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

I wonder if offering different experiences for what is the same site is actually working out better in practice than we'd expect. That contradicts what we seem to know about site design and would be considered uneconomical, but might it help Reddit keep a broader set of communities? I'm not sure how we'd know this externally, but perhaps someone here has some insights.

By the time New Reddit was launched old reddit wasn't even the primary way to view the site anymore. Nowadays new reddit crushes old reddit. Reddit doesn't need it's old users, it doesn't need you, and it doesn't need me. It could kill off old reddit today and it would be fine.

Even imagining a bug in the registration code, you would at least go to a confirmation page before creation is commited.

It sees Google credentials and then auto creates an account that you can change the name on. I keep deleting them but reddit keeps making them. I just gave up and kept u/redditisastupidhead as my minor protest.

It was the final straw, I now just avoid the place altogether. It is like having a preappreoved credit card turn up in the mail, it is trying to suck you in. No thanks!

Politics is fine if it's discussed like it is on HN†: level-headed arguments are debated, discussed, and, if a consensus isn't reached, we can agree to disagree. Reddit is polluted by absolute political drivel, except for a very small subset of subs. Low-effort "Trump is bad" posts that get massively upvoted just gets old after a while, especially when you see it every single day.

† HN has been historically center-libertarian (which is a bit of self-selection by entrepreneurial folks), but recently started leaning much more left, no doubt due to an influx of non-startup-founding users.

I don't go to Reddit for content, I go for the community. That doesn't seem right because the perception is that Reddit is highly toxic, but it sustains a lot of life when you look closer.

There is a particular health-related sub-reddit that I discovered after a diagnosis and while it is highly imperfect it was a lifeline and something I spent a lot of time contributing back on. In about 20% of threads it spun off to PM threads and discussions continued over days. I see this pattern across the site, even though my bookmark goes to r/programming.

Also, I find that searching Reddit with Google yields much more trustworthy information than just searching Google, which tends to return a bunch of sponsored results, ads, and SEO garbage. Folks on Reddit (especially focused subreddits) do a very good job of filtering all that stuff out already. It's not perfect, but it's often vastly better than Google alone.

I'd go so far as to say that politics is inherently destructive to online communities. It inevitably leads to people fighting over which team that they're on.

it really isn't. it's bottom-quality content, everyone can have an opinion about politics, it's too easy. Every subreddit > 100000 has a politics problem because people have now been conditioned to see politics everywhere. It takes effort to keep things topical. And then, even the politics subreddits themselves are completely confused, e.g. r/libertarian is a mostly socialist sub now.

You can say it is addiction but I would say it is focused addiction. When I am reading about options trading, I am reading about options, investments, dividends and what not - usually there is a purpose and maybe a perceived benefit, and when I am reading about entertainment, it is to track reviews and user comments - same perceived benefit - I could go to IMDB but it is not the same.

reddit makes money off rage.

Its like, unusable... I'm amazed that the video player still only seems to work half the time.

I guess the questions is if they can keep it that way and also monetize.

I left that cess pool behind about a year ago, and I don't miss it.

Do any other APIs include ads to be shown to the end user? It's an interesting idea!

The overall quality of my experience on Reddit was slowly degrading for the past few years. I didn’t enjoy the culture of the subs I visited any more, or the apparent culture of the site overall—and Reddit itself seemed to be funneling me towards those people and places because that kind of mild controversy drives engagement. But it felt like it had become an unjustifiable waste of time because I wasn’t even being enriched or entertained anymore. They started pushing harder to share my location, watch live broadcasts, use their chat, started abusing app notifications, and the ads became surprisingly intrusive. Eventually I just decided to leave.

I don’t really begrudge them any of the changes if it helps them build a successful, sustainable business that their users enjoy—I’m just not interested in the new experiences and functionality they have prioritized.

pull, not push for me.

For me it's essentially my work e-mail (not personal), the WSJ, my credit card, my calendar and Accuweather. Everything else can forever hold its peace

I remember a certain version of mobile web in 2017/2018 that worked GREAT. But then reddit decided to mess it all up by forcing mobile web users to use their (bloated and ad-filled) app and making it hard to access certain communities and read more than 2 layers of child comments.

I guess that's what relentless pursuit of advertising money/monetization targets over actually listening to the community (that made the product what it is now in the first place) does to a company.

[0]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.onelouder....

If you're logged in you can set it to always default to the old design. I do that, and disable all custom stylesheets, which is basically a necessity to make the site useable again.

I keep looking and monitoring promising replacements but haven't found one yet. I do think the ultimate way forward is going to be some kind of federated system where each "subreddit" is hosted individually and there are aggregators which glue them together, either as a hosted portal or as individual apps.

One of the things that has been killing me is that small interesting subreddits keep getting either killed for not being actively moderated enough or invaded by people who have their own goals. It's very frustrating and it really hurts the longterm knowledge that gets generated in these subreddits.

If anyone is working in this space, please drop me a line.

It's like when a favorite local family owned burger joint shuts down and is replaced by a McDonalds. It serves many more people but the core community and values are gone.

One day I stopped what I was doing and looked at what it was. I was on the website I'd blocked. The way I'd done it was I'd forwarded the Xserver from a dedicated server I was running elsewhere and was browsing on a remote Konqueror or Epiphany or some shit.

It taught me something interesting about my Akrasia - the problem isn't a lack of focus on a specific task. It was a task choice problem and a long-term incentive awareness problem. I wasn't even aware I'd done all of these things to access the site I'd blocked. I'd auto-piloted through them. Fascinating.

And FWIW I agree with you. I've been a 15 year reddit user (and employee!) but if old.reddit goes away, I suspect my usage will go way down. The good news is that the current execs know this, because I have told them.

But at the end of the day they have to do what's best for the business, and I'm afraid those of us who like the old interface aren't large in number.

Edit to add: I don't think they'll kill off the old.reddit interface. I think they'll just stop updating and more and more things won't work there, like i.reddit.com.

[edit] If I open reddit in incognito then I can see the redesign, otherwise I can't. Maybe I opted out of the redesign at some point? Can't see anything about it in settings though

It really is unusually heavy; even for a "modern" web-page.

Removing Old reddit might be the single biggest negative change that can occur to my daily internet life.

People have ben telling them this for years. They know and do not give a shit or at the very least they are powerless to do anything. The redesign is so bad I'll stop using reddit completely if they ever kill the old domain. Its almost like they intentionally tried to make the least functional website possible.

Great UX xD

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...

There's obscene amounts of in-group signaling here too. It just takes different forms. Forms other users can adapt to if they have motivation.

https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/jwme40/deprecating...

Reddit's whole philosophy with chat was just to shove it down everyone's throats, and see if it sticks. The spammers loved it right from the get-go, but nobody else is using it.

There must be a quite large fraction of their MAUs who are just random visitors (to meme posts etc) who don't return.

If found Reddit kinda unusable for something like that, at least compared to the old school IMDB forums.

The first results looking for any media are usually the official subs attached to the IP, and there you will rarely find anybody being critical of anything, it's often just a giant fandom circle-yerk.

Bigger things will sometimes have their own threads on r/movies, with more diverse takes, but that feels more like an exception than a rule.

Interesting tidbit is that the Falun Dafa believe their rituals improve their organs so they have the most desirable organs to have harvested.

Around the time of Cesar Sayoc's, the "MAGABomber"[1], mail bomb campaign, even Wikipedia articles like "Terrorism in the United States"[2] were banned in comments, and posts that contained it would have the AutoModerator shadowban the comment instantly.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAGA_Bomber

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States

Think of it like talking points. You get your daily site and subject list and with reddit it means voting on specific postings.

And yeah, I wish we could stop reporting on how Trump is bad and corrupt, but that would require to stop doing bad and corrupt things.

Maybe you are mistaking views you disagree with as bias even when they are firmly grounded in reality?

If you see something you suspect is propaganda on r/pics, just ask yourself, what is the user who submitted it trying to make me feel? What associations are they trying to form in my mind between the subject of the photo and the title?

Which then get taken over by SJW mods after some time any way.

Didn't they champion themselves as the bastions of free speech at one point?

that was a real stroke of brilliance but also of pure evil. When combined with the downvote button and aggressive moderation against 'undesired content' and 'misinformation', they've ensured themselves to be quite a powerful totalitarian bubble with a large army and outsized influence on internet culture.

I found myself getting really angry needlessly and had to delete my account. I'll browse subs like Unity though.

Consider that most "purges" happen to coincide with bad PR and you'll understand that's what their motive is.

And unless you put a similar fee to unlock voting, you don't prevent a whole class of issues with bots.

However, I think the qualities that you are saying define post-Trump Republicans are a caricature that is convenient to believe in but not fair. Trump's unexpectedly broad support has to do more with the fact that he's willing to stand up against a far-left influence that has been spiraling out of control and taking the near-left and center with it, all the while facing little critique or checks from other politicians. This is a deeper topic than I can articulate in a single HN comment, but my point is that the quick takes that portray Trump voters in such negative terms feel good to us but are not fair because people have deeper, and often legitimate reasons to support him despite all of his drawbacks.

I also think we should remember that progressive activists are only 8% of the country (https://hiddentribes.us/profiles/#progressive-activists) but they are forcing their views on everyone else, through aggressive/uncivil/authoritarian tactics and due to the physical location of influential media/tech companies. These mainstream platforms are marching to the tune of this 8% (an extreme) rather than the broad center in my opinion.