It appears that Reddit is forcing me to use their app to see deep linked content
twitter.com
twitter.com
For anyone else annoying by the reddit redesign, you can use the Redirector chrome extension to fix it w/the following...
redirect: https://www.reddit.com(.*)
to: https://old.reddit.com$1just drag and over what you want to remove and add the '.old'
I also left reddit years ago but need it for certain things like builds for small/niche games or less popular programming/computer subs. The problem will be when they get rid of the '.old'.
I seriously think it will be soon, but then also wonder if it's possibly keeping so many old users at least visiting the platform they don't want to shoot themselves in the foot...but then I remember the redesign decision and all logic goes out the window.
Edit- after posting this I thought maybe this person was right, maybe they visit so many subs it does get tedious, so I apologize.
Then I thought, maybe a good solution would be some kind of browser add-on that could add '.old'.
Then I founds this [1] ,but as with all good addons now, it's for desktop only. Still, maybe it can help you!
Man firefox used to be the shit, now it's just shit ;(
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/reddirect-new...
The feedback is minimum, and the users who are complaining are not the users who make Reddit money. Like if you're not making them money they're not going to want to improve your experience. They're going to want to make it worse and push you into a better experience. Their motivation for this is clear, and I am confused as to why anyone would be puzzled why Reddit wants to control how people use their app, especially since if you use the app, you have to see ads and you are getting tracked. There are also notification possibilities to push more content to you. This all makes a lot of sense, and I am pretty sure revenue-wise, it's working.
People keep talking about Digg but Reddit has already had their Digg moments and are still standing and there are countless clones and countless apps that just mirror their content. Use them.
It basically feels like you are constantly trying to fight the ui to show you what you want while trying to dodge the buffet of churned content they throw at you to try and keep you in the social media vortex. Like everything else that becomes mainstream popular, the demographic has shifted away from people who care about these things.
the answer is yes.
“Does a company need more money? No. Does a company want more money? Yes”
Doesn’t matter if they wouldn’t know what to do with the extra money, or if they were sustainable before, they’ll want more.
- Favors privacy by proxying everything - Works without javascript - No account, so no voting/commenting/posting but also no tracking
Teddit is to Reddit what Nitter is to Twitter or Invidious is to Youtube. There are even extensions taking care of redirecting those most common tracking websites
Their design vision is: more ads, more user tracking, more selling of user data.
All of this to the detriment of the actual content, readability, and user satisfaction. They’re betting it doesn’t matter. I for one hope they’re wrong.
For you.
Forcing users into an algorithmically-controlled scroll tunnel is probably great for their advertising sales though.
I already have the app installed.
Native apps and URLs are like peanut butter and mayonnaise, they just don't go well together.
When I get the mobile page on Reddit, clicking "Open in App" on the popup works fine for a third party Android app (Now for Reddit).
And it is on the web for others, but not for you!
I was pretty disappointed as it wasn't too bad.
Long press the “continue in app” or Reddit “open” button depending on how it displays. A menu pops up and you can select “open in “Reddit””
Doing this once completely solved the problem for me. It was driving me crazy. I hope it helps!
Is that the same on iOS?
However, that's all your browser is using on android anyway. It's a little different on iOS as your URI needs a custom scheme while android apps fan e.g. register themselves to handle reddit.com/* if anyone asks but Reddit already sniffs your platform to pick which app store URI and to show a safari or chrome logo
Long press the “continue in app” or Reddit “open” button depending on how it displays. A menu pops up and you can select “open in “Reddit””
Doing this once completely solved the problem for me. It was driving me crazy. I hope it helps!
I have been finding ways to bypass their blocks, so my apologies if they decide to make it an entirely private site.
Edit: using the www prefix, not old or i.
>I have been finding ways to bypass their blocks, so my apologies if they decide to make it an entirely private site.
using the i.reddit.com subdomain should work.
It’s not as convenient on mobile but reddit now is hostile to lurkers so it is what it is.
I guess this is what they did with the results.
When they drop old style they should be prepared for a huge migration of users away like what happened to Digg. Hoping someone has a viable competitor spinning up for when they decide to make their next decision that is terrible for the users.
On the app I get 2, maybe 3 posts per screen and at least 1 ad taking up 30% or more of the screen. I don’t see how that’s an objectively better user experience unless someone desperately needs glasses.
Another factor is that communities can’t use CSS to style their pages with the new site. /r/nfl for example is a thousand times better with their CSS than the few tools for differentiation Reddit provides.
Reddit allows you to see your subreddit's statstistics, and the last time I checked, around 1/3 of our traffic is from old reddit. So definitely not just a small minority.
(Then again, it has been around a year since I checked, so perhaps the numbers have shifted.)
The number used to be falling much faster, but seems to be falling in a somewhat stable fashion around the 15% mark over the past year.
Get more value and less hate from here, as it is.
Must have been some MutationObserver hook to prevent people from fiddling.
I was pretty turned off after that. Anyway, that being said, browser perf is so bad with the new Reddit, you basically have to use the app.
- It's unusable on mobile and always has been. Don't bother trying. Use unofficial apps, not the Reddit app. For example, Apollo on iOS is excellent. It's an indie app with a really great, responsive developer. Pay real money for an ad-free app like Apollo.
- For desktop, set your user settings to always visit old.reddit.com. Yes, this is an official setting that's part of the user profile settings. If you want to stay logged out, there are lots of Old Reddit redirect extensions.
- Always use Reddit Enhancement Suite on desktop, you're missing out if you don't.
I believe Reddit's leadership knows that a decent subset of their longer tenured audience values old.reddit.com, but at the same time I wouldn't want to necessarily blame them for wanting to get new users on the app and using the newer website.
For everyone that thinks they're "yet another Digg," I don't think so. They have deliberately made it so that their existing users are allowed to use Reddit in the old way that they want to.
We can get upset about the dark patterns, but it's also true that social media customers are categorically not willing to pay for that kind of product. If Reddit charged even a small fee like $10 a year they'd have probably 1/10th of the visitors they do now. It just doesn't make business sense not to run off of the "data vacuum" model. Sorry, the MBAs are right in this case.
As an example, there's a common Internet meme where people joke about how nobody in their right mind would pay for YouTube Premium, even though it's on many levels an excellent product and a fair business model to pay for the service without seeing personalized ads.
- realtime: every post has built-in slack quality chat w/markdown support.
- open: the site is completely open for anyone, if you want to chat, creating an account is a breeze w/no email required
- minimal: focus is on conversations w/low friction, designed so both tech and non-tech people can post, share, and easily join in a conversation.
- clean design: mobile/desktop web friendly
- new features dropping regularly
Most importantly, you don't need to download anything to view a post!
There have been numerous reddit clones. But the main issue is the lack of a community. People who like reddit... still use reddit for the most part. It'll take something like reddit killing the old ux to finally force enough people to move to an alternative such that a good, sizable community is formed.
-Javascript ridden mess to display text. Loading spinners left right and center. I bet you can display text in rows without executing more than 2 megabytes of javascript.
-Dark patterns like infinite scrolling
-Chat style discussions are a fertile ground for low quality messages
I'm jaded enough not to expect better by now but I think these are still worth mentioning if you are comparing yourself against nu-reddit.
A website that advertises itself as "the front page of the internet" should allow it's users to stay in their internet browsers.
I personally don't care for local dedicated apps for every little site or resturant I eat at. There's a large group of people that don't want load up their phone with Cheesecake Factory, Bestbuy, Sonos, and Reddit apps.
Browsers are really cool.
Deleted my 10+ year accounts a few weeks ago.
Hardly use it now, and have been able to use it more responsibly.
Personally though I think you would be better off just avoid reddit, that place is horrible for people.
I never open it at work and get along just fine.
In the area where the Tweet would show, it instead says "Something went wrong" EDIT: it has been like this for several years so I assumed it was a dark pattern.
It seems to be triggered by IPv6 combined with Apple telling cookies to go duck themselves.
JUST the front page, it appears.
For a website that has been around so long and has been a fundamental building block of what most of us understand to be a diverse, open, and highly interconnected internet, this is quite close-minded.
I guess as long as it “works”, i.e. as long as dirty tricks continue to increase certain metrics, we’ll see apps that use them.
Still, I’m surprised, because good UX seemed to be part of the core offering of this particular website.
Are they betting that the community won’t go anywhere? Do they want to attract so many new users that they don’t care about existing ones?
I dunno.
I'd rather let the owner know, or I can always build my own garden. Thankfully there are couple of free, ready-to-use DIY gardens, aka Federated social networks.
Why not complain? Reddit got their users by word of mouth so surely it is just fair to warn users and sow dissent too.
It's a sketchy annoyance but hardly a problem. Or use old.reddit like everyone else suggests.
Are you visiting the exact subreddit? I can reproduce it just fine. As I mentioned in another comment, the behavior is subreddit specific. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27554337
(logs in, continues on merry way, in browser, all working)
Lemmy seems OK, though (and IIRC is actively trying to avoid that fate somehow).
> HL Mencken once said that “the trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”
> There’s an unfortunate corollary to this, which is that if you try to create a libertarian paradise, you will attract three deeply virtuous people with a strong commitment to the principle of universal freedom, plus millions of scoundrels. Declare that you’re going to stop holding witch hunts, and your coalition is certain to include more than its share of witches.
1. https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-central...
Because it doesn't have the adverse selection problem since it appeals to mainstream audiences. That could be bad as well if your prior userbase was above average, ie. "eternal September"
>Who gets to define what constitutes a scoundrel?
I don't think thats worth discussing. You don't need an exact definition of a "scoundrel" to see why free speech reddit clones tend to attract a certain kind of user base.
And I certainly think it's worth discussing what constitues a scoundrel. After all Scott Alexander himself has infamously been regarded as one by mainstream institutions like the New York Times. For him to be quoted as an expert on the subject is painfully ironic.
I don't think "contrarians" in the early internet are the "scoundrels" that alexander scott was talking about. Specifically, it's possible to be a contrarian but not be that type of contrarian that you get on voat. Also, how free speech are those venues in the early internet? Were they literally "as long as it's legal we'll let you post it"? Could you get away with spamming racist posts, or would you get shunned/blocked by the community?
>Of course there is adverse selection if one is looking for remnants of an Internet before or some several years after Eternal September. Mainstream usage does not imply that something is free from scoundrels.
It's not free of scoundrels, but they're diluted and moderated to the point that you don't notice them.
Yes. On Usenet you could and still can post anything you want. Even if is/was illegal. Warez, drugs, and other less-then-savory stuff have had whole boards devoted to them.
>>Could you get away with spamming racist posts, or would you get shunned/blocked by the community?
Once again yes. On Usenet, you could get kicked from a particular discussion depending whether an admin thought one was racist, not racist enough, or for any reason at all. However, there was nothing stopping one from making a different account and continuing to use the same board. After all, there wasn't a real name or email requirement a la Facebook back then or even today. Think 4chan or early Reddit but with more academics. That's what Usenet was and, to a more limited extent, so were BBSs.
>>It's not free of scoundrels, but they're diluted and moderated to the point that you don't notice them.
The dilution you speak of is a passive one and never permanent. It just happens to exist because most people are ignorant and uninterested enough to not give to certain types of scoundrels for the time being much serious attention. Their ignorance serves as a buffer against the spread of ideas. But up to a point. That same ignorance breeds naiveté towards seriously considering certain critical issues and leaves them susceptible to manipulation when faced with an issue one "feels" is important, but lacks an internalized explanation for. At a some critical juncture - a word said, a topic raised - the once blissful, sleeping giant of collective ignorance thrusts itself into the tumult armed with nothing by shoddy memes and crackpot ideas peddled by the scoundrels of their choosing. Except those scoundrels don't call themselves "scoundrels". These mainstream-appealing types call themselves "Joe Blow", " just a guy like you", a "clinical expert", a "thinker", a "hard-hitting journalist", etc. Maybe they believe their own drek or maybe they sell their horseshit with knowing impunity. Either way, mainstream audiences are generally less well-equipped (and likely less interested) to actively think through their chosen scoundrels positions, despite the wishful thinking behind the "wisdom of the crowds"-types suggesting otherwise.
On a free speech platform, a la Voat or Usenet, you know what you're getting itself into without any of the pretensions. The value in the content is in digesting the premises and principles behind one's thinking. How close one is to recreating society or its proclaimed values is not the goal or the measure by which one delineates, or should delineate, scoundrels from non-scoundrels. Doing so just breeds stagnation and scoundrels of a different strain: empty-headed, hypocritical pundits.
The most absolutely illegal stuff was posted. And often as not where one would expect ordinary porn. It was well beyond Wild West, and much more depraved Epstein rape island.
It took quite a few years for reliably legal porn newsgroups to become a thing, and even longer to weed out the criminal image and video groups… if they even did; the web took off before Usenet solved its criminal porn problems.
Anything you can imagine and worse was available on the early Usenet. Absolutely nothing was being done to regulate it.
My guess is something will pop up with good UX and rules, that a critical mass moves to. Something akin to lemmy, but centralized.
It’s a horrible platform that does more harm than good and is a major contributor to the extremely polarized society we are building for ourselves.
And spare me the whole “but some communities are good” hand waving. I’m sure you can find a flower growing in a minefield too.
Oh! The irony.