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Comment by pg_bot | Hacker News Reader

Reddit is one of a few websites (Twitter, LinkedIn) whose design has gotten progressively worse for as long as I can remember. I really wish someone would come along and execute on a clear design vision for the company. It's insane to me that it is this poorly built.

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Reddit is leaning in to the 90/9/1 rule. The 1% of content creators know how to circumvent the barriers and are probably using an app anyway. The 90% of users just stumbling in from google get assaulted with prompts to login/download/read ads. They're the revenue providers.

Who are the remaining 9%?

90% viewers / consumers of content, 9% who contribute a little (comments and occasional posts,) 1% who actively generate majority of content

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)

It’s intentionally built - the purpose is to funnel people into the app which has an extremely high ads to content ratio compared to the old site, or most other social media platforms.

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.

> progressively worse

For you.

Forcing users into an algorithmically-controlled scroll tunnel is probably great for their advertising sales though.

The design is fine, but you can't make money by showing ads to a bunch of anonymous users and non-logged in visitors. Hence the dickbar for mobile users. Reddit have big investors now, and they are under pressure to monetize. Unfortunately their ad product is garbage, and the Reddit audience is notoriously ad-unfriendly.

I could be wrong, but doesn't reddit make most of its money (which probably isn't that much) selling awards? It seems dumb to me, but people buy them.

That's like the concession stand for a sports team. It makes them some money, but nothing close to what they'd expect to bring in through a proper ad service.

Sure, I realize they want to make money on ads like facebook, but the reality is (admittedly I could be wrong) they make more on those trophy awards. It seems to have a lot to do with why they struggle to make a profit and go public.

dickbar is my new favorite word.

It was coined in 2011 by John Gruber: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/03/06/dickbar

Reddit web/mobile is painful to use, slow, ugly, and full of dark patterns so I get that. But why do you think Twitter is bad? Yeah they force ads on you, but the app itself is nice imo.

Twitter in mobile browsers is painful and slow too, at least for me, but still much better than reddit.

Twitter is one of the slowest websites I visit via HN. Plus they have so many popups if you're not logged in

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