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Comment by eljimmy | Hacker News Reader

I can’t help but think this is the end for that site. It started off with a very old school minimalist designed forum vibe and has been devolving into dark patterns and advertisements as of late.

I guess good things can’t stay free forever and the bills need to be paid somehow. Wish they went to a donation model like Wikipedia instead.

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I found reddit from the great digg.com exodus.

They didn’t learn.

Slashdot did the same thing even before digg. I miss those days sometimes.

The fact that old.reddit.com continues to be available suggests that they did.

To this point, I would probably stop using the desktop version of the site if they nixed old.reddit.com.

I’m a fan of teddit.net

Same. I only use old mode for both mobile and desktop. It’s super annoying that about once a week they drop me back into their utterly awful mobile web experience. Then have to go back to settings and choose request desktop site yet again.

Most recently they’ve switched image galleries to using their new desktop design, so simply trying to view images often pops up this new and totally incompatible experience. Earlier today the left/right nav icons stopped working so I just gave up on trying to view those images.

https://github.com/tom-james-watson/old-reddit-redirect

Alternatively as a User script:

https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/40897-old-reddit-please

Unfortunately this extension is basically useless. If I’m on a real desktop, I don’t need to visit old.reddit.com. I have that set in the user preferences. (Currently using Chrome on desktop.)

I use mobile safari on mobile, which this extension doesn’t work for.

i.reddit.com works pretty well for phone browsers, quite minimalist and mostly not broken.

Which raises the question.

Where will people head from the reddit exodus?

Nowhere. People comparing it to Digg more than a decade later are wildly out of touch with the current state of the internet.

There are lots of interesting potential new homes popping up, including SaidIt.net, Tildes.net, Gab.com, even Parler.com and/or whatever Donal Trump has announced. Problem for all of them is their lack of critical mass. Reddit is slowly squeezing users and communities out to appeal to advertisers, but they haven't had their Digg moment yet. That would be something like killing old.reddit.com. Such a catalyst would cause a huge portion of their userbase to leave. So far, they've been too smart to do that, but I can foresee a bunch of new management entering the business after IPO and making those "tough" changes.

I'm also seeing various communities simply making their own websites. rdrama.net, for example, is surprisingly successful. kotakuinaction2.win is also doing quite well. I'm sure there are other, even better examples. At first I was resistant of this fragmentation, but I quickly came to embrace this reversion to the internet of yore. It wasn't so long ago that we would go to individual sites to discuss certain things. It's a relatively recent phenomenon that we've embraced monolithic communities for all of our media and social consumption. I don't think it's healthy, and perhaps this fragmentation is exactly what the internet needs right now. Less algorithm-generated outrage in the dystopian "news feed," and more user-driven experiences based on choosing which sites to visit. A crazy concept for many today.

The problem with the sites you've listed isn't "lack of critical mass" it's that they're infested with neo-nazis.

Big yikes from me, dawg.

Yeah...

Anyone know of any that aren't? Most things around that I know of are from people getting banned from reddit and building their own.

Just checked out tildes.net, that one seems pretty ok at a first glance.

They have been touting MAUs and DAUs a lot over the last one year. Turns out their numbers are very very public.

Whenever a new user creates an account, she automatically gets added to r/announcements. It's not a choice, they dont even show it as an option.

The current subs of r/announcements is 127M. It was 124M at the start of this month. Just shows that reddit - with newer design or not - has not found much acceptance in the upcoming generations. They tend to visit the site, yet are hesitant to create an account. For reference, their MAUs for month of Dec 19 alone were 430M. They got a lot of help from SEO for everyone of their threads being indexed, and hence the high traffic, but regular users and personalized ads isnt there. Likely low ARPU.

Edit: This is probably the reason for those dark patterns too. If I can see that low conversion rate, so can people inside, and they would try and improve that via different UX patterns. Because it seems like a low hanging fruit when it is not really one.

Yeah, “Reddit is going down because they only converted three million new users in the last month.” Is probably not the argument that will convince anyone who’s ever built a b2c of your point.

That is not my argument. A standalone number of 3M is good, especially when 3M new users combined with 100M existing ones demonstrate huge stickiness.

What I am trying to say is that, reddit is attracting a lot of new users through SEO, yet they have not been able to convert them like at all. The existing userbase is sticking and has been very active, but the site is not as appealing to new users who are just finding out about reddit.

Well, they tried. For a very long time they asked people to donate. They even tried to gamify it with reddit gold and the like. I suspect it just didn't work.

There is, Reddit gold. Not that I’d give them any money for the decisions they made, I don’t reward bad behavior and I paid with my data.

Disclaimer: I worked at Reddit prior to when ads were a major revenue source and left in 2018

Prior to ads and the current dark patterns you see on the site, Reddit primarily tried to monetize through Reddit Gold. It didn't work, and users never purchased it in any meaningful volume to keep the site afloat. So while you wouldn't give them money for the decisions they've made recently, they weren't making enough money when they were (ostensibly) making better decisions.

How would you go about solving this problem? It's a genuine question without snark - if social media companies are unable to stay sustainable through direct user funding, then they're going to look to ads or other sources eventually.

Interesting - I never knew that was the purpose of Reddit gold. I feel like a donation drive with direct acknowledgement that it would keep the site private and free of external financial interests would have provoked me to donate.

I thought Reddit gold was just some meaningless emoji thing.

Really? It was pretty obvious, my guilded comments and gold stats even says that donation paid for an amount of server time.

The meaningless emoji stuff was added later to boost sales (think of it similar to skins in video games). You used to not get any of that, and the clear thing you did get was no ads (IIRC, this is still the case and if you have Reddit gold you get no ads on the site).

I remember 4chan did it by donate or die. They needed server money and they got it because it wasn’t working as long as they didn’t have a server. That was a much smaller scale though.

Can you talk about your work there? It’s cool if you don’t want to, how was it? You left obviously so I can guess.

I honestly don't have any hard feelings or ill will towards Reddit - I liked my coworkers and my time there was fun overall. I worked on mostly backend/data stuff during my time there, but over time it became painfully clear that there was no way Reddit would make it as a business without resorting to the kinds of shady tactics that you see today.

I sincerely believe that the leadership tried to avoid the ads revenue stream and all the ills that come with it for as long as possible, and searched for a lot of ways out (see things like Reddit Notes in the past). But I don't think I'll work in the social media domain again, because the experience really soured me on the sustainability model as a whole. People are generally unwilling to donate/pay for the content, and it's impossible to operate a site where there's no subscription revenue coming in.

What do you think of substack? I like it as decentralized news. Medium dropped off the face of a cliff but substack has freedom of speech, email lists that is controlled by the writer, and they made it a subscription based long form article model.

I don’t disagree with you though, if it’s given to you free it’s expected to be free forever. They’ll try to get money somehow but nobody will like it. I definitely liked it at first too, but it’s become so much different.

Substack is good, and certainly much better than Medium! But I think it serves a different purpose, since it lets content creators monetize their audience rather than managing P2P user interaction like most social media.

I'm not sure where the P2P interactions will go - it's possible that they stay centralized on the major platforms of today, or we see a return to smaller forums as we had back in the late 90s and early 2000s.

I don't use Wikipedia any more, they wouldn't leave me alone with their constant begging. I could just set up a block for the things, but I'd rather just be edgy and never use the site again. The content has been going downhill for years anyway. A lot more fun to find specific resources on cooler websites.

The repeated asking for donations is a bit much, I agree. I do still donate to Wikipedia though as I find it is an amazing resource to have available.

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