Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31508253

by skdotdan • 4 years ago

176 200 4 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Terrible UX, mostly useless answers (most replies to posts are either poorly sarcastic or not replying to the actual point). Before it wasn't like this. Did the Reddit board voluntarily or involuntarily cause this via technical decisions, or it's just unavoidable to get this degradation after the userbase grows too much?

bitxbitxbitcoin• 4 years ago

I’d argue the latter.

handmodel• 4 years ago

I first started using Reddit around 2009 when I was in college and use it more today.

I browse old.reddit.com because I think that text feel is better.

I think it probably depends on your subreddit or area of interest? For my making hobbies I find it to be the best forum out there. Extremely good for my sports and television discussion as well.

CM30• 4 years ago

A bit of both. It's clear Reddit hasn't made the best technical decisions via the redesign, and the constant drive to get people to use the app has likely driven away some veteran users.

But it's also because Reddit is growing more and more popular, and eventually the demographics will to match the population as a whole rather than a self selecting, more dedicated sample of it. Hence ypu get the same idiocy as in other situations and on other large social media services.

vehemenz• 4 years ago

It's hard to generalize about Reddit because each subreddit is kind of its own world. If you want good discussion, go to where the good discussion is. What is terrible about the UX? Are you not using old.reddit.com?

If you're judging by /r/all, sure, it's not much better than YouTube comments. As much as I hate this word, it's mostly "normies" with "normie" views. The cream rarely rises to the top, except on humor threads.

But other than that, I don't think Reddit has changed too much for the worse in the 14 or so years since I've used it. The demographic has gotten more mainstream, and arguably dumber, but that's just a microcosm of the Internet. It's still better on Reddit than many other places.

tinus_hn• 4 years ago

The UI of the site itself certainly has went down a lot, in favor of ‘engagement’ tricks like ‘this image hasn’t been approved, use the app to look at it’

BitwiseFool2• 4 years ago

/r/all is heavily manipulated and it's quite obvious a small cadre of power users and power mods are responsible for the content and character of what gets shown. I would not be surprised at all if there is dark money behind all of this, especially considering the political nature of it all.

jandrese2• 4 years ago

The default feed is completely worthless. Unfortunately I think that's what a lot of people see. Carefully curating a list of quality subreddits is key to a good experience, but most people either don't know to do this or don't know how.

tsol• 4 years ago

It has become incredibly political. It always has had a heavy political aspect, but now it's just about completely impossible to avoid.

tootie• 4 years ago

Yeah, and honestly that's a really great thing that they have pulled off very well. In the olden days, the front page was the only option and now it's really just their "Top of the Funnel" so to speak. Most user-generated content sites have a solid 90/9/1 split where 90% are passive consumers who are either not logged in or logged in only to curate their feed, 9% might make comments, and 1% are driving most of the submissions and moderation. The front page is dominated by the 90% and exists to drive SEO and ad views to pay for everyone else. If you are in the other 10%, you login, curate a feed that excludes /r/funny or /r/pics and just zooms in on the special interests you like and it's a fantastic experience. And yeah, you do that with old.reddit.com (or i.reddit.com).

marginalia_nu3• 4 years ago

What is terrible about the UX?

It's been a few years now, and they still haven't fixed so you can copy and paste text in their text inputs.

maleldil• 4 years ago

Are you using old or new reddit? I can't reproduce your issue on old reddit + RES. Copy-pasting stuff works fine.

I'm using Firefox 100 on Monterey, but I'm sure it worked on previous Firefox versions on Windows 10.

warrenm7• 4 years ago

I copy-paste all the time into Reddit ... what makes you think you can't?

singhrac• 4 years ago

This is one of the best things about Reddit, which is that the individual subreddits still have relatively strong control over moderation over their own content. You can find incredibly niche subreddits that align with your interests or sense of humor. Personally I find it full of interesting content and discussions (maybe too much).

bergenty• 4 years ago

tbh I’ve come a full circle and feel like the “normie” stuff is actually good, quality content. It’s the non-normies with agendas and single minded thinking that ruin a lot of what Reddit was.

rockbruno• 4 years ago

There was a thread the other day about how every community is bound to lose its identity once it gets big enough, and it likely can be applied to this. Once Reddit caught the attention of the advertising world to the point where people with high karma were being asked to sell their accounts, the entire platform devolved into people reposting each other's content to farm karma.

In the last couple of months people have even been spotting "organized bot groups" that not only repost old popular content, but also immediately populate said reposts with the popular comments of the previous thread.

kordlessagain• 4 years ago

Well, at least this place has the kind beatings into submission thing going for it. That's the advantage of having a paid moderator vs. group moderation. I think it builds a healthier culture.

robotjosh2• 4 years ago

Reddit hired more paid moderators, to whom being mean to racists and other people they like is “hate speech” while actual racists and nazis run amok being shitty to actual protected groups. Reddit is turning into the next stormfront.

peterkos2• 4 years ago

The reposts are what made me the most frustrated. I got really tired of seeing the same stuff keep cropping up literally every two or three days

pixl977• 4 years ago

The bots these days really put you in the point where you wonder what percent of people you talk to are real.

I've seen a few popular comments bots give themselves away accidently by posting the same comment under a thread under different user names. Go and look at the accounts, and they are all the same comments, but generally in different threads. Because they seem to have been human comments at some point in the past, they seem to be much harder to detect for the average user.

lamontcg2• 4 years ago

Those are comment repaste bots.

They look for highly voted comments which typically have more upvotes than the comment they are responding to, but they're stuck under an ultimate grandparent comment which isn't the highest voted comment, and then the bot posts that comment in the comment chain under the top comment trying to farm karma.

They're now truncating the comment so it isn't a perfect match, which often results in "am i having a stroke?" comments under it as they mangle it.

I guess you do that and even if 99 accounts get banned the 1 account that gets a pile of karma can be sold off to social media companies / troll farms to push whatever their agenda is.

sleepdreamy• 4 years ago

This is subjective, no? I have no clue which subreddits you frequent. I work in IT and as such follow a bunch of related subs. Those subs are perfectly fine if not helpful in a lot of cases. It depends on what you're consuming like..most things.

garciasn• 4 years ago

I think it's mainly fine for general subs and great for super niche stuff I am interested in.

Like any Internet forum, of course it'll have its issues, particularly on the Reddit scale, but for the most part, I think it's pretty decent and I find it way better than most other 'social media' platforms.

NOTE: RES is a must-have for me: https://redditenhancementsuite.com/

jyu• 4 years ago

The leaders, managers, engineers need to do something to justify their promotions. They are growing because the internet is centralizing. It's succeeding despite all the bad user decisions being made, but at some point it will catch up with them.

Reminds me of Meg Whitman running ebay into the ground while collecting billions and eventually getting wrecked by Amazon. They're still around but a shell of their former relevance.

bombcar• 4 years ago

eBay, Amazon, and Etsy have all devolved to an alibaba outlet with some differentiation.

It’s getting hard to find the things eBay was famous for (used goods) amongst all the buyitnow alibaba junk.

Animats• 4 years ago

On Alibaba, you get pictures of the factory and business background info. On Amazon, you get nothing.

Sohcahtoa82• 4 years ago

Terrible UX

If you're browsing on a desktop, configure your account to always use the old reddit experience. If you lurk without an account, use old.reddit.com. If you can, install RES, it's a game-changer.

If you're browsing on mobile, don't use the official reddit app. It's garbage. Use one of the many 3rd party apps. Personally, I use Bacon Reader.

Don't bother ever browsing /r/all. Tailor your subscriptions to the subs you actually care about.

Try to find more niche subreddits. Subs like /r/AskReddit are just massive karma farms.

jandrese2• 4 years ago

I do worry a bit that I'm carefully building my own personal echo chamber when I make a custom feed the same way that everybody on Twitter does.

I really do wish that the default feed wasn't such a burning trash pile.

hunter2_• 4 years ago

If you're looking to sample the whole world, as should be the case for someone who uses reddit as their main source of news and/or general socializing, it's important to avoid tailoring it to your preferences lest you buildan echo chamber. But if you're looking to meet more specific goals, as should be the case for someone who uses reddit to dive into particular interests, by all means, tailor it.

FirstLvR• 4 years ago

Apollo for IOS is great as well

dorfsmay• 4 years ago

old.reddit.com also works on mobile.

nowahe• 4 years ago

On a (sad) related note, a few month ago[1] the devs announced the end of active development on RES, and from now on will only receive bugfixes, if any at all.

Which is understandable considering that since the redesign, they have been more and more working against a black box, with the Reddit staff actively trying to prevent access to certain functionalities outside of their clients.

I'm still worried about Reddit turning off old.reddit.com one day, or making some major breaking change crippling RES. Tho it could be a good way to quit using it, as the friction of the new design overpowering by far my desire to go on it.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/RESAnnouncements/comments/sh83gx/an...

lp0_on_fire2• 4 years ago

If you're browsing on a desktop, configure your account to always use the old reddit experience.

I've had the option turned on since the day they offered it and it's never worked for me.

astrange• 4 years ago

Reddit has actually clearly improved; they’ve grown so large they no longer are a community and are just everyone on Earth posting stuff.

Usually this would be bad, but not when your old community was the dorks on Reddit. So they no longer have the problem where the first reply to every post is a long chain of bad puns and the second one is the answer.

Some of the default subs did seem to get all their content replaced with Facebook memes, and AskReddit shows me a teenager posting a new “how do I get the ladies to like me?” question every day, but that’s life.

TameAntelope2• 4 years ago

You call it degradation, Reddit calls it "explosive growth".

The UX redesign was hugely successful in attracting new users, users who could then be monetized.

The "useless answers" are wildly popular responses because people generally prefer to meme, not solve problems.

Your complaint essentially boils down to, "Why do people not behave how I want them to?" and that, my friend, is a question as old as time itself.

From the HN guidelines, but it also applies to Reddit:

Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob[0] illusion[1], as[2] old[3] as[4] the[5] hills[6].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=926703

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=633099

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=582513

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=289254

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=253657

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=66057

[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13852

kelseyfrog4• 4 years ago

The UX redesign is also clearly part of a mobile-first strategy. The mobile site funnels users into the mobile app, and the desktop site clearly echos the mobile design principles.

Mobile users fundamentally engage with the platform in different ways. For one, they form a different demographic segment than older users, and secondly the mobile app frames and filters content in uniquely mobile ways. High-signal content is much more difficult to craft on a mobile device so more mobile use represents a greater proportion of content noise.

Early adopters seek high-signal over content quantity and will move platforms if the opportunity arises. Such a migration will play into future case studies critiquing Reddits MAU-chasing at the expense of hollowing out their long-time user base.

parineum3• 4 years ago

Mobile users fundamentally engage with the platform in different ways. For one, they form a different demographic segment than older users, and secondly the mobile app frames and filters content in uniquely mobile ways. High-signal content is much more difficult to craft on a mobile device so more mobile use represents a greater proportion of content noise.

I'd argue the only thing that really matters about mobile users is they are online _way_ more often. Engagement can be higher on mobile because the access is mobile.

colinmhayes2• 4 years ago

More importantly, it's very difficult to block ads on a mobile app. Reddit's problem is that the vast majority of their "power users" use adblockers and therefore provide zero revenue. Mobile also makes it much easier to doom scroll for hours a day, key to facebook's success.

As far as I can tell reddit's website provides minimal income and is just an ad for their app.

TameAntelope2• 4 years ago

I don't know how credible this site is [0], but I think something that goes understated in these conversations is just how explosive the growth is that Reddit has experienced even in the last year:

* A doubling of mobile app downloads in the past year

* Valuation increase of 4Bn in 6 months (from ~6Bn to ~10Bn) (Feb 2021 to Aug 2021)

* Revenue growth forecast over 250%

I guess we're all kind of used to the idea that Reddit keeps growing, because it more or less has since it was created (citation needed), but the nature of exponential growth is such that maybe we're a bit numb to just how big the numbers have gotten in the past year or so.

[0] https://backlinko.com/reddit-users

toss1• 4 years ago

IOW, Reddit redesigned the UI towards mobile, devalued high-signal and high-quality, and so recreated the Eternal September [0] on their own platform.

You'd think they'd know better, but maybe to them, replacing high-information-demanding users with a casual audience is a feature and not a bug.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

GekkePrutser2• 4 years ago

The mobile site funnels users into the mobile app, and the desktop site clearly echos the mobile design principles.

More like hoards them into the app with a cattle prod. You can't use the mobile site without constantly confirming that no, I really really really don't want to use the app like I said 20 seconds ago.

This is beyond dark patterns. It's pure user hostility.

hyperbovine• 4 years ago

I must be using Reddit differently than the typical user. It's almost hilarious how much worse the new UX is compared to browsing the exact same content on old.reddit.com. Like, I literally cannot believe that serious money, time, and effort were invested in designing this product, though presumably that is true. The same applies particularly to their video player, it is just amazingly bad compared to similar offerings from other large social media sites.

mmis10002• 4 years ago

Their mobile app is terrible enough that I eventually gave up and find some alternative app. It isn't about UI or UX, it's purely usability issue.

What the heck they removed my subs from the sidebar and add it back from time to time, move the avatar every week, and constantly generate fake notification dot even there isn't any? It's just annoying that you see it says you have notification, you click and there isn't any.

This is the most dumb app I ever seen. And this is also the first time I use an alternative client on a social platform because the vanilla one is so useless.

butterfi• 4 years ago

It also depends on what sub-reddit you're in. Some are really good, some are BS echo-chambers. It can't all be BS considering how many people are using Google Site search to get "better" answers from sub-reddits as opposed to generic google search results.

denimnerd422• 4 years ago

real people are better than seo spam but these days not by much

NonNefarious3• 4 years ago

A lot of subs are useless because they're moderated by infantile admins who delete posts and ban users for no legitimate (or even stated) reason. I received a permanent ban for asking (politely) why a bunch of on-topic comments (most of them not mine) had been deleted in a thread discussing a technical topic.

These asshole admins then followed me to another, related sub where they permanently banned me for answering another user's question about a product; again with no excuse. This reveals the depressing fact that Reddit is an inbred community of inbred moderators who bully users for fun and render the entire platform a waste of effort. You spend a bunch of time helping people, only to have your work deleted and being made to feel like you're the bad guy. Just typing this out, I'm getting pissed-off and tense, for having done nothing offensive at all. Who needs that in his day?

I discovered Reddit after Digg sold out and became a spam aggregator, and everyone abandoned it in favor of Reddit. I see that someone below also referred to this incident, and marked it as the beginning of the decline of Reddit. I find it odd to blame the Digg ex-pats because Digg was (in its heyday) a tech-news site not too different from this one.

But not long after arriving at Reddit, I did notice that the technical content soon diminished and was replaced by an endless stream of cutesy "This little guy followed me home" posts about stray animals or other pleasant but wholly useless content.

Sad.

mattwilsonn888• 4 years ago

A lot of people have been saying it for a while.
Therefore its bogus!

What kind of reasoning is that?

SilasX• 4 years ago

I’m happy to entertain that thesis, but what is the evidence? How do you known it wasn’t other factors that drove greater usage, like ads on other platforms or word-of-mouth? I notice you didn’t post any such evidence.

Incidentally, if you’re really into HN guidelines, it might be a good idea to avoid inflammatory comments that lack the evidence to back them up.

usrn2• 4 years ago

I think they legitimately thought it was an improvement. The guy responsible for it actually started a thread here to show off. The comments were pretty rough.

NonNefarious3• 4 years ago

Link?

nunez2• 4 years ago

Agreed. You can't endlessly dumbscroll on old reddit and engage with other Redditors while you can, easily, on new Reddit. Lots of people like dumbscrolling.

seydor• 4 years ago

The UX redesign was hugely successful in attracting new users

Is there evidence for that?

orangepurple2• 4 years ago

Dead Internet Theory (DIT)

TLDR: Large proportions of the supposedly human-produced content on the internet are actually generated by artificial intelligence networks in conjunction with paid secret media influencers in order to manufacture consumers for an increasing range of newly-normalised cultural products.

https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-...

stnmtn2• 4 years ago

What products would this be in reddits case? I don't see what subreddits that show up on /r/all are secretly advertising.. The better explanation using Occams Razor is that optimizing for engagement metrics means that low-quality, broadly appealing shallow content simply is more popular

orangepurple2• 4 years ago

Low-quality, broadly appealing shallow content also drives away anybody interested in putting in effort

happythebob2• 4 years ago

I spend enough time on Reddit that I think the bots excuse is overblown. I think there's just that many stupid people now who are too busy to think or read at a meaningful level. Social media by default encourages reaction (upvotes and quick comments) as opposed to reflection. Conservatives have been doing a much better job of reaching younger people imo the past ten years, too

Tostino2• 4 years ago

I think the phenomenon is explained by a little bit of A and a little bit of B.

The barrier to entry for internet communities has dropped like a rock over the last 10 years as smartphone usage has become ubiquitous. So you do have more average and below average intelligence (but still very real) people interacting online than ever before, by a wide margin from back in the mid 2000's.

I have seen the bot argument taken to the extreme by some when there was no indication it wasn't a person, so yeah it does get blown out of the water a lot of times just to try and shut down conversation. Even more so in political related discussions, people are so quick to call bot/shill on some topics, and I wonder how much of that has been influenced by the media narrative around the "Russian troll farms". One section of the population are entirely convinced that Hillary would have won if not for the bots/trolls, and use that to deflect from any other criticism of how she actually conducted herself / campaigned. Another section of the population looks at that argument as ridiculous, and dismiss bots/shill's as a delusion by the "other side" entirely.

pixl977• 4 years ago

Eh, feedback loops exist here for sure.

Countless studies have shown the initial trajectory of a post dictates its upvote/downvote ratio over time. Bots commonly will ensure the first few comments dominate most of the threads views.

Conservatives are reaching younger people the same way candy companies reach kids. By feeding them a diet of sugar shit that's going to have massive long term negative consequences. "Nothing is your fault, hate all immigrants" is a great way to reach someone that can't get a job and wants to blame someone else. It's not going to get them a job, it's not going to fix their situation. Oh boy, but it does generate engagement.

andrewmutz• 4 years ago

Some of reddit is good: many smaller subs feel genuine and have great discussion that I can't find anywhere else. Also, the product is less engaging than other social media networks, which is better for using it in moderate amounts (as opposed to more addictive products like twitter or tiktok). Some new innovative features like predictions.

Some of reddit is terrible: relentlessly pushing people to the mobile app, garbage notifications system.

0xRusty• 4 years ago

In terms of the UI/UX use old.reddit.com - I honestly don't understand how anyone uses the new default version. Comments are hidden, there are ads and other threads content on the page. It's literally impossible to use. It's such a disaster I can't understand how it ever passed testing.

The community itself when you get away from the big main subreddits isn't too bad. The best experience is had when you unsub from all the main subreddits and only browse the smaller niche ones. Although they can be pretty toxic too. If you're looking for better quality in depth discussion on a hobby or topic I'm sure you already know better forums, but if you want beginners guides and more superficial meme chat it's a great resource on the whole.

Domenic_S• 4 years ago

I honestly don't understand how anyone uses the new default version

The day they kill old.reddit is the day I stop reading it.

parineum3• 4 years ago

There are alternate reddit sites that use their API to re-host the posts. Some (all) are even self-hostable.

If they get rid of old.reddit, I might quit just because of how hostile to the users I'd view that but I wouldn't quite because of the UI.

zhynn• 4 years ago

It amuses me every time I do it, but my two most common browser prefixes when I want a break are:

old (resolves to old.reddit.com) new (resolves to news.ycombinator.com)

It makes me chuckle.

tedivm• 4 years ago

I had never noticed this and it's absolutely hilarious. I always wondered why they went with "old" as the descriptor there, but now I'm glad they did.

blueblob2• 4 years ago

There are ads in the old version too. They show up as sponsored posts though I don't know if they are as egregious because I also use old.

The only thing that I feel I miss out on in using old.reddit.com is the predictions. The /r/muaythai has a predictions tournament that's pretty fun but there's no way to get notifications that there are new predictions to be made with the old interface (as far as I know).

SoftTalker3• 4 years ago

Use an ad blocker. I use ublock origin and don't see any ads on old.reddit.

KallDrexx2• 4 years ago

To offer an opposite argument, I hated reddit before the redesign and always take "old." out of links.

Every reddit looked like a geocities offering to me, they were inconsistent in coloring and contrast and all the bullshit I don't care about. Non-old reddit gave me a more consistent and less distracting way for me to quickly browse subreddits and posts I'm interested in and getting out.

noir_lord• 4 years ago

with old.reddit.com when logged in you can opt out for subreddits been able to override the CSS then you get the vanilla and clean defaults everywhere.

I use it as my "whoops, forgot to login" reminder.

dvngnt_• 4 years ago

not with RES

_abox• 4 years ago

In terms of the UI/UX use old.reddit.com - I honestly don't understand how anyone uses the new default version. Comments are hidden, there are ads and other threads content on the page. It's literally impossible to use. It's such a disaster I can't understand how it ever passed testing.

Not to mention it brings even a powerful machine to its knees..

ajmurmann2• 4 years ago

It's almost like Twitter. You get the experience that matches what you subscribe to. Even some large subreddits like the F1 subreddit are great and friendly.

utcursch• 4 years ago

In terms of the UI/UX use old.reddit.com

Even better: https://reddit.com/.compact

DavideNL• 4 years ago

I still prefer old.reddit.com with the Reddit Enhancement Suite extension;

Primarily it's easier to toggle comments.

mmis10002• 4 years ago

I personally think the new UX is okay for a entertainment site. Although If you are there for information, then it isn't useful.

The actual problem is the performance. The new UX is just so terribly laggy. And even eat 20~30% cpu by literally just 4 tabs on my old 2700

How could they done such a bad job on coding a forum site? I just don't understand.

rckclmbr• 4 years ago

I can think of a couple major points that have caused massive culture shifts on reddit (some might say for the worse). There have been other temporary shifts/events, but I think these ones were longer lasting

* The "Digg invasion", when Digg 4.0 came out in 2013. This is when reddit turned into mostly memes. Before that, the frontpage was closer to slashdot, but much more open conversation around it. (of course there were still ffuuuu comics, but we dont talk about those)

* The pandemic in 2020. It seems like your typical Facebook user started using reddit. Reddiquette is no longer a thing -- if you don't agree with something you downvote. Alternative views aren't supported, people don't want their views challenged. I think this has been the biggest culture shift and probably what you're getting at. It's people looking to kill time rather than adventure to learn something new.

Sunspark4• 4 years ago

The downvoting thing is interesting.. I fairly often upvote comments with 0 if they haven't said anything bad or objectionable just to make things more fair.

The mods on subreddits are a problem too. There is no recourse. If they decide to ban you for any reason, that's the end of it, even if no rule has been broken. If you message modmail to ask for more information, they can just mute you from messaging modmail.

NonNefarious3• 4 years ago

"The mods on subreddits are a problem"

An absolutely site-killing problem. If you actually try to pursue specific topics on subreddits, you find they're administered by a bunch of babies wallowing in their little sandboxes and throwing tantrums for no apparent reason.

monkeybutton• 4 years ago

2020 and the pandemic was when I finally caved in and created my first accounts on Reddit, HN and imgur. It was entirely as an outlet for boredom and isolation. It's been a fun experiment starting engaging with all 3 around the same time. Of them, HN is the most interesting and satisfying but it is still very easy to reply with a "Google bad hur hur" comment in one of weekly "Google bad" threads and receive a ton of points.

parineum3• 4 years ago

Alternative views aren't supported, people don't want their views challenged. I think this has been the biggest culture shift and probably what you're getting at

I don't disagree with this but I'm not sure what I'd consider a reasonable solution. One thing I will say though is that the moderators on default subs promote this behavior. If I were to try to change the situation, I think that's where I'd start.

For example, I'm fairly certain I'm shadowbanned on r/news and my positions on topics range from moderate to liberal, depending on the topic.

dmix2• 4 years ago

It's fascinating to use https://www.reveddit.com/ for any of the big subs when a 'controversial' topic is posted. I've seen threads where 30-50% of comments were removed (in the thousands) and even the mildest critiques and disagreements of the topic would be deleted by mods, often faster than they can be archived.

Some of the bigger subs have 100+ moderators so people don't realize the massive scale of moderation going on.

The idea that comments get deleted because they are 'bad faith', racist, or whatever is wildly incorrect. Moderators act like editors of their own pet newspapers where the comments are the content.

fknorangesite• 4 years ago

Reddiquette is no longer a thing -- if you don't agree with something you downvote.

The pandemic had nothing to do with it: people have been making this complaint about reddit for fifteen years. Rediquette was always a myth.

lp0_on_fire2• 4 years ago

Reddiquette is no longer a thing -- if you don't agree with something you downvote.

That's always been a thing.

alar44• 4 years ago

The pandemic was a big one. I was already getting tired of the 0 effort posts on Reddit. Once the pandemic hit, it seems like that kind of behavior exploded. I left and haven't looked back.

dredmorbius• 4 years ago

Given enough eyeballs, all content is shallow.

For most of the past decade, Reddit have pursued a growth path, with features and changes designed to hook and keep on-site an ever-growing number of eyeballs. Put the blame for that squarely on Conde Nast / Advance Publications / Steven Newhouse (CEO).

This has had corresponding impacts on the quality of discourse. My own response, as noted at my personal subreddit, is to take my time and attention elsewhere, which seems to be widely reflected across other subreddits I've followed. (See: https://teddit.net/r/dredmorbius, particularly pinned posts.)

HN has remained one of those places --- moderation, search, and a reasonably-well curated membership seem to help. It's not ideal, but it's dramatically better than typical online forums, and has maintained a remarkably even keel for going on two decades, all but unheard of.

For various reasons, progress to implementing an independent blog have lagged.

As a lark I created a new account that blocks idiots, though I've not used that sufficiently to determine if it has a positive impact on S:N ratios, though I suspect it might. The idiots are, however, legion.

If anyone else wants to try that practice and report on results, I'd be interested in how well it does or does not work.

hnuser847• 4 years ago

Honestly, despite the UX changes, Reddit has stayed remarkably consistent over the past decade or so I've used it. Big, generic subreddits are trash and always have been, but small, focused subreddits are great. Reddit is still hands down the best place on the internet for product recommendations, candid product reviews, niche hobbies, and discussions about TV shows, movies, and games.

Edit - to prove my point further, take a look at the top 1000 posts on r/all from 10 years ago.[1] Does that look like quality content to you? Once again, the front-page of Reddit and the large subs have been hot garbage since day 1. Nothing has changed in that respect. You've always had to go the smaller subs for quality content.

[1] https://www.redditarchive.com/2012-05-25.html

jesuslop• 4 years ago

Agreed. I see a "Use new Reddit as my default experience" preference checkbox not to click if you don't want (longtimer here...) . It also supports RSS for subreddits, that's nice.

usrn2• 4 years ago

small, focused subreddits are great.

No, not in my experience. Not compared to small focused forums on any moderately complex or interesting topic anyway. The whole format is designed for quick throwaway content and not for having long nuanced discussions and so the subreddit will be oriented towards just that. Worse still I think it might even poison the brains of the Redditors into thinking that the subreddit is all their is to the topic.

cpsns• 4 years ago

I fully agree with this. People constantly claim small subreddits are still okay in defence of reddit, but my question is: where are those subreddits?

My experience on reddit has been universally negative regardless of community size. The site's very design discourages quality content.

subsection1h• 4 years ago

to prove my point further, take a look at the top 1000 posts on r/all from 10 years ago.[1] Does that look like quality content to you?

LOL. Reddit peaked long before 2012.

raviparikh• 4 years ago

For the Terrible UX, try https://old.reddit.com/

For the content degradation, I find that creating an account, unsubscribing from all the default subreddits, and subscribing to niche subreddits works well. There are still plenty of great smaller communities within Reddit.

ChrisArchitect• 4 years ago

such a generic ask. plenty of recent/not-so-recent threads that get into this, especially gripes about the UX , a long known issue, many here just live on old.reddit.

It was always weak as far as posts and activity in the larger subreddits etc due to the natural effects of huge numbers of random users. The quality of users has declined enormously because of memes and just general public use, but that's the way it is.

Reddit is not really that special, it had explosive user growth due to lack of options out there and ease of use for most to just engage and/or run small forum-like communities. It was almost dead! Back before some big missteps by other players made it get really lucky in user growth. A momentum boost from a fluke.

And that's where the value/real stuff is: the rest of it - all the countless smaller communities -- reddit is basically a forum system for them, and they with the help of dedicated mods etc, people that care about the connections and community, it works great. That's it. That's all it is.

orthecreedence• 4 years ago

Terrible UX

old.reddit.com -- You're welcome.

mostly useless answers

Any sufficiently popular platform degrades like this (including the entire internet itself).

or it's just unavoidable to get this degradation after the userbase grows too much?

Pretty much. HN has pretty ferocious moderation, which is required unless you want every other response to be "sigh unzips." You see this in individual forums in general...once they grow past a certain size, the original intent is watered down, discussion suffers, etc etc.

That said, there are plenty of places on reddit that are still great.

wollsmoth• 4 years ago

I think the more visual look of the new design works well for some communities that are more about image/video sharing.

But you're right, it's slower to load and generally slower to navigate, although opening and closing a post is a smidge faster for me in the new ui. I think Reddit got enough VC capital that it has to try to make a return on and they still haven't really come up with a great way to monetize the communities they host. So they're blowing money on engineering and probably seeing more users.

I'm not a product person, idk what the real answer is on what Reddit should have done. I agree I dislike a lot of what they added to it, but I'm just not a product person. I guess having steady growth and a reasonable amount of ad revenue just wasn't cutting it after a while.

Rochus3• 4 years ago

From my point of view, the quality of discussions is generally getting worse, including here (you could, for example, make a statistic of how many comments start with "I" and do not refer to the referenced article at all). It likely also depends which subreddit you're in; e.g. r/ProgrammingLanguages has generally good contributions and discussions, r/programming not so. Concerning the UX: I'm using https://old.reddit.com/ which is OK and remains constant.

barrysteve3• 4 years ago

The topic raised by a new speaker doesn't always grab everyone's attention though. It happens in group conversations too.

I'm amazed HN can still find some periphirally related topic to talk about and save an otherwise dead thread.

The statistic of 'missed topics' would be really interesting if you could parse what people were really wanting to talk about.

Rochus3• 4 years ago

Very often people seem to just pick up the title and to tell the world how they relate to some key words without even having a look at the article. Since a couple of weeks I regularly check the HN RSS feed to see what was posted; I would consider myself part of the original target audience of HN but find more interesting stuff in the RSS feed than on the front page; from that I conclude that the audience has changed.

kjrose• 4 years ago

Basically the same thing that happens to most forums like this. It was always better when you originally joined, and if it is particularly popular, you get more and more individuals who are simply not of the quality of a smaller self-chosen group.

happythebob2• 4 years ago

Unfortunately I think it's a combination of popularity and exposing what happens in upvoted systems as opposed to discussion forums; the lowest common denominator rules.

"Both sides" fallacies, typically having a political meaning, are naturally going to get exploited on social media sites where both sides upvote the poorly baked, emotionally charged fallacies.

It is alarming to me as a statnerd that the NBA and NFL communities seem to be getting dumber as time goes on, not smarter, but I'm not positive this is a Reddit problem (but possibly, due to how mainstream it is now).

Sunspark4• 4 years ago

The NBA community is just for entertainment purposes not serious sports research and discussion. It has 5 million nephews. If 1% of that number decide to participate on any given day, that's going to be 50,000 nephews out in force.

TMWNN• 4 years ago

It is alarming to me as a statnerd that the NBA and NFL communities seem to be getting dumber as time goes on

In addition to what sunspark said, I've heard that the average /r/nba person doesn't actually watch games, and only participates for the memes.

nivenkos• 4 years ago

Remember what happened to Digg?

seabird• 4 years ago

I would argue that reddit never was really that great. It has gotten worse (the really aggressive advertising and dogshit UI is fairly recent), but karma farming is as old as time, is pretty much fundamentally unavoidable with their current model, and is probably one of the biggest issues with discussion on the site. I avoided the site for years because of the tendency toward low quality high engagement posts, and I know plenty of people who felt the exact same way. I can't speak to what it was like around 2010, but when I started looking a few years after that it was a lot of what I described above.

The only true fix to this is either firm AND benevolent moderation (really only works for small stuff, like HN), or just ditching usernames and internet points altogether. 4chan was, for the most part, low quality discussion, but people at least had a reason behind their post that wasn't ego-flaming to save face on their pseudonymous internet account/getting internet points to feel like they had some clout.

breck• 4 years ago

Do you have data to support your positions?

I think it's gotten better, not worse. Though the variance between subreddits is high, so if you're not subredditing well, ymmv.

My only complaint are their dark patterns pushing the mobile app.

john-tells-all• 4 years ago

Here's a very valuable sub-reddit, which lists other sub-reddits, that have pictures of cats. I think we're at ~800 cat reddits.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Catsubs/wiki/index/

You're welcome! :-D

pawelduda• 4 years ago

At least their KPI's went through the roof

throwaway0x7E6• 4 years ago

Terrible UX

VC chickens coming home to roost, the inevitable ultimate fate of every single VC-funded startup

mostly useless answers (most replies to posts are either poorly sarcastic or not replying to the actual point)

1) reddit format is vastly inferior to classic forums for serious discussion. everything except for a couple stickied threads is ephemeral

2) the culture is dominated by repetitive low-quality humor and insufferable soapboxing that spills over into topical subreddits

warrenm7• 4 years ago

everything except for a couple stickied threads is ephemeral

I find ephemera one of the most enjoyable aspects of most social media - most of what's talked about is inherently time-based

Sure, it's helpful to be able to find some forum post or Reddit thread on replacing a freezer control board for your 2011 upright Frigidaire (not that that happened to me in the last week, or anything ;)) - but most topics are inherently short-lived

joshstrange2• 4 years ago

Sounds like another instance of the Eternal September [0]. Reddit has grown and larger communities are harder to moderate. Of course, each subreddit is its own world. There are some that are well moderated (size factors in here for sure) that are quite enjoyable to participate in.

As for UI I think we all agree, it's horrible. That's what old.reddit.com is for, it's still a sane UI overall. On Mobile I use Apollo (iOS) but anything but the default app is a huge step up.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

SoftTalker3• 4 years ago

Yeah I think it's the ultimate end of all social media, excepting forums that are aggressively moderated to stay on topic. I'm on a few email lists that are moderated this way. Any tangents into politics and memes are killed immediately, even neutral off-topic stuff is discouraged.

Usenet is dead. Reddit, Facebook, Twitter are dying. Something will take their place, become popular, and it will eventually die for the same reasons.

joshstrange2• 4 years ago

Moderation is key (IMHO) and it's not easy. I've moderated small subreddits and tried to be an "unbiased moderator" but I've come to the conclusion this is the worst of all worlds. Trying to please everyone ends in pleasing no one. The community-killers (people who can singlehandedly, or in a small group, ruin a community) will be very vocal/loud when you start to curb their actions, you have to tune them out. I look back at a community that withered away and the #1 reason was the moderators attempted to be completely neutral and only enforce clear rule violations. That just meant that the same people walked right up to and over that line over and over and in an attempt to stay "neutral" we didn't ban them like we should have. Tons of people who weren't vocal or were just lurkers evaporated away because of the actions of a handful of toxic community-killers.

HN is able to avoid this with heavy moderation and the participants agreeing to root out bad behavior (with downvotes and/or flags). Free speech online is something I used to consider a "right" we all should have. I have swung to the almost opposite end of the spectrum. On the internet, at least, it leads to toxic ghost towns and more often than not the moderators who attempt to allow "free speech" will overcorrect for their biases and reprimand people they agree with and let the ones they don't slide (in an attempt to not appear biased).

lvass• 4 years ago

Reddit was great for the brief period of time after internet search engines like Google nosedived in quality thanks to blogspam, and before companies realized people were relying on Reddit for reading honest opinions. Whenever there's some economic interest involved in a Reddit thread (like product recommendations), companies are now flooding it with disguised ads, which is low quality content like all ads.

pixl977• 4 years ago

This is the curse of all public forums. I would add that the ability for bots and spammers to flood forums is getting easier and ads are many times less noticeable so the barrier to entry has lowered and we get even more crap with time.

About the only places that don't get completely ate up with it are so dark and foul your risking other facets of your mental health by visiting them.

Gustomaximus• 4 years ago

I think its more than ads. The ability to have conversation has largely gone. It's seems so full of hatred and anger now vs people posting interesting information or politely joking about. While there were always toxic subs they tended to exist in their own universe for people that wanted that. I really miss the days of polite discussion, joking about bacon and grammar nazis.

While reddit still has great points, I feel there needs to be a new reddit that has its core rules based on courtesy and some kind of intelligence/knowledge test before people can comment, and have to repeat if they can't follow basic polite and value add conversation.

nickdothutton• 4 years ago

The answer is that your friends, family, and colleagues are a narrow strata of society and Reddit is not a strata it’s a core cross section, or perhaps a core sample.

hackernewds• 4 years ago

As an avid user, in my personal opinion there are multiple factors, but the most significant one is that during lockdown and school closures, a lot of kids, blue collar workers and amateur investors (/r/wallstreetbets) were suddenly attracted to reddit due to the abundance of content, community and opportunity. In the reddit community, this used to be called summer reddit when kids were on summer vacations, but this time it seems the userbase has been retained.

peterkos2• 4 years ago

My philosophy is to never browse reddit as a "whole" but instead just go to specific subreddits for what I need. It's been 10x more "normal" and each subreddit has a better balance between full of snarky replies (r/programmerhumor) or more helpful (r/rust) rather than the more popular ones (r/funny, etc.)

barrysteve3• 4 years ago

Every community worth some money was captured by a specific interest group. All the organic growth got turned off and the places that still nurture organic growth are front ends for shopify/unreal engine/alibaba, ect.

The real sense of community which enabled so much valuable information flow was stamped out. Community was replaced with politics, auto mods and feudal lords crushing dissent instead of leading discussion.

enumjorge• 4 years ago

It’s troubling that Reddit doesn’t really have a lot of competition, and the new user hostile UI on mobile shows their leadership knows it. I still remember when Digg made those big changes that caused a bunch of people to migrate over. But there isn’t a credible alternative to Reddit. It feels like most of them focus on anti-censorship or little moderation which means they get taken over by fringe groups.

We have old.reddit.com for now, but I feel like that’s just temporary sugar for the medicine to go down while people get used to getting pushed to the mobile app. If they took that away, and there’s really no guarantee it’ll always be there, I don’t know what else I’d use. There’s Discord but it’s such a different interaction model that it doesn’t feel like a valid alternative.

pixl977• 4 years ago

No competition because in general it's a gigantic money pit to finance via ads alone.

Those that do find financing always seem to bring up the question of "Why is X group giving them Y millions of dollars, what are they going to get out of it and what are they asking for".

ternaryoperator• 4 years ago

All really good forums, in my experience, have attentive and firm moderators. (HN for example.) A few years ago, I moderated a developer forum (not on Reddit) and by posting clear rules and enforcing them consistently without being a jerk about it, the forum was indeed evolved into a useful place for conversations. But it took constant attention; and I think most Reddit moderators don't have the inclination to do that work day in and day out for the sake of the community--and so the quality progressively deteriorates.

pixl977• 4 years ago

It may not even be the inclination, it may be the absolute mass of posts involved.

Just a few people with bots can make your moderating job absolute hell, especially from a non-admin level where you can block things at a lower level.

nvarsj• 4 years ago

This... so much this. The few, good subreddits are _really_ good and it's due almost solely to a great moderation team (/r/anime is one example). I've seen a lot of small communities die off because they grew and the moderation did not happen.

In my opinion, moderators of an online forum are like the leadership team of a company. With bad leadership all the good people leave, and only the bottom feeders remain.

mgr86• 4 years ago

What I find truly troubling is the loss of message boards elsewhere online. The bigger ones I was apart of years ago are gone, or with a much reduced and aging user base. Often the time sink that these homes were have been replaced by social media. Instagram, tiktok, and obviously reddit. It causes me to feel a sense of loss.

On the plus side Reddit search has improved the last five years or so.

kosherhurricane• 4 years ago

The key word is “monetization”.

Entertainment (aka funny) makes money. Useful information can make money but not nearly as much as entertainment.

xhrpost3• 4 years ago

I find searching reddit for niche things to be at least useful enough to point me in the right direction on some topics. But wow, discussion, even the small subs can be pretty toxic. It's sad as I'd love to have better discussion around various topics but every post feels like I'm walking on egg shells.

My theory is just that if anyone can join, and everything is anonymous and there is no barrier to entry [1], quality of communication will just be low. Makes me think about how some Ham Radio enthusiasts want to keep Morse Code as a requirement to get a license even though it's not really needed, it simply acts as a good filter for keeping less prudent people out of the eco-system. For web boards, maybe September will never end [2].

Hope this all isn't too cynical and please speak up if it sounds so.

[1] I realize HN is easy to join but is often seen as having far superior discussion than Reddit. I think there's just something about heavily technical article titles and topics that make it a bigger lift to want to jump in with trivial but aggressive arguing. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

pixl977• 4 years ago

HN is easy to join, but is heavily moderated and doesn't put up with much crap. And manages to avoid most the toxicity. Probably because most political discussion is avoided.

xhrpost3• 4 years ago

That's a good point, need to remember all of the work the mods do.

ajmurmann2• 4 years ago

I am curious on what type of smaller subreddits you've seen toxicity. I find that smaller, hobby-related communities are really great and I rarely to never see toxicity. Looking at anything that has potential to be even remotely be related to politics immediately turns hostile. For example r/f1 usually is quite friendly, but when the topic shifts to how races should take place in different countries, it gets a lot more hostile (e.g. "don't race in Jeddah because human right!" - "Well, let's skip USA as well, because human right then"...)

denimnerd422• 4 years ago

f1 is pretty toxic imo. it’s worse than nfl or nba. has to do with the nature of the sport being intricately rules based and it’s current high popularity I think.

xhrpost3• 4 years ago

I was heavily watching some of the stock/options trading communities and felt like even well worded questions were sometimes blown away and downvoted while others could ask completely noob questions covered immediately in pinned posts and get 100 replies.

nathias• 4 years ago

Reddit is good if you want to buy something, or are starting a hobby, for anything professional or academic its mostly terrible, mostly because the of the jannies.

phailhaus• 4 years ago

This is a very low-effort subjective post with no data to back it up. You're just asking people to rant on their own gripes about Reddit.

haunter• 4 years ago

mostly useless answers (most replies to posts are either poorly sarcastic or not replying to the actual point)

You are in the wrong subs

I agree though that default /r/all subs are overly politicized and most of them are utter thrash

xisukar• 4 years ago

It's simply degradation (if we're talking about early adopters) and growth (if we're talking about the demographics Reddit is now targeting).

themadturk• 4 years ago

I don't use Reddit's mobile app, which is awful; I use Narwhal on iOS, don't see any ads, and am reasonably happy with it.

I'm one of about two semi-technical Reddit users in the world who doesn't mind the new desktop browser interface.

I guess I carefully curate my Reddit feeds, but I don't find it hard to find quality posts. I may just be good at ignoring the bad ones.

warrenm7• 4 years ago

I use the Reddit mobile app - find it pretty nice, honestly :)

I also like the desktop interface, and curate what groups I'm in

FargaColora• 4 years ago

Reddit is a psychopath corporation. It actively promotes clownish propaganda, misinformation and conflict to make money from clicks. The homepage is thousands of people screaming hate at each other. I can't think of a corporation that has done more to degrade US society than Reddit.

When they go public soon, they're going to lock all the user-generated content behind their mobile app, and remove access from the website and APIs. Thanks for the content, suckers!

gralx• 4 years ago

The turning point for me was when they canned Victoria from r/ama. My experience with it got progressively worse thereafter. I might sign in to it once a year now (using old.reddit.com when I do). When I read posts there, I first convert the link to teddit.net.

dougmwne• 4 years ago

I have observed a few things.

-Obvious bot activity has increased, probably coordinated by troll farms warming up accounts then pushing public opinion.

-The Overton Window has slammed shut. Speech on both the right and the left has been massively curtailed. It has been decided from high up that the US population needs a cooling off period which makes all conversations quite bloodless.

-The real organic user base of people willing to invest in participation has dried up. Many niche subreddits that previously had lively and interesting communities and subcultures are now ghost towns. For example I follow some VR and travel subreddits where the participation has absolutely cratered.

My guess is that the above have scared off the high value users that drive novelty and engagement and that the whole platform is a shell just waiting to crack.

MrMan• 4 years ago

I am a bot, and I am neither far right nor left, so I am loving reddit more than 10 years ago when it was all in jokes. there are lots of good communities on reddit

physicsguy• 4 years ago

The thing I hate most of it is that every community turns into a caricature of what it is like in real life.

The UK ones are all bizarre in-jokes about stereotypes that are not at all realistic of people in the real world. It’s like people feel they have to say weird things so they fit in.

“Does anyone else love tea? Ho ho ho, I really don’t like the television programme Miranda that hasn’t even been on for 9 or 10 years. Oh god, when people try and talk to me on the tube I just die?!”

randombits0• 4 years ago

They don’t have paid staff moderators so sub moderation is chaotic.

nunez2• 4 years ago

The big communities have always been susceptible to lower content quality and mis/disinformation campaigns. Every forum that gets huge is like this. Facebook descended into this. Slashdot was not panacea before Hacker News and (ironically) Reddit stole much of their traffic.

Hacker News is _still_ not like this because:

1. Their subscriber count is relatively low compared to, say, /r/pics 2. dang and co are basically benevolent tyrants and are ultra quick about removing low-quality discussion 3. The topics are more-or-less consistent, largely due to (2) but also community response that has been shaped by (2) over time

Many of the less popular subs and all of the SUPER-well-moderated large subs (/r/History, /r/askscience) are like this. /r/COVID19 was an extremely important component in the race towards the vaccine, for example, while /r/coronavirus was doomscrolling on tap with lots of disinformation. Both are large communities.

New Reddit aside (old Reddit is safe for now), I don't think much about Reddit has changed in the 10 years I've been on it.

hammyhavoc• 4 years ago

A new generation's 4chan.

Giorgi• 4 years ago

Mods. Whenever you see community/forums take the wrong turn - it's always mods. Reddit is now extremely leftwing, to the point of pushing communism and banning everyone with even slightest conservative view-points, and that's where mods come in - mods can ban account for life sitewide. This was the first mistake

Second mistake was banning and removing subs that were controversial and might or might not have been frowned upon by advertiser.

Old Reddit used to break news first, now reddit is just 9gag

Bellend• 4 years ago

I'd argue mods as well. My account was OG and in a local subreddit after a local incident occurred, I suggested that the issue had made me reconsider my views on a subject. Pretty innocent. The mods banned me from the sub, when I replied why and gave a couple of paragraphs about how it's my local area and it would be quite upsetting to be banned over a non-offensive view, they responded with "F$£D OFF" and then my account was permabanned for "Spreading Hate or Violence".

I think I would have been able to goto the website and appeal, but I didn't really want to be part of it any more in the end. A year later, I don't miss it. I just consider it dead.

shitlord2• 4 years ago

lastitude's comment below is flagged (probably because of the source), but it was an important and newsworthy event that adds to your point.

The people who moderate the website aren't capable of behaving impartially. The admins who are supposed to moderate the platform are selected from that group. The result is unsurprising.

kcexn• 4 years ago

I've started using Reddit less and less. It used to be a great place to interact with other people who were deeply engaged and knowledgeable about hobbies, interests, and even professions. But over time the average response to my questions and comments on Reddit has dramatically lowered in quality. I think the demographic has skewed much younger, with more teenagers and kids than before. Which means that when I ask questions, particularly ones that might be even slightly technical, it's met with dozens of answers that come straight from the first page of Google...

I feel it's probably just a reversion to the mean effect. As more people adopt the Reddit platform, the platform becomes more and more like facebook.

mywaifuismeta• 4 years ago

I agree with the terrible UI/UX, but I never noticed the degradation of usefulness. I think it highly depends on what subreddits you are active in.

yogthos• 4 years ago

Anybody looking for a platform that resembles old Reddit should check out Lemmy https://lemmy.ml/

shitlord2• 4 years ago

This doesn't resemble old reddit to me. Old reddit was the wild west with competing mini fiefdoms. This website appears to be heavily curated by its operators.

yowmamasita• 4 years ago

old.reddit.com

RickJWagner• 4 years ago

I just don't much care for the crowd on Reddit. Too much political mono-think, and never any good answers for things that don't align with the common political philosophy.

In other words... kind of a waste of time, for a lot of topics.

stereoradonc• 4 years ago

Reddit was fine till Chinese invested in it.

reportgunner• 4 years ago

Reddit was always terrible, it's most likely you who matured.

warrenm7• 4 years ago

Am I the only one on HN who likes the new desktop look'n'feel?

From the smattering of comments I read here today... it seems like it

I also find that the subs I'm in are of decent-to-high quality - though none are especially large/high-traffic (ie they're all pretty niche)

thenerdhead• 4 years ago

Investors want their fair share at the sad cost of the UX that made it so great.

loceng• 4 years ago

Funded by the advertising industrial complex, captured, gamed, and manipulated by all industrial complexes including political and tyrannical, and take a peek at the last investment rounds and % of those rounds they took hold of.

My favourite subreddit?

https://www.reddit.com/WatchRedditDie

clint• 4 years ago

I actually found the old reddit (pre-2016 or so) hard to use and full of even more useless content than it is today. I personally don't understand how people continue to use the "old" reddit interface.

I spend a lot of time reading incredibly engaging and useful content on reddit (web/official app) these days.

prepend• 4 years ago

It’s kind of the same thing that’s happened to the internet. Everyone is now there instead of self-selecting smart, hacker types.

It’s a balance between making things easier to use while also that letting in everyone. And the hoi polloi are just regular people.

Not to sound snobby, but different people like different things. And McDonalds is a $200B company for a reason.

So now they’re on Reddit just being interested in regular stuff and raging and whatnot.

With the masses comes company attention and fake accounts and SEO so the corporate content is low value but prevalent.

I still use Reddit for my subreddits and get good info. But it’s harder to weed out things.

Finally, I had a curious interaction with a company trying to take over my subreddit. I started /r/grass fed years ago when I was interested in this. Not a lot of activity. Some marketing company for an unnamed company petitioned to take it over as if it was abandoned. When I responded that it’s not abandoned, just not very active and that they were welcome to post as much as they like the sub stayed with me as a mod. But they didn’t post anything. Makes me wonder what kind of company wants to mod a sub in order to participate. And how common this is.

Ask HN: What Happened to Reddit?

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