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Once Steve Huffman told me at a conference that the developer who developed Reddit Enchantment Suite(RES) worked at Reddit upon asking him why reddit user inter

Once Steve Huffman told me at a conference that the developer who developed Reddit Enchantment Suite(RES) worked at Reddit upon asking him why reddit user interface was so terrible when there were already things like RES to take inspiration from. According to him the employees at reddit were not allowed to use RES so that they could strive to make reddit better rather than making Reddit with RES better. We never saw reddit get better in terms of UI, it only got worse with new reddit UI they came up with. They might as well let their people use RES since improving the user experience was clearly not their priority.

closetohome 5y ago
> improving the user experience was clearly not their priority Basically. Reddit's updates are meant to drive ad engagement. The redesign makes it harder to browse without identifying yourself (requiring an account to see comments, making your online status visible by default). Pushing people to their app just means they can have unblockable ads and better analytics. Clearly it's working, as 70-something percent of their traffic comes from apps now, and their advertising revenue has become significant enough to start talking about going public. This is of course a cycle we've seen repeatedly with internet communities -- indie > popular > fully monetized.