8 ms·

How has Reddit not had its Digg 2.0 moment yet? They are blatantly user-hostile in so many ways nowadays. For those who don't know, a UI change at Digg trigger

How has Reddit not had its Digg 2.0 moment yet? They are blatantly user-hostile in so many ways nowadays. For those who don't know, a UI change at Digg triggered a mass exodus to reddit years ago.

brutal_chaos_ 6y ago
Because they keep the old UI around still, at: https://old.Reddit.com https://old.Reddit.com But I agree with the user hostile notion. They are terrible nowadays
Swenrekcah 6y ago
Because they are smart and provide old.reddit.com for those of us that would otherwise have left. But it's a pretty shit site now anyway compared to how it used to be. It's the law of forums it seems to be.
scrooched_moose 6y ago
It seems like they learned a lot of lessons from the Digg redesign and are being a lot smarter (or insidious...) about the transition. Digg rolled out massive changes overnight which caused a sharp, immediate rebuke. Reddit has been slowly rolling out changes for a couple years, and at least so far are leaving the old interface available at old.reddit.com. The redesign is as bad or worse in every way; but it's so slow there hasn't been the organized revolt. Reddit also has the advantage of doing it during a major UI shift - it's easy to justify design changes when everyone is heading for mobile browsers anyway. Digg didn't have that excuse. It's funny though, I actually really like the new Digg. It's nothing like what it used to be, but it's a nice curated list of interesting articles, major headlines, and tech news.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  > Reddit also has the advantage of doing it during a major UI shift - it's easy to justify design changes when everyone is heading for mobile browsers anyway. Digg didn't have that excuse. On the contrary, Digg’s UI changes were happening when “Web 2.0”-hype was peaking, including bold new web-design trends - many sites were actively redesigning themselves with a brighter theme and better visual-effects: this was around 2007-2010 when IE6-support was starting to be discounted by tech-oriented websites so they could start using new CSS features and alpha-channel PNG images that IE7, Firefox, and Opera supported. I argue that the changes to their recommendation algorithm - and the introduction - and eventual promotion - of mainstream news (especially sports news) meant that their early users: technology news readers, lost interest in the site. The redesign of the site was a contributing factor, but a bad redesign is nowhere near as damaging to a site’s popularity than it losing relevance to its core user base.
  - sparkie 6y ago
    Digg's decline began before Web2.0 and any redesign - it was mainly a result of the "bury brigades" killing anything that was remotely interesting through downvotes and leaving it to be a dull feed of mainstream news links, which got progressively worse over time. Reddit has the bury brigades too in some of the more popular subreddits (the ones which you used to be subscribed to by default), but you can avoid them by only participating in the subreddits that interest you. This is where Reddit is a huge improvement over what digg was, but I wouldn't say it's immune to failure. The more they try to be the arbiters of what people ought to find interesting, the less people are going to put the effort into interacting with the platform as a whole.
    - entropea 6y ago
      5 mods control 92 of the top 500 subreddits. Those bury brigades are real, but instead they just remove what they don't want seen or promote content they do want seen with huge influence in the most popular subreddits. The same issue with Digg power users having too much control (among other reasons it failed) is also apparent on Reddit. https://i.redd.it/bfhl8s6o2fn41.png https://i.redd.it/bfhl8s6o2fn41.png
      - vkgfx 6y ago
        Yep. Check out r/redditminusmods On average, 80-100% of the content of the frontpage is removed by mods every day.
- ehsankia 6y ago
  Eh, I'm not sure I follow your reasoning. As you say, the reason there hasn't been a revolt is because the old UI is still up and working, but no matter how gradually they update the new one, the day they get rid of the old UI, there will be a revolt. I guess the plan is that enough people will have started with the new UI and have never known the old one that even with the old people leaving, the site may still remain alive?
  - Polylactic_acid 6y ago
    Yes, I wouldn't be surprised if a huge chunk of reddit users have never even seen the old UI before. Most users probably use the official app these days.
- jccalhoun 6y ago
  I just don't get what is taking reddit so long. It has been a long time and at least once a week the "new" version forgets you are logged in and won't let you log in. Functionality from the old version like managing multireddits is still missing. Yet they are adding things like chat and the reddit public access network thing that no one seems to be using. Not to mention the things that are just bad about the new layout like how everything is hidden behind an extra click now.
- fierarul 6y ago
  > It seems like they learned a lot of lessons from the Digg redesign and are being a lot smarter (or insidious...) about the transition +1. They learned how to boil the frog much better. Note how the top comments are recommending old.reddit as a valid option. While old is specifically there as an A/B test of sorts to prevent the most vocal people from leaving. It's all quite amazing in a way...
- RealStickman_ 6y ago
  I recently switched from the new to the old UI simply because the new UI became very laggy after scrolling for some time, sometimes taking a second to react to clicks.
nojito 6y ago
>How has Reddit not had its Digg 2.0 moment yet? They are blatantly user-hostile in so many ways nowadays. There's nothing more user hostile than going bankrupt due to advertising fraud.
qppo 6y ago
I'm guessing because most users are on mobile, using Apollo on iOS or Reddit is Fun on Android. Both of which are miles and above superior to the "official" Reddit app, which seems to have been the driving force for the redesign.
anthony_romeo 6y ago
Reddit was already superior to Digg as a news aggregator. Before the exodus, the joke (and I had observed this to often be true) was that Digg’s content was mostly the same as reddit’s... just posted a day later. At present there isn’t an obvious choice for where to migrate. Maybe more specialized boards like Hacker News will be the thriving suburbs outside of a dystopian reddit metropolis.
- nvr219 6y ago
  I'm thinking of going back to metafilter myself.... not sure why I stopped.
- TeeMassive 6y ago
  Parler is becoming more popular, but it's mostly only conservative stuff and frankly their UI is non-intuitive.
  - tenuousemphasis 6y ago
    The problem with reactionary, "free speech" platforms is that they're always filled with the worst of the worst from other platforms.
    - userbinator 6y ago
      If the sibling comment to yours is any indication, the speech might not actually be that free either --- it's just biased in the other direction.
  - SauciestGNU 6y ago
    While I long for a Reddit replacement, parler doesn't seem like it. I've seen numerous anecdotes of parler banning people for posting milquetoast non-conservative content.
- mikecoles 6y ago
  Sounds like SlashDot. See the article on HN then shortly thereafter in the /. firehouse.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mxcrossb 6y ago
I think it’s because there’s no good alternative. All the copy cat sites aren’t interested in a good user experience, they just want a place with less content restrictions.
canada_dry 6y ago
I don't believe Reddit's demise will be like Digg's. IMHO Digg was a success despite itself. Run more like a sophomoric Animal House [i] than a facebook or twitter. It was only a matter of time until it imploded. [i] https://youtu.be/Wp5qAP1iH-g?t=57 https://youtu.be/Wp5qAP1iH-g?t=57
james412 6y ago
Reddit attracted a much larger share of the normie vote than Digg ever did. Back when they were competitors, you could expect the average user was part of the fairly homogenous group of tech workers. They were better organized, more politically aligned, and generally more likely to be early adopters of new tech That was a decade ago, and tech has become a lot more normalized since. Today's Reddit gets visibility on MM possibly more often than any site other than Google. Its users span the political spectrum, treat it as a utility, and for the most part never chose to come to Reddit, never critiqued it, and wouldn't notice if anything about it changed much. It's easy to imagine many modern users never make it off the front page. I don't think Reddit will die like Digg did. It's the megaphone of the Internet, and could probably commit much worse transgressions than some random DRM technobabble before the common user would take notice.
LeoPanthera 6y ago
Reddit has been (rightly) attempting to drive away it's far-right troll userbase, so whenever a potential viable alternative to Reddit pops up, it's them that go there first, resulting in no-one else wanting to go there, which results in the inevitable failure of that alternative, or at least it becoming an entrenched hangout for bigots. It's happened more than once already.
- Polylactic_acid 6y ago
  I remember voat. Originally it was looking like it would become the new reddit. The UI was good, the site was stable, but then it become totally flooded with racists so it never took off.
  - dt3ft 6y ago
    I started building https://20-things.com https://20-things.com with a rather big barrier to entry (requires SMS verification) in order to discourage racists from signing up, which is what happens when anonymous registration is allowed, as seen on voat example. So far a few hundred people signed up, but I am the only one actively posting content, I use it like my personal bookmarking service. Without SMS verification, registration would be anonymous which enables racism, and in order to go this route, I'd have to have an army of moderators.
    - petargyurov 6y ago
      SMS verification is good but I doubt it works on a larger scale. I've long thought about a social network where each user is required to verify their identity. That comes with its own problems of course, especially in the current times of data protection, misuse of data and a lack of trust for these kinds of things. I'm sure it can be done properly, but who's to say what "properly" means.
      - fabianlindfors 6y ago
        I think I have seen a startup doing exactly this here in Sweden, can't remember their name though. We have a well-established e-ID which makes the verification part dead simple. I'm working on bringing e-IDs to more people which would make ideas like your much easier to implement. If you want to make your idea reality I'd love to collaborate!
jokoon 6y ago
I only use my own multireddit, /r/popular and /r/all are cesspools now To be honest, as a whole the content has slowly decreased in quality. Now I finally understand that a lot of content on reddit is just farming karma for bots, so those bots can be sold for astroturfers. So I have a lot of distrust for reddit in general. I'm feeling more and more frustrated, and I tell myself more and more that I have little interest going to reddit.
boobsbr 6y ago
I thought the AACS key fiasco triggered the exodus. At least that was my reason for leaving.
xyzal 6y ago
I suspect the redesign was motivated to make ads look more like regular content. At least I seem to click ads looking like regular posts frequently since the redesign, and in my opinion, it is an underhanded tactic.
rm445 6y ago
Reddit is too nebulous to get very mad about. You can leave a subreddit you're sick of. Trash your account if you're worried your comments risk doxing yourself. Start afresh, it's easy. Everyone is pseudonymous and reputations seem to matter far less than places like Hacker News. I've been using Reddit - reading a lot, commenting quite a bit, posting a little - since I read about it in the Joel on Software blog in 2006. It has been fascinating and fun but I've made no lasting friendships or connections. I'd move to something better with no regrets, but the site owners are probably never going to annoy me enough to move to something worse out of principle.
schoolornot 6y ago
I thought the site would have been done after spez abused his admin rights to edit user comments.

How has Reddit not had its Digg 2.0 moment yet? They are blatantly user-hostile in so many ways nowadays. For those who don't know, a UI change at Digg triggered a mass exodus to reddit years ago.

brutal_chaos_ 6y ago

Because they keep the old UI around still, at: https://old.Reddit.com https://old.Reddit.com But I agree with the user hostile notion. They are terrible nowadays

Swenrekcah 6y ago

Because they are smart and provide old.reddit.com for those of us that would otherwise have left. But it's a pretty shit site now anyway compared to how it used to be. It's the law of forums it seems to be.

scrooched_moose 6y ago

It seems like they learned a lot of lessons from the Digg redesign and are being a lot smarter (or insidious...) about the transition. Digg rolled out massive changes overnight which caused a sharp, immediate rebuke. Reddit has been slowly rolling out changes for a couple years, and at least so far are leaving the old interface available at old.reddit.com. The redesign is as bad or worse in every way; but it's so slow there hasn't been the organized revolt. Reddit also has the advantage of doing it during a major UI shift - it's easy to justify design changes when everyone is heading for mobile browsers anyway. Digg didn't have that excuse. It's funny though, I actually really like the new Digg. It's nothing like what it used to be, but it's a nice curated list of interesting articles, major headlines, and tech news.

DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
> Reddit also has the advantage of doing it during a major UI shift - it's easy to justify design changes when everyone is heading for mobile browsers anyway. Digg didn't have that excuse. On the contrary, Digg’s UI changes were happening when “Web 2.0”-hype was peaking, including bold new web-design trends - many sites were actively redesigning themselves with a brighter theme and better visual-effects: this was around 2007-2010 when IE6-support was starting to be discounted by tech-oriented websites so they could start using new CSS features and alpha-channel PNG images that IE7, Firefox, and Opera supported. I argue that the changes to their recommendation algorithm - and the introduction - and eventual promotion - of mainstream news (especially sports news) meant that their early users: technology news readers, lost interest in the site. The redesign of the site was a contributing factor, but a bad redesign is nowhere near as damaging to a site’s popularity than it losing relevance to its core user base.
- sparkie 6y ago
  Digg's decline began before Web2.0 and any redesign - it was mainly a result of the "bury brigades" killing anything that was remotely interesting through downvotes and leaving it to be a dull feed of mainstream news links, which got progressively worse over time. Reddit has the bury brigades too in some of the more popular subreddits (the ones which you used to be subscribed to by default), but you can avoid them by only participating in the subreddits that interest you. This is where Reddit is a huge improvement over what digg was, but I wouldn't say it's immune to failure. The more they try to be the arbiters of what people ought to find interesting, the less people are going to put the effort into interacting with the platform as a whole.
  - entropea 6y ago
    5 mods control 92 of the top 500 subreddits. Those bury brigades are real, but instead they just remove what they don't want seen or promote content they do want seen with huge influence in the most popular subreddits. The same issue with Digg power users having too much control (among other reasons it failed) is also apparent on Reddit. https://i.redd.it/bfhl8s6o2fn41.png https://i.redd.it/bfhl8s6o2fn41.png
    - vkgfx 6y ago
      Yep. Check out r/redditminusmods On average, 80-100% of the content of the frontpage is removed by mods every day.
ehsankia 6y ago
Eh, I'm not sure I follow your reasoning. As you say, the reason there hasn't been a revolt is because the old UI is still up and working, but no matter how gradually they update the new one, the day they get rid of the old UI, there will be a revolt. I guess the plan is that enough people will have started with the new UI and have never known the old one that even with the old people leaving, the site may still remain alive?
- Polylactic_acid 6y ago
  Yes, I wouldn't be surprised if a huge chunk of reddit users have never even seen the old UI before. Most users probably use the official app these days.
jccalhoun 6y ago
I just don't get what is taking reddit so long. It has been a long time and at least once a week the "new" version forgets you are logged in and won't let you log in. Functionality from the old version like managing multireddits is still missing. Yet they are adding things like chat and the reddit public access network thing that no one seems to be using. Not to mention the things that are just bad about the new layout like how everything is hidden behind an extra click now.
fierarul 6y ago
> It seems like they learned a lot of lessons from the Digg redesign and are being a lot smarter (or insidious...) about the transition +1. They learned how to boil the frog much better. Note how the top comments are recommending old.reddit as a valid option. While old is specifically there as an A/B test of sorts to prevent the most vocal people from leaving. It's all quite amazing in a way...
RealStickman_ 6y ago
I recently switched from the new to the old UI simply because the new UI became very laggy after scrolling for some time, sometimes taking a second to react to clicks.

nojito 6y ago

>How has Reddit not had its Digg 2.0 moment yet? They are blatantly user-hostile in so many ways nowadays. There's nothing more user hostile than going bankrupt due to advertising fraud.

qppo 6y ago

I'm guessing because most users are on mobile, using Apollo on iOS or Reddit is Fun on Android. Both of which are miles and above superior to the "official" Reddit app, which seems to have been the driving force for the redesign.

anthony_romeo 6y ago

Reddit was already superior to Digg as a news aggregator. Before the exodus, the joke (and I had observed this to often be true) was that Digg’s content was mostly the same as reddit’s... just posted a day later. At present there isn’t an obvious choice for where to migrate. Maybe more specialized boards like Hacker News will be the thriving suburbs outside of a dystopian reddit metropolis.

nvr219 6y ago
I'm thinking of going back to metafilter myself.... not sure why I stopped.
TeeMassive 6y ago
Parler is becoming more popular, but it's mostly only conservative stuff and frankly their UI is non-intuitive.
- tenuousemphasis 6y ago
  The problem with reactionary, "free speech" platforms is that they're always filled with the worst of the worst from other platforms.
  - userbinator 6y ago
    If the sibling comment to yours is any indication, the speech might not actually be that free either --- it's just biased in the other direction.
- SauciestGNU 6y ago
  While I long for a Reddit replacement, parler doesn't seem like it. I've seen numerous anecdotes of parler banning people for posting milquetoast non-conservative content.
mikecoles 6y ago
Sounds like SlashDot. See the article on HN then shortly thereafter in the /. firehouse.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

mxcrossb 6y ago

I think it’s because there’s no good alternative. All the copy cat sites aren’t interested in a good user experience, they just want a place with less content restrictions.

canada_dry 6y ago

I don't believe Reddit's demise will be like Digg's. IMHO Digg was a success despite itself. Run more like a sophomoric Animal House [i] than a facebook or twitter. It was only a matter of time until it imploded. [i] https://youtu.be/Wp5qAP1iH-g?t=57 https://youtu.be/Wp5qAP1iH-g?t=57

james412 6y ago

Reddit attracted a much larger share of the normie vote than Digg ever did. Back when they were competitors, you could expect the average user was part of the fairly homogenous group of tech workers. They were better organized, more politically aligned, and generally more likely to be early adopters of new tech That was a decade ago, and tech has become a lot more normalized since. Today's Reddit gets visibility on MM possibly more often than any site other than Google. Its users span the political spectrum, treat it as a utility, and for the most part never chose to come to Reddit, never critiqued it, and wouldn't notice if anything about it changed much. It's easy to imagine many modern users never make it off the front page. I don't think Reddit will die like Digg did. It's the megaphone of the Internet, and could probably commit much worse transgressions than some random DRM technobabble before the common user would take notice.

LeoPanthera 6y ago

Reddit has been (rightly) attempting to drive away it's far-right troll userbase, so whenever a potential viable alternative to Reddit pops up, it's them that go there first, resulting in no-one else wanting to go there, which results in the inevitable failure of that alternative, or at least it becoming an entrenched hangout for bigots. It's happened more than once already.

Polylactic_acid 6y ago
I remember voat. Originally it was looking like it would become the new reddit. The UI was good, the site was stable, but then it become totally flooded with racists so it never took off.
- dt3ft 6y ago
  I started building https://20-things.com https://20-things.com with a rather big barrier to entry (requires SMS verification) in order to discourage racists from signing up, which is what happens when anonymous registration is allowed, as seen on voat example. So far a few hundred people signed up, but I am the only one actively posting content, I use it like my personal bookmarking service. Without SMS verification, registration would be anonymous which enables racism, and in order to go this route, I'd have to have an army of moderators.
  - petargyurov 6y ago
    SMS verification is good but I doubt it works on a larger scale. I've long thought about a social network where each user is required to verify their identity. That comes with its own problems of course, especially in the current times of data protection, misuse of data and a lack of trust for these kinds of things. I'm sure it can be done properly, but who's to say what "properly" means.
    - fabianlindfors 6y ago
      I think I have seen a startup doing exactly this here in Sweden, can't remember their name though. We have a well-established e-ID which makes the verification part dead simple. I'm working on bringing e-IDs to more people which would make ideas like your much easier to implement. If you want to make your idea reality I'd love to collaborate!

jokoon 6y ago

I only use my own multireddit, /r/popular and /r/all are cesspools now To be honest, as a whole the content has slowly decreased in quality. Now I finally understand that a lot of content on reddit is just farming karma for bots, so those bots can be sold for astroturfers. So I have a lot of distrust for reddit in general. I'm feeling more and more frustrated, and I tell myself more and more that I have little interest going to reddit.

boobsbr 6y ago

I thought the AACS key fiasco triggered the exodus. At least that was my reason for leaving.

xyzal 6y ago

I suspect the redesign was motivated to make ads look more like regular content. At least I seem to click ads looking like regular posts frequently since the redesign, and in my opinion, it is an underhanded tactic.

rm445 6y ago

Reddit is too nebulous to get very mad about. You can leave a subreddit you're sick of. Trash your account if you're worried your comments risk doxing yourself. Start afresh, it's easy. Everyone is pseudonymous and reputations seem to matter far less than places like Hacker News. I've been using Reddit - reading a lot, commenting quite a bit, posting a little - since I read about it in the Joel on Software blog in 2006. It has been fascinating and fun but I've made no lasting friendships or connections. I'd move to something better with no regrets, but the site owners are probably never going to annoy me enough to move to something worse out of principle.

schoolornot 6y ago

I thought the site would have been done after spez abused his admin rights to edit user comments.