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Reddit Claims 52M Daily Users, Revealing a Key Figure for Social-Media Platforms

203 points by prostoalex 6y ago

londons_explore 6y ago
That's smaller than I expected...
- hue3 6y ago
  Once you are inside the bubble it’s hard to notice how small it is. At least it was for me when I used it.
abhiminator 6y ago
On a side note, really hope reddit's engineering team doesn't kill off their 'old.reddit.com' domain though. That's probably the only thing keeping me from dumping reddit altogether (aside from their API-powered custom reddit apps made by indie devs for Android).
- GEBBL 6y ago
  I use i.Reddit.com, much better
  - abhiminator 6y ago
    I agree that it's better than the new mobile web, but its design still feels super clunky and dated. I remember a certain version of mobile web in 2017/2018 that worked GREAT. But then reddit decided to mess it all up by forcing mobile web users to use their (bloated and ad-filled) app and making it hard to access certain communities and read more than 2 layers of child comments. I guess that's what relentless pursuit of advertising money/monetization targets over actually listening to the community (that made the product what it is now in the first place) does to a company.
    - tootie 6y ago
      As someone who has had a luxurious career based on adding full-bleed photography to the websites of companies with more money than sense, all I can say the look of i.reddit.com is just beautifully minimal. UX is about more than intuitive controls, it's about speed and comfort and I can use that site with so quickly and smoothly. The color palette doesn't even register in my head anymore. It's also a somewhat forgotten rule that designing for occasional is very different than for habitual use. Habitual users don't need training wheels, they need shortcuts.
- EarthIsHome 6y ago
  I use Slide for Reddit [0]. Some things don't work in the app like Reddit videos, but I get around that by opening those links in a separate browser. Other than that, I've enjoyed how I've set it up [1]; it's got the link's domain name displayed before clicking the link, and if you're signed in, you can save and vote on posts with one click. What have you used and enjoyed? [0]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=me.ccrama.redditslide&hl=en&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=me.ccrama.redd... [1]: https://imgur.com/a/9XhE3By https://imgur.com/a/9XhE3By
  - samtimalsina 6y ago
    I use BaconReader Premium [0] and it does almost everything I want out of Reddit, including Reddit videos. [0]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.onelouder.baconreader.premium&hl=en_US&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.onelouder....
- Loughla 6y ago
  Redditisfun is the only thing that has kept me on there (and I'm still pissed somebody stole my username). I haven't accessed the desktop site in years, because it defaults to the new reddit. It smacks of when /. changed their layout; there was a huge to-do and users lost their mind. I haven't been back there in, what, 9 years? I guess, the moral of this story is, what is the reddit replacement? Because so far I have found nothing that compares.
  - Trasmatta 6y ago
    > I haven't accessed the desktop site in years, because it defaults to the new reddit If you're logged in you can set it to always default to the old design. I do that, and disable all custom stylesheets, which is basically a necessity to make the site useable again.
  - georgiecasey 6y ago
    I love RIF as well. It's so simple and straightforward but with all the features of the website. It seems be well down the list of Android app in popularity though, I don't know why.
    - officeplant 6y ago
      People like overly fancy modern looking apps. RIF and other open source reddit apps like Diode (available on F-Droid) basically provide the same minimal and working experience old.reddit provides.
  - vorpalhex 6y ago
    > what is the reddit replacement? I keep looking and monitoring promising replacements but haven't found one yet. I do think the ultimate way forward is going to be some kind of federated system where each "subreddit" is hosted individually and there are aggregators which glue them together, either as a hosted portal or as individual apps. One of the things that has been killing me is that small interesting subreddits keep getting either killed for not being actively moderated enough or invaded by people who have their own goals. It's very frustrating and it really hurts the longterm knowledge that gets generated in these subreddits. If anyone is working in this space, please drop me a line.
- Trasmatta 6y ago
  Yeah, the new Reddit design is such a step back in terms of both performance and user experience. It was probably optimized in some way to increase engagement, but it's just really bad. On mobile I use Relay, which is really good.
  - obilgic 6y ago
    Probably unpopular opinion on HN: but I really prefer the new design. finally something that doesn't scream "we have a sub-culture" but rather welcomes new users.
    - kmnc 6y ago
      Yeah kill off the only good part of reddit and turn it into a TikTok clone. Of course I have no doubt most reddit leadership has this as goal #1.
    - Trasmatta 6y ago
      What is it about the old design that screams "we have a sub-culture" to you? For me, it's just a clean, simple, fast interface.
      - obilgic 6y ago
        sticking to a very old design, and refusing to update and adapt to current design patterns and styles while everything about technology/devices and how we use them changes daily: feels like a sub-culture
        Trasmatta 6y ago
        Well they tried to use "current design patterns and styles" for the redesign, and it led to a bloated, slow, bad user experience. That's either an indictment of modern web patterns or just a bad implementation of them. I think it's a bit of both.
        6y ago
- THE_PUN_STOPS 6y ago
  I've been an everyday compulsive reddit user for 12 years. The day they kill old.reddit.com is the day I stop using reddit forever.
  - Trasmatta 6y ago
    Same, and I feel like it's inevitable at some point. Either some day someone will do the math and determine they can get a lot more ad revenue if they force everyone to use the new design, or they'll decide the cost of maintaining two versions of the site's frontend is too high.
    - newsbinator 6y ago
      Is there much to maintain on old.reddit.com? It lacks all the features that make new Reddit annoying and slow, and it doesn't need to gain any new ones. It's basically a graphical version of the core api, which is solid.
      - Trasmatta 6y ago
        The cost is probably relatively low (but not negligible). I could imagine a future though where they decide to make some big breaking changes to the API, and decide it's not worth updating the old site.
  - popup21 6y ago
    I highly doubt that.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - Linkd 6y ago
      Exact same thing happened with digg.com
  - TheOperator 6y ago
    I started browsing the site on mobile without the extension on the new site because it makes Reddit's attempts to manipulate me more obvious and more annoying.
- isatty 6y ago
  I know that Reddit admins read HN so please please do not kill off old.reddit.com. The redesign is absolute garbage. Normally I don’t express such strong sentiment on HN but I’ve been a Reddit user for 10 years and I genuinely like the communities, but not enough to suffer through the new website.
  - dawnerd 6y ago
    Not even just the redesign. It's the constant forcing you to download the app, the broken amp layout (which is really just being used to trick google into showing them first). The site is just extremely hostile now if you don't use the app or sign in.
    - tmpz22 6y ago
      Yesterday I tried to visit https://reddit.com/r/gaming https://reddit.com/r/gaming and received an infinite loading indicator through multiple refreshes until I gave up. It felt like loadshedding where they were encountering an issue and decided to drop my traffic, which is not a good UX.
    - marrone12 6y ago
      The amp stuff is beyond annoying. I click on "view more comments" from an amp page and it redirects me to a non amp page and then i have to click on view more comments again.
  - jedberg 6y ago
    I'm not sure how many of the current admins read HN. I just know some of us old guys hang around here. And FWIW I agree with you. I've been a 15 year reddit user (and employee!) but if old.reddit goes away, I suspect my usage will go way down. The good news is that the current execs know this, because I have told them. But at the end of the day they have to do what's best for the business, and I'm afraid those of us who like the old interface aren't large in number. Edit to add: I don't think they'll kill off the old.reddit interface. I think they'll just stop updating and more and more things won't work there, like i.reddit.com.
- forgotmypw17 6y ago
  As others have said, it being called old.reddit means it will get killed. And it's already happening, new features either don't work at all or are broken, existing features are rotting apart, it's definitely not a priority. The future is in communities operating their own site and running it the way they want. Politics aside, thedonald.win is a great example. The interface is way better and less buggy, and the community is cohesive. If you look at reddit facebook twitter instagram, their design paradigm is not to facilitate discussion, but to break it apart into a bunch of ad-separated pieces and then stash it away, never to be findable again. Almost like what people say about qwerty layout.
- nitrohorse 6y ago
  Worth keeping an eye on Teddit development [1] [2], an alternative, open-source/self-hostable/JS-free interface similar to Invidious/YouTube, Bibliogram/Instagram, and Nitter/Twitter. Login functionality isn’t supported yet but apparently on the roadmap. [1] https://codeberg.org/teddit/teddit https://codeberg.org/teddit/teddit [2] https://teddit.net https://teddit.net
  - konjin 6y ago
    That is amazing. I've just replaced the bookmarks I had after 15 seconds. The UI is better on mobile than all reddit incarnations.
- jbj 6y ago
  if they do they probably open up the market to competitors for that subsegment of users
- skocznymroczny 6y ago
  I've been trying to use the redesign several times, and still haven't figured out how to perform a search in the current subreddit. In old reddit there's just a checkbox for that.
  - runaway 6y ago
    It's absurd but you have to first perform a search while in r/yoursubreddit and then on the results page click "Show results from r/yoursubreddit"
  - jcims 6y ago
    You run the search, and at the top of the search results there is a link that says 'limit to /r/subreddit'. Great UX xD
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- mkskm 6y ago
  Wasn’t a bad redesign how Digg ultimately lost to Reddit?
  - Macha 6y ago
    Digg also touched the ranking algorithm and external submission rules at the same time, which ended up prioritising "partner" content over user content. This was much more controversial than the UI aspect of Digg's redesign.
- tomcam 6y ago
  Absolutely. I greatly enjoy Reddit but am unable to use the new interface.
- gaius_baltar 6y ago
  I suppose they will slow-boil old.reddit.com until it's dead. Things like gradually adding unwanted changes from the redesign, removing or not supporting features (is there a way to upload images to i.redd.it from it?), or causing random delays or errors. Something like the dark patterns used to force visitors using mobile devices into installing the app. We need a distributed or federated reddit, and give it power. Lemmy ( https://lemmy.ml/ https://lemmy.ml/ ) seems to be going into the right path.
  - qqn 6y ago
    I was wondering why no one mentioned this. I've bookmarked it to play with more but it seems to address lots of the issues here, at least at first blush.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  The problem is that the medium is the message, and while you might be using old.reddit.com, most of the other people posting are using the new site. That has lowered the quality of discourse. I first noticed this when people on hobby reddits started asking FAQs that had already been answered in the sidebar – the new design now hid the sidebar from users. So, subreddits where newbies typically got answers before they had to post basic questions, have devolved into people asking the same basic questions over and over again.
  - benhurmarcel 6y ago
    The admins can put messages and links in the new sidebar though.
    - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
      There is no visible sidebar on the modern mobile interface, though.
      - benhurmarcel 6y ago
        Ah yes, not on mobile. Reddit on mobile is only bearable using a third-party app.
  - slfnflctd 6y ago
    I've also noticed more threads with a bunch of top level comments saying exactly the same thing-- eventually, it occurred to me that it's because users in the new interface can't easily see all the existing comments or search them to see if what they're about to post is already there. It was a jarring realization.
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  If old.reddit.com goes, so will I. I've already stopped using Reddit altogether on mobile devices because of being tricked into loading the redesign, and because of the nagging. It's really no skin off my back to stop using a site that's slow and has a bad user experience.
- airstrike 6y ago
  Agreed. Also just wanted to note I have a smirk on my face every day as I open firefox and go "news.", enter, ctrl+t, "old." enter
- SMAAART 6y ago
  If they kill old.reddit.com there will be a mass migration to HN. DIGG-->reddit-->HN
  - scubadude 6y ago
    Subreddits are the thing though and there's no way the next mass migration is back to a single page.
- Springcleaning 6y ago
  I even use a browser extension to make sure that 100% of the time old.reddit.com is being shown, even when linked from another site or when I have deleted my cookies.
  - foresto 6y ago
    Would that be Old Reddit Redirect? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-redirect/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re... https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirect/dneaehbmnbhcippjikoajpoabadpodje https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...
obilgic 6y ago
Reddit is following the steps of Facebook: copying other's features. They have a live streaming platform, they added something similar to discord for chats. what's next?
- matzab 6y ago
  Probably Stories because that's what anything even remotely "social" has to do right now, apparently.
  - ppezaris 6y ago
    plus vscode, apparently.
    - thekyle 6y ago
      VS Code has stories?
- fernandotakai 6y ago
  honestly, i don't know anyone that really uses reddit's chat feature. most communities have their own discord server by now.
  - Someone1234 6y ago
    They just discontinued subreddit chat rooms too, which was a massive embarrassing back-tracking on a highly controversial feature. https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/jwme40/deprecating_community_chat_rooms/ https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/jwme40/deprecating... Reddit's whole philosophy with chat was just to shove it down everyone's throats, and see if it sticks. The spammers loved it right from the get-go, but nobody else is using it.
    - fernandotakai 6y ago
      thank god. i got spammed so hard by it for a while -- and the worst part is that there was no way to avoid said spam.
Raidion 6y ago
That number seems to indicate why they've started to use all the dark patterns for people to create an account. You can no longer see comments other than at the top level. Some subreddits require registration to view. All these things are artifacts of the new design that do not exist on old.reddit.com. I'm thankful HN is not designing for 'engagement' or MAUs at the UI level.
- waheoo 6y ago
  If they ever remove old Reddit they're done. So many communities use it exclusively and will just walk if forced into the new shite.
  - zerkten 6y ago
    Are there any communities where the new site is preferred? I wonder if offering different experiences for what is the same site is actually working out better in practice than we'd expect. That contradicts what we seem to know about site design and would be considered uneconomical, but might it help Reddit keep a broader set of communities? I'm not sure how we'd know this externally, but perhaps someone here has some insights.
    - Guest19023892 6y ago
      Someone mentioned in a previous post that it works well for /r/watches and I agree with them. It seems to be beneficial for image based subreddits where you're interested in seeing the majority of the images and only occasionally dive into the comments. Great for mindlessly scrolling images, but less so for content that you pick and choose what to view, text based content, and commenting. I think it'll come back to hurt them in the long run.
  - canofbars 6y ago
    Every day that goes by, new users join the site and have never seen the old UI. Eventually the scales will tip so the vast majority of users use the new UI and the old one will be cut off.
  - 6y ago
notananthem 6y ago
Of that 52M how many are bots, and how many are their toxic subs?
- krebsho 6y ago
  r/Eugene is filled with undercover cops from the local police propaganda dept and local communists, between the two the subreddit is toxic af.
- fortran77 6y ago
  The great thing about toxic subs is you don't have to subscribe to them! I don't see anything "toxic" on reddit. Just people having fun discussing the latest episode of "Below Deck" or sharing cat pictures, etc.
  - offtop5 6y ago
    If you ever view all the toxic stuff flows to the top. I found myself getting really angry needlessly and had to delete my account. I'll browse subs like Unity though.
- Scoundreller 6y ago
  Iunno, they’ve been on a censorship binge though. Dunno what it will accomplish as those users just go elsewhere, and then those communities will bolt on the regular subs as well. The cycle of social media I guess.
  - rnd0 6y ago
    <quote>Dunno what it will accomplish as those users just go elsewhere,</quote> That's irrelevant. If they go somewhere else, then they're not Reddit's problem. Consider that most "purges" happen to coincide with bad PR and you'll understand that's what their motive is.
- DethNinja 6y ago
  Bots are a huge problem for advertisement industry and social media in general. One good solution to this problem is as following: * In order to post content, accounts must be purchased based on a spot fee. For example, if suddenly 10 fold more people want to open accounts then spot price will rise to 60 dollars from a base price of 6 dollars. * This can be done through BTC payments instead of dollars to protect identity of account owners a bit. * Users should be able to hand-select moderators and if wanted, review their actions transparently. This will eliminate all unfair moderation and provide huge value to users. An user still can get banned by a moderator but only people who subscribe to that moderator will assume user is banned. * As accounts are bought to post content, there won’t be any advertisement. There might be some subscription fee though. * All this can be done in a decentralised framework to increase resilience.
cgearhart 6y ago
It’s been one less since their app started spamming my phone with notifications a few months ago. I suspect those kinds of engagement hooks are part of the reason they have been pushing the app so hard, but I got so tired of it that I uninstalled it from my phone. Fortunately they’ve also made the mobile/web experience so horrible that I’m not even tempted to wade back in. I had been a daily user for more than 10 years until that point.
- NortySpock 6y ago
  If i.reddit.com (which actually has a usable mobile web interface) ever gets pulled down, my mobile usage will go away with it. The modern mobile web experience of reddit.com is garbage.
- free2OSS 6y ago
  What kind of phone doesn't let you turn off notifications by app?
  - EvilPaticus 6y ago
    I mean, that's not really the point though. It would be nice to be able to use the notifications that make sense without the spam. Way to many apps do this these days.
  - cgearhart 6y ago
    None, but the app had notifications enabled because they were previously using them reasonably (eg when someone replied to a comment). Then they started using them for all kinds of other things like “did you see the new post in /r/funny?”, and while I _could_ just turn off the notifications this was the last of many signals that their objectives and motivations no longer align with a positive user experience for me. The overall quality of my experience on Reddit was slowly degrading for the past few years. I didn’t enjoy the culture of the subs I visited any more, or the apparent culture of the site overall—and Reddit itself seemed to be funneling me towards those people and places because that kind of mild controversy drives engagement. But it felt like it had become an unjustifiable waste of time because I wasn’t even being enriched or entertained anymore. They started pushing harder to share my location, watch live broadcasts, use their chat, started abusing app notifications, and the ads became surprisingly intrusive. Eventually I just decided to leave. I don’t really begrudge them any of the changes if it helps them build a successful, sustainable business that their users enjoy—I’m just not interested in the new experiences and functionality they have prioritized.
BitwiseFool 6y ago
Good for Reddit, but I'm becoming increasingly disillusioned with the entire site and how it's managed. The astroturfing isn't even subtle and the same few dozens of accounts dominate the front page day in and day out. The content on the frontpage, r/popular, r/all is starting to congeal into screenshots of tweets. The mods of the biggest subreddits don't seem to care if the content that gets posted actually lives up to the title and purpose of the subreddit. At this point I'm convinced Reddit's platform is being used as a propaganda tool, with the goal of bombarding users with the same views in every major subreddit.
- pradn 6y ago
  The biggest subreddits have always been awful. The best way to use reddit is to subscribe to niche subreddits, unsubscribe to the big ones, and avoid the temptation to see the /popular or /all pages.
  - Semaphor 6y ago
    what temptation is there even? all and popular are the shittiest parts of reddit
    - pradn 6y ago
      Some good memes :)
    - d3nj4l 6y ago
      r/all/rising is a good way to discover new communities.
  - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    That doesn't really solve it though. You have to continuously try and find the new subs for your niche because they all go to crap.
    - boringg 6y ago
      This is the internet of 2020s. It’s a lot of work to find good quality content. Everyone knows how to take advantage of everyone or every platform. Any new hot platform will be coopted once it gets traction. Recently made the conclusion so many other people realized is that google search is just searching through paid ads or paid seo. It just sucks frankly. DDG better but still painful.
nowledge 6y ago
conde nast is way too close to epstein for my comfort.
xvector 6y ago
I wonder how many HN has
- lmedinas 6y ago
  shhhshh don't tell anyone... let's keep it this way :)
peanut_worm 6y ago
Why is Reddit’s UI still getting worse? I have to click a link like 4 times on mobile for it to register, and I get errors for about 20% of links. Sometimes links take me the comments and not the content for some reason, particularly with images and videos.
- ciarannolan 6y ago
  They make the mobile site shitty to use on purpose, so that you download their app and let them harvest even more information about you.
- C19is20 6y ago
  So.....why are you still using Reddit? Genuine question.
  - cghendrix 6y ago
    It’s probably....out of habit?
- colinmhayes 6y ago
  They really really wan you to use he app. SO they've made he mobile site garbage.
- Springcleaning 6y ago
  Did you know you can use old.reddit.com in desktop mode? You can also use the Apollo App instead.
  - c0nducktr 6y ago
    The Apollo app has gotten so good that I'm starting to worry they'll purchase it and neuter it or shut it down, just like they did the Alien Blue app a few years ago.
- 0xy 6y ago
  The errors are fake and so are the "loading" screens. Reddit is one big cancerous dark pattern.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
doc_gunthrop 6y ago
reddit may have been a good site a decade or so ago, but in its current state it's mostly a propaganda machine to manipulate clueless rubes. One look at the front page makes this glaringly obvious. The only remotely productive way to use reddit is by being selective with what subs you check out. Avoid the larger subreddits at all cost.
- Raidion 6y ago
  Yea, I'm a decade+ Reddit user, and it's honestly wild hitting the site in an incongito window because the default subs are so different than the smaller subreddits.
- tenpies 6y ago
  The only useful thing to me is to append "Reddit" to some Google searches for certain niches. occasionally it brings up a post describing exactly what I'm looking for. It's always an old post though unless I'm searching for the latest in the US Democratic party's talking points, then I can just go to Reddit.
  - forgotmypw17 6y ago
    I used to do that, but lately it seems to ignore my "don,t use new layout" setting, which makes the pages largely useless to me...
    - O_H_E 6y ago
      Welp, this extention is a must have for me. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25307961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25307961 And Relay on Android.
- notyourwork 6y ago
  > One look at the front page makes this glaringly obvious. What does this mean?
  - seventytwo 6y ago
lebaux 6y ago
HN should prey Reddit keeps their marbles together, because you all know the place big chunk of their ursebase would fled to. I know I did.
- BitwiseFool 6y ago
  I'm very thankful the user culture and the moderation policy here is geared towards productive discussion on focused topics. It's not a one size fits all social media site, its meant for tech and startup discussion. Plus, people don't seem to reward stupid puns, pithy comments, twitter style "hot takes", begging for upvotes, etc.. I would hope this keeps HN somewhat inoculated from becoming another Reddit.
  - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    You're giving HN too much credit. Reddit may be scraping the bottom of the barrel intellectually but humans pretty much all have decent skills at fitting in. Reddit users are perfectly capable of coming here and not cracking puns if that's what it takes to make the virtue points counter in the top right get bigger. There's obscene amounts of in-group signaling here too. It just takes different forms. Forms other users can adapt to if they have motivation.
    - bitcharmer 6y ago
      Show me a better platform then
    - _underfl0w_ 6y ago
      e.g. the whole "Paul Graham" thing. Wonderful guy, but I've inadvertently stumbled onto what appeared to be the HN equivalent of dog-whistling when it comes to him and Lisp. It was unexpected at first.
- birdsbirdsbirds 6y ago
  When it comes to non-startup content, then hn is not the best choice. lobste.rs and lemmy.ml are more user friendly, and then there are plenty of other options, as can be seen in the subreddit for reddit alternatives.
tpmx 6y ago
A year ago they reported monthly active users at 430M, a +30% YoY increase. Extrapolating that over one more year with the same growth rate would mean they now have 560M MAUs. This would result in a DAU/MAU ratio of 9%, which is pretty low, and especially so for a social media company. https://andrewchen.co/dau-mau-is-an-important-metric-but-heres-where-it-fails/ https://andrewchen.co/dau-mau-is-an-important-metric-but-her...
- wongarsu 6y ago
  Reddit likely has a much higher fraction of throwaway or secondary accounts. RES has an account switcher for a reason
  - tpmx 6y ago
    Still, 9% for Reddit vs ">50%" for Facebook is a pretty dramatic difference, even taking throwaway/secondary accounts into consideration. There must be a quite large fraction of their MAUs who are just random visitors (to meme posts etc) who don't return.
- zjaffee 6y ago
  I virtually never go on reddit these days, but when I do it's often because I want to see peoples thoughts on a particular topic. i.e. skiing in x place, buying x product, what's the general consensus on x movie, ect. I imagine a lot of people are like that, especially since quora went nowhere. Also DAU is everything to a social media company as it relates to revenue, so it's clear reddit isn't in an especially good spot. Their market cap would have to be no more than 1/5th of say Snapchat or twitter.
  - freeflight 6y ago
    > what's the general consensus on x movie If found Reddit kinda unusable for something like that, at least compared to the old school IMDB forums. The first results looking for any media are usually the official subs attached to the IP, and there you will rarely find anybody being critical of anything, it's often just a giant fandom circle-yerk. Bigger things will sometimes have their own threads on r/movies, with more diverse takes, but that feels more like an exception than a rule.
cblconfederate 6y ago
If you like being the center of attention at parties, FB is your place If you like attention in the middle of a public square, twitter is for you If you're an introvert, gotta nerd out on reddit I don't see them as competitors
- holler 6y ago
  If you'd like to try a new option, check out https://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im
throwawaysea 6y ago
I used to love using Reddit after Digg's disastrous redesign many years ago, but it really has devolved in a number of key ways: 1. Site design. I can't help but think that the site redesign lends itself towards dark patterns, echo chambers, and the kind of "hot take" reactionary culture that makes most of social media so unhealthy. As a user, I am mad that Reddit uses so many annoying nudges to get me to use their mobile app instead of the browser. I am wary of "old.reddit.com" being killed. I am frustrated by the site being slower. 2. Censorship. Reddit used to be a bastion of free speech. The late Aaron Swartz was a staunch defender of it. I think users should be allowed to discuss whatever they want and view Reddit's role as a "dumb" forum hosting layer. If people don't like some content for any reason, they are free to block those posters, or leave those particular subs, but they shouldn't impose their censorship on others. Unfortunately, today Reddit heavily censors content across the board, particularly when it goes against San Francisco-centric progressive political culture. And ultimately, they even omitted Aaron Swartz from their "founders" page (https://reclaimthenet.org/aaron-swartz-reddit-founder/ https://reclaimthenet.org/aaron-swartz-reddit-founder/), which is disgusting but also sad. After all, pg noted that as a result of the early Reddit-Infogami merger, Aaron is legally a founder of the combined company (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20219). 3. Weaponization. It is very hard to escape Reddit's prevailing leftist political culture. Even if you leave r/news and r/politics, you will find politics injected into every other subreddit, including ones that have nothing to do with politics (like r/pics). This is in part because it has been targeted by activists as a way to get their word out and a location on which to squash opposing thought by any means necessary (banning subreddits, banning users, vote brigading, astroturfing, etc). Reddit users don't value civil discourse as much as vote wars to win for their side, which is a key way in which it is different from Hacker News. It's also telling that 92 of the top 500 subreddits are controlled by just 4 people (https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/fko21a/92_out_of_the_top_500_subreddits_on_reddit_are/ https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/fko21a/9...). ----- I really hope one of the many Reddit competitors (https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/hi97fz/list_of_active_reddit_alternatives_v5/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/hi97fz/...) grows into a platform of its own. I have my eye on Ruqqus (http://www.ruqqus.com/ http://www.ruqqus.com/) and Saidit (https://saidit.net/ https://saidit.net/). I'm also looking at Parler (https://parler.com https://parler.com) as a Twitter alternative and MeWe (https://mewe.com/ https://mewe.com/) as a Facebook alternative. Unfortunately with network effects being what they are, the big issue is that these alternatives may attract mostly those who are victims of censorship from Reddit, leading to two separate echo chambers - one for liberals and one for conservatives. It's better than one echo chamber with a "tyranny of the majority" but I'd rather we just get back to the old open Internet days where free speech reigns supreme.
dirtyid 6y ago
old.reddit is great, old.reddit admintools are still a shitshow and one of the largest reasons it's so hard to contain toxicity across the platform. Mods are trying to deal with 2020 user base in terms of scale and problems with 2010 tools, relying on third party tools because reddit devs are focused on user avatars.
neonate 6y ago
https://archive.is/ONgr7 https://archive.is/ONgr7
didip 6y ago
I have been a user since the beginning and I am probably in the minority here, but I really like the new reddit.com. The old reddit is simply too ugly for me. They just have to make the site loads much faster to improve the UX, and make sure ads load last.
symlinkk 6y ago
Reddit is garbage now. Every remotely interesting discussion gets locked by moderators. Every interesting subreddit gets deleted. So you’re left with content that is diluted to appeal to the lowest common denominator. It’s sad, it used to be a great place to read intelligent discussions from a variety of perspectives, a lot like HN is today but with a broader scope. But today that’s gone.
- TwoBit 6y ago
  > Every interesting subreddit gets deleted. Only if you find racism, misogyny, doxing, foreign infiltration, and hate interesting.
throwaway122378 6y ago
Only specific sub’s are worth visiting nowadays. The front page is curated and China’s influence takes away any true organic feel.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ParadiseEclipse 6y ago
modern reddit is a terrible experience.
- C19is20 6y ago
  #removemodern.
JesseMReeves 6y ago
How many of these are click farms used for taking over subs for marketing?
cblconfederate 6y ago
Reddit now feels like newsgroups after they were infested with spam. Little good content , hidden in corners under piles of spam. Instead of spam, they have politics though. It looks like a model on the verge of collapse.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Kaze404 6y ago
  Politics is fine. But in general Reddit has so little content actually worth anyone's time that it's crazy to me how people spend so much time on it. Not to mention YouTube channels that get millions of views where they just read AskReddit threads with the same jokes those people make literally every single thread.
  - dvt 6y ago
    > Politics is fine. Politics is fine if it's discussed like it is on HN†: level-headed arguments are debated, discussed, and, if a consensus isn't reached, we can agree to disagree. Reddit is polluted by absolute political drivel, except for a very small subset of subs. Low-effort "Trump is bad" posts that get massively upvoted just gets old after a while, especially when you see it every single day. † HN has been historically center-libertarian (which is a bit of self-selection by entrepreneurial folks), but recently started leaning much more left, no doubt due to an influx of non-startup-founding users.
    - Kaze404 6y ago
      I'm personally not a fan of that kind of content either, but I like that politics is mainstream enough now that it exists. Politics discussion (however shallow) shouldn't be exclusive to certain demographics in my opinion.
      - nomdep 6y ago
        Agreed. But should be contained in specific subreddits/forums, in my opinion. Yes, I'm one of those people that doesn't buy the "everything is politics!" mantra
acwan93 6y ago
I wonder if Reddit is hitting the same issue as Twitter did with regards to third-party apps. Like Twitter, Reddit has a robust API that allows for really full-featured apps to fetch/post content, which is great as a user, but horrible for monetization. I wouldn't be surprised if at some point third party Reddit clients end up getting neutered much like Twitter apps have become. Given that the mobile site is turning more inaccessible without registering for an account, it certainly seems that way.
- ihuman 6y ago
  > which is great as a user, but horrible for monetization That's Reddit's fault, though. They don't include ads when a user uses the API.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - marpstar 6y ago
    Even if they did, it'd be trivial for a developer to exclude the ads, and why wouldn't they? Obviously Reddit could try and enforce that via ToS, but even then they'd have to track offenders down and threaten them with revocation.
    - ryanmerket 6y ago
      ...or meter their API requests until they comply.
    - sumedh 6y ago
      Cant they use an API Key to track down offenders?
    - willcipriano 6y ago
      Don't be so sure, a lot of Reddit content looks like product placement to me.
  - mcintyre1994 6y ago
lucb1e 6y ago
Why publish this number now? Makes me think they're looking for buyers or to go public. Which would be the easiest way to make the owners, who have the only say about selling it, very rich indeed compared to trying to show nice ads to a critical audience.
- kp98 6y ago
  reddit is looking to IPO, make a good platform, turn it to crap, then dump it on investors and take the fed juiced profit
kp98 6y ago
I banned the reddit URL from my laptop so i cant go on it anymore. The extreme left wing bent is nuts, I had to go to 4chan unfortunately. Free speech used to be an ideal for the internet, now you can only get it on a few websites which is too bad. Also a lot of botting and astroturfing from foreign nations and those looking to curry support. On the business side, I can see reddit slowly becoming a new quora.
spoonjim 6y ago
Surprised that Reddit is only 1/40th of Facebook.
- cm2012 6y ago
  And ad revenue is 1/500th or so
- hadlock 6y ago
  I think of Reddit as a 21st century forum, whereas Facebook is a true 'Social Media' website. Forums have different usage patterns and allegiances compared to social media websites. They can be roughly compared, but it's a poor comparison, like trying to say if Excel (reddit) or Powerpoint (facebook) is better. Facebook has groups which sort of function as forums, but they're crudely spliced into your news feed, and rarely(!) sorted in chronological order. Forums on the other hand have dedicated threads about specific topics, are easily searchable and a two year old thread can still be relevant. Social media sites tend to be more immediate, and comments on old posts may only continue for several days on average. TL;DR Reddit and Facebook are very different products, with different usage patterns, and have different appeals to different segments of society. It does not surprise me in the least that an internet forum would have a lower daily usage count compared to a social media service.
- nexus2045 6y ago
  I've noticed my friends who are less comfortable with English don't bother with Reddit but they were all on Facebook at some point.
admiralspoo 6y ago
Reddit is an ad/astroturf and politics infested cesspool. I would say it needs to die, but it's already pretty dead in terms of its utility to most people I know.
- BaconJuice 6y ago
  While this is true as the default experience you can very very very easily only subscribe to content relevant to you. The article attached to this post it literally telling you there are 52M daily users visiting the platform yet you claim "I would say it needs to die, but it's already pretty dead in terms of its utility to most people I know." Perhaps try visiting the platform again and spend some time customizing the platform to your needs and gauge your opinion of it from there.
pcdoodle 6y ago
While I can not visit the site anymore without feeling like it's best to close it. I hope it fails.
intricatedetail 6y ago
Reddit used to be a place where you could meet interesting people and talk freely about anything. This days it is dominated by censorship and an army of trolls downvoting anything that doesn't align with Marxist doctrine. There are still a couple of subreddits that fortunately don't get involved in politics, but still there are people trying to plant some Marxist drivel which then distracts from otherwise interesting topics. To be clear I like to read view points of all sides including Marxists, but I don't like the suppression of other views. Those people will surely find a different platform, but that erodes diversity and breeds extremism. We should avoid having people creating their own echo chambers and encourage diverse communication instead of censorship and forcing the only correct world view.
raydev 6y ago
Most of those users must be on mobile apps. As someone who still visits on desktop, "new" reddit is painfully slow. I'm on a gigabit connection. My internet is fast. "New" reddit pages take up to 5 seconds to load content, and just flipping over to old.reddit.com will improve load times. It's not instant like a lot of other websites, but it's still a fraction of "new" reddit's 5 seconds. What are they using to measure performance? Do they not understand how much faster the old UI is?

203 points by prostoalex 6y ago

londons_explore 6y ago

That's smaller than I expected...

hue3 6y ago
Once you are inside the bubble it’s hard to notice how small it is. At least it was for me when I used it.

abhiminator 6y ago

On a side note, really hope reddit's engineering team doesn't kill off their 'old.reddit.com' domain though. That's probably the only thing keeping me from dumping reddit altogether (aside from their API-powered custom reddit apps made by indie devs for Android).

GEBBL 6y ago
I use i.Reddit.com, much better
- abhiminator 6y ago
  I agree that it's better than the new mobile web, but its design still feels super clunky and dated. I remember a certain version of mobile web in 2017/2018 that worked GREAT. But then reddit decided to mess it all up by forcing mobile web users to use their (bloated and ad-filled) app and making it hard to access certain communities and read more than 2 layers of child comments. I guess that's what relentless pursuit of advertising money/monetization targets over actually listening to the community (that made the product what it is now in the first place) does to a company.
  - tootie 6y ago
    As someone who has had a luxurious career based on adding full-bleed photography to the websites of companies with more money than sense, all I can say the look of i.reddit.com is just beautifully minimal. UX is about more than intuitive controls, it's about speed and comfort and I can use that site with so quickly and smoothly. The color palette doesn't even register in my head anymore. It's also a somewhat forgotten rule that designing for occasional is very different than for habitual use. Habitual users don't need training wheels, they need shortcuts.
EarthIsHome 6y ago
I use Slide for Reddit [0]. Some things don't work in the app like Reddit videos, but I get around that by opening those links in a separate browser. Other than that, I've enjoyed how I've set it up [1]; it's got the link's domain name displayed before clicking the link, and if you're signed in, you can save and vote on posts with one click. What have you used and enjoyed? [0]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=me.ccrama.redditslide&hl=en&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=me.ccrama.redd... [1]: https://imgur.com/a/9XhE3By https://imgur.com/a/9XhE3By
- samtimalsina 6y ago
  I use BaconReader Premium [0] and it does almost everything I want out of Reddit, including Reddit videos. [0]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.onelouder.baconreader.premium&hl=en_US&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.onelouder....
Loughla 6y ago
Redditisfun is the only thing that has kept me on there (and I'm still pissed somebody stole my username). I haven't accessed the desktop site in years, because it defaults to the new reddit. It smacks of when /. changed their layout; there was a huge to-do and users lost their mind. I haven't been back there in, what, 9 years? I guess, the moral of this story is, what is the reddit replacement? Because so far I have found nothing that compares.
- Trasmatta 6y ago
  > I haven't accessed the desktop site in years, because it defaults to the new reddit If you're logged in you can set it to always default to the old design. I do that, and disable all custom stylesheets, which is basically a necessity to make the site useable again.
- georgiecasey 6y ago
  I love RIF as well. It's so simple and straightforward but with all the features of the website. It seems be well down the list of Android app in popularity though, I don't know why.
  - officeplant 6y ago
    People like overly fancy modern looking apps. RIF and other open source reddit apps like Diode (available on F-Droid) basically provide the same minimal and working experience old.reddit provides.
- vorpalhex 6y ago
  > what is the reddit replacement? I keep looking and monitoring promising replacements but haven't found one yet. I do think the ultimate way forward is going to be some kind of federated system where each "subreddit" is hosted individually and there are aggregators which glue them together, either as a hosted portal or as individual apps. One of the things that has been killing me is that small interesting subreddits keep getting either killed for not being actively moderated enough or invaded by people who have their own goals. It's very frustrating and it really hurts the longterm knowledge that gets generated in these subreddits. If anyone is working in this space, please drop me a line.
Trasmatta 6y ago
Yeah, the new Reddit design is such a step back in terms of both performance and user experience. It was probably optimized in some way to increase engagement, but it's just really bad. On mobile I use Relay, which is really good.
- obilgic 6y ago
  Probably unpopular opinion on HN: but I really prefer the new design. finally something that doesn't scream "we have a sub-culture" but rather welcomes new users.
  - kmnc 6y ago
    Yeah kill off the only good part of reddit and turn it into a TikTok clone. Of course I have no doubt most reddit leadership has this as goal #1.
  - Trasmatta 6y ago
    What is it about the old design that screams "we have a sub-culture" to you? For me, it's just a clean, simple, fast interface.
    - obilgic 6y ago
      sticking to a very old design, and refusing to update and adapt to current design patterns and styles while everything about technology/devices and how we use them changes daily: feels like a sub-culture
      - Trasmatta 6y ago
        Well they tried to use "current design patterns and styles" for the redesign, and it led to a bloated, slow, bad user experience. That's either an indictment of modern web patterns or just a bad implementation of them. I think it's a bit of both.
        6y ago
THE_PUN_STOPS 6y ago
I've been an everyday compulsive reddit user for 12 years. The day they kill old.reddit.com is the day I stop using reddit forever.
- Trasmatta 6y ago
  Same, and I feel like it's inevitable at some point. Either some day someone will do the math and determine they can get a lot more ad revenue if they force everyone to use the new design, or they'll decide the cost of maintaining two versions of the site's frontend is too high.
  - newsbinator 6y ago
    Is there much to maintain on old.reddit.com? It lacks all the features that make new Reddit annoying and slow, and it doesn't need to gain any new ones. It's basically a graphical version of the core api, which is solid.
    - Trasmatta 6y ago
      The cost is probably relatively low (but not negligible). I could imagine a future though where they decide to make some big breaking changes to the API, and decide it's not worth updating the old site.
- popup21 6y ago
  I highly doubt that.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Linkd 6y ago
    Exact same thing happened with digg.com
- TheOperator 6y ago
  I started browsing the site on mobile without the extension on the new site because it makes Reddit's attempts to manipulate me more obvious and more annoying.
isatty 6y ago
I know that Reddit admins read HN so please please do not kill off old.reddit.com. The redesign is absolute garbage. Normally I don’t express such strong sentiment on HN but I’ve been a Reddit user for 10 years and I genuinely like the communities, but not enough to suffer through the new website.
- dawnerd 6y ago
  Not even just the redesign. It's the constant forcing you to download the app, the broken amp layout (which is really just being used to trick google into showing them first). The site is just extremely hostile now if you don't use the app or sign in.
  - tmpz22 6y ago
    Yesterday I tried to visit https://reddit.com/r/gaming https://reddit.com/r/gaming and received an infinite loading indicator through multiple refreshes until I gave up. It felt like loadshedding where they were encountering an issue and decided to drop my traffic, which is not a good UX.
  - marrone12 6y ago
    The amp stuff is beyond annoying. I click on "view more comments" from an amp page and it redirects me to a non amp page and then i have to click on view more comments again.
- jedberg 6y ago
  I'm not sure how many of the current admins read HN. I just know some of us old guys hang around here. And FWIW I agree with you. I've been a 15 year reddit user (and employee!) but if old.reddit goes away, I suspect my usage will go way down. The good news is that the current execs know this, because I have told them. But at the end of the day they have to do what's best for the business, and I'm afraid those of us who like the old interface aren't large in number. Edit to add: I don't think they'll kill off the old.reddit interface. I think they'll just stop updating and more and more things won't work there, like i.reddit.com.
forgotmypw17 6y ago
As others have said, it being called old.reddit means it will get killed. And it's already happening, new features either don't work at all or are broken, existing features are rotting apart, it's definitely not a priority. The future is in communities operating their own site and running it the way they want. Politics aside, thedonald.win is a great example. The interface is way better and less buggy, and the community is cohesive. If you look at reddit facebook twitter instagram, their design paradigm is not to facilitate discussion, but to break it apart into a bunch of ad-separated pieces and then stash it away, never to be findable again. Almost like what people say about qwerty layout.
nitrohorse 6y ago
Worth keeping an eye on Teddit development [1] [2], an alternative, open-source/self-hostable/JS-free interface similar to Invidious/YouTube, Bibliogram/Instagram, and Nitter/Twitter. Login functionality isn’t supported yet but apparently on the roadmap. [1] https://codeberg.org/teddit/teddit https://codeberg.org/teddit/teddit [2] https://teddit.net https://teddit.net
- konjin 6y ago
  That is amazing. I've just replaced the bookmarks I had after 15 seconds. The UI is better on mobile than all reddit incarnations.
jbj 6y ago
if they do they probably open up the market to competitors for that subsegment of users
skocznymroczny 6y ago
I've been trying to use the redesign several times, and still haven't figured out how to perform a search in the current subreddit. In old reddit there's just a checkbox for that.
- runaway 6y ago
  It's absurd but you have to first perform a search while in r/yoursubreddit and then on the results page click "Show results from r/yoursubreddit"
- jcims 6y ago
  You run the search, and at the top of the search results there is a link that says 'limit to /r/subreddit'. Great UX xD
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
mkskm 6y ago
Wasn’t a bad redesign how Digg ultimately lost to Reddit?
- Macha 6y ago
  Digg also touched the ranking algorithm and external submission rules at the same time, which ended up prioritising "partner" content over user content. This was much more controversial than the UI aspect of Digg's redesign.
tomcam 6y ago
Absolutely. I greatly enjoy Reddit but am unable to use the new interface.
gaius_baltar 6y ago
I suppose they will slow-boil old.reddit.com until it's dead. Things like gradually adding unwanted changes from the redesign, removing or not supporting features (is there a way to upload images to i.redd.it from it?), or causing random delays or errors. Something like the dark patterns used to force visitors using mobile devices into installing the app. We need a distributed or federated reddit, and give it power. Lemmy ( https://lemmy.ml/ https://lemmy.ml/ ) seems to be going into the right path.
- qqn 6y ago
  I was wondering why no one mentioned this. I've bookmarked it to play with more but it seems to address lots of the issues here, at least at first blush.
Mediterraneo10 6y ago
The problem is that the medium is the message, and while you might be using old.reddit.com, most of the other people posting are using the new site. That has lowered the quality of discourse. I first noticed this when people on hobby reddits started asking FAQs that had already been answered in the sidebar – the new design now hid the sidebar from users. So, subreddits where newbies typically got answers before they had to post basic questions, have devolved into people asking the same basic questions over and over again.
- benhurmarcel 6y ago
  The admins can put messages and links in the new sidebar though.
  - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
    There is no visible sidebar on the modern mobile interface, though.
    - benhurmarcel 6y ago
      Ah yes, not on mobile. Reddit on mobile is only bearable using a third-party app.
- slfnflctd 6y ago
  I've also noticed more threads with a bunch of top level comments saying exactly the same thing-- eventually, it occurred to me that it's because users in the new interface can't easily see all the existing comments or search them to see if what they're about to post is already there. It was a jarring realization.
heavyset_go 6y ago
If old.reddit.com goes, so will I. I've already stopped using Reddit altogether on mobile devices because of being tricked into loading the redesign, and because of the nagging. It's really no skin off my back to stop using a site that's slow and has a bad user experience.
airstrike 6y ago
Agreed. Also just wanted to note I have a smirk on my face every day as I open firefox and go "news.", enter, ctrl+t, "old." enter
SMAAART 6y ago
If they kill old.reddit.com there will be a mass migration to HN. DIGG-->reddit-->HN
- scubadude 6y ago
  Subreddits are the thing though and there's no way the next mass migration is back to a single page.
Springcleaning 6y ago
I even use a browser extension to make sure that 100% of the time old.reddit.com is being shown, even when linked from another site or when I have deleted my cookies.
- foresto 6y ago
  Would that be Old Reddit Redirect? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-redirect/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re... https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirect/dneaehbmnbhcippjikoajpoabadpodje https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...

obilgic 6y ago

Reddit is following the steps of Facebook: copying other's features. They have a live streaming platform, they added something similar to discord for chats. what's next?

matzab 6y ago
Probably Stories because that's what anything even remotely "social" has to do right now, apparently.
- ppezaris 6y ago
  plus vscode, apparently.
  - thekyle 6y ago
    VS Code has stories?
fernandotakai 6y ago
honestly, i don't know anyone that really uses reddit's chat feature. most communities have their own discord server by now.
- Someone1234 6y ago
  They just discontinued subreddit chat rooms too, which was a massive embarrassing back-tracking on a highly controversial feature. https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/jwme40/deprecating_community_chat_rooms/ https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/jwme40/deprecating... Reddit's whole philosophy with chat was just to shove it down everyone's throats, and see if it sticks. The spammers loved it right from the get-go, but nobody else is using it.
  - fernandotakai 6y ago
    thank god. i got spammed so hard by it for a while -- and the worst part is that there was no way to avoid said spam.

Raidion 6y ago

That number seems to indicate why they've started to use all the dark patterns for people to create an account. You can no longer see comments other than at the top level. Some subreddits require registration to view. All these things are artifacts of the new design that do not exist on old.reddit.com. I'm thankful HN is not designing for 'engagement' or MAUs at the UI level.

waheoo 6y ago
If they ever remove old Reddit they're done. So many communities use it exclusively and will just walk if forced into the new shite.
- zerkten 6y ago
  Are there any communities where the new site is preferred? I wonder if offering different experiences for what is the same site is actually working out better in practice than we'd expect. That contradicts what we seem to know about site design and would be considered uneconomical, but might it help Reddit keep a broader set of communities? I'm not sure how we'd know this externally, but perhaps someone here has some insights.
  - Guest19023892 6y ago
    Someone mentioned in a previous post that it works well for /r/watches and I agree with them. It seems to be beneficial for image based subreddits where you're interested in seeing the majority of the images and only occasionally dive into the comments. Great for mindlessly scrolling images, but less so for content that you pick and choose what to view, text based content, and commenting. I think it'll come back to hurt them in the long run.
- canofbars 6y ago
  Every day that goes by, new users join the site and have never seen the old UI. Eventually the scales will tip so the vast majority of users use the new UI and the old one will be cut off.
- 6y ago

notananthem 6y ago

Of that 52M how many are bots, and how many are their toxic subs?

krebsho 6y ago
r/Eugene is filled with undercover cops from the local police propaganda dept and local communists, between the two the subreddit is toxic af.
fortran77 6y ago
The great thing about toxic subs is you don't have to subscribe to them! I don't see anything "toxic" on reddit. Just people having fun discussing the latest episode of "Below Deck" or sharing cat pictures, etc.
- offtop5 6y ago
  If you ever view all the toxic stuff flows to the top. I found myself getting really angry needlessly and had to delete my account. I'll browse subs like Unity though.
Scoundreller 6y ago
Iunno, they’ve been on a censorship binge though. Dunno what it will accomplish as those users just go elsewhere, and then those communities will bolt on the regular subs as well. The cycle of social media I guess.
- rnd0 6y ago
  <quote>Dunno what it will accomplish as those users just go elsewhere,</quote> That's irrelevant. If they go somewhere else, then they're not Reddit's problem. Consider that most "purges" happen to coincide with bad PR and you'll understand that's what their motive is.
DethNinja 6y ago
Bots are a huge problem for advertisement industry and social media in general. One good solution to this problem is as following: * In order to post content, accounts must be purchased based on a spot fee. For example, if suddenly 10 fold more people want to open accounts then spot price will rise to 60 dollars from a base price of 6 dollars. * This can be done through BTC payments instead of dollars to protect identity of account owners a bit. * Users should be able to hand-select moderators and if wanted, review their actions transparently. This will eliminate all unfair moderation and provide huge value to users. An user still can get banned by a moderator but only people who subscribe to that moderator will assume user is banned. * As accounts are bought to post content, there won’t be any advertisement. There might be some subscription fee though. * All this can be done in a decentralised framework to increase resilience.

cgearhart 6y ago

It’s been one less since their app started spamming my phone with notifications a few months ago. I suspect those kinds of engagement hooks are part of the reason they have been pushing the app so hard, but I got so tired of it that I uninstalled it from my phone. Fortunately they’ve also made the mobile/web experience so horrible that I’m not even tempted to wade back in. I had been a daily user for more than 10 years until that point.

NortySpock 6y ago
If i.reddit.com (which actually has a usable mobile web interface) ever gets pulled down, my mobile usage will go away with it. The modern mobile web experience of reddit.com is garbage.
free2OSS 6y ago
What kind of phone doesn't let you turn off notifications by app?
- EvilPaticus 6y ago
  I mean, that's not really the point though. It would be nice to be able to use the notifications that make sense without the spam. Way to many apps do this these days.
- cgearhart 6y ago
  None, but the app had notifications enabled because they were previously using them reasonably (eg when someone replied to a comment). Then they started using them for all kinds of other things like “did you see the new post in /r/funny?”, and while I _could_ just turn off the notifications this was the last of many signals that their objectives and motivations no longer align with a positive user experience for me. The overall quality of my experience on Reddit was slowly degrading for the past few years. I didn’t enjoy the culture of the subs I visited any more, or the apparent culture of the site overall—and Reddit itself seemed to be funneling me towards those people and places because that kind of mild controversy drives engagement. But it felt like it had become an unjustifiable waste of time because I wasn’t even being enriched or entertained anymore. They started pushing harder to share my location, watch live broadcasts, use their chat, started abusing app notifications, and the ads became surprisingly intrusive. Eventually I just decided to leave. I don’t really begrudge them any of the changes if it helps them build a successful, sustainable business that their users enjoy—I’m just not interested in the new experiences and functionality they have prioritized.

BitwiseFool 6y ago

Good for Reddit, but I'm becoming increasingly disillusioned with the entire site and how it's managed. The astroturfing isn't even subtle and the same few dozens of accounts dominate the front page day in and day out. The content on the frontpage, r/popular, r/all is starting to congeal into screenshots of tweets. The mods of the biggest subreddits don't seem to care if the content that gets posted actually lives up to the title and purpose of the subreddit. At this point I'm convinced Reddit's platform is being used as a propaganda tool, with the goal of bombarding users with the same views in every major subreddit.

pradn 6y ago
The biggest subreddits have always been awful. The best way to use reddit is to subscribe to niche subreddits, unsubscribe to the big ones, and avoid the temptation to see the /popular or /all pages.
- Semaphor 6y ago
  what temptation is there even? all and popular are the shittiest parts of reddit
  - pradn 6y ago
    Some good memes :)
  - d3nj4l 6y ago
    r/all/rising is a good way to discover new communities.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  That doesn't really solve it though. You have to continuously try and find the new subs for your niche because they all go to crap.
  - boringg 6y ago
    This is the internet of 2020s. It’s a lot of work to find good quality content. Everyone knows how to take advantage of everyone or every platform. Any new hot platform will be coopted once it gets traction. Recently made the conclusion so many other people realized is that google search is just searching through paid ads or paid seo. It just sucks frankly. DDG better but still painful.

nowledge 6y ago

conde nast is way too close to epstein for my comfort.

xvector 6y ago

I wonder how many HN has

lmedinas 6y ago
shhhshh don't tell anyone... let's keep it this way :)

peanut_worm 6y ago

Why is Reddit’s UI still getting worse? I have to click a link like 4 times on mobile for it to register, and I get errors for about 20% of links. Sometimes links take me the comments and not the content for some reason, particularly with images and videos.

ciarannolan 6y ago
They make the mobile site shitty to use on purpose, so that you download their app and let them harvest even more information about you.
C19is20 6y ago
So.....why are you still using Reddit? Genuine question.
- cghendrix 6y ago
  It’s probably....out of habit?
colinmhayes 6y ago
They really really wan you to use he app. SO they've made he mobile site garbage.
Springcleaning 6y ago
Did you know you can use old.reddit.com in desktop mode? You can also use the Apollo App instead.
- c0nducktr 6y ago
  The Apollo app has gotten so good that I'm starting to worry they'll purchase it and neuter it or shut it down, just like they did the Alien Blue app a few years ago.
0xy 6y ago
The errors are fake and so are the "loading" screens. Reddit is one big cancerous dark pattern.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

doc_gunthrop 6y ago

reddit may have been a good site a decade or so ago, but in its current state it's mostly a propaganda machine to manipulate clueless rubes. One look at the front page makes this glaringly obvious. The only remotely productive way to use reddit is by being selective with what subs you check out. Avoid the larger subreddits at all cost.

Raidion 6y ago
Yea, I'm a decade+ Reddit user, and it's honestly wild hitting the site in an incongito window because the default subs are so different than the smaller subreddits.
tenpies 6y ago
The only useful thing to me is to append "Reddit" to some Google searches for certain niches. occasionally it brings up a post describing exactly what I'm looking for. It's always an old post though unless I'm searching for the latest in the US Democratic party's talking points, then I can just go to Reddit.
- forgotmypw17 6y ago
  I used to do that, but lately it seems to ignore my "don,t use new layout" setting, which makes the pages largely useless to me...
  - O_H_E 6y ago
    Welp, this extention is a must have for me. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25307961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25307961 And Relay on Android.
notyourwork 6y ago
> One look at the front page makes this glaringly obvious. What does this mean?
- seventytwo 6y ago

lebaux 6y ago

HN should prey Reddit keeps their marbles together, because you all know the place big chunk of their ursebase would fled to. I know I did.

BitwiseFool 6y ago
I'm very thankful the user culture and the moderation policy here is geared towards productive discussion on focused topics. It's not a one size fits all social media site, its meant for tech and startup discussion. Plus, people don't seem to reward stupid puns, pithy comments, twitter style "hot takes", begging for upvotes, etc.. I would hope this keeps HN somewhat inoculated from becoming another Reddit.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  You're giving HN too much credit. Reddit may be scraping the bottom of the barrel intellectually but humans pretty much all have decent skills at fitting in. Reddit users are perfectly capable of coming here and not cracking puns if that's what it takes to make the virtue points counter in the top right get bigger. There's obscene amounts of in-group signaling here too. It just takes different forms. Forms other users can adapt to if they have motivation.
  - bitcharmer 6y ago
    Show me a better platform then
  - _underfl0w_ 6y ago
    e.g. the whole "Paul Graham" thing. Wonderful guy, but I've inadvertently stumbled onto what appeared to be the HN equivalent of dog-whistling when it comes to him and Lisp. It was unexpected at first.
birdsbirdsbirds 6y ago
When it comes to non-startup content, then hn is not the best choice. lobste.rs and lemmy.ml are more user friendly, and then there are plenty of other options, as can be seen in the subreddit for reddit alternatives.

tpmx 6y ago

A year ago they reported monthly active users at 430M, a +30% YoY increase. Extrapolating that over one more year with the same growth rate would mean they now have 560M MAUs. This would result in a DAU/MAU ratio of 9%, which is pretty low, and especially so for a social media company. https://andrewchen.co/dau-mau-is-an-important-metric-but-heres-where-it-fails/ https://andrewchen.co/dau-mau-is-an-important-metric-but-her...

wongarsu 6y ago
Reddit likely has a much higher fraction of throwaway or secondary accounts. RES has an account switcher for a reason
- tpmx 6y ago
  Still, 9% for Reddit vs ">50%" for Facebook is a pretty dramatic difference, even taking throwaway/secondary accounts into consideration. There must be a quite large fraction of their MAUs who are just random visitors (to meme posts etc) who don't return.
zjaffee 6y ago
I virtually never go on reddit these days, but when I do it's often because I want to see peoples thoughts on a particular topic. i.e. skiing in x place, buying x product, what's the general consensus on x movie, ect. I imagine a lot of people are like that, especially since quora went nowhere. Also DAU is everything to a social media company as it relates to revenue, so it's clear reddit isn't in an especially good spot. Their market cap would have to be no more than 1/5th of say Snapchat or twitter.
- freeflight 6y ago
  > what's the general consensus on x movie If found Reddit kinda unusable for something like that, at least compared to the old school IMDB forums. The first results looking for any media are usually the official subs attached to the IP, and there you will rarely find anybody being critical of anything, it's often just a giant fandom circle-yerk. Bigger things will sometimes have their own threads on r/movies, with more diverse takes, but that feels more like an exception than a rule.

cblconfederate 6y ago

If you like being the center of attention at parties, FB is your place If you like attention in the middle of a public square, twitter is for you If you're an introvert, gotta nerd out on reddit I don't see them as competitors

holler 6y ago
If you'd like to try a new option, check out https://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im

throwawaysea 6y ago

I used to love using Reddit after Digg's disastrous redesign many years ago, but it really has devolved in a number of key ways: 1. Site design. I can't help but think that the site redesign lends itself towards dark patterns, echo chambers, and the kind of "hot take" reactionary culture that makes most of social media so unhealthy. As a user, I am mad that Reddit uses so many annoying nudges to get me to use their mobile app instead of the browser. I am wary of "old.reddit.com" being killed. I am frustrated by the site being slower. 2. Censorship. Reddit used to be a bastion of free speech. The late Aaron Swartz was a staunch defender of it. I think users should be allowed to discuss whatever they want and view Reddit's role as a "dumb" forum hosting layer. If people don't like some content for any reason, they are free to block those posters, or leave those particular subs, but they shouldn't impose their censorship on others. Unfortunately, today Reddit heavily censors content across the board, particularly when it goes against San Francisco-centric progressive political culture. And ultimately, they even omitted Aaron Swartz from their "founders" page (https://reclaimthenet.org/aaron-swartz-reddit-founder/ https://reclaimthenet.org/aaron-swartz-reddit-founder/), which is disgusting but also sad. After all, pg noted that as a result of the early Reddit-Infogami merger, Aaron is legally a founder of the combined company (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20219). 3. Weaponization. It is very hard to escape Reddit's prevailing leftist political culture. Even if you leave r/news and r/politics, you will find politics injected into every other subreddit, including ones that have nothing to do with politics (like r/pics). This is in part because it has been targeted by activists as a way to get their word out and a location on which to squash opposing thought by any means necessary (banning subreddits, banning users, vote brigading, astroturfing, etc). Reddit users don't value civil discourse as much as vote wars to win for their side, which is a key way in which it is different from Hacker News. It's also telling that 92 of the top 500 subreddits are controlled by just 4 people (https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/fko21a/92_out_of_the_top_500_subreddits_on_reddit_are/ https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/fko21a/9...). ----- I really hope one of the many Reddit competitors (https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/hi97fz/list_of_active_reddit_alternatives_v5/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/hi97fz/...) grows into a platform of its own. I have my eye on Ruqqus (http://www.ruqqus.com/ http://www.ruqqus.com/) and Saidit (https://saidit.net/ https://saidit.net/). I'm also looking at Parler (https://parler.com https://parler.com) as a Twitter alternative and MeWe (https://mewe.com/ https://mewe.com/) as a Facebook alternative. Unfortunately with network effects being what they are, the big issue is that these alternatives may attract mostly those who are victims of censorship from Reddit, leading to two separate echo chambers - one for liberals and one for conservatives. It's better than one echo chamber with a "tyranny of the majority" but I'd rather we just get back to the old open Internet days where free speech reigns supreme.

dirtyid 6y ago

old.reddit is great, old.reddit admintools are still a shitshow and one of the largest reasons it's so hard to contain toxicity across the platform. Mods are trying to deal with 2020 user base in terms of scale and problems with 2010 tools, relying on third party tools because reddit devs are focused on user avatars.

neonate 6y ago

https://archive.is/ONgr7 https://archive.is/ONgr7

didip 6y ago

I have been a user since the beginning and I am probably in the minority here, but I really like the new reddit.com. The old reddit is simply too ugly for me. They just have to make the site loads much faster to improve the UX, and make sure ads load last.

symlinkk 6y ago

Reddit is garbage now. Every remotely interesting discussion gets locked by moderators. Every interesting subreddit gets deleted. So you’re left with content that is diluted to appeal to the lowest common denominator. It’s sad, it used to be a great place to read intelligent discussions from a variety of perspectives, a lot like HN is today but with a broader scope. But today that’s gone.

TwoBit 6y ago
> Every interesting subreddit gets deleted. Only if you find racism, misogyny, doxing, foreign infiltration, and hate interesting.

throwaway122378 6y ago

Only specific sub’s are worth visiting nowadays. The front page is curated and China’s influence takes away any true organic feel.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ParadiseEclipse 6y ago

modern reddit is a terrible experience.

C19is20 6y ago
#removemodern.

JesseMReeves 6y ago

How many of these are click farms used for taking over subs for marketing?

cblconfederate 6y ago

Reddit now feels like newsgroups after they were infested with spam. Little good content , hidden in corners under piles of spam. Instead of spam, they have politics though. It looks like a model on the verge of collapse.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Kaze404 6y ago
Politics is fine. But in general Reddit has so little content actually worth anyone's time that it's crazy to me how people spend so much time on it. Not to mention YouTube channels that get millions of views where they just read AskReddit threads with the same jokes those people make literally every single thread.
- dvt 6y ago
  > Politics is fine. Politics is fine if it's discussed like it is on HN†: level-headed arguments are debated, discussed, and, if a consensus isn't reached, we can agree to disagree. Reddit is polluted by absolute political drivel, except for a very small subset of subs. Low-effort "Trump is bad" posts that get massively upvoted just gets old after a while, especially when you see it every single day. † HN has been historically center-libertarian (which is a bit of self-selection by entrepreneurial folks), but recently started leaning much more left, no doubt due to an influx of non-startup-founding users.
  - Kaze404 6y ago
    I'm personally not a fan of that kind of content either, but I like that politics is mainstream enough now that it exists. Politics discussion (however shallow) shouldn't be exclusive to certain demographics in my opinion.
    - nomdep 6y ago
      Agreed. But should be contained in specific subreddits/forums, in my opinion. Yes, I'm one of those people that doesn't buy the "everything is politics!" mantra

acwan93 6y ago

I wonder if Reddit is hitting the same issue as Twitter did with regards to third-party apps. Like Twitter, Reddit has a robust API that allows for really full-featured apps to fetch/post content, which is great as a user, but horrible for monetization. I wouldn't be surprised if at some point third party Reddit clients end up getting neutered much like Twitter apps have become. Given that the mobile site is turning more inaccessible without registering for an account, it certainly seems that way.

ihuman 6y ago
> which is great as a user, but horrible for monetization That's Reddit's fault, though. They don't include ads when a user uses the API.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- marpstar 6y ago
  Even if they did, it'd be trivial for a developer to exclude the ads, and why wouldn't they? Obviously Reddit could try and enforce that via ToS, but even then they'd have to track offenders down and threaten them with revocation.
  - ryanmerket 6y ago
    ...or meter their API requests until they comply.
  - sumedh 6y ago
    Cant they use an API Key to track down offenders?
  - willcipriano 6y ago
    Don't be so sure, a lot of Reddit content looks like product placement to me.
- mcintyre1994 6y ago

lucb1e 6y ago

Why publish this number now? Makes me think they're looking for buyers or to go public. Which would be the easiest way to make the owners, who have the only say about selling it, very rich indeed compared to trying to show nice ads to a critical audience.

kp98 6y ago
reddit is looking to IPO, make a good platform, turn it to crap, then dump it on investors and take the fed juiced profit

kp98 6y ago

I banned the reddit URL from my laptop so i cant go on it anymore. The extreme left wing bent is nuts, I had to go to 4chan unfortunately. Free speech used to be an ideal for the internet, now you can only get it on a few websites which is too bad. Also a lot of botting and astroturfing from foreign nations and those looking to curry support. On the business side, I can see reddit slowly becoming a new quora.

spoonjim 6y ago

Surprised that Reddit is only 1/40th of Facebook.

cm2012 6y ago
And ad revenue is 1/500th or so
hadlock 6y ago
I think of Reddit as a 21st century forum, whereas Facebook is a true 'Social Media' website. Forums have different usage patterns and allegiances compared to social media websites. They can be roughly compared, but it's a poor comparison, like trying to say if Excel (reddit) or Powerpoint (facebook) is better. Facebook has groups which sort of function as forums, but they're crudely spliced into your news feed, and rarely(!) sorted in chronological order. Forums on the other hand have dedicated threads about specific topics, are easily searchable and a two year old thread can still be relevant. Social media sites tend to be more immediate, and comments on old posts may only continue for several days on average. TL;DR Reddit and Facebook are very different products, with different usage patterns, and have different appeals to different segments of society. It does not surprise me in the least that an internet forum would have a lower daily usage count compared to a social media service.
nexus2045 6y ago
I've noticed my friends who are less comfortable with English don't bother with Reddit but they were all on Facebook at some point.

admiralspoo 6y ago

Reddit is an ad/astroturf and politics infested cesspool. I would say it needs to die, but it's already pretty dead in terms of its utility to most people I know.

BaconJuice 6y ago
While this is true as the default experience you can very very very easily only subscribe to content relevant to you. The article attached to this post it literally telling you there are 52M daily users visiting the platform yet you claim "I would say it needs to die, but it's already pretty dead in terms of its utility to most people I know." Perhaps try visiting the platform again and spend some time customizing the platform to your needs and gauge your opinion of it from there.

pcdoodle 6y ago

While I can not visit the site anymore without feeling like it's best to close it. I hope it fails.

intricatedetail 6y ago

Reddit used to be a place where you could meet interesting people and talk freely about anything. This days it is dominated by censorship and an army of trolls downvoting anything that doesn't align with Marxist doctrine. There are still a couple of subreddits that fortunately don't get involved in politics, but still there are people trying to plant some Marxist drivel which then distracts from otherwise interesting topics. To be clear I like to read view points of all sides including Marxists, but I don't like the suppression of other views. Those people will surely find a different platform, but that erodes diversity and breeds extremism. We should avoid having people creating their own echo chambers and encourage diverse communication instead of censorship and forcing the only correct world view.

raydev 6y ago

Most of those users must be on mobile apps. As someone who still visits on desktop, "new" reddit is painfully slow. I'm on a gigabit connection. My internet is fast. "New" reddit pages take up to 5 seconds to load content, and just flipping over to old.reddit.com will improve load times. It's not instant like a lot of other websites, but it's still a fraction of "new" reddit's 5 seconds. What are they using to measure performance? Do they not understand how much faster the old UI is?