see your online indicator.
This's gonna be a really short initial phase I suppose because not much engagement will come from that :].
Can't wait for the private public homepage/profile with your own posts on it à la twitter and then friending and then we have facebook.
Most communities would not obviously benefit from this. Surely it would make more sense to have this off by default and allow specific subreddits to enable it at their discretion.
I think Hanlon's razor [1] probably applies.
On both platforms, the site loads so slowly. If you try to delete a post or comment, the operation often fails with no error message. Sometimes you comment, there’s a long pause, then an error message and 2-3 copies of your comment show up. Pages break randomly on the back button. On mobile, login tends to break context - this is a feature even bootcamp projects have now.
I really don’t understand how it’s possible to be so bad after so many years and so much complaining. Conceptually, Reddit isn’t a very complex site. There is a core set of maybe 10 user flows, of which over half are broken on at least one platform.
I understand they’re trying to become hot for VC attention and are trying to monetize (are they profitable yet?)
I actually don’t mind ads on Reddit as they’re generally relevant and clearly marked (minus the shilling, which is an unsolved problem on many platforms). I just wish they’d make the core experience less obnoxious before trying to add these big features.
I didn’t mean to hijack the thread with this rant - it just hurts when the site for a community you really enjoy also sucks to use, and drains the joy out of it.
1) Navigate to a subreddit of interest 2) Start a search 3) The default behaviour is to search the entire site, not that subreddit
There's a checkbox there to 'search only this subreddit' which is disabled by default.
I am now wondering if there is some userscript I can inject to change the state of that checkbox by default. The fact that such lengths are even considered by your users should be a massive red flag.
It's some sort of organizational failure.
How else could something so stunningly opposite user intent persist this long?
It is customer-hostile but something to get away with.
I've always wondered why that checkbox is even there. Why are they even the same search box to begin with? If I go to a particular YouTube channel, there is a global search box at the top and a channel-specific search box a under the channel banner. That's a much more intuitive layout IMO.
I really wish they'd go to hackernews, CTRL+U and look at the beauty of the code that awaits them.
Works without JS flawlessly, fast, speedy, no cruft, no bullshit, just a simple fast loading page.
I actually enjoy HN a lot more than reddit these days, the cruft is so discouraging.
Instead they have released three half baked successors to old.reddit.com, broken in different ways.
- I like reddit's javascript. I like being able to collapse comment threads.
- HN doesn't have multiple niches and community. You get what you get for that day.
They day they kill that (and third-party app support), I leave reddit for good.
Granted, RES has a different charter and goals.
I have found Teddit[0] is much more usable, and much less privacy-invading. Of course Teddit does not allow posting or commenting though, so depending on your use case it might not be suitable.
allow subreddits to show me custom themes, show user flair, show link flair, allow my data to be used for research purposes, allow reddit to log my outbound clicks for personalization, let other users see my online status, Use new Reddit as my default experience, and everything under "set personalization preferences"
And enable "compress the link display" which in turn disables thumbnails. It's basically just like HN.
https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/lqtecn/update_to...
And then sets any other video to autoplay as soon as I scroll to it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
Edit: I had assumed Reddit's main business model was controlling what people saw on "the front page of the internet" via astroturfing and manufacturing consensus. Anyone who has been on the site long enough can tell you r/popular and r/all are blatantly manipulated by a few dozen power users and political activists. Mainly the AOC crowd, doing exactly what r/The_Donald did to manipulate the site's algorithms but across several subreddits. Outside of politics, people on subreddits such as r/HailCorporate often point out how seemingly genuine posts are actually covert advertisements for things like Coke, McDonalds, Wendy's, etc.
I do wonder if all these new features are a way to augment the propaganda model, or if they are merely an aside to get more revenue from harvesting data.
I'm also now convinced that there is a lot of psyop intel type operations that aim to spread their goals via reddit. Either pro / anti a foreign policy position.
I think these types of posts could probably easily be flagged and isolated but it doesn't seem to be a priority for reddit. I guess making money and invading users privacy is way more important for now.
you can get an addon to do that for you, or set an option in your user options (if logged in).
Wish these search engines would simply rewrite the URL to old reddit so I didn't have to do it myself.
I believe you meant to say that Safari and Chrome don't have extensions on mobile, lol.
I want it around for as long as possible. The new interface is a pain to use, and full of obstrusive Javascript.
Any thoughts on better forums out there? I love HN, Product Hunt (although that's not really a forum..)
Anonymous image boards?
Many forums that are ostensibly about one thing frequently have other topical sub-boards; so you can join a poker forum, and talk about car repair, etc.
Otherwise, HN, Metafilter.
The solution is bankruptcy, and a new site that 99% of redditors aren't aware of yet.
It's a distillation of the early reddit into a discussion platform that speaks activitypub. This means that the goal is not to have "one site" to rule them all, but that communities can each create their own and then interact with others if they chose to.
An demo instance is at https://littr.me
I disagree with the base premise. Not all companies need growth in order to survive, or to thrive.
Companies seeking highly speculative investment are not all companies. I don't think they're even the majority of companies.
If your company isn't growing but the market is, your company is shrinking. If your company isn't growing and the market isn't growing, how long will that market last? How many markets are stable over decades?
Shrinking relative to the addressable market.