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ruky.me

111 pointsrukshn53 comments

The day either 'i.reddit.com' or 'old.reddit.com' stop working, Reddit will never again receive a visit from me. To other readers, i.reddit.com will solve all your mobile woes.

As for me, I find the front page to already be a cesspool of pretty shallow political takes, star wars memes, gaming news and awful twitter screenshots, all of which are pretty repulsive. I also get the sense that Reddit is used more by a new generation of kids, about half my age. I guess one of the disadvantages of being over thirty is that you lose the appetite to engage with teenagers/early-20s people who are on their own journey towards maturity.

Have you tried googling something like: <technical issue> site:reddit.com ?

The results look relevant but often refer to other posts you don’t see if going to the link.

and a site:reddit.com with timestamp (last month etc) is useless now since it apparently uses timestamps off other posts that were visible in the same community once. Driving me avsolutely insane that this one site doesnt give accurate results on google.

There's also Pushshift[0], a Reddit analytics project that also offers a custom search engine[1]. It's clutched out significantly better results than either Google with site: tags or Reddit's native search, the few times I've had reason to try it.

[0] https://pushshift.io/

[1] https://redditsearch.io/

Indeed. I've found that what works best for me is to use an account with my subreddits subscribed to. This way, I don't get tempted to go to the home page.

There's also teddit.net, a reddit mirror that uses the reddit API to present a light weight skin. It is a bit too slow for me, and the features are pretty lacking. I don't think a spartan "no javascript" take is what's needed to cure the garbage that is full reddit web experience. Still it's a good first attempt.

I'm hoping someone will come along and create a lean, mean, yet functional semantic reddit web frontend.... That is, before reddit kills their API.

There's also: https://github.com/spikecodes/libreddit

And full-blown, federated Reddit alternative: https://join.lemmy.ml/

There's more than one federated reddit alternative. :P

Yes, been doing this since they changed the site on mobile. As well as being easier to read and scroll through, it's far, far faster to load pages

As someone who's in their mid twenties right now, I do somewhat relate to that. I used to hang around a lot more gaming community subreddits but I think somewhere along the lines the content shifted towards more crappy karma farming memes and other shit posts as opposed to more discussion based posts.

I barely visit /r/all anymore because most things you find there are just not enjoyable or good. There are still some smaller and sometimes even larger communities on there that are good at managing a nice balance between posts but they become more and more rare to find.

I used old.* but never i.* Thanks for the tip, the jquery mobile look brings back some memories!

Reddit is where nuance goes to die.

It's about who ever yells loudest. At a point I lacked the energy to keep using it, like I don't use social media or online dating. Life is very short, and they put you in a box at it's end. No one's box has their Reddit karma count on it.

My experience says hobby subs on Reddit are amazing though, and plenty of 30 or older generation. Used to visit leathercraft and bicycling sub daily, until real life forced me to forgo both hobbies.

Agreed. The more niche/focussed the hobby, the happier the subreddit atmosphere. I love /r/bikecommuting too, and also /r/ergomechkeyboards, /r/formula1, /r/financialindependence etc.

If you're interested for an alternative, keep an eye on my project (in my profile). I've been working on a link aggregator alternative for small to medium sized communities that can govern themselves and intercommunicate among themselves by using the ActivityPub protocol. The grand plan would involve convincing some of the cooler reddit communities to take off on their own using my (or a similar) platform.

Are they really forcing us to use the app for maximizing user engagement? I tend to think they can syphon more user data from an app than from a browser and that would be their motivation.

While I have my tinfoil hat on, let's continue. I think reddit gradually degraded the mobile browser experience on purpose to push users toward the app. Seriously, how hard is it to show an image without clipping it? Images were fully shown before, then you had to click on individual posts to see them without cropping. Forcing people to expand comments is another one. Before we had infinite scroll, then you had to click many times to see the full extent of comments... And then a bit later, passed a few levels of nesting you were forced to use the app.

I don't know if an app like SlimSocial (which let you use Facebook's mobile site with the embedded messenger) exists for Reddit. I hate being forced to accept "permissons" to install / use an app. Personal data is the price to pay for services nowadays.

They can't push notifications without an app, so yeah. Install the app and it's a neverending stream of bullshit, so no, thanks.

Getting rather fed up with Google's random news/articles (I'm guessing paid by advertisers?), although I know I can disable that, I just forgot where. I think I enabled it when setting up Assistant.

Another dark pattern they introduced recently are differing flavours of markdown in new and old reddit, resulting in lots of visually broken code snippets for users of old reddit. It might be unintentional (I doubt it), but there's no question that adding new formatting capabilities to reddit, but leaving in the raw source code for users of old reddit is quite a downgrade. I tried switching temporarily to the new design and I still hate it.

I think a lot of this pain is caused by people who think that correlation == causation.

Reddit's app users are more active than its mobile users, sure.

But that doesn't mean that the mobile users will become more active when you force them to be app users.

Eventually, all "light" users will abandon reddit while the "hardcore" users are forced to use the app.

The metrics of user engagement will look reeeaally good, but the breadth and depth of reddit will be gone.

And as a result, reddit will go the way of digg.

But what will be the new Reddit, is the question.

This is great. The other day I was tempted to go to reddit, for the first time in months, to check what was going on on a subreddit and was hit with that.

So I went away and my life is better for that. Thanks, reddit!

I can't even view comments without downloading the app.

All NSFW posts are behind a app wall ("use anonymous mode in app to view porn"). They know it will get people to download the app.

All subreddits are behind an app wall.

All live streams too, but since I don't care about them, I ain't complaining.

I was able to see small subreddits without the app. I was thinking whether they are blocking only the bigger subreddits.

They block based on the country you are from. If I use a UK/US VPN, I don't get the download app banner. But when I browse without a VPN (Indian IP), I get so many popups asking me to download the app.

I'm in the UK and I get the reddit app banners all the time browsing with my phone; I can ignore them and still browse the site.

I don't comment often, so I moved to use https://teddit.net/ -- probably a temp solution, but as long as it is available, I'll use it.

Just commented above. You can also have a look at: https://github.com/spikecodes/libreddit

IIRC “request desktop site” works

Yeah, but I don't want to do all that. I stopped using reddit.

How long have you scrolled? Ime, you can view only like a dozen posts, then it requires you to log in. Same for comments. Bigger subreddits seem blocked right away.

They chose the Pinterest model, and unlike Pinterest, Reddit actually has good content.

If you're on ios, use apollo app. Its not reddit's app so privacy concerns are nill but they have the best ui hands-down to browse reddit.

Also, NSFW posts work fine on apollo ;)

My only gripe with Apollo is the mod-mail functionality. Other than that, it is the best way to use Reddit. I can’t remember the last time I saw an ad or sponsored post!

Reddit NSFW content is best viewed on scrolller.com anyway :)

This is bound to happen to all websites dedicated to posting someone else's content. Start building your own websites and online communities instead of relying on brands which are cool now but later will do things like this to suck more money out of user-supplied content.

“instead what they should do is introduce some awesome features that will make the users download the app by themselves so they can enjoy those features”

This never works anywhere close to as well as login-walling content.

Google needs to start penalising sites like Reddit for this crap.

From the post title, I was expecting this to be about an application the author created in which the community of users and devs is accessible from within the application itself.

So for example, if you are using Blender then there is a tab for viewing recent posts, or Q&A by fellow users of the application.

I wonder why no one does that.

The last thing I want to do when I'm actually in Blender is context switch. I'll look at the subreddit some other time, but making it easier to distract myself doesn't sound like a good idea to me.

You make a good point.

Still it would be nice if an application provided it's own community platform, maybe as a separate executable.

I’ve just become so...tired of the anti-consumer mechanisms.

The pop-ups. The floating “dickbars” (as John Gruber calls them). The delayed prompts. The login blockers after trying to do like 2 simple things. At some point I just think “do you want me to use this or not?!?” and just leave.

I encourage everyone to do the same, just leave these sites that disrespect you. Start adding up all the time you saved, when you discover half the “articles” or comments weren’t really worth your time to begin with.

The UX changes definitely made it easy to cut reddit out of my life, not that I was using it for much anymore.

What I would love to understand is who is calling the shots here and what metrics are they using to justify these measures. Are people who previously lurked actually complying and installing the native app? Are reddit's internal metrics properly tracking this loss of engagement, or have they gamed the metrics to make it seem like there is 0 downside to these walls?

It's a decision that puts reddit at odds with the user experience. That said, just switch your mobile browser to "use desktop site" or however your browser calls that feature. You have to wrestle with a (an?) UI designed for big screens though, beats not being able to see anything at all.

What's more annoying than the prompt for me is that they don't automatically redirect to the app if I have it installed. I've seen other apps do this but I'm not sure on the technical specifics. Just take me to the app if I have it installed instead of having to decline / accept.

It’s like a paywall, sign in or install the app to view content

Did the people who found reddit involved with it anyway now? They were pretty cool people and I can't believe they would approve of all this nonsense.

Maybe the old team has been completely replaced by evil pointy haired people who don't care about anything except kpis?

I guess in any company or startup there comes a place where you have to focus on growth, and this change comes at a cost,

When Facebook introduced the feed, and many features that were bad in privacy but good in growth they all paid out to be good decisions on the long run because they were data driven.

I feel Reddit has come to that point and my assumption is these measures are also data driven

> Did the people who found reddit involved with it anyway now?

It was founded by three people:

Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide over bullshit charges.

Alexis Ohanian, who resigned from reddit's board in June this year.

Steve Huffman (AKA spez) who's still around as a CEO.

But nowadays the latter two try to erase Swartz's legacy (https://i.imgur.com/a3dARxi.jpg).

Wow, that's really disgusting. They should be ashamed of themselves.

I'm pretty sure there's more nuance to this story than you're suggesting.

Swartz was not a co-founder, their companies merged 6 months later (undeniably however he was heavily involved in the early days of reddit)

Recommendation:

If you prefer old.reddit.com to the new, try the RES (Reddit Enhancement Suite) add-on for Firefox mobile. It seems to be unaffected by these changes.

There are better ways to use reddit on mobile, but the reddit app isn't the way to go.

Please try out teddit.net , it's an amazing, lightweight, privacy friendly version of reddit!

I just stopped using it after this shit not Worth the hassle

Reddit used to be about free speech and internet activism, now it's about censorship and pushing a political agenda.

It's really amazing how you can go from awesome to super shitty. Reddit has implemented an automated thought police which means you will be banned if you upvote what they think is bad things.

It's really disgusting. Personally I went from loving reddit to hating it. If you like China and censorship, reddit is a great place for you.

> Reddit used to be about free speech and internet activism,

Not for me it wasn't.

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