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I genuinely wonder if the people in charge of Reddit ever come around to places like this to read these sentiments. Hell, they actually only need to read actual

I genuinely wonder if the people in charge of Reddit ever come around to places like this to read these sentiments. Hell, they actually only need to read actual Reddit posts to understand that many people are utterly disgusted by their tactics to try and force you onto their mobile app, they're upset at how slow the (default) site is, etc. Maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe people will keep using it forever. But I doubt it. They've turned Reddit from something that had potential to exist for a long time into something closer to TikTok (which, even without the current drama, was never going to be more than a fad IMO). There are more efficient ways to get low-effort shitposts and memes than Reddit. Those who want that will move on, and the people who were interested in more than that are leaving now.

edoceo 6y ago
Where are they going?
- ragnese 6y ago
  The people who want more non-meme content? I'm not sure. I'm not saying they've all moved on yet, but I bet they will. For example, I preferred some of the more tech-related subreddits. Then I discovered HackerNews and Lobste.rs. That can't be the only demographic of content that has forums out there. And I imagine more will pop up. Again, it's just my prediction/guess. I've certainly been wrong before. Perhaps I have it totally backwards. Maybe those people will stay because they're more tolerant of Reddit's bullshit to get to the good content. I don't think that's a smart bet for Reddit to make, though. EDIT: Also, a lot of people are apparently moving to Discord chats.
  - edoceo 6y ago
    My anecdata: I'm a long time reddit user, hate their new UI/UX, avoid their App and now visit less. I'm also still looking for what's next. Im thinking to go back to finding good RSS. Where is a good feed finder?
    - stevesycombacct 6y ago
      The closest service I've found to old-school RSS is Feedly[0], which allows me to subscribe to various news or social media pipelines and group them as I like. [0]https://feedly.com https://feedly.com
    - benrapscallion 6y ago
      Are you looking for a list of feeds to subscribe to?
    - calvano915 6y ago
      I moved from Feedly to Newsblur when Feedly started charging.
  - julianlam 6y ago
    Discord is great when you want real time conversation, but it exists parallel to a subreddit, not as a replacement. To look forwards, you must look backwards, at new forum software such as NodeBB or Flarum. Specialist niche communities are already shifting in that direction, or have never left their old BBSes behind, but are due to welcome a resurgence of new members.
    - FalconSensei 6y ago
      I still don't like it even for real time conversations. As they don't have threads, or any way to reply to a specific message, sometimes it's confusing to have 3 different conversations going on in the same channel
  - phillip_cypher 6y ago
    I've moved on, and come here. I always loved reddit for the news articles and conversation. I feel that both of those things have spread out to the margins. Some subs still have the quality text-based content that I like, but most have been snuffed out by power-hungry mods, or transformed by an influx of users who don't understand the older reddit culture. When a friend referred me to hackernews, I found that it has the type of content and users that I miss from reddit. I also visit Tildes on occasion, but the user base is so small that the content is much more limited than it is here.
  - aapppwe 6y ago
    is discord easy to search for? like what are some good technical discord for programmers?
bstar77 6y ago
I think most people that use reddit are using it for specific sub-reddits, not for memes or 'shitposting'. Apollo app makes reddit a really nice experience for me on iOS, but I'm not sure what Android has on that front. Problem is that 3rd party apps that provide a front-end to Reddit need to be in active development. Once the dev steps back for a couple months, everything is going to go to shit.
- rkangel 6y ago
  Android has "Sync for Reddit" (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.laurencedawson.reddit_sync https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.laurenceda...) which is an excellent app. One of the best designed and engineered Android apps that I use.
  - nirav72 6y ago
    Seconded - love sync's offline capabilities. Especially on long flights. I commented above that android seems to have better options than IOS when it comes to third-party reddit apps. (I use devices from both platforms).
  - stjohnswarts 6y ago
    Yeah I used to use a couple other ones (reddit is fun?) and sync is far above them.
- viraptor 6y ago
  > I'm not sure what Android has on that front. "Reddit is fun" has a very decent interface.
- ragnese 6y ago
  > I think most people that use reddit are using it for specific sub-reddits, not for memes or 'shitposting'. Perhaps. But the shear size of r/pic or r/jokes makes me doubt that most people are there for "serious business". Yes, I understand that you can subscribe to many subreddits and that you can sub to r/jokes AND r/serious-topic-with-serious-people. I'm just skeptical. Reddit is trying to be for the masses. Most of the time people spend on their phone is to look at cat pictures. I'm not passing judgement necessarily. It's just what everyone I know does. They read news, check Facebook, and then pull up TikTok/Snapchat/Instagram and look at funny pictures. I still visit particular subreddits. I never visit the front page- not even "my" front page. I go to exactly whichever subreddit I want to read from at the moment. Maybe lots of people are using that way, but it's not what I see in my bubble. Again, I could be totally wrong.
hoorayimhelping 6y ago
My time at Etsy (2012-2015) taught me that people will rationalize anything to avoid dealing with the fact that they made a fundamentally bad decision. A big reason Etsy has lost a lot of trust with consumers is their inconsistently applied policies and their allowance of cheap knock off crap. When I was there a few years ago, there were all sorts of forum posts, reddit posts and tweets about the problem all the time. The leadership (and more importantly) the people in the company, absolutely refused to believe it was a problem. We came up with any excuse and rationalization we could for not addressing it. The most common one was, "they (the people complaining) don't have access to our data, they don't know what we know, therefore their points are irrelevant." Another was, "they're just mad, let them vent, it's no big deal." Pure denial, the simplest reaction to bad news. By continuously shoving their heads in the sand and not addressing the perception (whether it was real or not) the company allowed the perception to become reality. I'd be pretty surprised if reddit leadership doesn't do the same thing when they see messages on HN talking about how shit reddit is. They'll rationalize how we're a bunch of pedantic, angry nerds who don't represent the average user. They'll ignore the growing negative trends in favor of looking at the positive ones. They'll do anything they can to not change the strategy they've committed to. It smacks of a company that doesn't plan, doesn't think about the consequences of their decisions, and goes with the first idea that pops into their head.
- Guest19023892 6y ago
  > It smacks of a company that doesn't plan, doesn't think about the consequences of their decisions, and goes with the first idea that pops into their head. I imagine the new design is a huge success in terms of revenue. Users now endlessly scroll through countless promotions and advertisements that seamlessly blend with the content and most likely have much higher engagement rates. They can kill all the serious subreddits and focus on meme, porn, drama, influencer content and still be far more financially successful than the old Reddit. They'll have no shortage of users. We might hate it and leave the site, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's sustainable in the long term for them and the right financial move.
MattGaiser 6y ago
They may be disgusted, but have they stopped buying? People rage at airlines all the time. Any given us legroom back? No, as people still boarded the plane.
- t0mas88 6y ago
  The airline example is even crazier. Even on a platform like Google Flights that shows you the legroom for each flight right next to the price, people still in large majorities select the lowest cost ticket with usually the least legroom. And then go on and complain about the legroom. It's like buying a car with a 150 hp engine and then complain it's slower than the more expensive 250 hp model.
  - rurp 6y ago
    > Google Flights that shows you the legroom for each flight right next to the price I've never seen this before on a flight booking site. How widespread and discoverable is this feature across the major booking sites, outside of Google Flights?
    - MattGaiser 6y ago
      SkyScanner, my goto, has it.
nightski 6y ago
Meh, I know it's popular to hate but I don't mind the app and I don't mind the website redesign either, it works great for me. I'm not saying it does for everyone else but it's largely possible that people aren't as annoyed as you think.
- ragnese 6y ago
  Possibly. But have you seen the "this subreddit is only available on the app" page you get when you visit certain subreddits while on a mobile browser? Simply changing the url to old.reddit.com "reveals" that it's certainly not "only available on the app". Or the periodic nagging to "continue with the app" when browsing the mobile site? I've not met anyone who thinks that's okay. And I will never use their app because of that. I'm actually quite upset that their campaign appears to be "working", as seen by the OP.
  - mjayhn 6y ago
    I get so frustrated using reddit on mobile browsers because the reddit app popups or dark patterns that stop me from reading a complete post or the comments in the post are so antagonistic. I don't know how much time I've wasted trying to get "Read more" to take me to the right spot just to find out I'd read the entire thing or there was one asinine comment in the entire thread it was hiding from me. The new reddit ux is so bad but I don't use the site enough anymore to dedicate myself to a full app, and those have all of their own frustrations. It'd be nice if the default browser experience was the native and "clean" one, not the worst one.
  - nightski 6y ago
    I'm sorry I haven't seen that because I just use the app. It's really not a big deal. I'm pretty careful with picking my battles and I get quite a bit of value from reddit.
  - themeiguoren 6y ago
    I deleted the app because it was too much of a skinners box for me, but it worked well. The mobile site on iOS works well, and I literally never get popup prompts or blockers guiding me towards the app. Perhaps those people aren’t logged in? On desktop I use the redesign happily - the biggest complaint I’ve heard from power users is that it’s not as information dense, but that’s super easily fixed by changing the default layout from ‘card’ to ‘classic’ or ‘compact’. I suspect those people skipped the popup walkthrough that explained this when the transition happened, because I’ve run across many bitter people who used the old site a lot and didn’t know you could change the new one away from the massive cards. IMO that’s pretty ironic. Reddit’s current UIs get a lot of hate, but I’ve been using the site at least weekly for the last 11 years and I really don’t get the complaints. The old site was ugly (albeit familiar), and the new skin doesn’t subtract from the functionality in any way besides a few obscure subreddits with wild styling. If that has helped bring people to my niche interest subs, that’s a huge win in my book.
screye 6y ago
I have come to the conclusion that reddit is 2 apps/websites. The first is a tiktok-esque waste of time, instant gratification meme machine. Everyone on this app uses the reddit native app and doesn't care about dark patterns. They would never know that reddit's app is shit, because they literally don't care enough. The 2nd is a Hackernews-esque collection of hobbyist sub-forums. These people are invested in their hobbies and sub-reddits. They use reddit to interact and discuss, but also a source of niche-news for their hobby. Every one here has a 3rd party reddit app or uses RES. (if you don't, please do). Unlike twitter, reddit lets 3rd parties offer feature complete wrappers for reddit. This group has ad-block, but will occasionally give someone gold. This group hates reddit, but also has no where to go. If a person tries to make reddit both, then it is an annoying experience. I use reddit entirely as the latter. The front-page and r/all are garbage to me. Every super popular (barring sports) subreddit is trash. But, my niche subreddits are literally the best places on the internet to gain niche information. Examples where the subreddit is the best source of open discussion on the internet for that niche: dota2, manga, soccer, metal, prog, civilized discourse, history, male fashion (kinda), calisthenics, small cities, fantasy fiction, niche YT channels, super authentic cooking....and that's just for me. PSA : Use a 3rd party reddit app (SYNC is my preferred. Pay up the 2$ dollars. It is worth it). Use RES, and enforce filters strongly. Use RedditProTools to detect trolls, bias and top contributors. Use Imagus (hoverzoom has malware) for pop-image/video viewer. These will greatly enhance your reddit experience.
- maest 6y ago
  > Examples where the subreddit is the best source of open discussion on the internet for that niche: dota2, manga, soccer, metal, prog, civilized discourse, history, male fashion (kinda), calisthenics, small cities, fantasy fiction, niche YT channels, super authentic cooking....and that's just for me. With the risk of sounding elitist, for some of those topics the main subreddit is overran with pointless and repetitive memes. You'd have to go to the r/true* subreddit to get the serious, in depth discussions.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    There are so many examples where a niche subreddit got filled with drama, and then a significant chunk split off and created another subreddit that now fights with the original occasionally. Gaming subreddits appear to be particularly bad at this.
minusSeven 6y ago
Once you get big you change your priorities. There is no reason the same can't happen to hacker news either. If they start allowing low quality shitpost. Right now I assume with the amount of traffic here, it doesn't cost lot of money to maintain this site. But the same for Reddit is different. Reddit on its barely makes any profit and had made losses for a number of years. Right now they are too big to pull Digg and not suffer any major consequences.
linuxftw 6y ago
> was never going to be more than a fad IMO That's what I said about SNAP. It seems platform stickiness is stronger than some of us might have judged. Especially considering today's tech illiterate youth. They have no idea what the implications of installing an 'app' are.
- ragnese 6y ago
  Good point. I also thought the same thing about SnapChat. I may be wrong about all three!
jokoon 6y ago
There are still interesting communities and multi reddit are cool. But you're right, reddit is being poisoned. Maybe they will remove the front page and /r/all one day. They should. All of this might be caused by elections. I wish somebody would write a repertoire of subreddit by tags or categories. I still love to read comments on science and other constructive debates. Curated posts should also be more visible, not like digg did though. Subreddit of the day is nice too. The shit posts are annoying, but it's part of how reddit want to attract as many types of users as possible, like tumblr. If you don't explore reddit your using it wrong. I should search for a repertoire though.
troughway 6y ago
You mean jedberg and others? Yeah, they're around.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  But as an ex-employee, I don't think they have much control over what Reddit is doing these days?
Pilottwave 6y ago
Adding to this reddit is centralizing themselves. Classically they were a link aggregator, a place pointing to other content. Now if you upload something there reddit is the place its pointing to. A video on reddit is hard to download, and a link to a video is always opened with a full reddit view with comments and everything. I dont like the way they are going and have sought alternatives 2 years ago. Thats where i found hackernews and tildes.net which are pretty good. However not a good alternative to the niche subreddits we all love.
- techer 6y ago
  Would like an invite to tildes if you can spare...
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  I kind of agree. The day they ditch oldreddit.com and break RES I'm probably gone from the site.
RealStickman_ 6y ago
Basically the only interactions I have with reddit nowadays is my Pythonbot that grabs wallpapers from a few subreddits.
Taylor_OD 6y ago
Why would they care if a small number of people hate that they aggressively push you to their mobile app when can achieve 50 million downloads? Follow the money. It will answer a lot of questions for you.
anonzzz 6y ago
> There are more efficient ways to get low-effort shitposts and memes than Reddit. What reddit replacements exist out there that have the niche communities that Reddit supports?
fossuser 6y ago
I’ve started noticing old Reddit is also just broken now for a lot of posts. If there’s a post with an image hosted on Reddit itself, old Reddit often doesn’t show it. I have to open in incognito to see it.
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  Do you have a link to a submission with this issue? I only use the old interface and don't think I've run into what you've experienced.
  - fossuser 6y ago
    I can try and find one - I last noticed it on r/sffpc. It could be NextDNS blocking someone Reddit url I need to whitelist (though I’m skeptical since it works in incognito).
    - WhyCause 6y ago
      I find that the images in galleries are hidden in old, until you click the Play or Plus button (or whatever the subreddit css defines for that) that's under the title on the comments page, just to the right of the up/down vote buttons and the score. Single images seem to show up just fine for me. I'm chalking it up to my preferences; I have "Show Thumbnails" disabled, and I suspect that's it, but I haven't experimented to verify.
      - fossuser 6y ago
        Interesting - I also disable custom themes, maybe that's why I don't see that button?
stjohnswarts 6y ago
Management? Probably never. We are probably 0.5% or less of the reddit audience. Even on reddit commenters are only like 5% of the people visiting make comments so they don't mean much to reddit management. They will only know if there is a geurilla movement in social media to criticize some part of reddit and then reddit and twitter blow up. That's when management notices.
reaperducer 6y ago
many people are utterly disgusted by their tactics to try and force you onto their mobile app, they're upset at how slow the (default) site is, etc. The problem is that not enough people are so disgusted that they stop using Reddit. As long as the managers can navigate that line between annoying people and turning people away, they will continue to make money. I was never a Reddit person, and the few times I've gone there through HN links convinced me not to make visiting a habit.
RandoHolmes 6y ago
I use old reddit redirect. If old.reddit ever went away I would stop going to reddit completely, similar to what happened with the digg bar. I don't use reddit on mobile specifically because I don't download apps on my phone (outside of a few small games such as bejeweled), and I think surfing the internet on the phone is miserable regardless. The only thing I ever crack my browser open for is to look something up while at the grocery store, etc.
make3 6y ago
I'm sure that what they care about is having viewers without adblock, which is what the app provides

edoceo 6y ago

Where are they going?

ragnese 6y ago
The people who want more non-meme content? I'm not sure. I'm not saying they've all moved on yet, but I bet they will. For example, I preferred some of the more tech-related subreddits. Then I discovered HackerNews and Lobste.rs. That can't be the only demographic of content that has forums out there. And I imagine more will pop up. Again, it's just my prediction/guess. I've certainly been wrong before. Perhaps I have it totally backwards. Maybe those people will stay because they're more tolerant of Reddit's bullshit to get to the good content. I don't think that's a smart bet for Reddit to make, though. EDIT: Also, a lot of people are apparently moving to Discord chats.
- edoceo 6y ago
  My anecdata: I'm a long time reddit user, hate their new UI/UX, avoid their App and now visit less. I'm also still looking for what's next. Im thinking to go back to finding good RSS. Where is a good feed finder?
  - stevesycombacct 6y ago
    The closest service I've found to old-school RSS is Feedly[0], which allows me to subscribe to various news or social media pipelines and group them as I like. [0]https://feedly.com https://feedly.com
  - benrapscallion 6y ago
    Are you looking for a list of feeds to subscribe to?
  - calvano915 6y ago
    I moved from Feedly to Newsblur when Feedly started charging.
- julianlam 6y ago
  Discord is great when you want real time conversation, but it exists parallel to a subreddit, not as a replacement. To look forwards, you must look backwards, at new forum software such as NodeBB or Flarum. Specialist niche communities are already shifting in that direction, or have never left their old BBSes behind, but are due to welcome a resurgence of new members.
  - FalconSensei 6y ago
    I still don't like it even for real time conversations. As they don't have threads, or any way to reply to a specific message, sometimes it's confusing to have 3 different conversations going on in the same channel
- phillip_cypher 6y ago
  I've moved on, and come here. I always loved reddit for the news articles and conversation. I feel that both of those things have spread out to the margins. Some subs still have the quality text-based content that I like, but most have been snuffed out by power-hungry mods, or transformed by an influx of users who don't understand the older reddit culture. When a friend referred me to hackernews, I found that it has the type of content and users that I miss from reddit. I also visit Tildes on occasion, but the user base is so small that the content is much more limited than it is here.
- aapppwe 6y ago
  is discord easy to search for? like what are some good technical discord for programmers?

bstar77 6y ago

I think most people that use reddit are using it for specific sub-reddits, not for memes or 'shitposting'. Apollo app makes reddit a really nice experience for me on iOS, but I'm not sure what Android has on that front. Problem is that 3rd party apps that provide a front-end to Reddit need to be in active development. Once the dev steps back for a couple months, everything is going to go to shit.

rkangel 6y ago
Android has "Sync for Reddit" (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.laurencedawson.reddit_sync https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.laurenceda...) which is an excellent app. One of the best designed and engineered Android apps that I use.
- nirav72 6y ago
  Seconded - love sync's offline capabilities. Especially on long flights. I commented above that android seems to have better options than IOS when it comes to third-party reddit apps. (I use devices from both platforms).
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  Yeah I used to use a couple other ones (reddit is fun?) and sync is far above them.
viraptor 6y ago
> I'm not sure what Android has on that front. "Reddit is fun" has a very decent interface.
ragnese 6y ago
> I think most people that use reddit are using it for specific sub-reddits, not for memes or 'shitposting'. Perhaps. But the shear size of r/pic or r/jokes makes me doubt that most people are there for "serious business". Yes, I understand that you can subscribe to many subreddits and that you can sub to r/jokes AND r/serious-topic-with-serious-people. I'm just skeptical. Reddit is trying to be for the masses. Most of the time people spend on their phone is to look at cat pictures. I'm not passing judgement necessarily. It's just what everyone I know does. They read news, check Facebook, and then pull up TikTok/Snapchat/Instagram and look at funny pictures. I still visit particular subreddits. I never visit the front page- not even "my" front page. I go to exactly whichever subreddit I want to read from at the moment. Maybe lots of people are using that way, but it's not what I see in my bubble. Again, I could be totally wrong.

hoorayimhelping 6y ago

My time at Etsy (2012-2015) taught me that people will rationalize anything to avoid dealing with the fact that they made a fundamentally bad decision. A big reason Etsy has lost a lot of trust with consumers is their inconsistently applied policies and their allowance of cheap knock off crap. When I was there a few years ago, there were all sorts of forum posts, reddit posts and tweets about the problem all the time. The leadership (and more importantly) the people in the company, absolutely refused to believe it was a problem. We came up with any excuse and rationalization we could for not addressing it. The most common one was, "they (the people complaining) don't have access to our data, they don't know what we know, therefore their points are irrelevant." Another was, "they're just mad, let them vent, it's no big deal." Pure denial, the simplest reaction to bad news. By continuously shoving their heads in the sand and not addressing the perception (whether it was real or not) the company allowed the perception to become reality. I'd be pretty surprised if reddit leadership doesn't do the same thing when they see messages on HN talking about how shit reddit is. They'll rationalize how we're a bunch of pedantic, angry nerds who don't represent the average user. They'll ignore the growing negative trends in favor of looking at the positive ones. They'll do anything they can to not change the strategy they've committed to. It smacks of a company that doesn't plan, doesn't think about the consequences of their decisions, and goes with the first idea that pops into their head.

Guest19023892 6y ago
> It smacks of a company that doesn't plan, doesn't think about the consequences of their decisions, and goes with the first idea that pops into their head. I imagine the new design is a huge success in terms of revenue. Users now endlessly scroll through countless promotions and advertisements that seamlessly blend with the content and most likely have much higher engagement rates. They can kill all the serious subreddits and focus on meme, porn, drama, influencer content and still be far more financially successful than the old Reddit. They'll have no shortage of users. We might hate it and leave the site, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's sustainable in the long term for them and the right financial move.

MattGaiser 6y ago

They may be disgusted, but have they stopped buying? People rage at airlines all the time. Any given us legroom back? No, as people still boarded the plane.

t0mas88 6y ago
The airline example is even crazier. Even on a platform like Google Flights that shows you the legroom for each flight right next to the price, people still in large majorities select the lowest cost ticket with usually the least legroom. And then go on and complain about the legroom. It's like buying a car with a 150 hp engine and then complain it's slower than the more expensive 250 hp model.
- rurp 6y ago
  > Google Flights that shows you the legroom for each flight right next to the price I've never seen this before on a flight booking site. How widespread and discoverable is this feature across the major booking sites, outside of Google Flights?
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    SkyScanner, my goto, has it.

nightski 6y ago

Meh, I know it's popular to hate but I don't mind the app and I don't mind the website redesign either, it works great for me. I'm not saying it does for everyone else but it's largely possible that people aren't as annoyed as you think.

ragnese 6y ago
Possibly. But have you seen the "this subreddit is only available on the app" page you get when you visit certain subreddits while on a mobile browser? Simply changing the url to old.reddit.com "reveals" that it's certainly not "only available on the app". Or the periodic nagging to "continue with the app" when browsing the mobile site? I've not met anyone who thinks that's okay. And I will never use their app because of that. I'm actually quite upset that their campaign appears to be "working", as seen by the OP.
- mjayhn 6y ago
  I get so frustrated using reddit on mobile browsers because the reddit app popups or dark patterns that stop me from reading a complete post or the comments in the post are so antagonistic. I don't know how much time I've wasted trying to get "Read more" to take me to the right spot just to find out I'd read the entire thing or there was one asinine comment in the entire thread it was hiding from me. The new reddit ux is so bad but I don't use the site enough anymore to dedicate myself to a full app, and those have all of their own frustrations. It'd be nice if the default browser experience was the native and "clean" one, not the worst one.
- nightski 6y ago
  I'm sorry I haven't seen that because I just use the app. It's really not a big deal. I'm pretty careful with picking my battles and I get quite a bit of value from reddit.
- themeiguoren 6y ago
  I deleted the app because it was too much of a skinners box for me, but it worked well. The mobile site on iOS works well, and I literally never get popup prompts or blockers guiding me towards the app. Perhaps those people aren’t logged in? On desktop I use the redesign happily - the biggest complaint I’ve heard from power users is that it’s not as information dense, but that’s super easily fixed by changing the default layout from ‘card’ to ‘classic’ or ‘compact’. I suspect those people skipped the popup walkthrough that explained this when the transition happened, because I’ve run across many bitter people who used the old site a lot and didn’t know you could change the new one away from the massive cards. IMO that’s pretty ironic. Reddit’s current UIs get a lot of hate, but I’ve been using the site at least weekly for the last 11 years and I really don’t get the complaints. The old site was ugly (albeit familiar), and the new skin doesn’t subtract from the functionality in any way besides a few obscure subreddits with wild styling. If that has helped bring people to my niche interest subs, that’s a huge win in my book.

screye 6y ago

I have come to the conclusion that reddit is 2 apps/websites. The first is a tiktok-esque waste of time, instant gratification meme machine. Everyone on this app uses the reddit native app and doesn't care about dark patterns. They would never know that reddit's app is shit, because they literally don't care enough. The 2nd is a Hackernews-esque collection of hobbyist sub-forums. These people are invested in their hobbies and sub-reddits. They use reddit to interact and discuss, but also a source of niche-news for their hobby. Every one here has a 3rd party reddit app or uses RES. (if you don't, please do). Unlike twitter, reddit lets 3rd parties offer feature complete wrappers for reddit. This group has ad-block, but will occasionally give someone gold. This group hates reddit, but also has no where to go. If a person tries to make reddit both, then it is an annoying experience. I use reddit entirely as the latter. The front-page and r/all are garbage to me. Every super popular (barring sports) subreddit is trash. But, my niche subreddits are literally the best places on the internet to gain niche information. Examples where the subreddit is the best source of open discussion on the internet for that niche: dota2, manga, soccer, metal, prog, civilized discourse, history, male fashion (kinda), calisthenics, small cities, fantasy fiction, niche YT channels, super authentic cooking....and that's just for me. PSA : Use a 3rd party reddit app (SYNC is my preferred. Pay up the 2$ dollars. It is worth it). Use RES, and enforce filters strongly. Use RedditProTools to detect trolls, bias and top contributors. Use Imagus (hoverzoom has malware) for pop-image/video viewer. These will greatly enhance your reddit experience.

maest 6y ago
> Examples where the subreddit is the best source of open discussion on the internet for that niche: dota2, manga, soccer, metal, prog, civilized discourse, history, male fashion (kinda), calisthenics, small cities, fantasy fiction, niche YT channels, super authentic cooking....and that's just for me. With the risk of sounding elitist, for some of those topics the main subreddit is overran with pointless and repetitive memes. You'd have to go to the r/true* subreddit to get the serious, in depth discussions.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  There are so many examples where a niche subreddit got filled with drama, and then a significant chunk split off and created another subreddit that now fights with the original occasionally. Gaming subreddits appear to be particularly bad at this.

minusSeven 6y ago

Once you get big you change your priorities. There is no reason the same can't happen to hacker news either. If they start allowing low quality shitpost. Right now I assume with the amount of traffic here, it doesn't cost lot of money to maintain this site. But the same for Reddit is different. Reddit on its barely makes any profit and had made losses for a number of years. Right now they are too big to pull Digg and not suffer any major consequences.

linuxftw 6y ago

> was never going to be more than a fad IMO That's what I said about SNAP. It seems platform stickiness is stronger than some of us might have judged. Especially considering today's tech illiterate youth. They have no idea what the implications of installing an 'app' are.

ragnese 6y ago
Good point. I also thought the same thing about SnapChat. I may be wrong about all three!

jokoon 6y ago

There are still interesting communities and multi reddit are cool. But you're right, reddit is being poisoned. Maybe they will remove the front page and /r/all one day. They should. All of this might be caused by elections. I wish somebody would write a repertoire of subreddit by tags or categories. I still love to read comments on science and other constructive debates. Curated posts should also be more visible, not like digg did though. Subreddit of the day is nice too. The shit posts are annoying, but it's part of how reddit want to attract as many types of users as possible, like tumblr. If you don't explore reddit your using it wrong. I should search for a repertoire though.

troughway 6y ago

You mean jedberg and others? Yeah, they're around.

saagarjha 6y ago
But as an ex-employee, I don't think they have much control over what Reddit is doing these days?

Pilottwave 6y ago

Adding to this reddit is centralizing themselves. Classically they were a link aggregator, a place pointing to other content. Now if you upload something there reddit is the place its pointing to. A video on reddit is hard to download, and a link to a video is always opened with a full reddit view with comments and everything. I dont like the way they are going and have sought alternatives 2 years ago. Thats where i found hackernews and tildes.net which are pretty good. However not a good alternative to the niche subreddits we all love.

techer 6y ago
Would like an invite to tildes if you can spare...
stjohnswarts 6y ago
I kind of agree. The day they ditch oldreddit.com and break RES I'm probably gone from the site.

RealStickman_ 6y ago

Basically the only interactions I have with reddit nowadays is my Pythonbot that grabs wallpapers from a few subreddits.

Taylor_OD 6y ago

Why would they care if a small number of people hate that they aggressively push you to their mobile app when can achieve 50 million downloads? Follow the money. It will answer a lot of questions for you.

anonzzz 6y ago

> There are more efficient ways to get low-effort shitposts and memes than Reddit. What reddit replacements exist out there that have the niche communities that Reddit supports?

fossuser 6y ago

I’ve started noticing old Reddit is also just broken now for a lot of posts. If there’s a post with an image hosted on Reddit itself, old Reddit often doesn’t show it. I have to open in incognito to see it.

heavyset_go 6y ago
Do you have a link to a submission with this issue? I only use the old interface and don't think I've run into what you've experienced.
- fossuser 6y ago
  I can try and find one - I last noticed it on r/sffpc. It could be NextDNS blocking someone Reddit url I need to whitelist (though I’m skeptical since it works in incognito).
  - WhyCause 6y ago
    I find that the images in galleries are hidden in old, until you click the Play or Plus button (or whatever the subreddit css defines for that) that's under the title on the comments page, just to the right of the up/down vote buttons and the score. Single images seem to show up just fine for me. I'm chalking it up to my preferences; I have "Show Thumbnails" disabled, and I suspect that's it, but I haven't experimented to verify.
    - fossuser 6y ago
      Interesting - I also disable custom themes, maybe that's why I don't see that button?

stjohnswarts 6y ago

Management? Probably never. We are probably 0.5% or less of the reddit audience. Even on reddit commenters are only like 5% of the people visiting make comments so they don't mean much to reddit management. They will only know if there is a geurilla movement in social media to criticize some part of reddit and then reddit and twitter blow up. That's when management notices.

reaperducer 6y ago

many people are utterly disgusted by their tactics to try and force you onto their mobile app, they're upset at how slow the (default) site is, etc. The problem is that not enough people are so disgusted that they stop using Reddit. As long as the managers can navigate that line between annoying people and turning people away, they will continue to make money. I was never a Reddit person, and the few times I've gone there through HN links convinced me not to make visiting a habit.

RandoHolmes 6y ago

I use old reddit redirect. If old.reddit ever went away I would stop going to reddit completely, similar to what happened with the digg bar. I don't use reddit on mobile specifically because I don't download apps on my phone (outside of a few small games such as bejeweled), and I think surfing the internet on the phone is miserable regardless. The only thing I ever crack my browser open for is to look something up while at the grocery store, etc.

make3 6y ago

I'm sure that what they care about is having viewers without adblock, which is what the app provides