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Comment by bazmattaz | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily past it’s expiration date. It’s ranked 6th most trafficked sites in the US.

I do think that Reddit could do with a massive overhaul.

If I was ceo tomorrow I would; - Install a bunch of new teams to focus on solving real problems for users - understand user pain points with the UX. why were people using third party apps? And fix the experience. Invest in better mobile apps - invest in some PR or similar to change peoples view of what Reddit is. Most people think it’s just a place for memes - (random wild idea) try to understand why users like Twitter how Reddit could attract those users over to Reddit to post content

I think with some targeted investment Reddit could do so much better for itself

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> I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily past it’s expiration date. It’s ranked 6th most trafficked sites in the US.

I don't think traffic is indicative of whether a site has outstayed its cultural relevance (or efficacy).

I imagine HN readers can list off any number of sites that were in the top 10 traffic-wise and then suddenly were gone.

> understand user pain points with the UX. why were people using third party apps?

Mostly ads, are you going to remove that? How are you going to explain the revenue loss to the board?

> invest in some PR or similar to change peoples view of what Reddit is

They already do that, maybe you'd like to increase the PR budget? It might be tricky with the ad revenue loss.

> try to understand why users like Twitter how Reddit could attract those users over to Reddit to post content

They also already do that, the whole redesign with individual comments taking 240px height and user avatars are the result of that.

I'm not saying the executive team cannot do better, but doing it without getting kicked out is incredibly hard.

> Mostly ads

Mostly features.

> Mostly ads

3rd-party apps, including RIF, do display ads already - I have a vague recollection of it becoming compulsory at one point. The difference is that they tend to be less intrusive than on the Reddit app.

Apart from that, I agree that it's a hard act - but it's also true that trying to be something they're not (i.e. Twitter) will inevitably produce a damp squid which loses what made Reddit unique (and it's happening a bit more every day) while not quite managing to be the other thing.

The social space is obsessed with "competition by copycat", instead of focusing on their core strenghts. Maybe because they all fear to be destroyed by this or that novelty feature, they all end up looking the same, regardless of whether it makes sense.

The app I use is "Now for Reddit", and their ads (Google Ads) were very unobtrusive, a tiny strip of pixels at the bottom of the viewport. Reddit's ads are right there in the feed as you scroll, like Twitter or Instagram.

I paid $5 to get rid of the ads anyway.

ITYM Damp squib.

All squids are already damp.

> Mostly ads, are you going to remove that? How are you going to explain the revenue loss to the board?

Since launch "new reddit" has been broken to the point where the page crashes if you copy and paste text in the comment textarea. You need a hard reload of the page to restore it, and then you lose your comment.

It's been what, 5 years now? I think it's safe to assume that nobody working on reddit's UX actually uses new reddit, and also most likely nobody else either.

The ability to edit text isn't a weird niche feature for powerusers. It's fairly central to using the service. Anyone who does more than passively scroll down the front page will run into this.

It's not because the issue hasn't been reported either. https://www.reddit.com/r/bugs/search/?q=paste&restrict_sr=1

The SerenityOS guy will soon have built a fully functional web browser rendering engine in less time it's taken Reddit to restore the default functionality of a textarea tag. It's unbelievable.

I've never had that bug, although I'm on chrome.

I've definitely gotten it with chrome (and chrome-based browsers), Safari's apparently affected as well, although it seems worst on firefox. Depends on what you paste. Seems to be some unicode in Chrome, vs anything in FF.

> The SerenityOS guy will soon have built a fully functional web browser rendering engine in less time it's taken Reddit to restore the default functionality of a textarea tag. It's unbelievable.

A text area box that they could get for free from the browser. It's not like a text entry box is fucking rocket surgery. HTML forms have existed for almost three decades.

> understand user pain points with the UX. why were people using third party apps?

Would actually act on this info if you found out that people using third party apps were a single digit percentage of total users and decreasing over time?

People are using third-party apps because they're not trying to be all things to all people, while also constantly pivoting to handle whatever it is that management thinks the business should try out next.

Not the OP, but yeah. If something is so bad that >1% of users go through the pain of changing it, then it's probably annoying many more users. Do those <99 % users do something else about the problem, i.e., use the app less often.

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