Reddit Rolls Out Green Indicator Dots to Notify People When You're Online | Hacker News Reader

Reddit Rolls Out Green Indicator Dots to Notify People When You're Online

pcmag.com

35 pointsdrewrem1112 comments

Reddit seems so preposterously stupid. They keep inventing ways to make the site worse.

For example, I just went to reddit to see if I could see a green dot by my username. First thing I got was a popup at the bottom asking me to register my email account (it's a 12 year account, I've refused to do this who knows how many times by now, keep me asking me though - maybe one day). I saw the green dot. I expanded my profile and saw a little toggle by "Online" and clicked it. Nothing happened. I clicked it repeatedly. After a few seconds I got five "Status saved" updates appearing at once. Now I didn't know the state of my setting. I refreshed the page. It loaded the page in the unauthenticated state, dark mode is gone, my reddit page is replaced with the unauthenticated version, etc. I refreshed again, now I'm back in authenticated and see my status indicator is off.

I don't even care about the status indicator, it just bothers me that reddit is striving to become more and more this clumsy, over-engineered, mess. It's slow. Things don't work right. It's obnoxious. Why not clean and simple, like hackernews?

They say the status indicator is to promote talking with your friends - but is that what people are using reddit for? Why not just try to be a good link aggregator and forum rather than mash in messenger and what not. Reddit would be much better had they focused on nothing but site reliability and performance for the past 10 years.

Reddit was great. It started as a response to sites like Digg where people would vote for an article and talk about it without having Read It. That was a great idea.

Then, slowly but surly it was taken over by children. They first and worst thing they did was add images to the home page. That alone was enough to kill the idea of the site and turn into a meme popularity contest, not for discussing articles you read.

Now children and teenagers rule the roost. I wish there was a good alternative but enough good people are still stuck on Reddit that its hard for any competitors to get traction.

By children do you mean the general masses, conde nast, or actually children?

r/teenagers alone is 2.4 mil subscribers. I can see that being their main demographic now, the redesigns and new features (and forcing the app format) are fair signs that their are banking that growing demographic.

I was floored to discover Reddit is violating Google’s Auth TOS! Check this out:

1. Log in using your Google account.

2. Log out of reddit.

3. Clear your Reddit cookies.

4. Visit Reddit again.

You’ll be automatically logged in..!! This is nuts, shady, and a violation of the Google TOS. You can’t keep users’ auth tokens, secretly, and then log them back in when you feel like it. A user clicking “log out” means you expire the auth token.

In case it saves anyone a click: https://old.reddit.com/prefs/ and scroll to “Privacy options” to opt out. While you’re at it, turn off ad personalization: https://old.reddit.com/personalization/

Launching this feature (show everyone your online presence) and making it an opt-out feature really demonstrates how tone deaf social media companies have become IMHO.

I really don't get why this was even released?? What benefit does reddit get from having it??

Spitballing possibilities -- in a brainstorming session, someone thought it'd be cool and drive up user engagement to have an online status, so users could talk to each other. Or an engineering team trying to preserve its function presented this idea. It then gets built, but business owners know that it will never get used if it's off by default, so they set it to on.

Either way, the mechanisms of a platform drive its culture. After people get used to this, people will respond to the ones who are online more than those offline. So people will stay online because they want replies to their comments. This will indeed drive up engagement, but as with Facebook's like button and YouTube's video recommendation algorithm -- this is not a feature that drives up engagement by making people want to stay. It's one that feeds on a person's psyche to make them feel like they can't leave.

I used to love reddit, and while I still use it almost daily, I have come to hate it. Whenever I do a search in firefox and end up on a reddit result it is always pushing the app, recently they even put an artificial delay on the 'open in browser' button, while the 'open in app' button appears straight away.

And this new 'online feature' why would you push this in the current age? Everyone is already scrambling for their privacy.

I can't use reddit as comfortably without a third-party app now.

Sync for Reddit is how I roll.

For all of you still perservering against the tide on old.reddit, you can turn off this new "feature." There's a new opt-out under the privacy section of the preferences page: 'let other users see my online status'

Thanks, I was about to ask.

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