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Comment by kelseyfrog | Hacker News Reader

The UX redesign is also clearly part of a mobile-first strategy. The mobile site funnels users into the mobile app, and the desktop site clearly echos the mobile design principles.

Mobile users fundamentally engage with the platform in different ways. For one, they form a different demographic segment than older users, and secondly the mobile app frames and filters content in uniquely mobile ways. High-signal content is much more difficult to craft on a mobile device so more mobile use represents a greater proportion of content noise.

Early adopters seek high-signal over content quantity and will move platforms if the opportunity arises. Such a migration will play into future case studies critiquing Reddits MAU-chasing at the expense of hollowing out their long-time user base.

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> The mobile site funnels users into the mobile app, and the desktop site clearly echos the mobile design principles.

More like hoards them into the app with a cattle prod. You can't use the mobile site without constantly confirming that no, I really really really don't want to use the app like I said 20 seconds ago.

This is beyond dark patterns. It's pure user hostility.

Better to ignore their current mobile site and use the old layout, which is inexplicably still available at https://i.reddit.com/ with a much better experience.

> inexplicably

There's a small but significant group of users who would probably quit reddit if old reddit went away. Keeping them around for (what I assume is) minimal cost is just good business.

And here I have been using https://old.reddit.com on a mobile device like a barbarian. Thank you for posting this!

Same here! Thank you!

Agreed, the UX for the mobile web app is very hostile.

I use it anyways in Brave to limit how much tracking Reddit can do on me, but I feel like that's probably a fools errand at this point.

Go to settings -> ask to open in app to disable this

I must be using Reddit differently than the typical user. It's almost hilarious how much worse the new UX is compared to browsing the exact same content on old.reddit.com. Like, I literally cannot believe that serious money, time, and effort were invested in designing this product, though presumably that is true. The same applies particularly to their video player, it is just amazingly bad compared to similar offerings from other large social media sites.

Using old.reddit.com + Reddit Enhancement Suite extension, and subscribing to subreddits focused on high quality discussion (usually signalled by "Discussion" or "True" in the subreddit name) gives the best experience of the site IMO. But even so I feel that version reddit is slowly fading over time. I'm half expecting to wakeup one day to find that old.reddit.com is no longer available.

Yeah me as well. It’s not really “supported” right?

More importantly, it's very difficult to block ads on a mobile app. Reddit's problem is that the vast majority of their "power users" use adblockers and therefore provide zero revenue. Mobile also makes it much easier to doom scroll for hours a day, key to facebook's success.

As far as I can tell reddit's website provides minimal income and is just an ad for their app.

Go to any popular subreddit and click the "gilded" tab at the top. At the top of this page it tells you how many months of server time "gold"s purchased in the subreddit paid for, you will be shocked.

I've seen subreddits with less than 50000 subscribers who had enough purchases to cover 3 years of server cost. /r/aww alone paid for 772 years of server time according to their calculations.

Reddit could go on indefinitely as is with no advertising.

> Reddit could go on indefinitely as is with no advertising.

I don't think the goal of tech companies is to just "go on indefinitely." Their investors need them to make billions of dollars.

Well of course, I was only responding to the point about whether the website made any money without advertising.

Given that the technology is solved, and the financing is solved, I wish there were a way to build such a website with such a community without the cycle always ending in its destruction for the sake of profit.

They did, once, and called it IRC. It's still good.

Even freenode is no longer good. At least it had to be renamed libera chat.

I'd be careful with that - it's widely known that Reddit admins use "fake" gold to artificially bring content that they want to the frontpage.

To be clear, it costs real money for regular people to give Reddit gold, but Reddit admins can do it for free. So it's a very strong signal from everyone but them, but just as meaningless as an upvote from them.

Good to keep in mind for the large subreddits and to put a grain on salt on those approximations, but even the subreddits hated by the admins show years-worth of purchases, it's also not likely to be prevalent in those like /r/aww where it's exclusively pictures of pets.

IOW, Reddit redesigned the UI towards mobile, devalued high-signal and high-quality, and so recreated the Eternal September [0] on their own platform.

You'd think they'd know better, but maybe to them, replacing high-information-demanding users with a casual audience is a feature and not a bug.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

I don't know how credible this site is [0], but I think something that goes understated in these conversations is just how explosive the growth is that Reddit has experienced even in the last year:

* A doubling of mobile app downloads in the past year

* Valuation increase of 4Bn in 6 months (from ~6Bn to ~10Bn) (Feb 2021 to Aug 2021)

* Revenue growth forecast over 250%

I guess we're all kind of used to the idea that Reddit keeps growing, because it more or less has since it was created (citation needed), but the nature of exponential growth is such that maybe we're a bit numb to just how big the numbers have gotten in the past year or so.

[0] https://backlinko.com/reddit-users

Absolutely. The business has a huge incentive to grow even if it results in old-timers migrating off platform.

Their mobile app is terrible enough that I eventually gave up and find some alternative app. It isn't about UI or UX, it's purely usability issue.

What the heck they removed my subs from the sidebar and add it back from time to time, move the avatar every week, and constantly generate fake notification dot even there isn't any? It's just annoying that you see it says you have notification, you click and there isn't any.

This is the most dumb app I ever seen. And this is also the first time I use an alternative client on a social platform because the vanilla one is so useless.

> Mobile users fundamentally engage with the platform in different ways. For one, they form a different demographic segment than older users, and secondly the mobile app frames and filters content in uniquely mobile ways. High-signal content is much more difficult to craft on a mobile device so more mobile use represents a greater proportion of content noise.

I'd argue the only thing that really matters about mobile users is they are online _way_ more often. Engagement can be higher on mobile because the access is mobile.

Maybe? I guess I'm speaking from personal experience here when I say writing in-depth sourced and edited comments[higher quality] is more difficult for me on a mobile device. But perhaps, my experience not the norm. Is it different for others?

The proportion of users on mobile devices could explain some of the sliding quality. I know if I am using a mobile device, it's primarily for content consumption. I can't quickly reply in any depth with a mobile keyboard, so that waits until I am at a full PC, which is a smaller and smaller proportion of the time I am actually using Reddit in recent years.

Engagement isn't about how much time you spend in the editor writing insightful comments. It's how much you scroll through the feed laced with ads. Sadly.

For sure. Optimizing for MAUs disincentives quality content.

Quantity of engagement > quality of engagement

Or "more ads better"

and app means more user info for ads

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