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I was the EM for Reddit's Growth team around this time. I am responsible for / contributed to a few features like the current signup flow, AMP pages, push notif

by wting 5y ago

I was the EM for Reddit's Growth team around this time. I am responsible for / contributed to a few features like the current signup flow, AMP pages, push notifications, email digests, app download interstitials, etc. There was a new product lead who joined with many good ideas, but some of them were dark patterns that I heavily protested. After a few months of this, it was obvious that I was going to be reigned in or let go[0]; I immediately transferred to a different org. Now let me explain the other side of the story. 4 years later, Reddit's DAU, MAU, and revenue have all grown at ridiculous rates[1]. Yes, power users complain—and still continue using the site—but the casual user does not. These dark patterns have been normalized on other websites. These practices are done because it works. _____ 0: They changed it so I would report to the product lead, which is odd for an EM to report into a product chain and the only instance within the company ever. 1: Many friends are startup founders and I've been at a few startups myself—a byproduct of being in the Bay Area—and Reddit's growth numbers are impressive. As a former employee, I am quite happy about my equity growth.

Dreako 5y ago
makes sense. Also if anyone doesnt like the new mobile redesign they should probably try using "i.reddit.com" (which is a light mobile client)
- donmcronald 5y ago
  I simply quit using it on my phone. No big loss IMO.
zozbot234 5y ago
> These practices are done because it works. Which practices, though? A number of the practices you note (e.g. streamlined signup flow) are not user hostile at all, and others are a mixed bag. (E.g. one could argue that AMP + a properly featured mobile site and 'official' app were necessary steps with a subpar implementation). But when looking specifically at the dark patterns that power users are most likely to complain about, it's unclear that they would help DAU/MAU much, if at all. Casual users might not complain overtly all that much, but they're almost certainly discouraged by many such practices.
- irateswami 5y ago
  It's about pumping up engagement metrics, pure and simple, regardless of the quality of the user experience. Any and all social media is poison.
- wting 5y ago
  Features are only launched after running a successful experiment. We try to appeal to power users when possible. For example with the current signup flow has optional emails, though intentionally non-obvious. This means new users sign up with an email which means we can reduce churn through digests and also reset passwords / prevent account takeovers, a large burden for Reddit's anti spam teams.
  - jackson1442 5y ago
    Yep. People, even power users, are generally surprised when I say you don’t need an email after making a comment like “reddit went downhill when they started requiring an email address.”
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - gentleman11 5y ago
    Non obvious? It’s deliberately hidden. Its utterly dishonest. Thanks for mentioning it I’m just annoyed by user interfaces copying human choice and manipulating people. It goes way beyond “disrespectful” and should be illegal
    - ghosty141 5y ago
      Sorry but I have to side with reddit here. He said it's aimed at power users for whom it doesn't matter that it's hidden because they know how to use this feature. It's advantageous for Reddit to have accounts with emails, why shouldn't they incentivise users to supply them during the registration process? It's their website nonetheless.
grishka 5y ago
> These practices are done because it works. It works for metrics. It works for making more money than you know what to do with. It absolutely doesn't work for keeping your user base loyal. The moment you implement the dark patterns, the users immediately start looking for alternatives to your platform that respect them. That said, I still use reddit. Except I use the old design and RES. And a third-party app on my phone.
- c2h5oh 5y ago
  > That said, I still use reddit. Except I use the old design and RES. And a third-party app on my phone. Same. And should that no longer be an option I'm fairly confident I'd stop using reddit.
  - letitbeirie 5y ago
    I haven't been using old.reddit.com for years because I'm resistant to change. I've been using it because the new reddit design has sucked for as long as it's existed.
  - moistly 5y ago
    Likewise. I’ll probably end up writing an aggregation tool, a Bayesian filter, and a summary-bot, and just skip caring about what the chattering mobs say about the news of the day. Except for a very few tightly-moderated groups, most threads are nasty muck and rarely a pearl. I’ll be better off without reading them.
- denimnerd42 5y ago
  I just use tiktok now for "front page of the internet" some random sub reddits still otherwise. If I'm going to be subjected to tracking and ads I might as well go with the superior option. Half of the front page is tiktok videos anyway.
demux 5y ago
You say power users complain but the casual user does not (as a result of these features) - this sort of position ruins reddit's community as it suggests that reddit doesn't really care about the members who have contributed all kinds of content over the years and instead favors trying to get new members who are just marginally interested, or worse, just like endlessly scrolling through a timeline. This thread has mentions of several users that don't use reddit anymore (me included) and as reddit continues shoving monetization down the user's throat you'll see that those members will continue leaving until the platform is indistinguishable from the likes of Facebook, Digg, etc.
- Ozzie_osman 5y ago
  And apart from being a user, you (and others on this thread) could be a potential person Reddit could try to hire in the future... But with these patterns, I'm assuming they don't stand a chance.
- mioasndo 5y ago
  The purpose of reddit at this point is to keep as many naive and docile users as possible, and keep them clicking. Anything that could cause cognitive dissonance is bannable, while advertising and astroturfing are essentially encouraged. Any interesting comment or opinion that's actually worth reading will be hidden near the bottom or middle of any popular thread. If you try to engage in any potentially controversial conversation, you are at risk of getting banned, or having several comments in the convo deleted. The only thing left worth anything in on reddit are relatively small, niche subreddits.
- raunak 5y ago
  This happens with any social media. The great Digg exodus happened, and Reddit boomed. Reddit’s content and community grew healthily, then Reddit blew up exponentially, and now the content and community have grown sure, but very unhealthily. Actually, unhealthily for what Reddit used to be (long form content and discussion), healthily for what it’s becoming (social media a la infinite scroll, chat, and notifications galore). The point I’m trying to make is I don’t think this sort of effect is preventable - any community which encounters growth will see an influx of shitty content, unless you keep the community exclusive purposefully. Reddit just decided to roll with the punches so they could make some stacks on a nice IPO I imagine in the future.
ItsMonkk 5y ago
There's a sucker born every minute. When I was 10 I bought Pokemon cards, which looking back on, was a huge waste of money, but at least it wasn't all that much money in the end. I was a newbie to the scene, and I got taken advantage of. Lesson learned. 10 years later when phones were just coming into everyone's pockets, a whole new wave of gamers emerged. Game companies could either develop for the previous wave, by building games like Starcraft II, or they could build for the current wave, and build games like Candy Crush. Gamers who prefer games like Starcraft want to pay once for a game that lasts years and expect perfection. Candy Crush, like the Pokemon cards before it, expected nothing and were willing to spend a bunch of money for ultimately nothing. The business should clearly move to making Candy Crushes. The ROI is insane. But the more you bleed the users, the more they get fleeced, the more they start to learn, the more they regret. Yesterday's Pokemon cards buyers were todays Starcraft gamers, and today's Candy Crush players are tomorrows expert gamers. You want to build your platform to grow with them. Build a Candy Crush, then build it slightly more complex. In 10 years, they will be ready for Starcraft. You can continue to seek the bottom of the skill zone, but we had that one wave where adults of all ages were getting new phones and experiencing things that they had never done before. We had that one time where kids were able to ask their parents and their parents were not skilled and did not regret so they did not say no. Using a peak oil metaphor, we've reach peak sucker. We'll never have this opportunity again. So cutting back to Reddit - Reddit, like Digg and Slashdot and Usenet before it, released to the Starcraft level of the social commentors. They are hard to deal with, they expect everything for nothing, but the quality of their content brought along with it the slightly less expert commentators. Eventually that filtered down and the entire internet was on Reddit. The entire internet was incredible for their ROI. Digg was ruined because they abandoned the Starcraft commentors. When they left, everyone left with them. Reddit has been smart in this regard, as the old features and the old API still exists, the power users can use power user tools and keep the same experience. But understand, that if given the opportunity to move elsewhere, even somewhere that has less features like say... Hacker News, they will do so. They have done so. If Reddit keeps chasing the bottom of the market, when someone does show up with actual innovations like what Reddit had over Digg, you need to be afraid because just like Digg the site will be dead over-night. When you should be looking at bringing those casual users into moderate users, you keep trying the dark patterns. But each time you go back to the dark patterns they get weaker and weaker. That strong dark pattern that used to get you millions of dollars now only get you hundreds of thousands. Next week it will be tens of thousands. Your users are developing dark pattern tolerance. You don't yet have a valid competitor, this is exactly when you should be experimenting to disrupt yourself.
hitekker 5y ago
> They changed it so I would report to the product lead, which is odd for an EM to report into a product chain and the only instance within the company ever. This screams of power play. Good on you for moving your neck before the axe came down. The fact your engineering higher-ups didn’t push back or failed to push back is really scary.
Ozzie_osman 5y ago
I ran Product Engineering at a competing startup (hundreds of millions of MAUs) that tested/employed similar flows. And yes, they work in the short-term, and unless you are very principled, it's hard to avoid them. I'm glad you heavily protested them. But I'd like to further the argument for why they should be avoided. First, yes they do work in the short-term. You run an A/B test with some adversarial flow that blocks mobile web traffic users from doing certain things. Most of them get pissed, but enough of them download the mobile app (which allows you to build up their engagement via phone presence and notifications) that the A/B test is positive. Rinse and repeat. A few dozen experiments later, and now these patterns are pervasive across your product. Apart from whether they work (in the short-term), there are three other questions readers of this thread should think about because I'd hate for people to walk away thinking "these patterns are normalized and they work so, sigh, i should just do them too". One is whether they work in the long-term. Yes, you can juice your metrics in the short-term, and sometimes that translates to long-term growth, but it's harder to measure secondary effects. Can you accurately measure product brand damage and quantify the long-term impact? Second, and as an EM you should appreciate this, can you measure secondary brand damage like _recruiting brand_ damage? Dark patterns (and threads like this with hundreds of passionate engineers talking about how much they hate those dark patterns) _will_ damage your ability to hire the type of engineers you want to help you build your product. Finally, there's some subjective ethical question in here. Even if these patterns work in the short and long term, do you _want_ to spend your life, your intellectual energy, your time turning the internet into this? Do you want to go out and hire smart, passionate people and get _them_ to spend their time and intellectual energy turning the internet into this? (side note: I have no affiliation with the author of this post, but I wrote the original Disrespectful Design post he links to in his first paragraph)
- wting 5y ago
  One of the ways to measure long term impact is through the use of a golden cohort that is never opted into experiments. Unsurprisingly, I could not get this work prioritized on the roadmap. We also worked with growth consultants (read: Bay Area B2C product leads) in scoping out some of these ideas. We accrued what I call "product debt" where we launch the MVP but never followed up to polish the feature[0] as they don't improve KPIs. I assume this is the same with Growth teams everywhere but am happy to be corrected. Regarding long term impact, we measured this through various dimensions in marketing, recruiting, and user research. The outcomes are largely positive. ______ 0: One feature I argued for was an opt out of the mobile app interstitial. It makes sense to show it once or twice, but users aren't going to download the app just because they saw it 50x.
saiojd 5y ago
You've created value for shareholders, at the detriment of society. "Congrats".
- bostik 5y ago
  Douglas Rushkoff calls this "extracting wealth by destroying value". Apt.
tyre 5y ago
“I made it worse for users but it is making me rich” is peak Silicon Valley.
- ehsankia 5y ago
  "dark patterns work" surprised pikachu face Did they think people use dark patterns for the fun of it...?
  - sergiomattei 5y ago
    Yeah, it's a business, not a charity. People don't start businesses because it's cute and fun. Reddit needs to turn a profit or demonstrate ridiculous growth, and it seems to be working.
    - tyre 5y ago
      Straw man.
    - ehsankia 5y ago
      I was actually mocking the GP, who claims they worked at reddit and their justification for using dark patterns is that "they worked". Of course they do, that's the whole point, dark patterns trick users into increasing your metrics. Doesn't mean it's a good idea to use them. That's like saying not allowing users to unsubscribe really decreases the unsubscription rate. No shit.
donmcronald 5y ago
I always think that by building products that treat the consumer like an enemy to be conquered will eventually result in someone building a better product and stealing the market. It never happens though. I wonder if some of the tech like Cloudflare Workers will eventually allow someone to build competing products that crush the existing platforms. IMO it’s dangerous (business wise) to get addicted to revenue that comes from treating your users very badly. I think we’ll eventually see companies like Facebook and Reddit get conquered. At least I hope so.
- baby 5y ago
  How are cloudflare workers relevant? The tech of reddit has always been pretty simple to replicate. I think the code was open sourced at some point? I remember creating a reddit-clone for France a long time ago but bringing users in didn’t work. It was not a tech problem.
  - Seattle3503 5y ago
    This is an important point. It isn't the tech that makes reddit successful, it is the user base.
  - donmcronald 5y ago
    > How are cloudflare workers relevant? $5 / month gets me the same scaling capabilities as someone paying $50000 / month. I can build stuff with a low cost of operating since most stuff is never going to get massively popular, but if I get lucky and win the popularity lotto I can scale with a credit card instead of an architectural change. AWS, Azure, etc. are similar, but they get expensive really fast. The traditional cloud platforms have a "hump" in the pricing where you're too small to get discounts, but too big to afford it. So basically what I'm saying is that as compute / scaling improve to the point where you don't have to sell your soul to venture capitalists to pay for everything, we might see a lot more "fair value" minded entrepreneurs start to succeed.
- rognjen 5y ago
  > It never happens though. I think it frequently happens. Reddit built a better Digg for instance. It's just that once the new companies supplant the existing ones they seem to start doing the same things.
pkamb 5y ago
> I am responsible for ... AMP pages Why does Reddit use AMP pages and a mobile site that look exactly the same? For speed/SEO benefits? Disabling AMP would still look mostly the same for normal Reddit users but would make "old." users much happier.
- rognjen 5y ago
  > For speed/SEO benefits Almost definitely SEO.
srik 5y ago
> power users complain—and still continue using the site—but the casual user does not. This was the exact situation digg just before the mass migration to reddit happened.
- ehsankia 5y ago
  They've been fairly clever having their cake and eating it too with old/new reddit UI. They're basically cultivating a whole new userbase that only knows the new UI, while still keeping the old userbase around. I can imagine that once the new one because large enough to be self-sustainable, they'll kill the old interface and the mass exodus won't fully kill reddit since they still have the other half who won't care.
  - Sunspark 5y ago
    It's a dangerous game they're playing. They don't create original content, so if someone clones or creates a site with the old user-friendly interface then the switch might flip on them as abruptly as it did for digg.
    - edgyquant 5y ago
      I hope so, I’ve come to seriously hate Reddit. I never used Facebook or Twitter as a replacement for the forums of the 2000s internet so it didn’t bother me as much that they were gamified and had low quality content. Reddit pivoting to a social media site breaks my heart and the fact that people who work there come to HN and say, “we don’t care what you or power users think because we have record engagement,” just infuriates me. Reddit killed the old Internet forums but was a good replacement for them to an extent, and now they’ve destroyed and stopped trying to be that replacement leaving the internet with a serious lack of niche communities for discussion. I’ve tried putting together ideas for something that could fill that niche and not be susceptible to becoming overran with low quality meme content but I don’t really have the time to work on such a thing with the attention it deserves right now; and it isn’t a trivial problem to solve.
baby 5y ago
True. And reddit is now a much worse place than most people remember. I remember r/atheism being in the defaults and not a FP full of pictures and brainless memes :(
wting 5y ago
Edit: "reined in" and not "reigned in". I apologize for the Freudian slip as my edit window has passed.
brailsafe 5y ago
So some of his ideas were dark patterns that you protested, and others were dark patterns that you supported, and in retrospect are happy that you implemented, due to revenue growth? Did you receive any pushback from engineers, and if so, how did you handle that?
blondin 5y ago
"power users complain—and still continue using the site—but the casual user does not..." this summarizes the way i feel about every single application out there.
rognjen 5y ago
> it works. That's the thing. I don't doubt that it does. But certainly there are _other_ things that work as well that may or may not be as profitable but are certainly more ethical. And that's basically what bugs me. They don't seem to be in earnest trying to do anything else that might provide much more value. > power users complain—and still continue using the site—but the casual user does not. And that's what makes it worse. That's effectively exploiting the fact that most users are not well informed about privacy. At the risk of sounding too hyperbolic, a similar but more nefarious example is that power users didn't fill in Cambridge Analytica's quizzes, but casual users did.
okareaman 5y ago
For those trying follow along, from Andrew Chen's site: DAU/MAU is a popular metric for user engagement – it’s the ratio of your daily active users over your monthly active users, expressed as a percentage. Usually apps over 20% are said to be good, and 50%+ is world class. How did this metric come into use? DAU/MAU has been a popular metric because of Facebook, which popularized the metric. As a result, as they began to talk about it, other consumer apps came to often be judged by the same KPIs. I first encountered DAU/MAU as a ratio during the Facebook Platform days, when it was used to evaluate apps on their platform.
effingwewt 5y ago
True,but you know what else grows at ridiculous rates? Cancer. Growth, especially at all costs, leads to a cancerous organization that cannabilizes itself. But hey,the shareholders!
jcrza 5y ago
I'm /u/zjz on wallstreetbets. That google sign-in flow thing has caused us a good bit of hassle because people became convinced that usernames fitting the Word-Word-#### scheme are all bots. It doesn't help that the kind of person who lets a google sign-in type flow suggest a username for them is probably a lazy commenter. Perhaps an announcement in the future when a user-facing identifier is auto-generated would be wise.
shawnz 5y ago
I don't think it's accurate that "lay-users" prefer the new UI. Perhaps the metrics have improved, but in my experience I have heard nothing but frustration from my non-technical peers when it comes to the new dark patterns which Reddit has been implementing.
kexx 5y ago
"Yes, power users complain—and still continue using the site" I wonder what would happen after you removed old.reddit.com and api access for reddit apps. For icing on the cake, use creative class names to f*ck with RES and ad blockers. My guess, if you do all of this, reddit's gonna crash on the ground pretty quickly.

by wting 5y ago

Dreako 5y ago

makes sense. Also if anyone doesnt like the new mobile redesign they should probably try using "i.reddit.com" (which is a light mobile client)

donmcronald 5y ago
I simply quit using it on my phone. No big loss IMO.

zozbot234 5y ago

> These practices are done because it works. Which practices, though? A number of the practices you note (e.g. streamlined signup flow) are not user hostile at all, and others are a mixed bag. (E.g. one could argue that AMP + a properly featured mobile site and 'official' app were necessary steps with a subpar implementation). But when looking specifically at the dark patterns that power users are most likely to complain about, it's unclear that they would help DAU/MAU much, if at all. Casual users might not complain overtly all that much, but they're almost certainly discouraged by many such practices.

irateswami 5y ago
It's about pumping up engagement metrics, pure and simple, regardless of the quality of the user experience. Any and all social media is poison.
wting 5y ago
Features are only launched after running a successful experiment. We try to appeal to power users when possible. For example with the current signup flow has optional emails, though intentionally non-obvious. This means new users sign up with an email which means we can reduce churn through digests and also reset passwords / prevent account takeovers, a large burden for Reddit's anti spam teams.
- jackson1442 5y ago
  Yep. People, even power users, are generally surprised when I say you don’t need an email after making a comment like “reddit went downhill when they started requiring an email address.”
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- gentleman11 5y ago
  Non obvious? It’s deliberately hidden. Its utterly dishonest. Thanks for mentioning it I’m just annoyed by user interfaces copying human choice and manipulating people. It goes way beyond “disrespectful” and should be illegal
  - ghosty141 5y ago
    Sorry but I have to side with reddit here. He said it's aimed at power users for whom it doesn't matter that it's hidden because they know how to use this feature. It's advantageous for Reddit to have accounts with emails, why shouldn't they incentivise users to supply them during the registration process? It's their website nonetheless.

grishka 5y ago

> These practices are done because it works. It works for metrics. It works for making more money than you know what to do with. It absolutely doesn't work for keeping your user base loyal. The moment you implement the dark patterns, the users immediately start looking for alternatives to your platform that respect them. That said, I still use reddit. Except I use the old design and RES. And a third-party app on my phone.

c2h5oh 5y ago
> That said, I still use reddit. Except I use the old design and RES. And a third-party app on my phone. Same. And should that no longer be an option I'm fairly confident I'd stop using reddit.
- letitbeirie 5y ago
  I haven't been using old.reddit.com for years because I'm resistant to change. I've been using it because the new reddit design has sucked for as long as it's existed.
- moistly 5y ago
  Likewise. I’ll probably end up writing an aggregation tool, a Bayesian filter, and a summary-bot, and just skip caring about what the chattering mobs say about the news of the day. Except for a very few tightly-moderated groups, most threads are nasty muck and rarely a pearl. I’ll be better off without reading them.
denimnerd42 5y ago
I just use tiktok now for "front page of the internet" some random sub reddits still otherwise. If I'm going to be subjected to tracking and ads I might as well go with the superior option. Half of the front page is tiktok videos anyway.

demux 5y ago

You say power users complain but the casual user does not (as a result of these features) - this sort of position ruins reddit's community as it suggests that reddit doesn't really care about the members who have contributed all kinds of content over the years and instead favors trying to get new members who are just marginally interested, or worse, just like endlessly scrolling through a timeline. This thread has mentions of several users that don't use reddit anymore (me included) and as reddit continues shoving monetization down the user's throat you'll see that those members will continue leaving until the platform is indistinguishable from the likes of Facebook, Digg, etc.

Ozzie_osman 5y ago
And apart from being a user, you (and others on this thread) could be a potential person Reddit could try to hire in the future... But with these patterns, I'm assuming they don't stand a chance.
mioasndo 5y ago
The purpose of reddit at this point is to keep as many naive and docile users as possible, and keep them clicking. Anything that could cause cognitive dissonance is bannable, while advertising and astroturfing are essentially encouraged. Any interesting comment or opinion that's actually worth reading will be hidden near the bottom or middle of any popular thread. If you try to engage in any potentially controversial conversation, you are at risk of getting banned, or having several comments in the convo deleted. The only thing left worth anything in on reddit are relatively small, niche subreddits.
raunak 5y ago
This happens with any social media. The great Digg exodus happened, and Reddit boomed. Reddit’s content and community grew healthily, then Reddit blew up exponentially, and now the content and community have grown sure, but very unhealthily. Actually, unhealthily for what Reddit used to be (long form content and discussion), healthily for what it’s becoming (social media a la infinite scroll, chat, and notifications galore). The point I’m trying to make is I don’t think this sort of effect is preventable - any community which encounters growth will see an influx of shitty content, unless you keep the community exclusive purposefully. Reddit just decided to roll with the punches so they could make some stacks on a nice IPO I imagine in the future.

ItsMonkk 5y ago

There's a sucker born every minute. When I was 10 I bought Pokemon cards, which looking back on, was a huge waste of money, but at least it wasn't all that much money in the end. I was a newbie to the scene, and I got taken advantage of. Lesson learned. 10 years later when phones were just coming into everyone's pockets, a whole new wave of gamers emerged. Game companies could either develop for the previous wave, by building games like Starcraft II, or they could build for the current wave, and build games like Candy Crush. Gamers who prefer games like Starcraft want to pay once for a game that lasts years and expect perfection. Candy Crush, like the Pokemon cards before it, expected nothing and were willing to spend a bunch of money for ultimately nothing. The business should clearly move to making Candy Crushes. The ROI is insane. But the more you bleed the users, the more they get fleeced, the more they start to learn, the more they regret. Yesterday's Pokemon cards buyers were todays Starcraft gamers, and today's Candy Crush players are tomorrows expert gamers. You want to build your platform to grow with them. Build a Candy Crush, then build it slightly more complex. In 10 years, they will be ready for Starcraft. You can continue to seek the bottom of the skill zone, but we had that one wave where adults of all ages were getting new phones and experiencing things that they had never done before. We had that one time where kids were able to ask their parents and their parents were not skilled and did not regret so they did not say no. Using a peak oil metaphor, we've reach peak sucker. We'll never have this opportunity again. So cutting back to Reddit - Reddit, like Digg and Slashdot and Usenet before it, released to the Starcraft level of the social commentors. They are hard to deal with, they expect everything for nothing, but the quality of their content brought along with it the slightly less expert commentators. Eventually that filtered down and the entire internet was on Reddit. The entire internet was incredible for their ROI. Digg was ruined because they abandoned the Starcraft commentors. When they left, everyone left with them. Reddit has been smart in this regard, as the old features and the old API still exists, the power users can use power user tools and keep the same experience. But understand, that if given the opportunity to move elsewhere, even somewhere that has less features like say... Hacker News, they will do so. They have done so. If Reddit keeps chasing the bottom of the market, when someone does show up with actual innovations like what Reddit had over Digg, you need to be afraid because just like Digg the site will be dead over-night. When you should be looking at bringing those casual users into moderate users, you keep trying the dark patterns. But each time you go back to the dark patterns they get weaker and weaker. That strong dark pattern that used to get you millions of dollars now only get you hundreds of thousands. Next week it will be tens of thousands. Your users are developing dark pattern tolerance. You don't yet have a valid competitor, this is exactly when you should be experimenting to disrupt yourself.

hitekker 5y ago

> They changed it so I would report to the product lead, which is odd for an EM to report into a product chain and the only instance within the company ever. This screams of power play. Good on you for moving your neck before the axe came down. The fact your engineering higher-ups didn’t push back or failed to push back is really scary.

Ozzie_osman 5y ago

I ran Product Engineering at a competing startup (hundreds of millions of MAUs) that tested/employed similar flows. And yes, they work in the short-term, and unless you are very principled, it's hard to avoid them. I'm glad you heavily protested them. But I'd like to further the argument for why they should be avoided. First, yes they do work in the short-term. You run an A/B test with some adversarial flow that blocks mobile web traffic users from doing certain things. Most of them get pissed, but enough of them download the mobile app (which allows you to build up their engagement via phone presence and notifications) that the A/B test is positive. Rinse and repeat. A few dozen experiments later, and now these patterns are pervasive across your product. Apart from whether they work (in the short-term), there are three other questions readers of this thread should think about because I'd hate for people to walk away thinking "these patterns are normalized and they work so, sigh, i should just do them too". One is whether they work in the long-term. Yes, you can juice your metrics in the short-term, and sometimes that translates to long-term growth, but it's harder to measure secondary effects. Can you accurately measure product brand damage and quantify the long-term impact? Second, and as an EM you should appreciate this, can you measure secondary brand damage like _recruiting brand_ damage? Dark patterns (and threads like this with hundreds of passionate engineers talking about how much they hate those dark patterns) _will_ damage your ability to hire the type of engineers you want to help you build your product. Finally, there's some subjective ethical question in here. Even if these patterns work in the short and long term, do you _want_ to spend your life, your intellectual energy, your time turning the internet into this? Do you want to go out and hire smart, passionate people and get _them_ to spend their time and intellectual energy turning the internet into this? (side note: I have no affiliation with the author of this post, but I wrote the original Disrespectful Design post he links to in his first paragraph)

wting 5y ago
One of the ways to measure long term impact is through the use of a golden cohort that is never opted into experiments. Unsurprisingly, I could not get this work prioritized on the roadmap. We also worked with growth consultants (read: Bay Area B2C product leads) in scoping out some of these ideas. We accrued what I call "product debt" where we launch the MVP but never followed up to polish the feature[0] as they don't improve KPIs. I assume this is the same with Growth teams everywhere but am happy to be corrected. Regarding long term impact, we measured this through various dimensions in marketing, recruiting, and user research. The outcomes are largely positive. ______ 0: One feature I argued for was an opt out of the mobile app interstitial. It makes sense to show it once or twice, but users aren't going to download the app just because they saw it 50x.

saiojd 5y ago

You've created value for shareholders, at the detriment of society. "Congrats".

bostik 5y ago
Douglas Rushkoff calls this "extracting wealth by destroying value". Apt.

tyre 5y ago

“I made it worse for users but it is making me rich” is peak Silicon Valley.

ehsankia 5y ago
"dark patterns work" surprised pikachu face Did they think people use dark patterns for the fun of it...?
- sergiomattei 5y ago
  Yeah, it's a business, not a charity. People don't start businesses because it's cute and fun. Reddit needs to turn a profit or demonstrate ridiculous growth, and it seems to be working.
  - tyre 5y ago
    Straw man.
  - ehsankia 5y ago
    I was actually mocking the GP, who claims they worked at reddit and their justification for using dark patterns is that "they worked". Of course they do, that's the whole point, dark patterns trick users into increasing your metrics. Doesn't mean it's a good idea to use them. That's like saying not allowing users to unsubscribe really decreases the unsubscription rate. No shit.

donmcronald 5y ago

I always think that by building products that treat the consumer like an enemy to be conquered will eventually result in someone building a better product and stealing the market. It never happens though. I wonder if some of the tech like Cloudflare Workers will eventually allow someone to build competing products that crush the existing platforms. IMO it’s dangerous (business wise) to get addicted to revenue that comes from treating your users very badly. I think we’ll eventually see companies like Facebook and Reddit get conquered. At least I hope so.

baby 5y ago
How are cloudflare workers relevant? The tech of reddit has always been pretty simple to replicate. I think the code was open sourced at some point? I remember creating a reddit-clone for France a long time ago but bringing users in didn’t work. It was not a tech problem.
- Seattle3503 5y ago
  This is an important point. It isn't the tech that makes reddit successful, it is the user base.
- donmcronald 5y ago
  > How are cloudflare workers relevant? $5 / month gets me the same scaling capabilities as someone paying $50000 / month. I can build stuff with a low cost of operating since most stuff is never going to get massively popular, but if I get lucky and win the popularity lotto I can scale with a credit card instead of an architectural change. AWS, Azure, etc. are similar, but they get expensive really fast. The traditional cloud platforms have a "hump" in the pricing where you're too small to get discounts, but too big to afford it. So basically what I'm saying is that as compute / scaling improve to the point where you don't have to sell your soul to venture capitalists to pay for everything, we might see a lot more "fair value" minded entrepreneurs start to succeed.
rognjen 5y ago
> It never happens though. I think it frequently happens. Reddit built a better Digg for instance. It's just that once the new companies supplant the existing ones they seem to start doing the same things.

pkamb 5y ago

> I am responsible for ... AMP pages Why does Reddit use AMP pages and a mobile site that look exactly the same? For speed/SEO benefits? Disabling AMP would still look mostly the same for normal Reddit users but would make "old." users much happier.

rognjen 5y ago
> For speed/SEO benefits Almost definitely SEO.

srik 5y ago

> power users complain—and still continue using the site—but the casual user does not. This was the exact situation digg just before the mass migration to reddit happened.

ehsankia 5y ago
They've been fairly clever having their cake and eating it too with old/new reddit UI. They're basically cultivating a whole new userbase that only knows the new UI, while still keeping the old userbase around. I can imagine that once the new one because large enough to be self-sustainable, they'll kill the old interface and the mass exodus won't fully kill reddit since they still have the other half who won't care.
- Sunspark 5y ago
  It's a dangerous game they're playing. They don't create original content, so if someone clones or creates a site with the old user-friendly interface then the switch might flip on them as abruptly as it did for digg.
  - edgyquant 5y ago
    I hope so, I’ve come to seriously hate Reddit. I never used Facebook or Twitter as a replacement for the forums of the 2000s internet so it didn’t bother me as much that they were gamified and had low quality content. Reddit pivoting to a social media site breaks my heart and the fact that people who work there come to HN and say, “we don’t care what you or power users think because we have record engagement,” just infuriates me. Reddit killed the old Internet forums but was a good replacement for them to an extent, and now they’ve destroyed and stopped trying to be that replacement leaving the internet with a serious lack of niche communities for discussion. I’ve tried putting together ideas for something that could fill that niche and not be susceptible to becoming overran with low quality meme content but I don’t really have the time to work on such a thing with the attention it deserves right now; and it isn’t a trivial problem to solve.

baby 5y ago

True. And reddit is now a much worse place than most people remember. I remember r/atheism being in the defaults and not a FP full of pictures and brainless memes :(

wting 5y ago

Edit: "reined in" and not "reigned in". I apologize for the Freudian slip as my edit window has passed.

brailsafe 5y ago

So some of his ideas were dark patterns that you protested, and others were dark patterns that you supported, and in retrospect are happy that you implemented, due to revenue growth? Did you receive any pushback from engineers, and if so, how did you handle that?

blondin 5y ago

"power users complain—and still continue using the site—but the casual user does not..." this summarizes the way i feel about every single application out there.

rognjen 5y ago

> it works. That's the thing. I don't doubt that it does. But certainly there are _other_ things that work as well that may or may not be as profitable but are certainly more ethical. And that's basically what bugs me. They don't seem to be in earnest trying to do anything else that might provide much more value. > power users complain—and still continue using the site—but the casual user does not. And that's what makes it worse. That's effectively exploiting the fact that most users are not well informed about privacy. At the risk of sounding too hyperbolic, a similar but more nefarious example is that power users didn't fill in Cambridge Analytica's quizzes, but casual users did.

okareaman 5y ago

For those trying follow along, from Andrew Chen's site: DAU/MAU is a popular metric for user engagement – it’s the ratio of your daily active users over your monthly active users, expressed as a percentage. Usually apps over 20% are said to be good, and 50%+ is world class. How did this metric come into use? DAU/MAU has been a popular metric because of Facebook, which popularized the metric. As a result, as they began to talk about it, other consumer apps came to often be judged by the same KPIs. I first encountered DAU/MAU as a ratio during the Facebook Platform days, when it was used to evaluate apps on their platform.

effingwewt 5y ago

True,but you know what else grows at ridiculous rates? Cancer. Growth, especially at all costs, leads to a cancerous organization that cannabilizes itself. But hey,the shareholders!

jcrza 5y ago

I'm /u/zjz on wallstreetbets. That google sign-in flow thing has caused us a good bit of hassle because people became convinced that usernames fitting the Word-Word-#### scheme are all bots. It doesn't help that the kind of person who lets a google sign-in type flow suggest a username for them is probably a lazy commenter. Perhaps an announcement in the future when a user-facing identifier is auto-generated would be wise.

shawnz 5y ago

I don't think it's accurate that "lay-users" prefer the new UI. Perhaps the metrics have improved, but in my experience I have heard nothing but frustration from my non-technical peers when it comes to the new dark patterns which Reddit has been implementing.

kexx 5y ago

"Yes, power users complain—and still continue using the site" I wonder what would happen after you removed old.reddit.com and api access for reddit apps. For icing on the cake, use creative class names to f*ck with RES and ad blockers. My guess, if you do all of this, reddit's gonna crash on the ground pretty quickly.