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I'm going to sound maximum hipster/back-in-my-day/gate-keeper here, but Reddit circa 2015 and earlier was far better. Nobody wants the redesign. Reddit doesn't

I'm going to sound maximum hipster/back-in-my-day/gate-keeper here, but Reddit circa 2015 and earlier was far better. Nobody wants the redesign. Reddit doesn't need avatars. It used to nicely tread the line between enough people to make it active, but not so many that it didn't still feel niche. It feels very mainstream now, and I think it's lost a lot of what made it actually good. It's asymptotically approaching a social network, but to no benefit, and only the downsides that come with that.

throwqqq 6y ago
Reddits eternal September was 2011 if we're going to try and out hipster each other.
dleslie 6y ago
It really fell off the rails when it became an imageboard moreso than a forum and link aggregator. It was all about the text, and so attracted those most willing to tolerate a wall of text. Use Archive.org to compare 2008 to 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016 and onwards. The addition of thumbnails and gradual shift of the frontpage away from textual content and towards images is almost as remarkable as the increase in high-anxiety, anger and tribalism. At some point sub-reddits were added, as well, which probably didn't help with the tribalism.
- fouc 6y ago
  probably related to the integration of imgur?
  - rhizome 6y ago
    Speaking of sites that have become nightmares...
- sjtindell 6y ago
  Ironically in my opinion subreddits are the only thing keeping the site useful at all. It’s all about curating a set of smaller subreddits targeted at your interests or frequented by people whose content you like. Beyond that it’s just terrible.
  - Yhippa 6y ago
    The line between a small subreddit struggling to get enough posts and then getting big enough to have drama is so fine these days.
    - BolexNOLA 6y ago
      The amount of work the ask historians mods have to put in to make reddit function like people think it does/want it to is staggering. That team is basically doing a second full time job. I don’t know how they do it.
  - _pmf_ 6y ago
    > Ironically in my opinion subreddits are the only thing keeping the site useful at all. At what point in time could one derive value from reddit without subreddits?
    - rcxdude 6y ago
      It didn't have them initially. Though at that point it was basically a slightly less focused /r/programming .
- lovegoblin 6y ago
  > At some point sub-reddits were added, as well Hah that was in 2006. The real change for subreddits was when they became user-creatable, but even that was already in 2008. Point is it's not like they're a recent addition.
- jedberg 6y ago
  Reddit had thumbnails in 2007.
  - byte1918 6y ago
    I'm sure it did not or maybe it was not enabled by default. I distinctly remember having to turn 'condensed view' back on because the thumbnails were taking so much vertical space. edit: Just noticed who I replied to. I guess you would know better.
  - dleslie 6y ago
    Of course, but the dominance of images over text was gradual. Compare archives of the front page in 2008, 2010 and so on. It is remarkable how the content focus shifts.
    - jedberg 6y ago
      Oh for sure. It's shifted way too far towards images now. I was just pointing out the shift started really early.
fiblye 6y ago
I joined HN right around the time I thought reddit had become a dump. Apparently that was 10 years ago. Early reddit was a really fun place. Not sure how to explain it, but it kind of felt like one of those movie/cartoon mad science labs, but as a community. Basically everyone was an engineer, programmer, or scientist of some sort, or so it seemed. Most of the front page was science, tech, and programming news, and the remaining bit was people posting about tech gadgets and other stuff they made. It seemed pretty similar to HN, but more active and with a less market-oriented crowd just making stuff for the hell of it (which HN still gets a decent amount of). Then people started posting pictures of cakes, political/religious discussions were everywhere, and it just felt weird. Digg was starting to decline and small waves of people started coming in, and once v4 launched and killed Digg, reddit's comment section completely changed, and the submitted content soon followed. Now I go and see avatars and people buying gifts and gold (someone actually took an old 4chan joke and turned it into a business idea) and endless fake videos and random images. It looks like an absolute circus now. People having been mentioning that finding niche subreddits is the answer, but in my experience, it's just a game of musical chairs. Virtually all of them get bad eventually.
- ozi 6y ago
  > Virtually all of them get bad eventually. Like pretty much everything on the internet.
  - IggleSniggle 6y ago
    Eternal September: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
  - loudtieblahblah 6y ago
    Given enough people or money, everything goes to shit. On and offline.
- msla 6y ago
  > Not sure how to explain it, but it kind of felt like one of those movie/cartoon mad science labs, but as a community. I think this is where everyone goes off the rails a bit, and I want to explain why: Reddit can't be a community. Reddit is too big to be a community. Reddit is too diverse to be a community. Where's the community between Old-School Runescape players and Lisp programmers? There might be some tiny Venn-diagram overlap, but there's no shared goal there, no spirit of common purpose. The two worlds aren't allied, they aren't opposed, they're simply sharing a common platform useful for allowing online discussions, and they don't cross paths otherwise. After all, what's a great white shark to a wolf? If you expect a platform-as-a-whole to be a community, you'll be driven off one platform after the other, time and time again, until you either find one so niche it's never going to grow, or you die unsatisfied. Hell, you might not even be satisfied with the niche platform, given that it'll be a stagnant backwater utterly ignored by the rest of the Internet. Reddit's solution is Usenet's solution: Subdivisions! Allow tons of smaller sub-platforms to proliferate, and allow them to be communities. Or not. There are some fairly community-like subreddits, and there are some clubby Usenet newsgroups.
hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
I joined Reddit back during "The Great Digg V4 Exodus" of 2010 (honestly it shocked me to realize that was a decade ago). I remember the thing that really struck me about the Reddit community back then, even on some of the larger subreddits, was that people generally thought of themselves as a community of people helping each other. Lots of "I live in town Foo, I can donate Bar to you" type of stuff. I distinctly remember how that felt like a novel thing for a (relatively at the time) large community. Sure, there was some trolling, but absolutely nowhere near the level of toxicity that is just much more common now. In some ways that mirrors online discourse at large, but in other ways you're right, just feels like whenever I community reaches a certain size it just starts to suck by definition.
- AdamJacobMuller 6y ago
  I moved from dig to reddit in 2007, when Digg was banning accounts for posting the AACS key. I remember having a deep sense of fear in choosing to give up my digg account, knowing I was going to get banned for posting the AACS key. It was like I was losing a vital part of my identity online. After a while with my reddit account I felt the same way (it being a vital part of my identity online), but, in recent years I care less and less about the platform. My account is now dead. I just checked and it's almost 2 years since I posted anything. I have created a few alt accounts which I use for discussing some specific niche things on some niche subreddits which I enjoy, but, the site as a whole has no appeal to me anymore. If I couldn't unsubscribe from the default subs, I would leave the site and never return. There are some cool communities I enjoy. I spent time (on an alt) in /r/thelastofus discussing the game after I finished playing TLOU2. I spent time on /r/seattle and /r/seattlewa reading about CHAZ/CHOP and events there. I enjoy HN a lot, but, it's very focused which has an effect of myopia. When the redesign becomes mandatory and old reddit goes away (and don't kid yourself, it will), I will probably leave and never return, but, unlike digg in 2007 I'm not going to feel like I'm losing anything when I do.
  - Bnshsysjab 6y ago
    I’m curious about this, I regularly use and rotate burners on almost all social media, I’m not looking for approval from my peers and generally don’t believe my opinion matters (in the sense that the SNR is so bad that even if I had a valid point it wouldn’t change anything in the big scheme of things). What about your online identity do you value so much?
BolexNOLA 6y ago
Honestly I’d say it’s closer to 2013 or so. The rise of rage comics/f7u12, /r/DAE, etc. was a major red flag. Subs that basically demanded “this sounds like niche but literally everyone thinks it” posts that often meandered into bigotry overnight. Plus the handful of users that moderated every major sub.
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago
  I loved f7u12, I don't think content that you can simply avoid is a red flag that shows any particular degeneracy? HN has 3? moderators. Number of moderators isn't the issue it's whether they're operating with ulterior motives, particularly hidden motives. Here, I think you can assume promoting Ycombinator and other pg associations are a motive that's not explicit.
  - BolexNOLA 6y ago
    I guess it’s more that low effort content became popular. I say this as someone who loved f7u12. But I realized over time that it became a game of “how do I make enough references for the front page?” and then, as always, dog whistles. DAE and advice animals were notorious for the latter.
SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
> asymptotically Had to look that up, fancy pants. I don’t think there is an near tangent approach plan at all, more like what seems a clear intention. Add in their beta-ing a pay to win karma system right now... it’s like they want the worst of everything. Next they’ll make a “Reddit award” that is just a loot box, trying to edge a n the worst part of gaming.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Bayart 6y ago
>Nobody wants the redesign. People who only stick to the image-posting part of Reddit seem to like it. Not that it speaks highly of it.
- Kiro 6y ago
  > Not that it speaks highly of it. Is looking at images profane all of a sudden?
  - michaelt 6y ago
    There's nothing inherently wrong with images - but if a website shows more of highly upvoted content; and if users can upvote a cute cat picture after 10 seconds while a written article takes 10 minutes to read, the cute cats are going to dominate.
    - Kiro 6y ago
      That's why there are different subreddits.
      - telchar 6y ago
        That doesn't really help much. Most enthusiast subreddits are full of posts that are just "look at my [basic standard hobby gear] picture". Even those places are overrun with this.
        BolexNOLA 6y ago
        Every day on /r/CRT: Post blurry picture of tv “is this any good?” Every response: “the model # is on the back.”
egypturnash 6y ago
I regularly wish there were avatars on Reddit to make it easier to recognize the regulars in subs I hang out on. Hearing they added avatars in the redesign tempts me to finally switch. Same here, really.
- FridgeSeal 6y ago
  The Reddit Enhancement Suite plugin is everything that Reddit actually needs. Nicknames and user tags give all the benefit of profile pics, but less obnoxious and without needing MB’s of JS or needing to subject yourself to adds
  - egypturnash 6y ago
    Wish that still worked on Safari.
chottocharaii 6y ago
Saidit.net is pre-2015 reddit, with some minor tweaks. Might take off
- fiblye 6y ago
  I don’t mean to offend, but looking at Saidit, seemingly every single item on the front page is political in nature. Unless that changes, I don’t see the average person migrating there.
- Kiro 6y ago
  Top voted comment on the top voted thread is a racist joke, with someone replying "are we on Voat?" and then another commenter saying "go back to reddit".
bitwize 6y ago
Ah, 2007 Reddit. When the death of Fup the cat, of Powell's Books fame, could make it to the tippy-top of the front page. Feels like a lifetime ago...
sschueller 6y ago
I didn't realise that users have avatars now as I am still using https://old.reddit.com/ https://old.reddit.com/ since the horrid redesign.
- paganel 6y ago
  And https://i.reddit.com/ https://i.reddit.com/ for mobile (I have an iPhone SE, so the new website version just doesn't do it for me). And when they'll take both old.* and i.* out I guess I'll be leaving that website for good.
  - sschueller 6y ago
    Yep, once they shut those down im out. I hope by then https://dev.lemmy.ml/ https://dev.lemmy.ml/ has federation working.
  - toxik 6y ago
    I use old.reddit.com on mobile too, I cannot stand infinite scroll. It’s such an addictive behavior. Just like youtube or netflix’s auto-play. I absolutely detest things like that!
  - FridgeSeal 6y ago
    Not sure how you feel about apps, but I can definitely vouch for how good Apollo for Reddit is.
    - toyg 6y ago
      Apollo is too image-oriented for my taste, I use Narwhal.
      - charrondev 6y ago
        There’s quite a lot flexibility in Apollo. You turn turn on condensed lists, adjust text size, adjust thumbnail size (or hide them entirely), etc
  - 6y ago
darawk 6y ago
I hate the redesign so much. It just seems objectively worse to me. But maybe that's because I don't primarily look at pictures? I continue to use old.reddit.com and I will for as long as they offer it.
- deergomoo 6y ago
  Even aside from the visual aspect which I still don't think is great (although the old reddit is famously quite ugly), the new site just chugs constantly. I'm on a decently powerful machine and it's intolerably sluggish. Thankfully there is respite in third party apps. I use Apollo, but there are many good options that push the new "features" to the side or omit them entirely.
  - marrone12 6y ago
    Performance is much worse, but am I the only one that likes the redesign? Better fonts, better spacing.
Kye 6y ago
Something I found when I used the redesign is it has the same addictive quality as Twitter. It's hard to pull away. Reddit is even worse paired with an engagement-driven design because it has the depth Twitter lacks if you find the right communities.
braythwayt 6y ago
Back in my day, Reddit was just one thing, they hadn’t developed subreddits yet. Reddit was a better Digg, just as Digg was a better Slashdot. Like Digg before it, there was an “Eternal September,” and one of the consequences was that Paul Graham launched Hacker News to preserve the culture that was being diluted. This is one of the reasons HN has a strongly opinionated culture and the appetite for firm moderation to maintain that culture: It’s not just a tool for YCombinator, it’s a deliberate attempt to maintain something that was repeatedly lost when previous “hacker” social media sites hit the mainstream. Even if we look away from its more controversial aspects, at the root of the issue is a simple truth that all successful social media sites become their own worst enemy. You and I can exchange arguments about whether Reddit 2008 was or wasn’t better than Reddit 2014, but fundamentally, I suspect we agree that “dilution” has a certain effect on culture. The flip side of that, of course, is “Who are we to scoff at the newcomers?” I am not a more valuable user than someone who joined yesterday, and there is nothing wrong with a social media site evolving to serve newcomers with new tastes and interests. My son loves exchanging Star Wars and other memes on Reddit. I love that HN doesn’t do memes. C’est la vie.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  HN has jumped the shark, these days you want to be on Lobsters.
  - braythwayt 6y ago
    I love the “jumped the shark” metaphor, but in the interests of derailing the thread with pedantry, I think that’s the wrong metaphor. To me, jumping the shark is typified by the creators/stewards of a thing making more and more desperate attempts to cling to relevancy, with no coherence between their attention-grabbing efforts, and with nearly all of them corrupting the thing that made the original show/site popular to begin with. HN may not be the place it was, but I don’t see the site doing wild things like allowing people to post videos that play on the site. I really think “Eternal September” describes it: There is a new generation of users that now dominates the culture. Thus, it is no longer what it was, but nevertheless the stewards aren’t trying to recover its lost “glory” with stunts. To me, it feels like a pub that used to be a cloth-cap and sandwiches place, but as the neighbourhood around it gentrified, it evolved to serve a wider menu. But it’s still a pub, it’s not like they pulled out the darts boards and replaced them with a DJ and dance floor. Reddit, on the other hand... Reddit is throwing stuff at the wall incoherently.
whywhywhywhy 6y ago
Honestly boggles my mind how unusable and slow the redesign is. But I don't think it matters anymore, seems like most Reddit users just use the app these days which is equally bad design wise but runs ok at least.
grillvogel 6y ago
to go even further, reddit in 2007 was amazing, discussion on the same level you'd find on sites like this. one trend i remember noticing over time was that the quality dip coincided with more posts that had "I" or "me" in the title as we started to enter the social media age
bmlzootown 6y ago
This is actually part of the reason that I created an account here. I used to just visit once in a while, but now HN is one of my pinned tabs. I still use Reddit rather often, don't get me wrong, but my interest has been dwindling.

throwqqq 6y ago

Reddits eternal September was 2011 if we're going to try and out hipster each other.

dleslie 6y ago

It really fell off the rails when it became an imageboard moreso than a forum and link aggregator. It was all about the text, and so attracted those most willing to tolerate a wall of text. Use Archive.org to compare 2008 to 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016 and onwards. The addition of thumbnails and gradual shift of the frontpage away from textual content and towards images is almost as remarkable as the increase in high-anxiety, anger and tribalism. At some point sub-reddits were added, as well, which probably didn't help with the tribalism.

fouc 6y ago
probably related to the integration of imgur?
- rhizome 6y ago
  Speaking of sites that have become nightmares...
sjtindell 6y ago
Ironically in my opinion subreddits are the only thing keeping the site useful at all. It’s all about curating a set of smaller subreddits targeted at your interests or frequented by people whose content you like. Beyond that it’s just terrible.
- Yhippa 6y ago
  The line between a small subreddit struggling to get enough posts and then getting big enough to have drama is so fine these days.
  - BolexNOLA 6y ago
    The amount of work the ask historians mods have to put in to make reddit function like people think it does/want it to is staggering. That team is basically doing a second full time job. I don’t know how they do it.
- _pmf_ 6y ago
  > Ironically in my opinion subreddits are the only thing keeping the site useful at all. At what point in time could one derive value from reddit without subreddits?
  - rcxdude 6y ago
    It didn't have them initially. Though at that point it was basically a slightly less focused /r/programming .
lovegoblin 6y ago
> At some point sub-reddits were added, as well Hah that was in 2006. The real change for subreddits was when they became user-creatable, but even that was already in 2008. Point is it's not like they're a recent addition.
jedberg 6y ago
Reddit had thumbnails in 2007.
- byte1918 6y ago
  I'm sure it did not or maybe it was not enabled by default. I distinctly remember having to turn 'condensed view' back on because the thumbnails were taking so much vertical space. edit: Just noticed who I replied to. I guess you would know better.
- dleslie 6y ago
  Of course, but the dominance of images over text was gradual. Compare archives of the front page in 2008, 2010 and so on. It is remarkable how the content focus shifts.
  - jedberg 6y ago
    Oh for sure. It's shifted way too far towards images now. I was just pointing out the shift started really early.

fiblye 6y ago

I joined HN right around the time I thought reddit had become a dump. Apparently that was 10 years ago. Early reddit was a really fun place. Not sure how to explain it, but it kind of felt like one of those movie/cartoon mad science labs, but as a community. Basically everyone was an engineer, programmer, or scientist of some sort, or so it seemed. Most of the front page was science, tech, and programming news, and the remaining bit was people posting about tech gadgets and other stuff they made. It seemed pretty similar to HN, but more active and with a less market-oriented crowd just making stuff for the hell of it (which HN still gets a decent amount of). Then people started posting pictures of cakes, political/religious discussions were everywhere, and it just felt weird. Digg was starting to decline and small waves of people started coming in, and once v4 launched and killed Digg, reddit's comment section completely changed, and the submitted content soon followed. Now I go and see avatars and people buying gifts and gold (someone actually took an old 4chan joke and turned it into a business idea) and endless fake videos and random images. It looks like an absolute circus now. People having been mentioning that finding niche subreddits is the answer, but in my experience, it's just a game of musical chairs. Virtually all of them get bad eventually.

ozi 6y ago
> Virtually all of them get bad eventually. Like pretty much everything on the internet.
- IggleSniggle 6y ago
  Eternal September: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
- loudtieblahblah 6y ago
  Given enough people or money, everything goes to shit. On and offline.
msla 6y ago
> Not sure how to explain it, but it kind of felt like one of those movie/cartoon mad science labs, but as a community. I think this is where everyone goes off the rails a bit, and I want to explain why: Reddit can't be a community. Reddit is too big to be a community. Reddit is too diverse to be a community. Where's the community between Old-School Runescape players and Lisp programmers? There might be some tiny Venn-diagram overlap, but there's no shared goal there, no spirit of common purpose. The two worlds aren't allied, they aren't opposed, they're simply sharing a common platform useful for allowing online discussions, and they don't cross paths otherwise. After all, what's a great white shark to a wolf? If you expect a platform-as-a-whole to be a community, you'll be driven off one platform after the other, time and time again, until you either find one so niche it's never going to grow, or you die unsatisfied. Hell, you might not even be satisfied with the niche platform, given that it'll be a stagnant backwater utterly ignored by the rest of the Internet. Reddit's solution is Usenet's solution: Subdivisions! Allow tons of smaller sub-platforms to proliferate, and allow them to be communities. Or not. There are some fairly community-like subreddits, and there are some clubby Usenet newsgroups.

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago

I joined Reddit back during "The Great Digg V4 Exodus" of 2010 (honestly it shocked me to realize that was a decade ago). I remember the thing that really struck me about the Reddit community back then, even on some of the larger subreddits, was that people generally thought of themselves as a community of people helping each other. Lots of "I live in town Foo, I can donate Bar to you" type of stuff. I distinctly remember how that felt like a novel thing for a (relatively at the time) large community. Sure, there was some trolling, but absolutely nowhere near the level of toxicity that is just much more common now. In some ways that mirrors online discourse at large, but in other ways you're right, just feels like whenever I community reaches a certain size it just starts to suck by definition.

AdamJacobMuller 6y ago
I moved from dig to reddit in 2007, when Digg was banning accounts for posting the AACS key. I remember having a deep sense of fear in choosing to give up my digg account, knowing I was going to get banned for posting the AACS key. It was like I was losing a vital part of my identity online. After a while with my reddit account I felt the same way (it being a vital part of my identity online), but, in recent years I care less and less about the platform. My account is now dead. I just checked and it's almost 2 years since I posted anything. I have created a few alt accounts which I use for discussing some specific niche things on some niche subreddits which I enjoy, but, the site as a whole has no appeal to me anymore. If I couldn't unsubscribe from the default subs, I would leave the site and never return. There are some cool communities I enjoy. I spent time (on an alt) in /r/thelastofus discussing the game after I finished playing TLOU2. I spent time on /r/seattle and /r/seattlewa reading about CHAZ/CHOP and events there. I enjoy HN a lot, but, it's very focused which has an effect of myopia. When the redesign becomes mandatory and old reddit goes away (and don't kid yourself, it will), I will probably leave and never return, but, unlike digg in 2007 I'm not going to feel like I'm losing anything when I do.
- Bnshsysjab 6y ago
  I’m curious about this, I regularly use and rotate burners on almost all social media, I’m not looking for approval from my peers and generally don’t believe my opinion matters (in the sense that the SNR is so bad that even if I had a valid point it wouldn’t change anything in the big scheme of things). What about your online identity do you value so much?

BolexNOLA 6y ago

Honestly I’d say it’s closer to 2013 or so. The rise of rage comics/f7u12, /r/DAE, etc. was a major red flag. Subs that basically demanded “this sounds like niche but literally everyone thinks it” posts that often meandered into bigotry overnight. Plus the handful of users that moderated every major sub.

pbhjpbhj 6y ago
I loved f7u12, I don't think content that you can simply avoid is a red flag that shows any particular degeneracy? HN has 3? moderators. Number of moderators isn't the issue it's whether they're operating with ulterior motives, particularly hidden motives. Here, I think you can assume promoting Ycombinator and other pg associations are a motive that's not explicit.
- BolexNOLA 6y ago
  I guess it’s more that low effort content became popular. I say this as someone who loved f7u12. But I realized over time that it became a game of “how do I make enough references for the front page?” and then, as always, dog whistles. DAE and advice animals were notorious for the latter.

SV_BubbleTime 6y ago

> asymptotically Had to look that up, fancy pants. I don’t think there is an near tangent approach plan at all, more like what seems a clear intention. Add in their beta-ing a pay to win karma system right now... it’s like they want the worst of everything. Next they’ll make a “Reddit award” that is just a loot box, trying to edge a n the worst part of gaming.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Bayart 6y ago

>Nobody wants the redesign. People who only stick to the image-posting part of Reddit seem to like it. Not that it speaks highly of it.

Kiro 6y ago
> Not that it speaks highly of it. Is looking at images profane all of a sudden?
- michaelt 6y ago
  There's nothing inherently wrong with images - but if a website shows more of highly upvoted content; and if users can upvote a cute cat picture after 10 seconds while a written article takes 10 minutes to read, the cute cats are going to dominate.
  - Kiro 6y ago
    That's why there are different subreddits.
    - telchar 6y ago
      That doesn't really help much. Most enthusiast subreddits are full of posts that are just "look at my [basic standard hobby gear] picture". Even those places are overrun with this.
      - BolexNOLA 6y ago
        Every day on /r/CRT: Post blurry picture of tv “is this any good?” Every response: “the model # is on the back.”

egypturnash 6y ago

I regularly wish there were avatars on Reddit to make it easier to recognize the regulars in subs I hang out on. Hearing they added avatars in the redesign tempts me to finally switch. Same here, really.

FridgeSeal 6y ago
The Reddit Enhancement Suite plugin is everything that Reddit actually needs. Nicknames and user tags give all the benefit of profile pics, but less obnoxious and without needing MB’s of JS or needing to subject yourself to adds
- egypturnash 6y ago
  Wish that still worked on Safari.

chottocharaii 6y ago

Saidit.net is pre-2015 reddit, with some minor tweaks. Might take off

fiblye 6y ago
I don’t mean to offend, but looking at Saidit, seemingly every single item on the front page is political in nature. Unless that changes, I don’t see the average person migrating there.
Kiro 6y ago
Top voted comment on the top voted thread is a racist joke, with someone replying "are we on Voat?" and then another commenter saying "go back to reddit".

bitwize 6y ago

Ah, 2007 Reddit. When the death of Fup the cat, of Powell's Books fame, could make it to the tippy-top of the front page. Feels like a lifetime ago...

sschueller 6y ago

I didn't realise that users have avatars now as I am still using https://old.reddit.com/ https://old.reddit.com/ since the horrid redesign.

paganel 6y ago
And https://i.reddit.com/ https://i.reddit.com/ for mobile (I have an iPhone SE, so the new website version just doesn't do it for me). And when they'll take both old.* and i.* out I guess I'll be leaving that website for good.
- sschueller 6y ago
  Yep, once they shut those down im out. I hope by then https://dev.lemmy.ml/ https://dev.lemmy.ml/ has federation working.
- toxik 6y ago
  I use old.reddit.com on mobile too, I cannot stand infinite scroll. It’s such an addictive behavior. Just like youtube or netflix’s auto-play. I absolutely detest things like that!
- FridgeSeal 6y ago
  Not sure how you feel about apps, but I can definitely vouch for how good Apollo for Reddit is.
  - toyg 6y ago
    Apollo is too image-oriented for my taste, I use Narwhal.
    - charrondev 6y ago
      There’s quite a lot flexibility in Apollo. You turn turn on condensed lists, adjust text size, adjust thumbnail size (or hide them entirely), etc
- 6y ago

darawk 6y ago

I hate the redesign so much. It just seems objectively worse to me. But maybe that's because I don't primarily look at pictures? I continue to use old.reddit.com and I will for as long as they offer it.

deergomoo 6y ago
Even aside from the visual aspect which I still don't think is great (although the old reddit is famously quite ugly), the new site just chugs constantly. I'm on a decently powerful machine and it's intolerably sluggish. Thankfully there is respite in third party apps. I use Apollo, but there are many good options that push the new "features" to the side or omit them entirely.
- marrone12 6y ago
  Performance is much worse, but am I the only one that likes the redesign? Better fonts, better spacing.

Kye 6y ago

Something I found when I used the redesign is it has the same addictive quality as Twitter. It's hard to pull away. Reddit is even worse paired with an engagement-driven design because it has the depth Twitter lacks if you find the right communities.

braythwayt 6y ago

Back in my day, Reddit was just one thing, they hadn’t developed subreddits yet. Reddit was a better Digg, just as Digg was a better Slashdot. Like Digg before it, there was an “Eternal September,” and one of the consequences was that Paul Graham launched Hacker News to preserve the culture that was being diluted. This is one of the reasons HN has a strongly opinionated culture and the appetite for firm moderation to maintain that culture: It’s not just a tool for YCombinator, it’s a deliberate attempt to maintain something that was repeatedly lost when previous “hacker” social media sites hit the mainstream. Even if we look away from its more controversial aspects, at the root of the issue is a simple truth that all successful social media sites become their own worst enemy. You and I can exchange arguments about whether Reddit 2008 was or wasn’t better than Reddit 2014, but fundamentally, I suspect we agree that “dilution” has a certain effect on culture. The flip side of that, of course, is “Who are we to scoff at the newcomers?” I am not a more valuable user than someone who joined yesterday, and there is nothing wrong with a social media site evolving to serve newcomers with new tastes and interests. My son loves exchanging Star Wars and other memes on Reddit. I love that HN doesn’t do memes. C’est la vie.

zozbot234 6y ago
HN has jumped the shark, these days you want to be on Lobsters.
- braythwayt 6y ago
  I love the “jumped the shark” metaphor, but in the interests of derailing the thread with pedantry, I think that’s the wrong metaphor. To me, jumping the shark is typified by the creators/stewards of a thing making more and more desperate attempts to cling to relevancy, with no coherence between their attention-grabbing efforts, and with nearly all of them corrupting the thing that made the original show/site popular to begin with. HN may not be the place it was, but I don’t see the site doing wild things like allowing people to post videos that play on the site. I really think “Eternal September” describes it: There is a new generation of users that now dominates the culture. Thus, it is no longer what it was, but nevertheless the stewards aren’t trying to recover its lost “glory” with stunts. To me, it feels like a pub that used to be a cloth-cap and sandwiches place, but as the neighbourhood around it gentrified, it evolved to serve a wider menu. But it’s still a pub, it’s not like they pulled out the darts boards and replaced them with a DJ and dance floor. Reddit, on the other hand... Reddit is throwing stuff at the wall incoherently.

whywhywhywhy 6y ago

Honestly boggles my mind how unusable and slow the redesign is. But I don't think it matters anymore, seems like most Reddit users just use the app these days which is equally bad design wise but runs ok at least.

grillvogel 6y ago

to go even further, reddit in 2007 was amazing, discussion on the same level you'd find on sites like this. one trend i remember noticing over time was that the quality dip coincided with more posts that had "I" or "me" in the title as we started to enter the social media age

bmlzootown 6y ago

This is actually part of the reason that I created an account here. I used to just visit once in a while, but now HN is one of my pinned tabs. I still use Reddit rather often, don't get me wrong, but my interest has been dwindling.