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Comment by samstave | Hacker News Reader

DIGG blew its userbase by fucking up the UX.

Reddit is on path to do same. If reddit ever kills old.reddit, exodus will happen.

But seriously, a designer should be thinking about the consumption/participation model as opposed to just the eyeballs/adwords-please-kill-me-now model...

The consumption and participation of a site is direct to the UX - and when DIGG basically made it a 100% consumption push, while also making participation weird/hard/less-desirable, that shit was dead.

Reddit is becoming a weird corporate bot colony and they are actively killing their UX.

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> Reddit is on path to do same. If reddit ever kills old.reddit, exodus will happen.

I use Reddit exclusively in the "old" mode, but I wonder how impactful would this be. The Reddit redesign was basically done to cater to a wider audience (9gag, TikTok, etc). I feel that either at this point or in the near future the number of people that use old.reddit.com exclusively will be a small percentage of the whole lot of people using the new design. Particularly because Reddit is "strangling" out users of old.reddit by leaving them out of the new features (I normally see comments with stuff like :4222: which I assume are emoticons only available in the new reddit).

I've posted a lot about this in the past, and one of the things about 'old./r/' that is overlooked by the massive mobile consumers, is that information density is super high with old.reddit and RES.

I posted a bunch of tips on how to set them up for speed - Like I said, as a daily redditor for 15 years, uhm I have the 1,000 Karma Stare.

> I normally see comments with stuff like :4222: which I assume are emoticons only available in the new reddit

For what it's worth, someone posted this Tampermonkey script that converts those codes to the proper custom Emoji's, on Old Reddit. It works well with Firefox at least:

https://justpaste.it/6624t

>I normally see comments with stuff like :4222: which I assume are emoticons only available in the new reddit

You're not missing much

IIRC, Old Reddit addicts are a disproportionate influence among the moderation and high-karma populations. New Reddit is for the read-only proles, Old Reddit is for the people who provide value.

> If reddit ever kills old.reddit, exodus will happen.

You overestimate. Most people have moved on, and reddit gains new users every day who have no idea what old.reddit is.

it's becoming tiktok slowly

moved on to what?

I have to imagine most users are mobile or it's actively trending in that direction

To using reddit as reddit intends, either the default interface on the web (so not old.reddit), or even more likely the first-party apps on iOS and Android.

This is one of those things where the distinction between "UI" and "UX" really matters. reddit is fucking up the UI, but the content is still reddit. digg fundamentally changed the content they displayed from community driven to publisher and power-user driven. they could have survived a redesign if they hadn't also pivoted the whole product direction at the same time.

IIRC, ads and paid posts caused Digg to lose over Reddit. I didn’t use either at the time, but people I know did.

Yes. This is exactly what happened.

DIGG basically became what new Reddit looks like now, but they were specifically transparent that every post was essentially a paid marketing blob and the corporate commercial took over all of DIGG - pissed everyone off and they all flocked to Reddit.

Reddit is doing the same thing, however, when DIGG messed around with the UX, bots were not a thing in the same form they are now…

“Video killed the radio star” but now it’s

“Bot killed any sense of trust on social media”

As someone who only occasionally visits reddit, can I ask what the bots are doing? I’ve only ever seen bots that do things like correct spelling

> If reddit ever kills old.reddit, exodus will happen.

Plausible, but if it really does happen it will be a landmark. Modern losing against old and ~crippled UX.

It is still so friggin' weird to me that Reddit had the longevity over Digg.

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