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Reddit has been very aggressive over the past few years to increase retention. They're barely a link aggregator anymore, they try to self-host as much content

by simias 6y ago

Reddit has been very aggressive over the past few years to increase retention. They're barely a link aggregator anymore, they try to self-host as much content as possible. Images, videos, they even attempted to make user-pages à la Facebook (no idea if this caught on). They're competing with Facebook and Instagram, not Hacker News. On paper that's not necessarily bad, but they don't hesitate to make the user experience worse to achieve this. If you want to link a video hosted on reddit, there's no straightforward way to only link the video and not the full reddit thread. Here's a random example from the frontpage: https://www.reddit.com/r/Whatcouldgowrong/comments/ici161/wcgw_spinning_the_propeller_of_a_remote_control/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Whatcouldgowrong/comments/ici161/wc... No way to share just the video, you have to share the garbage comments as well. Of course many video sharing sites are the same, but Reddit was supposed to be a link aggregator at first, not Youtube-but-worse. They've added a photo gallery feature lately with the same limitation: you can't just link the gallery, you have to link the full comment page. I suspect that they did that specifically because they couldn't really prevent people to share the URL to the image directly since that's a standard feature of the web, so by adding galleries they can "lock in" the content. At least they don't do referrer checks, I suppose... Well, not yet. And yeah, as you point out, the mobile experience on a browser is atrocious. Especially if like me you're only a lurker: if you're not logged in you can't even browse a subreddit, it forces you to install the app (or alternatively, you can go to i.reddit.com that still works and is much faster to boot). Vanilla Reddit is effectively becoming less pleasant to use that those shady streaming websites that change their domain names every month to evade copyright enforcement. At least those website usually manage to stream SD video reliably. Basically Reddit tries to become Instagram for people who think they're too cool for Instagram, and it shows.

anoncake 6y ago
> And yeah, as you point out, the mobile experience on a browser is atrocious. Especially if like me you're only a lurker, if you're not logged in you can't even browse a subreddit, it forces you to install the app (or alternatively, you can go to i.reddit.com that still works, and is much faster to boot). Or a different client (Reddit hasn't gone full Twitter yet), or enable Request Desktop Site.
drawkbox 6y ago
The reddit video player is one of the worst/lagging experiences of any video player since Real Player, and that had bad internet to deal with and Microsoft messing with it constantly. I usually don't like to rag on bad but highlight good, but in reddit's video player they are obviously doing too much tracking in it or it was rushed because it is not responsive many times even on a fast connection on a massive desktop machine. It is hard to seek, hard to play/stop/pause, half the time half way through it goes to down version that is compression glitched and blurry, on and on. If so much of the site is video, why not make that the slickest player of all time? Youtube has always known how to do this. Streaming services do as well. Open source tools are better than this. What is going on reddit with the video player? It probably has lots to do with tracking, cost savings and more but it is unwieldy right now.
- dylz 6y ago
  It uses adaptive streaming (MPEG-DASH), iirc. Starts at a low bitrate and scales upward over time. Works great for Twitch-length stuff. For a 10 second gif-equivalent, you don't get enough scale up time.
  - simias 6y ago
    There's no excuse to get such a bad quality for even low-res videos. Imgur, gfycat and Youtube manage to stream higher quality video faster on the same device on the same connection. I also think they shouldn't even attempt to stream video under a certain bitrate, I'd sooner have a video buffer for 10s than end up with something that's unwatchable because the resolution is like 10x10. And I'm barely exaggerating, I don't have an amazing connection but I can stream Netflix and Amazon Prime in 720p without any issue, yet I just got this on Reddit: https://svkt.org/~simias/up/20200819-142013_redditvideo.jpg https://svkt.org/~simias/up/20200819-142013_redditvideo.jpg This is not upscaled or anything, that's literally what I saw on my screen as the video was playing. It's just half-assed, there's no other explanation really.
    - dylz 6y ago
      imgur and gfycat directly stream a .mp4/etc file, the opposite of what reddit does. Many uploads on reddit are also repeated re-uploads of compressed and then recompressed ad nauseum videos and stolen content, so I wouldn't be surprised if a fairly significant amount of the uploads started at 360p or less, downloaded from a phone. > I also think they shouldn't even attempt to stream video under a certain bitrate You are not the target demographic; the target are mostly on phones, where rapid start and 360p is not a huge deal. You don't get 1080p or 720p from snapchat or instagram. In super blunt terms reddit would rather not want you, they'd much rather have someone with the app downloaded, all tracking on, with push notifications on and the impossibility of ad blocking. In your example, the video thumbnail implies that this is a recording OF a recording - this is someone that has already uploaded a compressed version to Twitter, where it has been further compressed, and then recorded and cropped on presumably a phone screen, then uploaded to reddit. If I google the text, the first reddit results are all natively in 240p uploaded original.

by simias 6y ago

anoncake 6y ago

> And yeah, as you point out, the mobile experience on a browser is atrocious. Especially if like me you're only a lurker, if you're not logged in you can't even browse a subreddit, it forces you to install the app (or alternatively, you can go to i.reddit.com that still works, and is much faster to boot). Or a different client (Reddit hasn't gone full Twitter yet), or enable Request Desktop Site.

drawkbox 6y ago

The reddit video player is one of the worst/lagging experiences of any video player since Real Player, and that had bad internet to deal with and Microsoft messing with it constantly. I usually don't like to rag on bad but highlight good, but in reddit's video player they are obviously doing too much tracking in it or it was rushed because it is not responsive many times even on a fast connection on a massive desktop machine. It is hard to seek, hard to play/stop/pause, half the time half way through it goes to down version that is compression glitched and blurry, on and on. If so much of the site is video, why not make that the slickest player of all time? Youtube has always known how to do this. Streaming services do as well. Open source tools are better than this. What is going on reddit with the video player? It probably has lots to do with tracking, cost savings and more but it is unwieldy right now.

dylz 6y ago
It uses adaptive streaming (MPEG-DASH), iirc. Starts at a low bitrate and scales upward over time. Works great for Twitch-length stuff. For a 10 second gif-equivalent, you don't get enough scale up time.
- simias 6y ago
  There's no excuse to get such a bad quality for even low-res videos. Imgur, gfycat and Youtube manage to stream higher quality video faster on the same device on the same connection. I also think they shouldn't even attempt to stream video under a certain bitrate, I'd sooner have a video buffer for 10s than end up with something that's unwatchable because the resolution is like 10x10. And I'm barely exaggerating, I don't have an amazing connection but I can stream Netflix and Amazon Prime in 720p without any issue, yet I just got this on Reddit: https://svkt.org/~simias/up/20200819-142013_redditvideo.jpg https://svkt.org/~simias/up/20200819-142013_redditvideo.jpg This is not upscaled or anything, that's literally what I saw on my screen as the video was playing. It's just half-assed, there's no other explanation really.
  - dylz 6y ago
    imgur and gfycat directly stream a .mp4/etc file, the opposite of what reddit does. Many uploads on reddit are also repeated re-uploads of compressed and then recompressed ad nauseum videos and stolen content, so I wouldn't be surprised if a fairly significant amount of the uploads started at 360p or less, downloaded from a phone. > I also think they shouldn't even attempt to stream video under a certain bitrate You are not the target demographic; the target are mostly on phones, where rapid start and 360p is not a huge deal. You don't get 1080p or 720p from snapchat or instagram. In super blunt terms reddit would rather not want you, they'd much rather have someone with the app downloaded, all tracking on, with push notifications on and the impossibility of ad blocking. In your example, the video thumbnail implies that this is a recording OF a recording - this is someone that has already uploaded a compressed version to Twitter, where it has been further compressed, and then recorded and cropped on presumably a phone screen, then uploaded to reddit. If I google the text, the first reddit results are all natively in 240p uploaded original.