9 ms·

It seems to me like they are deliberately sacrificing the old userbase for a younger, "more naive" audience. I moderate a medium-sized subreddit, and I am serio

It seems to me like they are deliberately sacrificing the old userbase for a younger, "more naive" audience. I moderate a medium-sized subreddit, and I am seriously considering just closing the thing down, because I'm not going to be willing to adapt my bots to a work with a crippled API (its bad enough as it is). And let's be real here, the API will be crippled in the near future. Do you really think you'll be allowed to have an ad-free and tracking-free experience in a third-party app when they are done with this redesign project? * They went closed-source. * They removed the cloudsearch syntax from the search API. That may not seem very signifficant since very few people used it for their day to day redditing. But this was the only way of acquiring submissions older than the most recent 1000 for any given subreddit. Now there is no way to obtain old data, short of searching for random keywords and checking the date. I guess they don't want you to benefit from the aggregated data. * They abandoned iterative development to do a redesign-by-giant-committee. They are just pushing hostile shit and adjust if the complaints get too loud. That's a clear warning sign of things to come. * They rolled out the redesign on wide scale while it was not even close to alpha state. Half of the endpoints just straight up didn't work, and the remaining half was broken, like flairs, rules, css, and basically everything else. * The new system refuses to serve hosted image content to non-trackable clients (ie, you need img.png?sid=valid_sid to get image data). It also includes some rather hostile tracking technology, I forget the details but it was described in /r/privacy somewhere. At this point, it seems like the best thing to do is to set my subreddits to private so at least I am not contributing to their $100M revenue... but yeah, unfortunately it sucks for the community (and possibly other mods interested to keep the place running), hard decision to pull the trigger :/

imglorp 8y ago
Session replay tracking might be what you were thinking of. WTF. I've been on there for 10 years with 60k+ karma and I mod some subs also. I spend much less time on there now because of this crap. If I wanted FB or IG, I'd go there. https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/8mmybp/psa_the_reddit_redesigned_ui_is_worse_for_privacy/ https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/8mmybp/psa_the_red... Edit, ps. I've come to realize that Reddit is all about the community, not the software, and it's still there (for now). Recent example: one of the Marvel subs (/r/thanosdidnothingwrong) is going to ban half its members, ~200k, as a fun joke, and they're all excited about it. But if the UI and the monetization pisses them off enough, they will flee.
- SauciestGNU 8y ago
  Funny enough, that ban stunt is the first thing I thought of when I read the part of the article about pitching front page takeovers to brands.
- deathhand 8y ago
  I would like to plug notabug.io It isn't my site but I believe in the tech (peer 2 peer with voting done through crypt) and the philosophy "I think all censorship should be deplored. My position is that bits are not a bug." — Aaron Swartz (1986 - 2013)
- mustacheemperor 8y ago
  Wow. I think it says something about how the community has already been altered or manipulated that this wasn't on the front page of the site. The reddit I joined years ago would have gone apoplectic. The new site is such a javascript spaghetti dish it won't even function without JS enabled, and with it enabled all of your keystrokes and mouse movements are collected. It really is frustrating to see the admins post time and again about "transparency" at reddit and then not clearly disclose a change like this to the community. Which, as other posters pointed out, fits the course for the redesign at large and the site's management over the last couple years. Aside, I think it shows how much the growth of sponsored content on the front page and the death of IAMA has jaded me that when I saw multiple front page posts about "working with the admins" to ban half that Infinity War subreddit I assumed it was advertising related.
  - imglorp 8y ago
    Sigh, you're probably right. I was looking for an example of users being a fun bunch, but it could easily have been a marketing stunt with a little nudging. I've been mind controlled with the rest of the lemmings.
    - mustacheemperor 8y ago
      It's tough to decide! And I think the real problem is that it's tough to decide - the value of a platform like reddit is devalued when even the fun and cute things make you wonder if they're just mind control tactics.
chatmasta 8y ago
> * They removed the cloudsearch syntax from the search API. Didn't know that. That sucks. Is the massive dataset of reddit posts still on BigTable?
- ZoomStop 8y ago
  Showing the error "Unable to find table: fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2015_05" https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/table/fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2015_05 https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/table/fh-bigquery:reddit_c...
  - chatmasta 8y ago
    Wow. To be fair, lots of apps/sites scrape viral content from reddit. I can see the argument for why reddit would want to limit that access, but in reality it's a fool's errand in the same realm as Twitter restricting API access.
  - minimaxir 8y ago
    I'm not seeing an error; you may have to display the `fh_bigquery` project first.
  - throwawaymath 8y ago
    You can just get the canonical dataset directly at data.pushshift.io. That's the origin of the BigQuery-hosted version.
- minimaxir 8y ago
  The datasets are still available on BigQuery: https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/dataset/fh-bigquery:reddit_posts?pli=1 https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/dataset/fh-bigquery:reddit... https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/dataset/fh-bigquery:reddit_comments?pli=1 https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/dataset/fh-bigquery:reddit... They are not owned by Reddit.
  - chatmasta 8y ago
    > They are not owned by Reddit. You sure about that? I would bet that if reddit requested google take down the data, google would comply. If not Reddit, then who owns it?
hungerstrike 8y ago
I am looking forward to the death of reddit because I think it can be done way better. One big thing I'd like to see changed is the very blunt upvote/downvote hammer that results in tyranny of the majority every time. Instead, I'd like comments to be sorted based on my "network of influencers", or users who I've rated positively... Another thing I think should be changed is that mods shouldn't be all powerful and they shouldn't be able to just shut down.
- beirut_bootleg 8y ago
  > Instead, I'd like comments to be sorted based on my "network of influencers", or users who I've rated positively... This would in essence create your personal echo chamber.
  - krapp 8y ago
    A lot of people do want echo chambers, and a lot of social media is designed to exploit this. People tend to consider content that appeals to and reinforces their biases and desires to be more interesting, of higher quality and more trustworthy than content that doesn't. Even self-described "free thinkers" tend not to want their beliefs challenged or to be moved from their comfort zone too much.
    - tristor 8y ago
      I’m not sure your latter statement is true. I’m a “free thinker” (whatever that is supposed to mean these days) and run in those circles. Most of us have jobs, so we only have the time to digest articles that take less than an hour to read except in rare instances. I’m very open to other ideas and I actively manipulate the mechanisms on sites like Facebook to prevent being put in an echo chamber. But I am difficult to convince using emotional arguments and I also don’t have time to read a 900 page dissertation on my lunch break. Long form journalism is amazing though, but unfortunately rare and often now corrupted by bias. Most people in my circle are in the same boat. We are all welcoming of total mental shifts if warranted by the data. We’re happy to entertain an idea long enough to get through a lengthy article even if we’re not sure of it. But if you start with trying to gut wrench you’ve lost us. Unfortunately the majority of people respond more strongly to pithy memes and emotional appeals, so that’s most of what I see both from those who putatively agree with me and those who don’t. It takes extraordinary effort to find good arguments about anything being written/presented by anyone.
paulcole 8y ago
Why would you close it? Aren’t the other users getting some value out of it?
- bionoid 8y ago
  Just as a small protest to the hostility, and to spread awareness.
Cthulhu_ 8y ago
> The new system refuses to serve hosted image content to non-trackable clients (ie, you need img.png?sid=valid_sid to get image data). It also includes some rather hostile tracking technology, I forget the details but it was described in /r/privacy somewhere. imgur.com is still the more friendly alternative, as in, you can still get a direct link without tracking information with relative ease. Probably only a matter of time though.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  Sounds like a job for Greasemonkey.
- Klathmon 8y ago
  imgur has been fighting the ability to get direct links for a while. I don't entirely blame them, there's literally no money in direct image hosting for free, but it's getting harder and harder to upload an image, then get a direct link that will work in all situations. In many cases they look at the referrer and redirect a direct link, and they make it harder and harder to get direct links (first by having the UI show the "full page" link by default, by making the image link to the full page so if you right-click and select "copy image address" it sends you to the "full page", then they moved everything into "albums" which meant it's even harder to link to a single image, and in many cases if you try to right-click and select "copy image address" you get a data URI.
throwawaymath 8y ago
Just an FYI if you're not aware: the entire corpus of reddit comments, users, submissions and subreddits is publicly available as a dataset from various sources. There is a very straightforward (and as of now, loosely sanctioned) method of continually crawling all reddit activity that doesn't rely on the API. Judging by your complaints you might find this useful. But I agree that reddit is likely restrict access even more in the future.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  Would you have more info on this? I’d like to make sure the entirety of Reddit makes it into the Internet Archive before they go full on Digg.
  - chokma 8y ago
    http://files.pushshift.io/reddit/ http://files.pushshift.io/reddit/ I have a little open source project for rudimentary indexing and search of the dataset as well as adding sentiment data: https://github.com/dewarim/reddit-data-tools https://github.com/dewarim/reddit-data-tools
dredmorbius 8y ago
Pretty much precisely my view. I'm offloading my content presently for rehoming elsewhere.
dkasper 8y ago
That’s a bummer about the cloudsearch functionality and I’m sure we wouldn’t mind adding it back, but definitely no malice there. Reddit’s search was not exactly great before... so moving it to a completely new backend was necessary. https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/6pi0kk/improving_search/?st=JJA518GV&sh=ad67c7d3 https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/6pi0kk/improving...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  Reddit search was incomplete but powerful, and a major factor in my choosing the platform over alternative, particularly Ello (no effective search) or G+ (none until earlier this year). Most key: searching for my own posts. Other factors: CSS, markdown. Notifs are middlin'. Fostering conversation: utterly broken. Nuking my sub's CSS in the new version is among unpardonable offenses. https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/wiki/faq#wiki_so.2C_reddit.27s_got_everything_you_couldn.27t_find_at_the_other_place.3F https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/wiki/faq#wiki_so.2C_red... https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/20yhxc/reddit_and_community_what_works_what_raises_flags/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/20yhxc/reddit_... https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/8rq08y/i_wont_even_pretend_that_reddit_is_the_principle/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/8rq08y/i_wont_... Reddit are burning massively through goodwill.
patmcguire 8y ago
Have they started shoving out the less savory subreddits? This may be the alternative to that - the brands that advertise don't want their stuff showing up in the wrong places, and you have to be able to say to them no, that's not true... it's either that or do what Tumblr did and aggressively marginalize anything not ad-friendly.
- gunnyguy121 8y ago
  Yes they have. They've banned subs that could've been used to do illegal things. Subs like gundeals (for users to buy guns between eachother ) or alcoholtrading (same thing but for alcohol). I don't remember the exact names, but there were dozens of similar subs that were all banned.
  - MrMember 8y ago
    Gundeals wasn't for buying and selling firearms between private parties. It was for posting links to deals from retailers and FFLs.
- gowld 8y ago
  They have shoved out the most overtly committed hate and crime subreddits, but they have been promoting only slightly-less savory subreddits to replace them. The default front page was changed (a few years ago by now) to allow any subreddit to upvote-brigade to the frontpage, leading to flooding by trash subreddits like /r/CringeAnarchy (anti-transgender bullying) and /r/ImGoingToHellForThis (racist jokes) and many flavors of redundant mindless anti-Trump fake-news/clickbait-title subreddits (including /r/esist, /r/politicalhumor, and the ironically named /r/AgainstTrumpSpam which is actually "Against-Trump Spam". )
jl87 8y ago
Why would you not want to contribute to their revenue?
- EpicEng 8y ago
  Because those in charge have not been able to come up with any solutions which aren't user hostile.
- bionoid 8y ago
  First off because they are generating that revenue by exploiting my community. Secondly because them rolling out broken updates generates work for me as a moderator; we'll need to update everything to work for a completely new system. It's going to be a lot of work, and they are changing shit all the time. I don't want to spend my time to support their exploitative and slimy tactics.
dghughes 8y ago
I'm a ten year user of reddit and I've found it to be getting worse faster. There are always changes but lately it's been changes coming rapidly that do nothing but threaten users. Locking of posts I think is a terrible idea it censors and stifles debate. If something gets out of hand it's the job of Moderators to handle it, if it really gets out of hand Admins should step in. It was great in the old days when you could post something without ready 20 or more rules and still get denied. It's almost getting to be like the old Slashdot. Aggressive users seem to have taken over. Well-known subreddits spread hate with no policing.
phyzome 8y ago
I absconded from all my moderator positions a while back. I was nervous about it, leading up, but it felt so freeing afterwards. I highly recommend it. Once you've stepped away, you'll wonder at how you could ever have felt so deeply invested in it.
ryandrake 8y ago
Having observed software and worked in software development for decades, a great sign that a software product is on a final decline is a grand UI redesign. There are exceptions, but it is a fairly reliable indicator. It’s a sign that could mean a number of (usually bad) things: the designers and/or marketers have taken over development, there is no longer internal direction to work on quality or fix bugs, the product people are out of ideas that are feasible so the only thing they can think of to keep it fresh is a paint job. “A full UI redesign would make this site/software so much better!” - said no end user ever.
- go1dfish 8y ago
  > “A full UI redesign would make this site/software so much better!” - said no end user ever. Said someone who has never used The GIMP 1.x line.
- colordrops 8y ago
  You could replace "grand UI redesign" with anything and your statement is still correct. "grand performance update". "grand timeline feature". "grand 3rd party integration". If it's not grounded in an actual user need or problem, then it's a negative indicator. UI design is sometimes a real problem that needs to be addressed, though I'd agree that they only made things worse with Reddit's new update.

imglorp 8y ago

Session replay tracking might be what you were thinking of. WTF. I've been on there for 10 years with 60k+ karma and I mod some subs also. I spend much less time on there now because of this crap. If I wanted FB or IG, I'd go there. https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/8mmybp/psa_the_reddit_redesigned_ui_is_worse_for_privacy/ https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/8mmybp/psa_the_red... Edit, ps. I've come to realize that Reddit is all about the community, not the software, and it's still there (for now). Recent example: one of the Marvel subs (/r/thanosdidnothingwrong) is going to ban half its members, ~200k, as a fun joke, and they're all excited about it. But if the UI and the monetization pisses them off enough, they will flee.

SauciestGNU 8y ago
Funny enough, that ban stunt is the first thing I thought of when I read the part of the article about pitching front page takeovers to brands.
deathhand 8y ago
I would like to plug notabug.io It isn't my site but I believe in the tech (peer 2 peer with voting done through crypt) and the philosophy "I think all censorship should be deplored. My position is that bits are not a bug." — Aaron Swartz (1986 - 2013)
mustacheemperor 8y ago
Wow. I think it says something about how the community has already been altered or manipulated that this wasn't on the front page of the site. The reddit I joined years ago would have gone apoplectic. The new site is such a javascript spaghetti dish it won't even function without JS enabled, and with it enabled all of your keystrokes and mouse movements are collected. It really is frustrating to see the admins post time and again about "transparency" at reddit and then not clearly disclose a change like this to the community. Which, as other posters pointed out, fits the course for the redesign at large and the site's management over the last couple years. Aside, I think it shows how much the growth of sponsored content on the front page and the death of IAMA has jaded me that when I saw multiple front page posts about "working with the admins" to ban half that Infinity War subreddit I assumed it was advertising related.
- imglorp 8y ago
  Sigh, you're probably right. I was looking for an example of users being a fun bunch, but it could easily have been a marketing stunt with a little nudging. I've been mind controlled with the rest of the lemmings.
  - mustacheemperor 8y ago
    It's tough to decide! And I think the real problem is that it's tough to decide - the value of a platform like reddit is devalued when even the fun and cute things make you wonder if they're just mind control tactics.

chatmasta 8y ago

> * They removed the cloudsearch syntax from the search API. Didn't know that. That sucks. Is the massive dataset of reddit posts still on BigTable?

ZoomStop 8y ago
Showing the error "Unable to find table: fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2015_05" https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/table/fh-bigquery:reddit_comments.2015_05 https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/table/fh-bigquery:reddit_c...
- chatmasta 8y ago
  Wow. To be fair, lots of apps/sites scrape viral content from reddit. I can see the argument for why reddit would want to limit that access, but in reality it's a fool's errand in the same realm as Twitter restricting API access.
- minimaxir 8y ago
  I'm not seeing an error; you may have to display the `fh_bigquery` project first.
- throwawaymath 8y ago
  You can just get the canonical dataset directly at data.pushshift.io. That's the origin of the BigQuery-hosted version.
minimaxir 8y ago
The datasets are still available on BigQuery: https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/dataset/fh-bigquery:reddit_posts?pli=1 https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/dataset/fh-bigquery:reddit... https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/dataset/fh-bigquery:reddit_comments?pli=1 https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/dataset/fh-bigquery:reddit... They are not owned by Reddit.
- chatmasta 8y ago
  > They are not owned by Reddit. You sure about that? I would bet that if reddit requested google take down the data, google would comply. If not Reddit, then who owns it?

hungerstrike 8y ago

I am looking forward to the death of reddit because I think it can be done way better. One big thing I'd like to see changed is the very blunt upvote/downvote hammer that results in tyranny of the majority every time. Instead, I'd like comments to be sorted based on my "network of influencers", or users who I've rated positively... Another thing I think should be changed is that mods shouldn't be all powerful and they shouldn't be able to just shut down.

beirut_bootleg 8y ago
> Instead, I'd like comments to be sorted based on my "network of influencers", or users who I've rated positively... This would in essence create your personal echo chamber.
- krapp 8y ago
  A lot of people do want echo chambers, and a lot of social media is designed to exploit this. People tend to consider content that appeals to and reinforces their biases and desires to be more interesting, of higher quality and more trustworthy than content that doesn't. Even self-described "free thinkers" tend not to want their beliefs challenged or to be moved from their comfort zone too much.
  - tristor 8y ago
    I’m not sure your latter statement is true. I’m a “free thinker” (whatever that is supposed to mean these days) and run in those circles. Most of us have jobs, so we only have the time to digest articles that take less than an hour to read except in rare instances. I’m very open to other ideas and I actively manipulate the mechanisms on sites like Facebook to prevent being put in an echo chamber. But I am difficult to convince using emotional arguments and I also don’t have time to read a 900 page dissertation on my lunch break. Long form journalism is amazing though, but unfortunately rare and often now corrupted by bias. Most people in my circle are in the same boat. We are all welcoming of total mental shifts if warranted by the data. We’re happy to entertain an idea long enough to get through a lengthy article even if we’re not sure of it. But if you start with trying to gut wrench you’ve lost us. Unfortunately the majority of people respond more strongly to pithy memes and emotional appeals, so that’s most of what I see both from those who putatively agree with me and those who don’t. It takes extraordinary effort to find good arguments about anything being written/presented by anyone.

paulcole 8y ago

Why would you close it? Aren’t the other users getting some value out of it?

bionoid 8y ago
Just as a small protest to the hostility, and to spread awareness.

Cthulhu_ 8y ago

> The new system refuses to serve hosted image content to non-trackable clients (ie, you need img.png?sid=valid_sid to get image data). It also includes some rather hostile tracking technology, I forget the details but it was described in /r/privacy somewhere. imgur.com is still the more friendly alternative, as in, you can still get a direct link without tracking information with relative ease. Probably only a matter of time though.

kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
Sounds like a job for Greasemonkey.
Klathmon 8y ago
imgur has been fighting the ability to get direct links for a while. I don't entirely blame them, there's literally no money in direct image hosting for free, but it's getting harder and harder to upload an image, then get a direct link that will work in all situations. In many cases they look at the referrer and redirect a direct link, and they make it harder and harder to get direct links (first by having the UI show the "full page" link by default, by making the image link to the full page so if you right-click and select "copy image address" it sends you to the "full page", then they moved everything into "albums" which meant it's even harder to link to a single image, and in many cases if you try to right-click and select "copy image address" you get a data URI.

throwawaymath 8y ago

Just an FYI if you're not aware: the entire corpus of reddit comments, users, submissions and subreddits is publicly available as a dataset from various sources. There is a very straightforward (and as of now, loosely sanctioned) method of continually crawling all reddit activity that doesn't rely on the API. Judging by your complaints you might find this useful. But I agree that reddit is likely restrict access even more in the future.

toomuchtodo 8y ago
Would you have more info on this? I’d like to make sure the entirety of Reddit makes it into the Internet Archive before they go full on Digg.
- chokma 8y ago
  http://files.pushshift.io/reddit/ http://files.pushshift.io/reddit/ I have a little open source project for rudimentary indexing and search of the dataset as well as adding sentiment data: https://github.com/dewarim/reddit-data-tools https://github.com/dewarim/reddit-data-tools

dredmorbius 8y ago

Pretty much precisely my view. I'm offloading my content presently for rehoming elsewhere.

dkasper 8y ago

That’s a bummer about the cloudsearch functionality and I’m sure we wouldn’t mind adding it back, but definitely no malice there. Reddit’s search was not exactly great before... so moving it to a completely new backend was necessary. https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/6pi0kk/improving_search/?st=JJA518GV&sh=ad67c7d3 https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/6pi0kk/improving...

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
dredmorbius 8y ago
Reddit search was incomplete but powerful, and a major factor in my choosing the platform over alternative, particularly Ello (no effective search) or G+ (none until earlier this year). Most key: searching for my own posts. Other factors: CSS, markdown. Notifs are middlin'. Fostering conversation: utterly broken. Nuking my sub's CSS in the new version is among unpardonable offenses. https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/wiki/faq#wiki_so.2C_reddit.27s_got_everything_you_couldn.27t_find_at_the_other_place.3F https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/wiki/faq#wiki_so.2C_red... https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/20yhxc/reddit_and_community_what_works_what_raises_flags/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/20yhxc/reddit_... https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/8rq08y/i_wont_even_pretend_that_reddit_is_the_principle/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/8rq08y/i_wont_... Reddit are burning massively through goodwill.

patmcguire 8y ago

Have they started shoving out the less savory subreddits? This may be the alternative to that - the brands that advertise don't want their stuff showing up in the wrong places, and you have to be able to say to them no, that's not true... it's either that or do what Tumblr did and aggressively marginalize anything not ad-friendly.

gunnyguy121 8y ago
Yes they have. They've banned subs that could've been used to do illegal things. Subs like gundeals (for users to buy guns between eachother ) or alcoholtrading (same thing but for alcohol). I don't remember the exact names, but there were dozens of similar subs that were all banned.
- MrMember 8y ago
  Gundeals wasn't for buying and selling firearms between private parties. It was for posting links to deals from retailers and FFLs.
gowld 8y ago
They have shoved out the most overtly committed hate and crime subreddits, but they have been promoting only slightly-less savory subreddits to replace them. The default front page was changed (a few years ago by now) to allow any subreddit to upvote-brigade to the frontpage, leading to flooding by trash subreddits like /r/CringeAnarchy (anti-transgender bullying) and /r/ImGoingToHellForThis (racist jokes) and many flavors of redundant mindless anti-Trump fake-news/clickbait-title subreddits (including /r/esist, /r/politicalhumor, and the ironically named /r/AgainstTrumpSpam which is actually "Against-Trump Spam". )

jl87 8y ago

Why would you not want to contribute to their revenue?

EpicEng 8y ago
Because those in charge have not been able to come up with any solutions which aren't user hostile.
bionoid 8y ago
First off because they are generating that revenue by exploiting my community. Secondly because them rolling out broken updates generates work for me as a moderator; we'll need to update everything to work for a completely new system. It's going to be a lot of work, and they are changing shit all the time. I don't want to spend my time to support their exploitative and slimy tactics.

dghughes 8y ago

I'm a ten year user of reddit and I've found it to be getting worse faster. There are always changes but lately it's been changes coming rapidly that do nothing but threaten users. Locking of posts I think is a terrible idea it censors and stifles debate. If something gets out of hand it's the job of Moderators to handle it, if it really gets out of hand Admins should step in. It was great in the old days when you could post something without ready 20 or more rules and still get denied. It's almost getting to be like the old Slashdot. Aggressive users seem to have taken over. Well-known subreddits spread hate with no policing.

phyzome 8y ago

I absconded from all my moderator positions a while back. I was nervous about it, leading up, but it felt so freeing afterwards. I highly recommend it. Once you've stepped away, you'll wonder at how you could ever have felt so deeply invested in it.

ryandrake 8y ago

Having observed software and worked in software development for decades, a great sign that a software product is on a final decline is a grand UI redesign. There are exceptions, but it is a fairly reliable indicator. It’s a sign that could mean a number of (usually bad) things: the designers and/or marketers have taken over development, there is no longer internal direction to work on quality or fix bugs, the product people are out of ideas that are feasible so the only thing they can think of to keep it fresh is a paint job. “A full UI redesign would make this site/software so much better!” - said no end user ever.

go1dfish 8y ago
> “A full UI redesign would make this site/software so much better!” - said no end user ever. Said someone who has never used The GIMP 1.x line.
colordrops 8y ago
You could replace "grand UI redesign" with anything and your statement is still correct. "grand performance update". "grand timeline feature". "grand 3rd party integration". If it's not grounded in an actual user need or problem, then it's a negative indicator. UI design is sometimes a real problem that needs to be addressed, though I'd agree that they only made things worse with Reddit's new update.