Also, I know people are going to come out of the woodwork with examples, but they'll all be inexplicably inferior with even worse UI, terrible performance, and problems that even old.reddit.com solved decades ago.
Then what?
"Build it and they will come" does not apply to social networks. The value of Reddit is in the information posted & pseudo-communities formed.
You could create the Platonic Ideal of a Reddit-like website but without massive numbers of users sharing information, forming communities, heading moderation efforts, then it will just collect dust.
It's an interesting question, how to create a viable social-based platform. It's certainly not a technical problem. How do you solve it? Forget creating the next Reddit / FB / Insta; how do you create a social network at all that doesn't fail to launch or wither and die?
Lemmy was already built and deployed in several instances, but the reddit API controversy showed it wasn't quite ready. But now maybe it's closer?
Lemmy and other larger alternatives still leave some important problems unsolved, but the point is that "build it and they will come" still rings true if you have the patience to wait for the next inevitable misstep from the current major players.
Cueing Internet meme: You had one job ...
And what incentive do people have to build or maintain these communities going forward, for the sake of shareholders? How does reddit "get better"?
basically, yes. but their developers don't think their UI is inferior. because there are legions of developers around the world with replacements lined up, but all of their replacements are built with opinions about the bits of reddit they like. and while everybody can agree that the reddit UI sucks, nobody can agree about how it sucks, and everybody who sets out to fix it fixes it in a different way that everybody else hates.
a social site populated entirely by contrarians who think old.reddit.com is peak web design is not a site that anybody will want to visit.
that's basically what lemmy is right now, and it's no fun.
Sounds like another orange site I know, that starts with an H and ends with an S ;)
I know I'm pretty bad at UI/UX, so could you explain how the old.reddit.com is terrible? Like it's not usable on mobile, but on desktop I have no issues with it.
Remind me what caused that again?
But I recently found /r/NYCbitcheswithtaste/ to be surprisingly active. a bunch of teen and 20something females in NYC asking for recommended lip injections. Its a natural expansion from the many skincare subreddits that have been popular for years, but I admit I didn't think the userbase has expanded that much
1. Clicking on the side of the page -- on the background -- navigates to the subreddit main page. This makes it easy to navigate away when e.g. clicking on the page to focus on it.
2. Having to click expand a million times.
3. Having expand sometimes navigate to a new page so you have to reclick on the items you have expanded.
Which is almost impossible on mobile with the tiny (+) target on the latest iteration of new Reddit. If you miss then, as you say, it opens a new page instead, which has random unpredictable effects on the browser history for some reason. You can sometimes click on the whitespace above the comment to do the job, assuming the username isn’t so long as to fill all the whitespace.
Actually writing all this out really brings it home how much of a clusterfuck Reddit’s UI is.
Because on today's Internet the hard part isn't the content. There's always some idiots willing to post for imaginary Internet points.
The hard part is anti-spam/anti-abuse.
Anything "free" immediately becomes a magnet for all the bad actors across the entire world. And if you take payments, you have to be careful not to wind up being a credit card fraud magnet.
It's kind of funny. Back in the day, SomethingAwful seemed kind of weird for requiring a single payment to sign up. Now they look kind of prescient.
The technology to start one of the communities and get it through the first several waves of order-of-magnitude growth is trivial.
What's not trivial is drawing in enough users to seed a network effect and guiding/filtering those users towards a desired culture.
That's not developer stuff; that's marketing, partnerships, opportunity, and luck.
The lesson of 2023 with Reddit and Twitter is that they've grown so large that they're immune to consequences of enshittification. The eternal September is staying where it is this time. It's been shown that only a small number will move on to better places.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/feb/08/business....
“In social networking, there is a huge advantage to have scale. You can find almost anyone on MySpace and the more time that has been invested in the site, the more locked in people are"