Reddit aims to double in size as social news site invests for growth | Hacker News Reader

Reddit aims to double in size as social news site invests for growth

theguardian.com

12 pointsmonkey_monkey26 comments

I'd love to see some negative growth there.

The whole platform is a joke. I wish people started founding their own new small communities again instead of going for a subreddit.

Yeah, that's the only thing that keeps me using it. It really is the best place for some niche communities/information.

A new small community getting critical mass is more difficult nowadays, because so many people are accessing the social internet primarily through mobile phones. That means that a lot of people expect a ready-made app, and navigating through a web browser to e.g. a phpBB forum and signing up for an account there seems too burdensome.

Then, because of the limitations of phone keyboards (even for those who boast of their touch-typing skills), discussion tends to get shorter and less information-dense. If you look at Reddit posting on some special-interest from six years ago, people were typically offering a couple of solid paragraphs. Now, most people there are writing one-line comments, and if you write the length I’m writing now, you look out of place. (People might even say "lol wall of text bro").

I think that's what discord offers. Communities have gone further into their little niche bubbles bur now you have a better realtime experience. Reddit has grown so big that it is catering to the lowest common denominator now.

Discord offers a chatroom, not a forum.

> Advertising is still “the vast majority” of Reddit’s revenue, but since the company began seriously focusing on the Premium business last year, it has doubled its take. “I think it has a lot of potential,” Wong says. “What’s exciting about it is, you know, you look at the east and the behaviours in Asian apps like WeChat etc: gamification, customisation, expression, being able to pay back and forth with coins and avatars, is just a part of the experience. We have always had that behaviour on Reddit, but we hadn’t put, you know, teams behind it to make it even more fun and diverse.”

I suppose we have to find out if big tech can have a yuckier business model than ads now

I've barely used Reddit's web interface ever since the redesign, and don't get me started on the mobile browsing experience. The generic UI, the useless features have just really turned me off from ever using any official webapp of theirs. I'd say the sole aspect I like is the rich markdown editor. I knew it was over when I saw that the account sign-up form essentially almost deceives new users into forking over their email address.

try: https://teddit.net/

You can even subscribe to subs without having to create an account.

Luckily you can turn off the redesign in preferences with an account. You can use old.reddit but that's pretty annoying imo. The redesign is truly terrible and having 2 UIs, one of which has many strange user engagement oriented features, is very odd. Old users are used to their old ways and stick to them, never really seeing the totally different world new users see.. This causes an odd divide in user behavior. I have heard mods complain about this as their members will be complaining to them about things the mod never sees since they prefer the old design.

Also yeah, the way they intentionally murdered mobile browser access infuriates me to no end. Truly a prime example in "how to get users to migrate platforms by totally degrading the old one and pissing the users off as much as possible'. If you googling something on your phone and open a reddit link, you'll first hit an entirely useless amp link that tries to get you to use the app. Then you subvert that and get another useless page that tries to get you to open the app. Ignore that. Oh, you can only see 3 comments and couple layers deep but want to expand the more replies. Ok, press expand. Oh, I am in the app store now. Truly some cancerous design.

The problem with you choosing old.reddit.com, is that it doesn’t fix the general culture of the site where everyone else is using the new interface. Everyone else is asking the same questions again and again because the subreddit’s sidebar (which might have a FAQ and general rules) is hidden in the new interface. Everyone else is engaging in inane one-line comments and meme posts because the new interface does not encourage substantial, nuanced discussion.

>Everyone else is engaging in inane one-line comments and meme posts because the new interface does not encourage substantial, nuanced discussion

How does the old interface (which I use) differ at all in terms of encouraging nuanced discussion? It's still just a box for markdown.

For example, the old interface shows more of the discussion, while the new interface hides things unless clicked on. So, readers actually have context before they give their own input. Less chance of kneejerk reactions to the post immediately above.

Js4.red is a good mobile alternative. You can login and comment, unlike the other alt reddit sites I’ve seen.

Nice, I like this. Thank you.

It took longer, but Reddit looks dead set on being the next digg. If they disabled the ability to use old.Reddit it would have already happened. But pushing more for gamification of tokens and premium experiences sounds like it will digg it reliably.

I've personally realized that reddit is user manipulation platform. The content you read there is strictly controlled and must comply with the Official Reddit Party Narrative, and users are tracked and have their data shared with other tech companies which use that data to train their human behavior manipulation machines.

I left Reddit and I will never go back.

Thanks for letting us know. Any thoughts on this article?

My thought on the article was implied: I do not support Reddit's aims, and won't partake in their business model.

Reddit has become irrelevant so good luck with that!

There were longbeards early on who warned us that Reddit would centralize discourse, providing a target for pr spooks, and then destroy free expression on the internet, and they were right.

"Social news" is an interesting thing to call it. Social yes, but "news"? That's a stretch.

Just when you thought social media reached peak toxicity. It’s going to be a disaster and is a disservice to the journalistic integrity.

Then what would you call Hacker News?

"News" is nothing but entertainment. Reddit "news" is just as much propaganda as traditional TV/newspaper "news"

I get all my domestic news through Reddit. I think your perspective on Reddit as a social news site spends on which country you live in and how healthy your country’s subreddits are.

whether or not you get your news from a site is distinct from whether or not that's the reason it exists. It would be a pretty tenuous stretch to say Reddit is a site that exists to give people news, even if many people do get their news there.

The same applies to Twitter. It does not in any way exist to be a source of news, but many people do get their news from there, for better or worse.

But they're both just social media sites. Anyone anywhere can post whatever they want and mostly get away with it on them. There is no vetting except in certain extreme circumstances.

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