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An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?

554 points by m0ck 7y ago

Someone1234 7y ago
This is classic shortermism. Reddit is, in the short term, driving more external users towards creating user accounts while in the long term removing one of the major value funnels for why they would (i.e. the quality of comments, particularly in certain niche communities/about niche topics). This will give them a short term "bump" at the cost of the site's long term relevance (as it falls down Google's search results rankings, due to loss of clicks as people stop looking to Reddit as a source of info). Most of the recent moves on Reddit are like this, it feels like the entire site is being turned into a pump and dump scheme.
- sithlord 7y ago
  same thing quora did, which made it hated by the masses.
  - CheeseCookie 7y ago
    Oh yeah, I remember browsing it back in the day. A friend touted it as some platform where your questions get answered by experts in that particular field. For a time it was cool - had NASA astronauts, computer scientists, famous politicians. But later it got filled with random no names and their sob stories, motivational self-help nonsense and just embellished factoids from history. It turned into a glorified r/askreddit
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - Cephalopterus 7y ago
    Quora is arguably worse, it actively incentivized people to post inane and unproductive questions reducing the overall quantity of the content. Language topics are littered which questions such as "What is the colour red in the language X" while topics like Math has stuff like "What is 1+1". I wish I was kidding about that last one, it's an actual question on Quora with 1,078 answers as of this comment. It's insane
    - justincredible 7y ago
      Most of the answers to that last question are inane and unproductive. The first answer is funny though: https://www.quora.com/What-is-1+1 https://www.quora.com/What-is-1+1
      - rurp 7y ago
        That was pretty great! I especially liked "We’ve now reduce the problem to a subproblem we can easily solve!"
- AJ007 7y ago
  Are they going to get away with keeping all of their google volume by cloaking the google bot and hiding the content from everyone else? Comments make up the vast majority of Reddit’s unique content. I would guess on a word basis it’s over 99%?
  - Someone1234 7y ago
    That wouldn't help. A significant metric Google uses for ranking is relevance, meaning number of historic clicks for a given search term. As users learn that Reddit links aren't useful sources of information, they'll click less, which means the relevance between the search term and Reddit goes down. Ultimately reducing Reddit's ranking, regardless of if the Googlebot is allowed to index the content. People often mix up indexing and ranking. Indexing is if you're even in the results set, but ranking is where. Reddit might, technically, still be in the results set but if it isn't on page 1 for a given search it may have well not be.
    - hnaccy 7y ago
      Hasn't stopped Pinterest from flooding google image search results.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - linuxftw 7y ago
        Pinterest needs to be blacklisted from search engines. I'm never signing up for an account there, period.
        WWLink 7y ago
        lol, reminds me of the image search I did last week to find some earrings for my mom. "celestial earrings threader -amazon -etsy -pinterest -aliexpress -alibaba -dhgate" The internet is becoming a friggin pain in the ass.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- WhompingWindows 7y ago
  I wish Reddit had gone the way of VLC -- keep your core product, the thing people liked, and stop chasing profits. Why do so many of these companies fall to the profit motive and lose their "soul"?
  - Red_Leaves_Flyy 7y ago
    Greed?
  - jermaustin1 7y ago
    Paying staff? Hosting costs? Recouping money for the time they spent on it?
    - MentallyRetired 7y ago
      Right? It's almost as if they have expenses to pay for. They provide value and they're entitled to earn a profit off of it. As a small business owner myself, I'm surprised by the amount of people who expect everything to be free.
      - ptero 7y ago
        The problem with this change is not that Reddit has costs that they are trying to recoup. The problem for me is that much of the user-generated quality content that Reddit is trying to monetize was created, by users, under certain assumptions. Then those assumptions were changed for a short-term monetization gain. If they initially said that they will be requiring sing-in to read comments, push app over browser, etc. it would be just fine (but then I suspect they would not have any quality content to monetize). Just my 2c.
      - stefan_ 7y ago
        reddit was once a small business in 2016 that turned plenty profit. Then someone got it into their head to turn it into a VC company, quintupled the headcount, took $150M investment from China, you know how it goes. So now you have a whole bunch of people doing a reenactment of Silicon Valley, only the actual site experience for users has basically not changed since 10 years now (except "corporate innovations" like nagging you to install their app so people playing startup have their hockeystick curve). It's a common phenomena. Look to Strava or Patreon, perfectly successful businesses that are instead exploding headcount and spending like a cancer, while never actually changing the core experience (except for worse).
- jackcosgrove 7y ago
  Nothing lasts forever. Reddit is 14 years old. They've had a good run. I think there is a general trend away from user-generated content as a business model, because that content can be a bit salty. Reddit might just be cashing out because the wave they rode has already crested.
  - Cephalopterus 7y ago
    > because that content can be a bit salty. AKA the fate of every site that is a collection of usergenerated content with an ad based business model. If you want to get serious about monetization then you need to actively curtail any content that is not "advertiser friendly" which in most cases means alienating your core content generators, case in point, Tumblr.
    - dmix 7y ago
      I do believe Reddit admins heavily influence the culture of the hyper-modding but at the same time tons of subreddits go way beyond just moderating out the bad stuff and act like full blown newspaper editors who delete 75%+ of organically upvoted submitted content because it doesn't fit their view of what the subreddit should be. They really aren't legitimately user-generated subreddits anymore and there's always this constant tension between users and what gets allowed to be 'frontpaged' or commented about. I know people can create spin-off subs but when it starts happening everywhere it becomes a serious problem.
      - vorpalhex 7y ago
        I still am very upset about /r/politics becoming super partisan. Reddit as a whole has always had biases, but there was a time when /r/politics was fairly centrist and genuinely useful as an aggregator with intelligent commentary. It's now a reposting of vox/buzzfeed more or less.
        trts 7y ago
        I don't remember this time at all. But I've never found much value in the big subreddits because of the incentives to game them for karma and traffic. The most interesting communities have always seemed like the small ones since there are more people interested in a conversation vs. a popularity contest.
- golergka 7y ago
  What else could you get when these decisions are made by employees who don't own significant amount of stock? The whole incentive model of employmen in modern world isn't built towards long-term thinking. The company you're working for is too big for you to make any impact on the long-term, but your own career depends entirely on the short-term. I don't think that a co-founder would ever make such a short-sighted decision.
- mikojan 7y ago
  This is just the next logical step in transforming reddit into some sort of not-racist 9gag. A stream of images and videos that encourage scrolling, not 2000s bulletin board discussions.
- Mr_Erratic 7y ago
  Agreed 100%. As a massive reddit fan, this makes me mad. I can't see how this won't kill their growth long-term. Several people I know (me included) refuse to use Pinterest because you can't browse without an account. #NotMyInternet
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- wool_gather 7y ago
  Stack Overflow is currently engaged in the same kind of transformation. It's sad to see these giants of user participation turning away from what (I believe) made them so wonderful, and towards raw-numbers-growth at all cost. I suppose the folks with the money will be happy, but it diminishes our culture. The pursuit of quality content certainly supports sustainable growth, but it seems that it's just not big and fast enough [to pay the VC piper][0]. [0]:https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/340250 https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/340250
ablation 7y ago
I'll pass, thanks. It didn't work for me when Quora did it, it won't work when Reddit does it.
- rusticpenn 7y ago
  It worked for me on quora, but that will be the last time.
  - virgilp 7y ago
    For some definition of "worked" ... sure, you signed up. Then what? I already had an account when Quora did it, and that made me use it less (wasn't always signed in, wasn't always willing to sign in - e.g. incognito sessions). For a long while, I started going back less and less - was only brought back occasionally by their emails which were still pretty good. Recently the emails got so bad that I unsubscribed (I kinda expect to stop visiting the site completely). So I'm guessing I'm not alone in reducing my engagement - the quality of the whole site seems to have gone dramatically down.
    - fjabre 7y ago
      Quora is particularly annoying in this regard. I too refuse to sign in oftentimes when they force me to. When a service puts its core usefulness behind an unnecessary login then they are forcing me to sign in, they are not making me want to. There is a key difference.
    - 52-6F-62 7y ago
      The thing that slowed my usage of Quora down to basically once every few months is so many of the answers to sincere subjects are promotional for some product someone's pushing—even if it's actually off-topic but some damned keyword aligned! I liked it before that kind of activity proliferated the space.
Havoc 7y ago
They've been making increasingly more user hostile choice lately. Digg lessons weren't apparently not learned
- cytzol 7y ago
  Learning lessons? They're making their website worse on purpose! They don't want people to use the Reddit website — they want people to use the app, because that's where all the ads and tracking is.
  - zer0tonin 7y ago
    That would make sense if the app wasn't also terribly user unfriendly.
    - jeremija 7y ago
      I have a feeling they will disable 3rd party apps soon. That will be the day I stop using Reddit.
      - pedrogpimenta 7y ago
        First they will disable old.reddit.com I think. Then 3rd party apps.
        de_watcher 7y ago
        Oh, old.reddit.com is the only usable thing.
        seieste 7y ago
        and https://i.reddit.com https://i.reddit.com It's probably 5x faster than the new mobile site, too
        conradfr 7y ago
detritus 7y ago
Ooh, so it's becoming another walled garden? Just what the internet needs!
schlupfknoten 7y ago
This currently only affects the mobile version of the site.
cryptos 7y ago
I'm on Reddit, but I would probably have never signed up if I were not able to read comments without login.
- elweston2 7y ago
  I am not on reddit. But I do read it a lot. I usually spend a couple of years before I make yet another account somewhere. Because most of the time other people have made my point and I do not have anything to add. At this point it has saved me many security breaches. As at some point the company almost always loses control of its password database for some reason.
- senectus1 7y ago
  this. the zero barrier to entry thing is what sucked me in. I use it multiple times a day for work and for social/news/entertainment... I dont use FB at all because of in part the barrier to entry.
CM30 7y ago
Hmm, I just checked myself, and I was able to read comment threads perfectly fine without being logged in, on both a desktop computer and a smartphone. Obviously old.reddit.com doesn't have these issues, but I'm pretty sure the session on smartphone used the new site, and that let me keep reading without any interruptions too. Either way, if Reddit does this, that's it. Not returning to the site. The internet doesn't need all these walled gardens, and it's worrying how this is going to affect how info is preserved for future generations.
- Normal_gaussian 7y ago
  I've been experiencing it either way on my phone this week. As I'm quite judicious about using "private" sessions for everything I suspect its been under a/b test. As you say, its not present on ud. or old.
  - CM30 7y ago
    Yeah, this feature being part of an A/B test makes sense. Hopefully the results of said test show enough of a drop in traffic/conversions for the variation with the 'login requirement' that they drop the idea altogether.
    - Normal_gaussian 7y ago
      I doubt it. Users will either login or switch to old/ud There doesn't seem to be any downside to old/ud - it retains users that would otherwise leave whilst being enough of a pain that those who the wouldn't leave just login.
    - city41 7y ago
      I wonder if this type of thing is A/B testable. I feel like the real effects of a change like this will take a very long time to see.
- paganel 7y ago
  Unfortunately the way things are going I can see them getting rid of old.reddit.com and i.reddit.com, at which point I think I'll also stop visiting the website (the mobile website is atrocious and I'm not going to install a dedicated app in order to read a forum).
testis321 7y ago
Googles algorithms should penalize them hard for that... but they probably wont. Random users clicking a reddit link in search results, and coming back after two seconds and clicking on another result, should bring their "site score" down.... but considering it's google .. and it's reddit.. it probably wont.
- apacheCamel 7y ago
  This would be very unfortunate for them since their own inner search system is very rough around the edges. I almost always have to search for a Reddit post via Google instead.
- greggman2 7y ago
  Quora ... :(
welly 7y ago
I'm not experiencing this on either desktop or mobile. I'm not a member of reddit so am not signed in. I can view comment threads and other content perfectly fine.
tsukurimashou 7y ago
R.I.P. not that there was much left to save
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
rchaud 7y ago
I noticed this occurring on Android Firefox with Ublock Origin enabled. Not sure if that's related, but I'm not about to disable it just to see if that's the distinguishing factor.
Irishsteve 7y ago
They are pretty aggressive with trying to push me to a native app or signup. Guess it’s related to the possible ad dollar
harimau777 7y ago
It feels to me like social media has been imploding recently. It seems like I am seeing more and more efforts to overtly force people use an app, associate browsing with an account, and link their account with a real world identity (e.g. via phone number). This in turn makes the platforms less useful and more hostile to users and presumably at some point that will cause users to leave the system. It also feels like social media platforms are starting to die faster than they can be replaced. In the past MySpace died but people could move to Facebook, Facebook shifted to emphasizing the feed over groups but people could move to Reddit, but I'm not sure what people could move to if Reddit becomes non-viable. Is this just me?
- coldpie 7y ago
  It's the same thing that happens to all "free"/ad-sponsored/VC-backed services. Unless you're FB or Twitter or YouTube, your ads aren't profitable enough to run your business. The business model is unviable unless you get that big. So you lose a bunch of money until you find a way to monetize or close. This always takes the form of user-hostile anti-features. Currently that's forcing users into your special apps, where they can't install an ad-blocker. Historically it's been stuff like increasingly scummy ad behavior, and/or requiring paid accounts to access features that used to be free. Your platform gets less useful and gets replaced by the next "free"/ad-sponsored/VC-backed money loser and the cycle repeats. It's happening to imgur and Reddit now. Time to find the next big thing.
  - msluyter 7y ago
    I call this the dismal equilibrium. Anything free that provides value is, in brute economic terms, mis-priced. Thus, it tends to degrade due to attempts at monetization until a balance is reached between its inherent value and the pain one must endure to use/access it.
    - noir_lord 7y ago
      > Anything free that provides value is, in brute economic terms, mis-priced. Damn, that's a good way to put it. I assume value includes non tangibles, otherwise open source wouldn't work.
cies 7y ago
Time for a new type of social. That FB users do not move for something less slik-polished-and-widely-used is understandible. But I believe a large part of the reddittors is more keen on privacy, openness, ad-free experience, uncensoredness, etc. I like this one: https://github.com/dessalines/lemmy https://github.com/dessalines/lemmy
- kevinali1 7y ago
  I think quality of the conversation will always trump "privacy, openness and ad-free". We have to pay for quality. If we're not going to pay with dollar bills, we pay with privacy.
  - cies 7y ago
    Until you are like in HK and need to organize yourselves for some reason. > If we're not going to pay with dollar bills, we pay with privacy. Paying with ads is also possible.
    - WhompingWindows 7y ago
      But if you pay with ads, don't you need to see a LOT of ads, unless your privacy is compromised and they use trackers about you to give you targeted (i.e. more lucrative) ads?
      - cies 7y ago
        I'm not sure what it costs to have a service running and what non-tracking adds may yield nowadays. So: not sure.
      - Karunamon 7y ago
        I don't see why topic-based ads based entirely on on-site participation would be a problem. No need for any user-hostile garbage, bucket your communities into topics, and let advertisers target the topics or the intersections between them. Ads are sold on-site, not via third party networks. Reddit does this, but no idea how successful it is.
zmzrr 7y ago
Only in mobile. I never do any serious web browsing in mobile, so...
nyolfen 7y ago
reddit should be a protocol
- crankylinuxuser 7y ago
  It was. It's called Usenet. And Usenet even included posting a single message to multiple groups, and people from both can respond.
  - jandrese 7y ago
    I would be thrilled if the followup to Reddit is Usenet but with working moderation.
  - technoplato 7y ago
    We’re there ever attempts to skin Usenet with friendly interfaces like old reddit? Any resources you can point me to? I’m really interested in these concepts.
- faleidel 7y ago
  There is activityPub which is used by mastodon (a twitter clone). Some peoples are making reddit clone that federate with activityPub a bit in the same way that emails federate.
kresten 7y ago
I eventually conceded to Medium’s constant harassment to sign in for free. Now it demands I pay. I wonder if there is a way to permanently exclude medium.com from all my search results.
- Kaiyou 7y ago
  I wonder that for many, many sites..
- onychomys 7y ago
  There's a way to do it for google: https://support.google.com/customsearch/answer/4513886?hl=en https://support.google.com/customsearch/answer/4513886?hl=en
ryanmercer 7y ago
I wonder if this has anything to do with them trying to catalog subs. This thread and what I'll share below lead me to believe they may be attempting to curate content. For context on them attempting to catalog subs about a month ago a Reddit admin messaged me unsolicited (apparently a lot of people). I have no problem sharing this since they randomly contacted me via the site, I've never done contract work for them, and there was no request to keep it private (and apparently hey just randomly mass messaged people): >Hey there! I work at Reddit and I’m reaching out because we’re looking for experienced redditors who might be interested in taking on some paid contract work for us. I have no idea if you’d be interested, but I figured I’d drop you a line. I replied requesting more info >Great! Essentially, this work would be reviewing lists of subreddits to help categorize what they are about and what content is in them. This would probably be maximum 10h/wk (no minimum) over a couple of weeks, though if it goes well there’s likely to be more. It pays $15/hr. I said sure and was told this >Can you send an email to redacted@reddit.com with your resume and your experience on Reddit and we can work on scheduling a time to chat about the opportunity? (No worries if your profession or line of work isn’t related to Reddit. We're looking for reliable people with existing Reddit knowledge; reviewing your resume will help us better understand your background.) Upon reviewing the resumes, we will schedule 30-minute phone calls with selected candidates to share details on the project work and conduct interviews. I did about 20 minutes later and within an hour got an email saying thanks but no thanks, there were tons of people interested and they're already full.
cmtRed 7y ago
I'm creating a new project that allows you to create a new Reddit in seconds: https://www.community.red https://www.community.red
mattchew 7y ago
I'm hoping one of the ActivityPub Reddit-like projects takes off. (yeah, I know, someone else make what I want . . . ) (or, we should have just fixed spam on Usenet . . . )
- howard941 7y ago
  Spam wasn't what killed netnews, big ISPs didn't want to serve it up for free anymore. Perhaps that wasn't what you were implying but in case it was, spam ain't what done her in.
  - mattchew 7y ago
    I've always assumed it was mostly spam, and the bulk of new users preferring other discussion formats. I appreciate the correction.
trophycase 7y ago
As someone else mentioned in the thread. Viewing NSFW content now requires signing in as well.
dougmwne 7y ago
I deleted my Reddit account recently in an effort to curb social media. I've still been checking r/all and some favorite subreddits. Thank you Reddit for further breaking the site and making it easier to ween myself off of. Thank you HN for the addiction block contols on the account screen.
- WhiskeyJack55 7y ago
  Sounds ass backwards, and I've been signing up for newsletters in addition to a little more HN to ween off of Reddit. Read some curated headlines in the morning, sure there's usually a "word from our sponsers", but it's a better experience overall than social media imo.
  - Zhyl 7y ago
    Any newsletter recommendations? I've been thinking of going down an RSS/Email&&Procmail route myself, but haven't done the research on quality sources yet.
    - WhiskeyJack55 7y ago
      The Download - MIT Tech Review The Hustle - Business/Tech Daily Programming Problems - Interview style questions that are language agnostic (mostly). I also have language specific news letters for Java, Python and C# that are ok, but nothing special.
- harshalizee 7y ago
  Exactly what I thought! I deleted the Reddit Apollo app when I realized I was using for over 3 hours a day. Now I catch myself sometimes using the mobile version. But the fact that they keep going out of the way to make it work and worse everyday means I actually get to stay away from it.
  - aschismatic 7y ago
    What are your favorite alternatives to stay in tune with what's happening now? I browse r/all multiple times daily for a bit. I don't get a lot of need-to-know information from it, but some things I like to see are movie trailers, big tech announcements (Xbox Series X yesterday), and in general, things that everyone seems to be "in the know" of. It's my main pop culture news outlet, but I feel like it shouldn't be.
Proven 7y ago
That's great. I generally dislike it, but reluctantly visit from time to time when other search engine results are sparse. Now I will finally be able to completely ignore it.
fjabre 7y ago
What if Google required signing in to search?
- vunie 7y ago
  Probably less impactful since we have alternatives that can more or less do the same thing. I think reddit is more impactful bdue to the network effect.
- blaser-waffle 7y ago
  Ugh. Then I'd have to use Bing for everything.
- tumetab1 7y ago
  Already is(G). (G) Google way to restrict search to signed-in users: If you're on Chrome (biggest market share) and you're signed into Chrome (big share also) then you auto-sign into your google account. PS: Not sure if they rollback on this change. Why the (G) way works? Because it's non-obtrusive way to force user to login.
idclip 7y ago
So this is how liberty dies.gif
dghughes 7y ago
If you have a reddit account and go to the site not logged in the site looks like trash. The articles seem worse than what you see when logged in. Similar to YouTube if you aren't logged in you see the trashiest videos on the "unlogged in" main page. I don't know if that's on purpose or it's just like that. But there seems to be a big difference in the quality depending on whether you are logged in or not. As for the reddit site itself I wonder what is the ratio of old.reddit viewers vs reddit viewers are. I've used reddit for over a decade and absolutely hate the new style I only go to old.reddit if that changes and only new reddit is available I'll abandon my account (or sell it to Russians ha! Kidding.).
- XaspR8d 7y ago
  > As for the reddit site itself I wonder what is the ratio of old.reddit viewers vs reddit viewers are. I moderate a top 100 sub and if the built-in stats are to be believed, the recent breakdown is something like: = Pageviews = 40% apps 28% old reddit 17% mobile reddit 15% new reddit = Unique visits = 41% mobile reddit 27% new reddit 24% apps 8% old reddit This doesn't really capture the ratio of contributors who use each (or perhaps, more interestingly, number of contributions per platform), but it's hard for me to guess that accurately since new-reddit detractors are a very vocal group.
  - DocG 7y ago
    Oh damn, old is so high. I thought the old would be lower than new. I guess I shouldn't be so afraid of old going away soon then :) I'm using old Reddit, on mobile.
    - XaspR8d 7y ago
      Well it's hard to guess what the admins are planning. They said it would stay around for the foreseeable future but I agree their changes are becoming increasingly adversarial. (EDIT: Though new reddit has brought about a number of good improvements to the moderating experience. Sadly at this point the mod community had already implemented all of them and more via 3rd party browser extensions...) Our community might have a slight old-reddit bias -- we have a core group that doesn't like change -- but I have a hard time believing it could have a terribly large effect once the numbers are in the millions.
Fnoord 7y ago
I guess there will be accounts which are shared just to read the content. Although it requires 1 malicious user to get such account closed, it makes the profiling much more difficult. That, or impersonate a search engine to access. They wouldn't block that, would they?
bovermyer 7y ago
So, who's up for going back to forums with small but active communities?
- coldpie 7y ago
  (Psst, come try the Something Awful Forums :-) )
  - gnome_chomsky 7y ago
    Truth, I remember reddit cratering the active user base there ten years ago, but I've found myself going back again over the past few years again, craving the type of community there vs the lowest common denominator and ad filled garbage that is reddit.
samantohermes 7y ago
So is there any third-party frontend for Reddit, like Invidious for YouTube and Nitter for Twitter? old.reddit.com may go to hell soon.
eric_cc 7y ago
Are there any good alternatives to the reddit platform? I've been a user since 2006. When reddit blew up in popularity, many subs massively declined in quality as is to be expected. Niche subs, however, remained pretty great. But reddit as an organization is beyond repair at this point. Changes like this are now par for the course. Worse even, reddit is now engaged in censoring subs. The most obvious and possibly most disturbing example is the quarantine of r/the_donald on political grounds.
- dmix 7y ago
  No there's not, I was recently a member of a harmless subreddit that got banned from someone abusing DMCA who had some vendetta against the subreddit over some nonsense. He sent hundreds of fake copyright claims to posts which he had no ownership but Reddit admins didn't give a shit when we complained. He got our next two subreddits banned even faster since they had little content but plenty of DMCA requests. We tried every single open or alternative Reddit and they were all garbage. And trust me when I said we tried everything. They are either awful early-2000s PHP-clone style sites, some stupid fringe political communities which push away mainstream users, or some weird moderation rules. https://saidit.net/ https://saidit.net/ was the closest clone but they had some bizarre "Pyramid of Debate" [1] moderation thing that seemed culty among their hardcore members, which our sub members got turned off from. But ultimately it's the lack of good mobile apps for these sites that pushed us away and we never managed to rebuild the community. Recreating a better Reddit is a project I've long been interested in doing myself. [1] https://infogalactic.com/w/images/thumb/e/ef/The_Pyramid_Of_Debate_v3_Detailed_TT_Norms_Medium_Text_Outline_Grey_BG.png/1024px-The_Pyramid_Of_Debate_v3_Detailed_TT_Norms_Medium_Text_Outline_Grey_BG.png https://infogalactic.com/w/images/thumb/e/ef/The_Pyramid_Of_...
  - ronsor 7y ago
    I spent approximately two weeks working on a reddit like site[1] [1]: https://yaddu.pw/c/general https://yaddu.pw/c/general
- DataGata 7y ago
  One solution might be a "federated reddit". Hacker News is essentially just a subreddit run by YC, so getting people/organizations/interest groups to run their own reddit forums is probably a good idea. It would let each community figure out its own income stream and not worry about advertisers running wild or the entire thing being bought out by the Chinese.
remote_phone 7y ago
Reddit is the Uber of social media. All of the hard work is done for free by the mods of each subreddit. But they have no piece of the pie when Reddit goes IPO. The entire value is predicated on an Army of free workers that get nothing when the site IPOs.
- fourstar 7y ago
  That's a pretty poignant comparison.
- loceng 7y ago
  Geocities was first platform that was successful due to this community moderation model - they did however give payout to moderators when they IPO's; I think it was $1,000 USD?
dmix 7y ago
Did all of the founders leave Reddit or something? This is totally backwards. Valuing pure signup rates over the user experience of hundreds of millions, who may already have accounts but dont feel like logging in, or just simply want to read content and sign up another day, is what happens when marketing/business people hijack a business over product/UX people. This is a very obvious vanity metric issue to anyone who has run a popular website. And most people do it to appease VCs/investors... Reddit is already mature, so there's no justification to artificially increasing growth at the expense of the wider product.
gomox 7y ago
A few years ago I deleted the reddit app because I felt I was spending too much time on it. I would then use the web based version when I felt like wasting some time. A month ago I ended up getting the app again because the web version became essentially unusable (they did some strange change where clicking on a link gave you the top three/five comments and then other posts from the same subreddit, wtf?). I wonder what short term pipe they're smoking in the product department.
- swarnie_ 7y ago
  A lot of your issues are mixed by opting out of the beta layout (account preference setting) and using a plugin like RES. Vanilla reddit is unusable.
bitwize 7y ago
Hackernews told me old-school distributed services need to die because centralized services have better UX. UX is everything, Hackernews told me. Where is your god now?
stratosmacker 7y ago
old.reddit.com
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  While it works. And: 1. If you don't mind being constantly redirected to www by arbitrary links. 2. Having old blocked by robots.txt from search-engine indexing. 3. The likelihood of old disappearing at some point in the future. I saw that future a couple of years ago and noped the heck out.
Nokinside 7y ago
Back to /.
Shivetya 7y ago
this appears to be limited to mobile? I am able to read threads just fine without an account, in this case safari on my Mac. Safari on the iPhone is fine too.
nbrempel 7y ago
For those who enjoy the Reddit format but don’t enjoy Reddit itself, I recommend taking a look at Tildes. It’s a much smaller community, of course, but the discourse is decent and it’s open source and not for profit. https://tildes.net/ https://tildes.net/
butterfi 7y ago
Is anybody else actually seeing this? I'm looking at Reddit right now and see comments just fine.
- butterfi 7y ago
  on second pass, I'm thinking they mean the mobile app now requires you to login, not the website. Thats a slightly different scenario.
blunte 7y ago
It's not a new pattern. And like MySpace, Yahoo, Digg, and so many others, Reddit will eventually fall out of favor and be replaced by a new better, less corporate system. And that system will also follow the same path (unless it is started by an already-very-rich group of techies who value status more than money). Just think: if you were fabulously wealthy, then burning a few million a year to have a completely free, non-commercial social site would be perfectly reasonable. Of course, eventually you would die and someone would then begin the usual path with your legacy...

554 points by m0ck 7y ago

This is classic shortermism. Reddit is, in the short term, driving more external users towards creating user accounts while in the long term removing one of the major value funnels for why they would (i.e. the quality of comments, particularly in certain niche communities/about niche topics). This will give them a short term "bump" at the cost of the site's long term relevance (as it falls down Google's search results rankings, due to loss of clicks as people stop looking to Reddit as a source of info). Most of the recent moves on Reddit are like this, it feels like the entire site is being turned into a pump and dump scheme.

sithlord 7y ago
same thing quora did, which made it hated by the masses.
- CheeseCookie 7y ago
  Oh yeah, I remember browsing it back in the day. A friend touted it as some platform where your questions get answered by experts in that particular field. For a time it was cool - had NASA astronauts, computer scientists, famous politicians. But later it got filled with random no names and their sob stories, motivational self-help nonsense and just embellished factoids from history. It turned into a glorified r/askreddit
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Cephalopterus 7y ago
  Quora is arguably worse, it actively incentivized people to post inane and unproductive questions reducing the overall quantity of the content. Language topics are littered which questions such as "What is the colour red in the language X" while topics like Math has stuff like "What is 1+1". I wish I was kidding about that last one, it's an actual question on Quora with 1,078 answers as of this comment. It's insane
  - justincredible 7y ago
    Most of the answers to that last question are inane and unproductive. The first answer is funny though: https://www.quora.com/What-is-1+1 https://www.quora.com/What-is-1+1
    - rurp 7y ago
      That was pretty great! I especially liked "We’ve now reduce the problem to a subproblem we can easily solve!"
AJ007 7y ago
Are they going to get away with keeping all of their google volume by cloaking the google bot and hiding the content from everyone else? Comments make up the vast majority of Reddit’s unique content. I would guess on a word basis it’s over 99%?
- Someone1234 7y ago
  That wouldn't help. A significant metric Google uses for ranking is relevance, meaning number of historic clicks for a given search term. As users learn that Reddit links aren't useful sources of information, they'll click less, which means the relevance between the search term and Reddit goes down. Ultimately reducing Reddit's ranking, regardless of if the Googlebot is allowed to index the content. People often mix up indexing and ranking. Indexing is if you're even in the results set, but ranking is where. Reddit might, technically, still be in the results set but if it isn't on page 1 for a given search it may have well not be.
  - hnaccy 7y ago
    Hasn't stopped Pinterest from flooding google image search results.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - linuxftw 7y ago
      Pinterest needs to be blacklisted from search engines. I'm never signing up for an account there, period.
      - WWLink 7y ago
        lol, reminds me of the image search I did last week to find some earrings for my mom. "celestial earrings threader -amazon -etsy -pinterest -aliexpress -alibaba -dhgate" The internet is becoming a friggin pain in the ass.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
WhompingWindows 7y ago
I wish Reddit had gone the way of VLC -- keep your core product, the thing people liked, and stop chasing profits. Why do so many of these companies fall to the profit motive and lose their "soul"?
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 7y ago
  Greed?
- jermaustin1 7y ago
  Paying staff? Hosting costs? Recouping money for the time they spent on it?
  - MentallyRetired 7y ago
    Right? It's almost as if they have expenses to pay for. They provide value and they're entitled to earn a profit off of it. As a small business owner myself, I'm surprised by the amount of people who expect everything to be free.
    - ptero 7y ago
      The problem with this change is not that Reddit has costs that they are trying to recoup. The problem for me is that much of the user-generated quality content that Reddit is trying to monetize was created, by users, under certain assumptions. Then those assumptions were changed for a short-term monetization gain. If they initially said that they will be requiring sing-in to read comments, push app over browser, etc. it would be just fine (but then I suspect they would not have any quality content to monetize). Just my 2c.
    - stefan_ 7y ago
      reddit was once a small business in 2016 that turned plenty profit. Then someone got it into their head to turn it into a VC company, quintupled the headcount, took $150M investment from China, you know how it goes. So now you have a whole bunch of people doing a reenactment of Silicon Valley, only the actual site experience for users has basically not changed since 10 years now (except "corporate innovations" like nagging you to install their app so people playing startup have their hockeystick curve). It's a common phenomena. Look to Strava or Patreon, perfectly successful businesses that are instead exploding headcount and spending like a cancer, while never actually changing the core experience (except for worse).
jackcosgrove 7y ago
Nothing lasts forever. Reddit is 14 years old. They've had a good run. I think there is a general trend away from user-generated content as a business model, because that content can be a bit salty. Reddit might just be cashing out because the wave they rode has already crested.
- Cephalopterus 7y ago
  > because that content can be a bit salty. AKA the fate of every site that is a collection of usergenerated content with an ad based business model. If you want to get serious about monetization then you need to actively curtail any content that is not "advertiser friendly" which in most cases means alienating your core content generators, case in point, Tumblr.
  - dmix 7y ago
    I do believe Reddit admins heavily influence the culture of the hyper-modding but at the same time tons of subreddits go way beyond just moderating out the bad stuff and act like full blown newspaper editors who delete 75%+ of organically upvoted submitted content because it doesn't fit their view of what the subreddit should be. They really aren't legitimately user-generated subreddits anymore and there's always this constant tension between users and what gets allowed to be 'frontpaged' or commented about. I know people can create spin-off subs but when it starts happening everywhere it becomes a serious problem.
    - vorpalhex 7y ago
      I still am very upset about /r/politics becoming super partisan. Reddit as a whole has always had biases, but there was a time when /r/politics was fairly centrist and genuinely useful as an aggregator with intelligent commentary. It's now a reposting of vox/buzzfeed more or less.
      - trts 7y ago
        I don't remember this time at all. But I've never found much value in the big subreddits because of the incentives to game them for karma and traffic. The most interesting communities have always seemed like the small ones since there are more people interested in a conversation vs. a popularity contest.
golergka 7y ago
What else could you get when these decisions are made by employees who don't own significant amount of stock? The whole incentive model of employmen in modern world isn't built towards long-term thinking. The company you're working for is too big for you to make any impact on the long-term, but your own career depends entirely on the short-term. I don't think that a co-founder would ever make such a short-sighted decision.
mikojan 7y ago
This is just the next logical step in transforming reddit into some sort of not-racist 9gag. A stream of images and videos that encourage scrolling, not 2000s bulletin board discussions.
Mr_Erratic 7y ago
Agreed 100%. As a massive reddit fan, this makes me mad. I can't see how this won't kill their growth long-term. Several people I know (me included) refuse to use Pinterest because you can't browse without an account. #NotMyInternet
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
wool_gather 7y ago
Stack Overflow is currently engaged in the same kind of transformation. It's sad to see these giants of user participation turning away from what (I believe) made them so wonderful, and towards raw-numbers-growth at all cost. I suppose the folks with the money will be happy, but it diminishes our culture. The pursuit of quality content certainly supports sustainable growth, but it seems that it's just not big and fast enough [to pay the VC piper][0]. [0]:https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/340250 https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/340250

ablation 7y ago

I'll pass, thanks. It didn't work for me when Quora did it, it won't work when Reddit does it.

rusticpenn 7y ago
It worked for me on quora, but that will be the last time.
- virgilp 7y ago
  For some definition of "worked" ... sure, you signed up. Then what? I already had an account when Quora did it, and that made me use it less (wasn't always signed in, wasn't always willing to sign in - e.g. incognito sessions). For a long while, I started going back less and less - was only brought back occasionally by their emails which were still pretty good. Recently the emails got so bad that I unsubscribed (I kinda expect to stop visiting the site completely). So I'm guessing I'm not alone in reducing my engagement - the quality of the whole site seems to have gone dramatically down.
  - fjabre 7y ago
    Quora is particularly annoying in this regard. I too refuse to sign in oftentimes when they force me to. When a service puts its core usefulness behind an unnecessary login then they are forcing me to sign in, they are not making me want to. There is a key difference.
  - 52-6F-62 7y ago
    The thing that slowed my usage of Quora down to basically once every few months is so many of the answers to sincere subjects are promotional for some product someone's pushing—even if it's actually off-topic but some damned keyword aligned! I liked it before that kind of activity proliferated the space.

Havoc 7y ago

They've been making increasingly more user hostile choice lately. Digg lessons weren't apparently not learned

cytzol 7y ago
Learning lessons? They're making their website worse on purpose! They don't want people to use the Reddit website — they want people to use the app, because that's where all the ads and tracking is.
- zer0tonin 7y ago
  That would make sense if the app wasn't also terribly user unfriendly.
  - jeremija 7y ago
    I have a feeling they will disable 3rd party apps soon. That will be the day I stop using Reddit.
    - pedrogpimenta 7y ago
      First they will disable old.reddit.com I think. Then 3rd party apps.
      - de_watcher 7y ago
        Oh, old.reddit.com is the only usable thing.
        seieste 7y ago
        and https://i.reddit.com https://i.reddit.com It's probably 5x faster than the new mobile site, too
      - conradfr 7y ago

detritus 7y ago

Ooh, so it's becoming another walled garden? Just what the internet needs!

schlupfknoten 7y ago

This currently only affects the mobile version of the site.

cryptos 7y ago

I'm on Reddit, but I would probably have never signed up if I were not able to read comments without login.

elweston2 7y ago
I am not on reddit. But I do read it a lot. I usually spend a couple of years before I make yet another account somewhere. Because most of the time other people have made my point and I do not have anything to add. At this point it has saved me many security breaches. As at some point the company almost always loses control of its password database for some reason.
senectus1 7y ago
this. the zero barrier to entry thing is what sucked me in. I use it multiple times a day for work and for social/news/entertainment... I dont use FB at all because of in part the barrier to entry.

CM30 7y ago

Hmm, I just checked myself, and I was able to read comment threads perfectly fine without being logged in, on both a desktop computer and a smartphone. Obviously old.reddit.com doesn't have these issues, but I'm pretty sure the session on smartphone used the new site, and that let me keep reading without any interruptions too. Either way, if Reddit does this, that's it. Not returning to the site. The internet doesn't need all these walled gardens, and it's worrying how this is going to affect how info is preserved for future generations.

Normal_gaussian 7y ago
I've been experiencing it either way on my phone this week. As I'm quite judicious about using "private" sessions for everything I suspect its been under a/b test. As you say, its not present on ud. or old.
- CM30 7y ago
  Yeah, this feature being part of an A/B test makes sense. Hopefully the results of said test show enough of a drop in traffic/conversions for the variation with the 'login requirement' that they drop the idea altogether.
  - Normal_gaussian 7y ago
    I doubt it. Users will either login or switch to old/ud There doesn't seem to be any downside to old/ud - it retains users that would otherwise leave whilst being enough of a pain that those who the wouldn't leave just login.
  - city41 7y ago
    I wonder if this type of thing is A/B testable. I feel like the real effects of a change like this will take a very long time to see.
paganel 7y ago
Unfortunately the way things are going I can see them getting rid of old.reddit.com and i.reddit.com, at which point I think I'll also stop visiting the website (the mobile website is atrocious and I'm not going to install a dedicated app in order to read a forum).

testis321 7y ago

Googles algorithms should penalize them hard for that... but they probably wont. Random users clicking a reddit link in search results, and coming back after two seconds and clicking on another result, should bring their "site score" down.... but considering it's google .. and it's reddit.. it probably wont.

apacheCamel 7y ago
This would be very unfortunate for them since their own inner search system is very rough around the edges. I almost always have to search for a Reddit post via Google instead.
greggman2 7y ago
Quora ... :(

welly 7y ago

I'm not experiencing this on either desktop or mobile. I'm not a member of reddit so am not signed in. I can view comment threads and other content perfectly fine.

tsukurimashou 7y ago

R.I.P. not that there was much left to save

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

rchaud 7y ago

I noticed this occurring on Android Firefox with Ublock Origin enabled. Not sure if that's related, but I'm not about to disable it just to see if that's the distinguishing factor.

Irishsteve 7y ago

They are pretty aggressive with trying to push me to a native app or signup. Guess it’s related to the possible ad dollar

harimau777 7y ago

It feels to me like social media has been imploding recently. It seems like I am seeing more and more efforts to overtly force people use an app, associate browsing with an account, and link their account with a real world identity (e.g. via phone number). This in turn makes the platforms less useful and more hostile to users and presumably at some point that will cause users to leave the system. It also feels like social media platforms are starting to die faster than they can be replaced. In the past MySpace died but people could move to Facebook, Facebook shifted to emphasizing the feed over groups but people could move to Reddit, but I'm not sure what people could move to if Reddit becomes non-viable. Is this just me?

coldpie 7y ago
It's the same thing that happens to all "free"/ad-sponsored/VC-backed services. Unless you're FB or Twitter or YouTube, your ads aren't profitable enough to run your business. The business model is unviable unless you get that big. So you lose a bunch of money until you find a way to monetize or close. This always takes the form of user-hostile anti-features. Currently that's forcing users into your special apps, where they can't install an ad-blocker. Historically it's been stuff like increasingly scummy ad behavior, and/or requiring paid accounts to access features that used to be free. Your platform gets less useful and gets replaced by the next "free"/ad-sponsored/VC-backed money loser and the cycle repeats. It's happening to imgur and Reddit now. Time to find the next big thing.
- msluyter 7y ago
  I call this the dismal equilibrium. Anything free that provides value is, in brute economic terms, mis-priced. Thus, it tends to degrade due to attempts at monetization until a balance is reached between its inherent value and the pain one must endure to use/access it.
  - noir_lord 7y ago
    > Anything free that provides value is, in brute economic terms, mis-priced. Damn, that's a good way to put it. I assume value includes non tangibles, otherwise open source wouldn't work.

cies 7y ago

Time for a new type of social. That FB users do not move for something less slik-polished-and-widely-used is understandible. But I believe a large part of the reddittors is more keen on privacy, openness, ad-free experience, uncensoredness, etc. I like this one: https://github.com/dessalines/lemmy https://github.com/dessalines/lemmy

kevinali1 7y ago
I think quality of the conversation will always trump "privacy, openness and ad-free". We have to pay for quality. If we're not going to pay with dollar bills, we pay with privacy.
- cies 7y ago
  Until you are like in HK and need to organize yourselves for some reason. > If we're not going to pay with dollar bills, we pay with privacy. Paying with ads is also possible.
  - WhompingWindows 7y ago
    But if you pay with ads, don't you need to see a LOT of ads, unless your privacy is compromised and they use trackers about you to give you targeted (i.e. more lucrative) ads?
    - cies 7y ago
      I'm not sure what it costs to have a service running and what non-tracking adds may yield nowadays. So: not sure.
    - Karunamon 7y ago
      I don't see why topic-based ads based entirely on on-site participation would be a problem. No need for any user-hostile garbage, bucket your communities into topics, and let advertisers target the topics or the intersections between them. Ads are sold on-site, not via third party networks. Reddit does this, but no idea how successful it is.

zmzrr 7y ago

Only in mobile. I never do any serious web browsing in mobile, so...

nyolfen 7y ago

reddit should be a protocol

crankylinuxuser 7y ago
It was. It's called Usenet. And Usenet even included posting a single message to multiple groups, and people from both can respond.
- jandrese 7y ago
  I would be thrilled if the followup to Reddit is Usenet but with working moderation.
- technoplato 7y ago
  We’re there ever attempts to skin Usenet with friendly interfaces like old reddit? Any resources you can point me to? I’m really interested in these concepts.
faleidel 7y ago
There is activityPub which is used by mastodon (a twitter clone). Some peoples are making reddit clone that federate with activityPub a bit in the same way that emails federate.

kresten 7y ago

I eventually conceded to Medium’s constant harassment to sign in for free. Now it demands I pay. I wonder if there is a way to permanently exclude medium.com from all my search results.

Kaiyou 7y ago
I wonder that for many, many sites..
onychomys 7y ago
There's a way to do it for google: https://support.google.com/customsearch/answer/4513886?hl=en https://support.google.com/customsearch/answer/4513886?hl=en

ryanmercer 7y ago

I wonder if this has anything to do with them trying to catalog subs. This thread and what I'll share below lead me to believe they may be attempting to curate content. For context on them attempting to catalog subs about a month ago a Reddit admin messaged me unsolicited (apparently a lot of people). I have no problem sharing this since they randomly contacted me via the site, I've never done contract work for them, and there was no request to keep it private (and apparently hey just randomly mass messaged people): >Hey there! I work at Reddit and I’m reaching out because we’re looking for experienced redditors who might be interested in taking on some paid contract work for us. I have no idea if you’d be interested, but I figured I’d drop you a line. I replied requesting more info >Great! Essentially, this work would be reviewing lists of subreddits to help categorize what they are about and what content is in them. This would probably be maximum 10h/wk (no minimum) over a couple of weeks, though if it goes well there’s likely to be more. It pays $15/hr. I said sure and was told this >Can you send an email to redacted@reddit.com with your resume and your experience on Reddit and we can work on scheduling a time to chat about the opportunity? (No worries if your profession or line of work isn’t related to Reddit. We're looking for reliable people with existing Reddit knowledge; reviewing your resume will help us better understand your background.) Upon reviewing the resumes, we will schedule 30-minute phone calls with selected candidates to share details on the project work and conduct interviews. I did about 20 minutes later and within an hour got an email saying thanks but no thanks, there were tons of people interested and they're already full.

cmtRed 7y ago

I'm creating a new project that allows you to create a new Reddit in seconds: https://www.community.red https://www.community.red

mattchew 7y ago

I'm hoping one of the ActivityPub Reddit-like projects takes off. (yeah, I know, someone else make what I want . . . ) (or, we should have just fixed spam on Usenet . . . )

howard941 7y ago
Spam wasn't what killed netnews, big ISPs didn't want to serve it up for free anymore. Perhaps that wasn't what you were implying but in case it was, spam ain't what done her in.
- mattchew 7y ago
  I've always assumed it was mostly spam, and the bulk of new users preferring other discussion formats. I appreciate the correction.

trophycase 7y ago

As someone else mentioned in the thread. Viewing NSFW content now requires signing in as well.

dougmwne 7y ago

I deleted my Reddit account recently in an effort to curb social media. I've still been checking r/all and some favorite subreddits. Thank you Reddit for further breaking the site and making it easier to ween myself off of. Thank you HN for the addiction block contols on the account screen.

WhiskeyJack55 7y ago
Sounds ass backwards, and I've been signing up for newsletters in addition to a little more HN to ween off of Reddit. Read some curated headlines in the morning, sure there's usually a "word from our sponsers", but it's a better experience overall than social media imo.
- Zhyl 7y ago
  Any newsletter recommendations? I've been thinking of going down an RSS/Email&&Procmail route myself, but haven't done the research on quality sources yet.
  - WhiskeyJack55 7y ago
    The Download - MIT Tech Review The Hustle - Business/Tech Daily Programming Problems - Interview style questions that are language agnostic (mostly). I also have language specific news letters for Java, Python and C# that are ok, but nothing special.
harshalizee 7y ago
Exactly what I thought! I deleted the Reddit Apollo app when I realized I was using for over 3 hours a day. Now I catch myself sometimes using the mobile version. But the fact that they keep going out of the way to make it work and worse everyday means I actually get to stay away from it.
- aschismatic 7y ago
  What are your favorite alternatives to stay in tune with what's happening now? I browse r/all multiple times daily for a bit. I don't get a lot of need-to-know information from it, but some things I like to see are movie trailers, big tech announcements (Xbox Series X yesterday), and in general, things that everyone seems to be "in the know" of. It's my main pop culture news outlet, but I feel like it shouldn't be.

Proven 7y ago

That's great. I generally dislike it, but reluctantly visit from time to time when other search engine results are sparse. Now I will finally be able to completely ignore it.

fjabre 7y ago

What if Google required signing in to search?

vunie 7y ago
Probably less impactful since we have alternatives that can more or less do the same thing. I think reddit is more impactful bdue to the network effect.
blaser-waffle 7y ago
Ugh. Then I'd have to use Bing for everything.
tumetab1 7y ago
Already is(G). (G) Google way to restrict search to signed-in users: If you're on Chrome (biggest market share) and you're signed into Chrome (big share also) then you auto-sign into your google account. PS: Not sure if they rollback on this change. Why the (G) way works? Because it's non-obtrusive way to force user to login.

idclip 7y ago

So this is how liberty dies.gif

dghughes 7y ago

If you have a reddit account and go to the site not logged in the site looks like trash. The articles seem worse than what you see when logged in. Similar to YouTube if you aren't logged in you see the trashiest videos on the "unlogged in" main page. I don't know if that's on purpose or it's just like that. But there seems to be a big difference in the quality depending on whether you are logged in or not. As for the reddit site itself I wonder what is the ratio of old.reddit viewers vs reddit viewers are. I've used reddit for over a decade and absolutely hate the new style I only go to old.reddit if that changes and only new reddit is available I'll abandon my account (or sell it to Russians ha! Kidding.).

XaspR8d 7y ago
> As for the reddit site itself I wonder what is the ratio of old.reddit viewers vs reddit viewers are. I moderate a top 100 sub and if the built-in stats are to be believed, the recent breakdown is something like: = Pageviews = 40% apps 28% old reddit 17% mobile reddit 15% new reddit = Unique visits = 41% mobile reddit 27% new reddit 24% apps 8% old reddit This doesn't really capture the ratio of contributors who use each (or perhaps, more interestingly, number of contributions per platform), but it's hard for me to guess that accurately since new-reddit detractors are a very vocal group.
- DocG 7y ago
  Oh damn, old is so high. I thought the old would be lower than new. I guess I shouldn't be so afraid of old going away soon then :) I'm using old Reddit, on mobile.
  - XaspR8d 7y ago
    Well it's hard to guess what the admins are planning. They said it would stay around for the foreseeable future but I agree their changes are becoming increasingly adversarial. (EDIT: Though new reddit has brought about a number of good improvements to the moderating experience. Sadly at this point the mod community had already implemented all of them and more via 3rd party browser extensions...) Our community might have a slight old-reddit bias -- we have a core group that doesn't like change -- but I have a hard time believing it could have a terribly large effect once the numbers are in the millions.

Fnoord 7y ago

I guess there will be accounts which are shared just to read the content. Although it requires 1 malicious user to get such account closed, it makes the profiling much more difficult. That, or impersonate a search engine to access. They wouldn't block that, would they?

bovermyer 7y ago

So, who's up for going back to forums with small but active communities?

coldpie 7y ago
(Psst, come try the Something Awful Forums :-) )
- gnome_chomsky 7y ago
  Truth, I remember reddit cratering the active user base there ten years ago, but I've found myself going back again over the past few years again, craving the type of community there vs the lowest common denominator and ad filled garbage that is reddit.

samantohermes 7y ago

So is there any third-party frontend for Reddit, like Invidious for YouTube and Nitter for Twitter? old.reddit.com may go to hell soon.

eric_cc 7y ago

Are there any good alternatives to the reddit platform? I've been a user since 2006. When reddit blew up in popularity, many subs massively declined in quality as is to be expected. Niche subs, however, remained pretty great. But reddit as an organization is beyond repair at this point. Changes like this are now par for the course. Worse even, reddit is now engaged in censoring subs. The most obvious and possibly most disturbing example is the quarantine of r/the_donald on political grounds.

dmix 7y ago
No there's not, I was recently a member of a harmless subreddit that got banned from someone abusing DMCA who had some vendetta against the subreddit over some nonsense. He sent hundreds of fake copyright claims to posts which he had no ownership but Reddit admins didn't give a shit when we complained. He got our next two subreddits banned even faster since they had little content but plenty of DMCA requests. We tried every single open or alternative Reddit and they were all garbage. And trust me when I said we tried everything. They are either awful early-2000s PHP-clone style sites, some stupid fringe political communities which push away mainstream users, or some weird moderation rules. https://saidit.net/ https://saidit.net/ was the closest clone but they had some bizarre "Pyramid of Debate" [1] moderation thing that seemed culty among their hardcore members, which our sub members got turned off from. But ultimately it's the lack of good mobile apps for these sites that pushed us away and we never managed to rebuild the community. Recreating a better Reddit is a project I've long been interested in doing myself. [1] https://infogalactic.com/w/images/thumb/e/ef/The_Pyramid_Of_Debate_v3_Detailed_TT_Norms_Medium_Text_Outline_Grey_BG.png/1024px-The_Pyramid_Of_Debate_v3_Detailed_TT_Norms_Medium_Text_Outline_Grey_BG.png https://infogalactic.com/w/images/thumb/e/ef/The_Pyramid_Of_...
- ronsor 7y ago
  I spent approximately two weeks working on a reddit like site[1] [1]: https://yaddu.pw/c/general https://yaddu.pw/c/general
DataGata 7y ago
One solution might be a "federated reddit". Hacker News is essentially just a subreddit run by YC, so getting people/organizations/interest groups to run their own reddit forums is probably a good idea. It would let each community figure out its own income stream and not worry about advertisers running wild or the entire thing being bought out by the Chinese.

remote_phone 7y ago

Reddit is the Uber of social media. All of the hard work is done for free by the mods of each subreddit. But they have no piece of the pie when Reddit goes IPO. The entire value is predicated on an Army of free workers that get nothing when the site IPOs.

fourstar 7y ago
That's a pretty poignant comparison.
loceng 7y ago
Geocities was first platform that was successful due to this community moderation model - they did however give payout to moderators when they IPO's; I think it was $1,000 USD?

dmix 7y ago

Did all of the founders leave Reddit or something? This is totally backwards. Valuing pure signup rates over the user experience of hundreds of millions, who may already have accounts but dont feel like logging in, or just simply want to read content and sign up another day, is what happens when marketing/business people hijack a business over product/UX people. This is a very obvious vanity metric issue to anyone who has run a popular website. And most people do it to appease VCs/investors... Reddit is already mature, so there's no justification to artificially increasing growth at the expense of the wider product.

gomox 7y ago

A few years ago I deleted the reddit app because I felt I was spending too much time on it. I would then use the web based version when I felt like wasting some time. A month ago I ended up getting the app again because the web version became essentially unusable (they did some strange change where clicking on a link gave you the top three/five comments and then other posts from the same subreddit, wtf?). I wonder what short term pipe they're smoking in the product department.

swarnie_ 7y ago
A lot of your issues are mixed by opting out of the beta layout (account preference setting) and using a plugin like RES. Vanilla reddit is unusable.

bitwize 7y ago

Hackernews told me old-school distributed services need to die because centralized services have better UX. UX is everything, Hackernews told me. Where is your god now?

stratosmacker 7y ago

old.reddit.com

dredmorbius 7y ago
While it works. And: 1. If you don't mind being constantly redirected to www by arbitrary links. 2. Having old blocked by robots.txt from search-engine indexing. 3. The likelihood of old disappearing at some point in the future. I saw that future a couple of years ago and noped the heck out.

Nokinside 7y ago

Back to /.

Shivetya 7y ago

this appears to be limited to mobile? I am able to read threads just fine without an account, in this case safari on my Mac. Safari on the iPhone is fine too.

nbrempel 7y ago

For those who enjoy the Reddit format but don’t enjoy Reddit itself, I recommend taking a look at Tildes. It’s a much smaller community, of course, but the discourse is decent and it’s open source and not for profit. https://tildes.net/ https://tildes.net/

butterfi 7y ago

Is anybody else actually seeing this? I'm looking at Reddit right now and see comments just fine.

butterfi 7y ago
on second pass, I'm thinking they mean the mobile app now requires you to login, not the website. Thats a slightly different scenario.

blunte 7y ago

It's not a new pattern. And like MySpace, Yahoo, Digg, and so many others, Reddit will eventually fall out of favor and be replaced by a new better, less corporate system. And that system will also follow the same path (unless it is started by an already-very-rich group of techies who value status more than money). Just think: if you were fabulously wealthy, then burning a few million a year to have a completely free, non-commercial social site would be perfectly reasonable. Of course, eventually you would die and someone would then begin the usual path with your legacy...