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Comment by RosanaAnaDana | Hacker News Reader

Reddit has completely jumped the shark in its UI design, the 'direction' its taken, and its basically complete capitulation to censorship at a corporate level. Its interesting to that they haven't IPO'd yet, because in my view, its a zombie carcass waiting for its replacement to find its way onto the net.

There has always been a place, a need, and a demand for anonymous, free form discussions on the internet. Craigslist community posts (those are still a thing too), Fark, SomethingAwful, Digg, Reddit, and yes, Hackernews. I get that there are difficulties in managing an anonymous community, especially in a world where things can go so toxic. But reddit is a walking corpse waiting to be taken over by a better product. Everything about the site, the community, the company is hot garbage, but there is no better alternative, so it walks on.

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>complete capitulation to censorship at a corporate level.

sigh

I would still use Reddit and put up with all the bad UI design and dark patterns if it wasn't for the censorship. I miss the pre-2016 election reddit when it was still full of pedantic types who would have long debates in comment threads where they would break each other's arguments down line by line. I wasn't strongly in favor of one belief or another, but it taught me a lot about forming arguments and persuasive writing that English classes never taught me. Back in those days you would still see productive debates between left-wing and libertarian types. Now with all the gold and comment badges discussion has devolved down to who can make the wittiest, snarkiest one liner that will get them rewarded.

I once spent an entire weekend collecting and aggregating data to create a bunch of charts that revealed some really interesting statistics for a subreddit and earned about 100 karma.

I made a one-line "zinger" comment on some random thread in r/pics and pulled in 1,800 karma.

That's when I realized I was casting pearl before swine by spending real effort on Reddit, and I should instead be directing my efforts on real quality content elsewhere.

The concept of lowest common denominator isn't really exclusive to Reddit, communicating through any medium there will always be more people able / willing to understand (or just to spend the time getting through) something short and simple than something long and complex.

All those things suck at reddit, but to me the fundamental issue with reddit is upvoting/downvoting + a massive user base. Subreddits get too large and are dominated by lowest common denominator quips and memes to the point that the content is junk food for echo chambers. Every so often some bit of insight can rise, but by and large that's the problem and it's fundamental to reddit's DNA and no UX fixes would solve that.

I disagree that UX can't play a role in this aspect of Reddit. Old reddit was a lot more insightful and had higher quality content and discussions, because the UX was geared towards that. Now the UX is heavily geared towards mindless scrolling of a feed on your phone, and so that is the kind of content you get.

Just look at Hacker News, it is upvote/downvote-based, but it has way better quality discussion than anywhere on (new) Reddit. Maybe comparable to some of the best subs 10 years ago, and that's because Hacker News has the same UI reddit had 10 years ago.

> Just look at Hacker News, it is upvote/downvote-based, but it has way better quality discussion than anywhere on (new) Reddit. Maybe comparable to some of the best subs 10 years ago, and that's because Hacker News has the same UI reddit had 10 years ago.

HN has paid moderators, which is unheard of for a community this small (~12k comments per day last time dang shared stats)

>Reddit has completely jumped the shark in its UI design, the 'direction' its taken, and its basically complete capitulation to censorship at a corporate level. Its interesting to that they haven't IPO'd yet, because in my view, its a zombie carcass waiting for its replacement to find its way onto the net.

They're never going to IPO, because they're owned by Advance Publications. Reddit hasn't been a startup for like a decade.

> There has always been a place, a need, and a demand for anonymous, free form discussions on the internet.

With the EU terreg and other countries like UK's online safety bill, owners will have to censor content on request or become liable. Free speech internet is going to be a pipe dream in a year or so. There is never going to be alternative to Reddit and remaining free speech sites will have to close or become compliant.

A lot has been written about the social and legal difficulties of running such a site (how much do you enjoy looking at child porn all day so you can ban the people posting it? How many mass-shooters would you like to have post their manifesto on your site?) But I think the real issue is just money. Even if you keep things pretty stripped down, as 4chan or the original reddit did, hosting still costs money. And if you ever catch on, it's going to cost a LOT of money. Where is that money going to come from? Your users? You don't have a commercial product people are willing to pay for. Advertisers? Not in a post ad-pocalypse era; they don't want to be anywhere near a free, anonymous platform. And keep in mind that eventually you'll have to pay for ddoss protection, a security and moderation team, and probably legal as well. So unless you're wealthy enough to just pay for the site out of pocket indefinitely, any reddit or image board clone is doomed to failure from the beginning. It has a ticking death clock that will expire when the owners finally realize they can no longer afford it.

There was in fact a time where Reddit’s front page included a progress bar showing how much Gold needed to be bought/gifted that day to pay off that day’s server time, and shortly after it was introduced the bar was overfilled every single day and eventually set to a more arbitrary goal than actual server bills. I’m assuming that didn’t include salaries and other overhead, but it does indicate the userbase could basically sponsor the hosting fees. That was also before Reddit directly hosted images and videos, so those bills have presumably gone up quite a bit.

This is actually one of the more troubling aspects of Reddit's decline IMO. The user-funded model WORKED but so much tracking data was getting left behind that someone chose to make the switch.

It will be difficult if not impossible to find a payment platform to service donations. If you accept crypto, exchanges may block you if user pays with stolen coins.

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