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Comment by Workaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

Everyone here is shitting on it, but to me it looks like it accomplished exactly what reddit wanted, and was wildly successful at doing so.

Reddit very successfully moved away from being the techy nerd basement dweller site to becoming a trendy young "normie" people site. Dumb everything down to shoot for the lowest common denominator, maximizing the size of your target demographic.

So hiring someone who probably loved instagram, facebook, pinterest, tumblr, but never used reddit (but had likely been to the site perhaps a few times before) is exactly who they wanted to redesign the site.

IIRC something like 95% of users are using the official app and/or the new website. And reddit has exploded in popularity in recent years.

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I think it does what Reddit wants, doom-scrolling. Long interactions with a single post isn't good for revenue.

Personally I don't understand how people can use the new design. My opinion that it's terrible is one thing, but it doesn't even work. For the first few years I repeatably made bug reports, then I just gave up. The "new" design is slow as all hell, the video player doesn't work and if you want to read more than a few comments... well to bad, because 80% of them are buried and you don't get to read them. The redesign is five years old, it has been worked on for longer, and it still doesn't work.

Maybe it has attracted more people, if so, it's the wrong kind, because Reddit has developed into a cesspit of negativity. Everyone appears to have be depressed, poor, angry, hostile towards people not who thinks differently and most seems to be medicated. It not a good place to visit, if you want to keep your sanity. I'd rather debate politics on /b/ on 4chan.

>successfully moved away from being the techy nerd basement dweller site to becoming a trendy young "normie" people site

I'm not convinced the redesign contributed to this. I think it was already happening prior to the redesign.

That is news to me ( i still use the old site but i dont see a lot of old people)

I think reddit's demographic still is young , and has always been so .

I'm not convinced, but that's anecdotal from being a millennial and frequent Reddit user myself, and seeing lots of "As a 40/50/60/70 some year old" comments.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/261766/share-of-us-inter...

Because when someone says "As an old person, I agree that the young people are right" it will get 1,000 upvotes in an hour.

> Reddit very successfully moved away from being the techy nerd basement dweller site to becoming a trendy young "normie" people site.

Didn't that transition happen in the early 2010s? When I was in grad school a decade ago basically everyone I knew (which included many "normies") was scrolling through reddit when they were bored. I don't think the dumbing down really started until new reddit was introduced, which was 5-6 years ago IIRC.

I don't like the phrase normie but that makes sense.

I feel the topics on their have gotten less interesting. Especially in stuff like travel and cooking. I used to really like the travel content on their but it feels useless lately. It just seems to basic and low effort.

That goes for practically any low-barrier-to-entry common interest topic.

Reddit lives and dies by the moderation. Communities with very strict moderation often get a lot of flack for not allowing the low effort drivel. Communities that "let the votes decide" are overrun with low effort memes, waves of "DAE <super common opinion>?" and repost after repost. Often times to have a truly unique and useful experience with the site you need to manage your own content moderation with blocks/filters/etc. This is why there's a lot of inertia to the 3rd party apps and plugins we use, because seeing those as on the chopping block means we're going back to a wild forest of low effort dredge.

If Reddit Is Fun, RES, or old. gets killed off I'm going to leave the site. It will absolutely be difficult, but it will be for the best. I avoid certain subs that are massively popular because they mostly play on the ragebait engagement or outright ignore core issues solved by the moderation. Having that put back to the forefront of my experience will feel like re-opening Facebook or signing up for Twitter. No thanks.

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