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Comment by jdprgm | Hacker News Reader

While I still use Reddit often I kind of hope this marks the decline and something new emerges. Pretty much anything and everything their army of devs have built over the past 5+ years has been anti user. I can't even remember the last time a positive new feature was added. (This also kind of feels broadly true for the majority of the consumer apps in recent years -- remember the 2010's when devs actually added new features for users to apps on a regular basis?)

There are countless things I assumed would have been fixed years and years ago that never have been. For example the trash search engine where you are better off using google with site:reddit.com. I do wonder if it's incompetence or intentional.

Would love to see something in a vein similar to what BlueSky is attempting with twitter clone for reddit. Have a lot of ideas in this area lately.

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> Pretty much anything and everything their army of devs have built over the past 5+ years has been anti user.

That's because you're a power user.

Reddit owners figured out that even though the service gained popularity as a middle ground between 4chan and Facebook, they can make most money if they kick out weirdos and cater to general audience, so they're consistently making changes to make it appealing to average Joe. You can clearly notice how they're slowly but surely removing controversial content and promoting userbase growth over everything else.

My prediction is that Reddit will keep growing, but it's simply going to be "Facebook, but for people 15 years younger".

What are some example "general audience" features added these last 5 years?

dark mode

- Realtime chat

- Design that is much less customizable via userscripts/CSS

- More emphasis on users rather than communities (enhancements to user pages, profile pictures that are displayed in comments)

- Garbage native media hosting alongside worse handling of offsite (youtube/imgur) media hosting

- Inline gifs in comments

- Algorithms that emphasize clickbait

- Algorithms that try to guess what you want to see rather than letting you tell it what you want to see

- Suppression of content deemed unsavory by advertisers

- Emphasis on mobile design over desktop design

- Backward incompatible changes

So, the userbase is increasing? Because those "15 years younger" are already on other platforms shaking their donkey.

Sounds like a great meeting summary but did it yield results?

That obnoxious FB feed style ui they try to force you to use.

Tons of mod tools built on top of shadow comment removals: crowd control, comment nuke, disruptive comment collapsing, contributor quality score, subreddit shadow bans via automoderator ...

Check your account here [1], you probably have removed comments you don't know about. Or comment here [2] to see how it works.

[1] https://www.reveddit.com

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/CantSayAnything/about/sticky

  > remember the 2010's when devs actually added new features for users to apps on a regular basis

AnkiDroid, Telegram, and the Tesla app are the only three applications that I've seen add actual features for end users, in years. Even Firefox has stagnated, and some apps like Google Translate have become difficult to use for anything other than the happy path. I just bought a new phone, a three year old model still in stock, and I'm not even updating the OS as the current OS allows me to record phone calls but the newer ones do not.

I am completely off the update treadmill.

Does Firefox need to be continuously adding features "for the users"?

I kind of like that their privacy efforts have been trimming back unnecessary features, at least from 3P hosts.

Honestly, most apps shouldn’t be “adding features.” Simply because of what OP said: the new features are almost always anti-user. Most applications I use today are either as good as or worse than the apps were in 2014. Developers throughout the industry have been furiously developing for ten years and we’re not making anything better.

Lemmy is to reddit as blue sky is to Twitter and both run on Activity pub, IIRC.

Mastodon instead of Bluesky and you've got it, I think. (Bluesky has its own protocol.)

Yes it does. Bluesky uses the AtProtocol.

I've really fallen in love with mastodon.

I follow a whole bunch of developers, artists and some writers. It's such a breath of fresh air compared to what twitter ended up being.

Interestingly enough the best kind of development I see happening in the public sector in Australia. For example both the official Bureau of Meteorology weather app and the general car rego / council matter app get regular worthwhile improvements. With actual meaningful changelogs in the play store updates. None of that stupid "bug fixes and performance improvements" bullshit that every other popular app puts in there.

Still boggles my mind at times.

At least they let you keep the old web interface, instead of forcing the new stuff on you.

You have to wonder how long this will last, especially now that they're public.

One day, they'll need to squeeze a few extra percentage of revenue to meet their quarterly target and decide that dropping old.reddit.com will move enough people to their revenue optimized new page to get there.

Or there will be a breaking change in the API and they'll decide they don't want to bother supporting the old one anymore.

In any case, the days of old.reddit.com are counted. I already stopped using Reddit on my phone after they shut down third party app. Just waiting on old reddit to disappear to finally say goodbye to this website

You have to wonder how long this will last, especially now that they're public.

Or there will be a breaking change in the API and they'll decide they don't want to bother supporting the old one anymore.

Reddit killed off the former mobile (i.reddit.com) interface, however. Amongst other uses, that was great in terminal browser clients.

Building an actually successful business is the most pro-user thing any company can do.

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