6 ms·

Wiht the new user interface, Reddit is trying really hard to go the way of Digg. I used to browse it on my phone but the popups asking me to install their app

Wiht the new user interface, Reddit is trying really hard to go the way of Digg. I used to browse it on my phone but the popups asking me to install their app block my screen. And no-- no fucking way I am going to install an app to view a webpage.

drb91 8y ago
Wasn’t digg’s issue power users or something? Reddit was and can never be that bad simply due to subreddits. I think a more apt comparison is simply facebook and twitter and instagram: make the UX shitty to promote ads.
- nickysielicki 8y ago
  > Reddit was and can never be that bad simply due to subreddits. Vote manipulation on reddit in 2018 is way worse than vote manipulation on Digg ever was. Due to the centralized categories of Digg, the userbase was unable to hide away from content they didn't like and that brought the community together to collectively take part in rejecting the influencers. On reddit, there isn't that same sense of a cohesive single community. In the past, there might have been a sort of collective identity of "redditors", but that's gone away as the site has grown. Nobody says, "Oh yeah, I go on reddit" anymore, they say that they are are active on a particular sub. I wonder if reddit could have done anything differently to maintain that "redditor" identity among their userbase, is it just a function of their growth? I think it's mostly just their growth, but they accelerated it by not being more careful with what subreddits were defaults and their responsibility to curate them. I remember when the frontpage of reddit transitioned from generally being longform content, to generally being shitty image-macro memes. I also remember when /r/politics used to be a relatively balanced source of news. If you do something that makes your happy and heavy users rescind from being globally active to just being active in their tiny niche subreddit, you can't expect your global sense of community to be maintained.
  - drb91 8y ago
    I guess in the subreddits I visit, the prospect of vote manipulation doesn’t really matter because the content is evidently good. The shared subreddits are indeed trash. I wonder if banning commonly astroturfed topics would help and directing people to moderated subreddits for that content. As a long time redditor (since 2007 or so), the identity has been decohering (or transforming) since the beginning and at this point I don’t see much of value left to lose. The culture centers around memes (I don’t mean this in a pejorative sense), not shared values or interests. A common joke used to be: reddit’s been going downhill since they added comments. Now I doubt most remember at one point it lacked them. At this point I just view comments bemoanings its fresh demise as reactionary: reddit’s not going anywhere, and you can’t change its direction at all. It’s just not easy accepting the direction it is going.
- newman8r 8y ago
  I think the main issue is when they just completely revamped digg in a way that destroyed the community driven nature of the website - they tried to "personalize the front page to each user" or something like that. But people didn't want a personalized news feed, they just wanted the community, which the updates really screwed up. I think I logged into the "new digg" 3 or 4 times before completely abandoning it for reddit, and never looking back - this was as a daily user of several years at the time. I really dislike the "new reddit" as well - if they hadn't kept the option to use their old site, I would have stopped using reddit too.
- gergles 8y ago
  Subreddits don't help when there are "powermods" who moderate hundreds of large subreddits and coordinate offsite to run them all in the same way. They are basically Digg's power users but hidden from most normal folks on the site who don't go digging.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  Can't it? Reddit has somehow become a parody of itself where most posts in most subs follow the exact same karma-chasing pattern. Which leaves a few gems and the draconianly moderated subs like /r/science etc. Frankly it got to be far to much work to get some signal in with the noise. The new UI and needing to stick with old.reddit.com is just icing on the cake.
ct0 8y ago
Yeah agreed. Digg was sooo good too. Old reddit users are very unaccepting of the new style. And I believe the main reason is because they cant find most of the usual options available on old.reddit.com
- scrollaway 8y ago
  Yeah. When Reddit introduced /r/all filters, I started exclusively browsing it using /r/all but filtering all the trash subreddits. There's a lot of frontpage trash to get rid of, but once it's gone, it leads to pretty good discovery. That filter is inexplicably gone in the new version, even though it's a feature that's less than 2 years old ... The subreddits still get filtered, so I go on old.r to add new entries (I'm up to over a hundred). If this goes away, I'll just stop regular visits. Not worth the hassle.
  - justtopost 8y ago
    Well once they started helpfully prefiltering, I hiked. The writing was on the wall. Its a shame voat was already entrenched by edgelords and under constant ddos. I think a new clone with better privacy filters would do well.
    - scrollaway 8y ago
      I think saying "the writing was on the wall" is a bit weird. People have been claiming Reddit going the way of Digg for as long as it's existed. It's bound to happen at some point... death is an inevitable part of life, even of a website's / company's life. You and I are bound to die at some point, the writing is on the wall, yknow? But yeah, I really miss Reddit not being full of vile shit. Does seem to be somewhat inevitable when a community grows. And the site has grown massively. Which means all the subreddits that existed back then grew massively. So new ones are created, and for a while those don't suck as much... but they grow as a function of the site's growth. And the bigger the site, the faster "fresh new subreddits" grow, and end up being atrocious.
    - elektor 8y ago
      There is a clone of Reddit that I've been using for 2 months that reminds me of a 2008-era Reddit. Its called Tildes and is run by a former Reddit admin. https://tildes.net/ https://tildes.net/ They're in beta mode right now, I have a few invites if anyone is interested.
inawarminister 8y ago
This, and I have had the "promote the app" setting in mobile internet being disengaged periodically even when I'm not logged out Really poor form. Thankfully, 3rd party reddit clients aren't hobbled... Yet.
phillipcarter 8y ago
It's just more of the sick culture of metric-driven "engagement" in our industry. Unfortunately, tricks like these tend to work, which is why they're done.
Jonnax 8y ago
Thing is Digg at its height is no where near to the amount of users that Reddit has reached. Replacing it with a similar site seems as likely as replacing YouTube. Anyone have any ideas on what could cause a mass shift?
- kodablah 8y ago
  > Anyone have any ideas on what could cause a mass shift? I have a few, but basically if you keep the UI simple, support multiple communication paradigms (e.g. not just reddit/hn style, but also live optionally-threaded conversations, more forum-like approaches, blogs+comments, microblogging, etc), and make it highly configurable (e.g. voting rules, moderation rules, threading rules, etc) I think people will come running. Bonus points if it's easily self-hostable, can be federated, can be encrypted, and/or can self-delete/rollover old messages.
mattmanser 8y ago
The reddit website on mobile has gone from incompetent to extremely embarrassing. If I ever worked there, I would be embarrassed to put Reddit on my resume right now. I don't really understand how a site worth billions has such bad programmers. Everything about it is bad. It's slow, it crashes frequently, basic things go missing like the image you were trying to view, you frequently get "whoops that page no longer exists" simply reopening your browser on a thread you were viewing the previous day. But go to the desktop version, and it all works fine. They even inexplicably implemented AMP, even though the whole point of the site is up-to-date comments, not a cached one sitting on google. The only competent part of their team seems to be ops, as it has finally stopped falling over.
- corobo 8y ago
  > it has finally stopped falling over. Even that I'd disagree with. I still get "You broke reddit!" screens every few days or so
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- Nagyman 8y ago
  Blaming the programmers seems misdirected; blame management, if anyone. Programmers rarely get to set the priorities or determine resource allocation.
  - guntars 8y ago
    I think it’s fair. If the management is incompetent and keeps rushing programmers to build poorly thought out features, they’re also usually unable to evaluate the quality. The programmers on the other hand know exactly how bad the things are that they’re building and if they sign their name and say “I built this!” then it’s on them. Maybe I’ve just worked for companies where developers have a lot of say in what and how gets built.
    - 8y ago
minimaxir 8y ago
If you want to view Reddit on mobile, I strongly recommend using an unofficial app, which doesn't have the UX antipatterns. On iOS in particular, Apollo is amazing.
- istjohn 8y ago
  Joey on Android is decent.
  - sebtoast 8y ago
    My favorite si far is BaconReader.
- LiquidFlux 8y ago
  Extending upon this, Sync for Android is pleasant.
- Adisuki 8y ago
  Reddit is Fun for Android, Narwhal for iOS. Both great, classic reddit experiences.
- justtopost 8y ago
  Or just stop supporting that kind of thing and browse elsewhere. Reddit is hardly the best forum for anything anymore. If you make a vacuum it will be filled elsewhere.
sitepodmatt 8y ago
Agreed, can't be bothered with /r/programming now, such a shit job they've done on web mobile - and app no thanks
divbyzer0 8y ago
The low-res version is available by replacing 'www' with 'i' in the url for a much friendlier mobile experience. eg https://www.reddit.com/r/backpacking https://www.reddit.com/r/backpacking vs https://i.reddit.com/r/backpacking https://i.reddit.com/r/backpacking Helpful for bookmarks.
- gota 8y ago
  And then you click in any link whatsoever and it's www.reddit again instead of i.reddit or (the still much better) old.reddit
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
Xunxi 8y ago
On the contrary I use an app called Slide to view reddit. It's open source, add free and I personally think it solved all the qualms I held especially against the redesign. https://github.com/ccrama/Slide https://github.com/ccrama/Slide
ognarb 8y ago
I use slide for android now. At least reddit provide an api. You can also use i.reddit.com or old.reddit.com
bitL 8y ago
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-redirect/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re... https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirect/dneaehbmnbhcippjikoajpoabadpodje https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...
thinkingemote 8y ago
Is there a firefox (mobile compatible) extension that blocks these annoying popups and messages? Because if there isn't I have found my weekend side project. edits: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-redirect/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re... just redirects to old subdomain, it doesn't block the annoying messages.

drb91 8y ago

Wasn’t digg’s issue power users or something? Reddit was and can never be that bad simply due to subreddits. I think a more apt comparison is simply facebook and twitter and instagram: make the UX shitty to promote ads.

nickysielicki 8y ago
> Reddit was and can never be that bad simply due to subreddits. Vote manipulation on reddit in 2018 is way worse than vote manipulation on Digg ever was. Due to the centralized categories of Digg, the userbase was unable to hide away from content they didn't like and that brought the community together to collectively take part in rejecting the influencers. On reddit, there isn't that same sense of a cohesive single community. In the past, there might have been a sort of collective identity of "redditors", but that's gone away as the site has grown. Nobody says, "Oh yeah, I go on reddit" anymore, they say that they are are active on a particular sub. I wonder if reddit could have done anything differently to maintain that "redditor" identity among their userbase, is it just a function of their growth? I think it's mostly just their growth, but they accelerated it by not being more careful with what subreddits were defaults and their responsibility to curate them. I remember when the frontpage of reddit transitioned from generally being longform content, to generally being shitty image-macro memes. I also remember when /r/politics used to be a relatively balanced source of news. If you do something that makes your happy and heavy users rescind from being globally active to just being active in their tiny niche subreddit, you can't expect your global sense of community to be maintained.
- drb91 8y ago
  I guess in the subreddits I visit, the prospect of vote manipulation doesn’t really matter because the content is evidently good. The shared subreddits are indeed trash. I wonder if banning commonly astroturfed topics would help and directing people to moderated subreddits for that content. As a long time redditor (since 2007 or so), the identity has been decohering (or transforming) since the beginning and at this point I don’t see much of value left to lose. The culture centers around memes (I don’t mean this in a pejorative sense), not shared values or interests. A common joke used to be: reddit’s been going downhill since they added comments. Now I doubt most remember at one point it lacked them. At this point I just view comments bemoanings its fresh demise as reactionary: reddit’s not going anywhere, and you can’t change its direction at all. It’s just not easy accepting the direction it is going.
newman8r 8y ago
I think the main issue is when they just completely revamped digg in a way that destroyed the community driven nature of the website - they tried to "personalize the front page to each user" or something like that. But people didn't want a personalized news feed, they just wanted the community, which the updates really screwed up. I think I logged into the "new digg" 3 or 4 times before completely abandoning it for reddit, and never looking back - this was as a daily user of several years at the time. I really dislike the "new reddit" as well - if they hadn't kept the option to use their old site, I would have stopped using reddit too.
gergles 8y ago
Subreddits don't help when there are "powermods" who moderate hundreds of large subreddits and coordinate offsite to run them all in the same way. They are basically Digg's power users but hidden from most normal folks on the site who don't go digging.
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
Can't it? Reddit has somehow become a parody of itself where most posts in most subs follow the exact same karma-chasing pattern. Which leaves a few gems and the draconianly moderated subs like /r/science etc. Frankly it got to be far to much work to get some signal in with the noise. The new UI and needing to stick with old.reddit.com is just icing on the cake.

ct0 8y ago

Yeah agreed. Digg was sooo good too. Old reddit users are very unaccepting of the new style. And I believe the main reason is because they cant find most of the usual options available on old.reddit.com

scrollaway 8y ago
Yeah. When Reddit introduced /r/all filters, I started exclusively browsing it using /r/all but filtering all the trash subreddits. There's a lot of frontpage trash to get rid of, but once it's gone, it leads to pretty good discovery. That filter is inexplicably gone in the new version, even though it's a feature that's less than 2 years old ... The subreddits still get filtered, so I go on old.r to add new entries (I'm up to over a hundred). If this goes away, I'll just stop regular visits. Not worth the hassle.
- justtopost 8y ago
  Well once they started helpfully prefiltering, I hiked. The writing was on the wall. Its a shame voat was already entrenched by edgelords and under constant ddos. I think a new clone with better privacy filters would do well.
  - scrollaway 8y ago
    I think saying "the writing was on the wall" is a bit weird. People have been claiming Reddit going the way of Digg for as long as it's existed. It's bound to happen at some point... death is an inevitable part of life, even of a website's / company's life. You and I are bound to die at some point, the writing is on the wall, yknow? But yeah, I really miss Reddit not being full of vile shit. Does seem to be somewhat inevitable when a community grows. And the site has grown massively. Which means all the subreddits that existed back then grew massively. So new ones are created, and for a while those don't suck as much... but they grow as a function of the site's growth. And the bigger the site, the faster "fresh new subreddits" grow, and end up being atrocious.
  - elektor 8y ago
    There is a clone of Reddit that I've been using for 2 months that reminds me of a 2008-era Reddit. Its called Tildes and is run by a former Reddit admin. https://tildes.net/ https://tildes.net/ They're in beta mode right now, I have a few invites if anyone is interested.

inawarminister 8y ago

This, and I have had the "promote the app" setting in mobile internet being disengaged periodically even when I'm not logged out Really poor form. Thankfully, 3rd party reddit clients aren't hobbled... Yet.

phillipcarter 8y ago

It's just more of the sick culture of metric-driven "engagement" in our industry. Unfortunately, tricks like these tend to work, which is why they're done.

Jonnax 8y ago

Thing is Digg at its height is no where near to the amount of users that Reddit has reached. Replacing it with a similar site seems as likely as replacing YouTube. Anyone have any ideas on what could cause a mass shift?

kodablah 8y ago
> Anyone have any ideas on what could cause a mass shift? I have a few, but basically if you keep the UI simple, support multiple communication paradigms (e.g. not just reddit/hn style, but also live optionally-threaded conversations, more forum-like approaches, blogs+comments, microblogging, etc), and make it highly configurable (e.g. voting rules, moderation rules, threading rules, etc) I think people will come running. Bonus points if it's easily self-hostable, can be federated, can be encrypted, and/or can self-delete/rollover old messages.

mattmanser 8y ago

The reddit website on mobile has gone from incompetent to extremely embarrassing. If I ever worked there, I would be embarrassed to put Reddit on my resume right now. I don't really understand how a site worth billions has such bad programmers. Everything about it is bad. It's slow, it crashes frequently, basic things go missing like the image you were trying to view, you frequently get "whoops that page no longer exists" simply reopening your browser on a thread you were viewing the previous day. But go to the desktop version, and it all works fine. They even inexplicably implemented AMP, even though the whole point of the site is up-to-date comments, not a cached one sitting on google. The only competent part of their team seems to be ops, as it has finally stopped falling over.

corobo 8y ago
> it has finally stopped falling over. Even that I'd disagree with. I still get "You broke reddit!" screens every few days or so
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
Nagyman 8y ago
Blaming the programmers seems misdirected; blame management, if anyone. Programmers rarely get to set the priorities or determine resource allocation.
- guntars 8y ago
  I think it’s fair. If the management is incompetent and keeps rushing programmers to build poorly thought out features, they’re also usually unable to evaluate the quality. The programmers on the other hand know exactly how bad the things are that they’re building and if they sign their name and say “I built this!” then it’s on them. Maybe I’ve just worked for companies where developers have a lot of say in what and how gets built.
  - 8y ago

minimaxir 8y ago

If you want to view Reddit on mobile, I strongly recommend using an unofficial app, which doesn't have the UX antipatterns. On iOS in particular, Apollo is amazing.

istjohn 8y ago
Joey on Android is decent.
- sebtoast 8y ago
  My favorite si far is BaconReader.
LiquidFlux 8y ago
Extending upon this, Sync for Android is pleasant.
Adisuki 8y ago
Reddit is Fun for Android, Narwhal for iOS. Both great, classic reddit experiences.
justtopost 8y ago
Or just stop supporting that kind of thing and browse elsewhere. Reddit is hardly the best forum for anything anymore. If you make a vacuum it will be filled elsewhere.

sitepodmatt 8y ago

Agreed, can't be bothered with /r/programming now, such a shit job they've done on web mobile - and app no thanks

divbyzer0 8y ago

The low-res version is available by replacing 'www' with 'i' in the url for a much friendlier mobile experience. eg https://www.reddit.com/r/backpacking https://www.reddit.com/r/backpacking vs https://i.reddit.com/r/backpacking https://i.reddit.com/r/backpacking Helpful for bookmarks.

gota 8y ago
And then you click in any link whatsoever and it's www.reddit again instead of i.reddit or (the still much better) old.reddit
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

Xunxi 8y ago

On the contrary I use an app called Slide to view reddit. It's open source, add free and I personally think it solved all the qualms I held especially against the redesign. https://github.com/ccrama/Slide https://github.com/ccrama/Slide

ognarb 8y ago

I use slide for android now. At least reddit provide an api. You can also use i.reddit.com or old.reddit.com

bitL 8y ago

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-redirect/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re... https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirect/dneaehbmnbhcippjikoajpoabadpodje https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...

thinkingemote 8y ago

Is there a firefox (mobile compatible) extension that blocks these annoying popups and messages? Because if there isn't I have found my weekend side project. edits: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-redirect/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re... just redirects to old subdomain, it doesn't block the annoying messages.