Reddit’s disrespectful design

I ran Product Engineering at a competing startup (hundreds of millions of MAUs) that tested/employed similar flows. And yes, they work in the short-term, and unless you are very principled, it's hard to avoid them. I'm glad you heavily protested them. But I'd like to further the argument for why they should be avoided.

First, yes they do work in the short-term. You run an A/B test with some adversarial flow that blocks mobile web traffic users from doing certain things. Most of them get pissed, but enough of them download the mobile app (which allows you to build up their engagement via phone presence and notifications) that the A/B test is positive. Rinse and repeat. A few dozen experiments later, and now these patterns are pervasive across your product.

Apart from whether they work (in the short-term), there are three other questions readers of this thread should think about because I'd hate for people to walk away thinking "these patterns are normalized and they work so, sigh, i should just do them too".

One is whether they work in the long-term. Yes, you can juice your metrics in the short-term, and sometimes that translates to long-term growth, but it's harder to measure secondary effects. Can you accurately measure product brand damage and quantify the long-term impact?

Second, and as an EM you should appreciate this, can you measure secondary brand damage like _recruiting brand_ damage? Dark patterns (and threads like this with hundreds of passionate engineers talking about how much they hate those dark patterns) _will_ damage your ability to hire the type of engineers you want to help you build your product.

Finally, there's some subjective ethical question in here. Even if these patterns work in the short and long term, do you _want_ to spend your life, your intellectual energy, your time turning the internet into this? Do you want to go out and hire smart, passionate people and get _them_ to spend their time and intellectual energy turning the internet into this?

(side note: I have no affiliation with the author of this post, but I wrote the original Disrespectful Design post he links to in his first paragraph)

You say power users complain but the casual user does not (as a result of these features) - this sort of position ruins reddit's community as it suggests that reddit doesn't really care about the members who have contributed all kinds of content over the years and instead favors trying to get new members who are just marginally interested, or worse, just like endlessly scrolling through a timeline. This thread has mentions of several users that don't use reddit anymore (me included) and as reddit continues shoving monetization down the user's throat you'll see that those members will continue leaving until the platform is indistinguishable from the likes of Facebook, Digg, etc.

> These practices are done because it works.

It works for metrics. It works for making more money than you know what to do with. It absolutely doesn't work for keeping your user base loyal. The moment you implement the dark patterns, the users immediately start looking for alternatives to your platform that respect them.

That said, I still use reddit. Except I use the old design and RES. And a third-party app on my phone.

“I made it worse for users but it is making me rich” is peak Silicon Valley.

You've created value for shareholders, at the detriment of society. "Congrats".

> power users complain—and still continue using the site—but the casual user does not.

This was the exact situation digg just before the mass migration to reddit happened.

I always think that by building products that treat the consumer like an enemy to be conquered will eventually result in someone building a better product and stealing the market. It never happens though.

I wonder if some of the tech like Cloudflare Workers will eventually allow someone to build competing products that crush the existing platforms. IMO it’s dangerous (business wise) to get addicted to revenue that comes from treating your users very badly. I think we’ll eventually see companies like Facebook and Reddit get conquered. At least I hope so.

> it works.

That's the thing. I don't doubt that it does. But certainly there are _other_ things that work as well that may or may not be as profitable but are certainly more ethical.

And that's basically what bugs me.

They don't seem to be in earnest trying to do anything else that might provide much more value.

> power users complain—and still continue using the site—but the casual user does not.

And that's what makes it worse. That's effectively exploiting the fact that most users are not well informed about privacy.

At the risk of sounding too hyperbolic, a similar but more nefarious example is that power users didn't fill in Cambridge Analytica's quizzes, but casual users did.

I'm /u/zjz on wallstreetbets. That google sign-in flow thing has caused us a good bit of hassle because people became convinced that usernames fitting the Word-Word-#### scheme are all bots.

It doesn't help that the kind of person who lets a google sign-in type flow suggest a username for them is probably a lazy commenter.

Perhaps an announcement in the future when a user-facing identifier is auto-generated would be wise.

For those trying follow along, from Andrew Chen's site: DAU/MAU is a popular metric for user engagement – it’s the ratio of your daily active users over your monthly active users, expressed as a percentage. Usually apps over 20% are said to be good, and 50%+ is world class.

How did this metric come into use? DAU/MAU has been a popular metric because of Facebook, which popularized the metric. As a result, as they began to talk about it, other consumer apps came to often be judged by the same KPIs. I first encountered DAU/MAU as a ratio during the Facebook Platform days, when it was used to evaluate apps on their platform.

> These practices are done because it works.

Which practices, though? A number of the practices you note (e.g. streamlined signup flow) are not user hostile at all, and others are a mixed bag. (E.g. one could argue that AMP + a properly featured mobile site and 'official' app were necessary steps with a subpar implementation). But when looking specifically at the dark patterns that power users are most likely to complain about, it's unclear that they would help DAU/MAU much, if at all. Casual users might not complain overtly all that much, but they're almost certainly discouraged by many such practices.

"power users complain—and still continue using the site—but the casual user does not..."

this summarizes the way i feel about every single application out there.

> They changed it so I would report to the product lead, which is odd for an EM to report into a product chain and the only instance within the company ever.

This screams of power play. Good on you for moving your neck before the axe came down.

The fact your engineering higher-ups didn’t push back or failed to push back is really scary.

> I am responsible for ... AMP pages

Why does Reddit use AMP pages and a mobile site that look exactly the same? For speed/SEO benefits? Disabling AMP would still look mostly the same for normal Reddit users but would make "old." users much happier.

There's a sucker born every minute.

When I was 10 I bought Pokemon cards, which looking back on, was a huge waste of money, but at least it wasn't all that much money in the end. I was a newbie to the scene, and I got taken advantage of. Lesson learned.

10 years later when phones were just coming into everyone's pockets, a whole new wave of gamers emerged. Game companies could either develop for the previous wave, by building games like Starcraft II, or they could build for the current wave, and build games like Candy Crush.

Gamers who prefer games like Starcraft want to pay once for a game that lasts years and expect perfection. Candy Crush, like the Pokemon cards before it, expected nothing and were willing to spend a bunch of money for ultimately nothing. The business should clearly move to making Candy Crushes. The ROI is insane.

But the more you bleed the users, the more they get fleeced, the more they start to learn, the more they regret. Yesterday's Pokemon cards buyers were todays Starcraft gamers, and today's Candy Crush players are tomorrows expert gamers. You want to build your platform to grow with them. Build a Candy Crush, then build it slightly more complex. In 10 years, they will be ready for Starcraft.

You can continue to seek the bottom of the skill zone, but we had that one wave where adults of all ages were getting new phones and experiencing things that they had never done before. We had that one time where kids were able to ask their parents and their parents were not skilled and did not regret so they did not say no. Using a peak oil metaphor, we've reach peak sucker. We'll never have this opportunity again.

So cutting back to Reddit - Reddit, like Digg and Slashdot and Usenet before it, released to the Starcraft level of the social commentors. They are hard to deal with, they expect everything for nothing, but the quality of their content brought along with it the slightly less expert commentators. Eventually that filtered down and the entire internet was on Reddit. The entire internet was incredible for their ROI.

Digg was ruined because they abandoned the Starcraft commentors. When they left, everyone left with them. Reddit has been smart in this regard, as the old features and the old API still exists, the power users can use power user tools and keep the same experience. But understand, that if given the opportunity to move elsewhere, even somewhere that has less features like say... Hacker News, they will do so. They have done so. If Reddit keeps chasing the bottom of the market, when someone does show up with actual innovations like what Reddit had over Digg, you need to be afraid because just like Digg the site will be dead over-night.

When you should be looking at bringing those casual users into moderate users, you keep trying the dark patterns. But each time you go back to the dark patterns they get weaker and weaker. That strong dark pattern that used to get you millions of dollars now only get you hundreds of thousands. Next week it will be tens of thousands. Your users are developing dark pattern tolerance. You don't yet have a valid competitor, this is exactly when you should be experimenting to disrupt yourself.

"Yes, power users complain—and still continue using the site" I wonder what would happen after you removed old.reddit.com and api access for reddit apps. For icing on the cake, use creative class names to f*ck with RES and ad blockers. My guess, if you do all of this, reddit's gonna crash on the ground pretty quickly.

True,but you know what else grows at ridiculous rates?

Cancer.

Growth, especially at all costs, leads to a cancerous organization that cannabilizes itself.

But hey,the shareholders!

So some of his ideas were dark patterns that you protested, and others were dark patterns that you supported, and in retrospect are happy that you implemented, due to revenue growth? Did you receive any pushback from engineers, and if so, how did you handle that?

True. And reddit is now a much worse place than most people remember. I remember r/atheism being in the defaults and not a FP full of pictures and brainless memes :(

I don't think it's accurate that "lay-users" prefer the new UI. Perhaps the metrics have improved, but in my experience I have heard nothing but frustration from my non-technical peers when it comes to the new dark patterns which Reddit has been implementing.

Edit: "reined in" and not "reigned in".

I apologize for the Freudian slip as my edit window has passed.

makes sense.

Also if anyone doesnt like the new mobile redesign they should probably try using "i.reddit.com"

(which is a light mobile client)

Seconded. The old.reddit.com UI is still pretty bad on mobile, but it's the only remotely usable one.

The default mobile site goes out of its way to make it difficult to read the thread, while also confusingly merging other threads into the page.

If it is an Imgur link there are additional steps. It shows you a microscopic image that is compressed to hell and refuses to respect “show desktop site”. The only way to see the full size image is to manually edit the url to “i.imgur.com/<id>.<extension>” where <extension> is one of jpg, jpeg, or webp but you have to guess. It’s astounding just how hostile the entire experience is.

The best solution I’ve found is buying Apollo and Opener so then the flow is.

Long press link, tap share, tap open in Apollo.

Their rich comment editor appears broken. Pasting once works but pasting twice completely breaks the text area.

Reddit has become another VC invested company where crippling features, dark patterns on forced "adoption" and dark "growth" hacks du jours are the norms.

I'm a very early and long term user, and I slowly moved away after "the" investment.

HN on the other hand is still safe, as the huge success of YC and their aim of gathering talent and readers gives more financial freedom. What if some investor now invests in HN, gathers a board, assigns a CEO with the profitability and "growth" target? I'm afraid to ask this, but the same could happen.

It's atrocious that their main interface is like this, but have you tried i.reddit.com?

> Meaning not only can I not expand any more comments, but I can't even go back see other un-expanded comments.

I'm pretty certain it used to work and they intentionally broke it so that you cannot close the modal popup.

>complete capitulation to censorship at a corporate level.

sigh

I would still use Reddit and put up with all the bad UI design and dark patterns if it wasn't for the censorship. I miss the pre-2016 election reddit when it was still full of pedantic types who would have long debates in comment threads where they would break each other's arguments down line by line. I wasn't strongly in favor of one belief or another, but it taught me a lot about forming arguments and persuasive writing that English classes never taught me. Back in those days you would still see productive debates between left-wing and libertarian types. Now with all the gold and comment badges discussion has devolved down to who can make the wittiest, snarkiest one liner that will get them rewarded.

All those things suck at reddit, but to me the fundamental issue with reddit is upvoting/downvoting + a massive user base. Subreddits get too large and are dominated by lowest common denominator quips and memes to the point that the content is junk food for echo chambers. Every so often some bit of insight can rise, but by and large that's the problem and it's fundamental to reddit's DNA and no UX fixes would solve that.

>Reddit has completely jumped the shark in its UI design, the 'direction' its taken, and its basically complete capitulation to censorship at a corporate level. Its interesting to that they haven't IPO'd yet, because in my view, its a zombie carcass waiting for its replacement to find its way onto the net.

They're never going to IPO, because they're owned by Advance Publications. Reddit hasn't been a startup for like a decade.

> There has always been a place, a need, and a demand for anonymous, free form discussions on the internet.

With the EU terreg and other countries like UK's online safety bill, owners will have to censor content on request or become liable. Free speech internet is going to be a pipe dream in a year or so. There is never going to be alternative to Reddit and remaining free speech sites will have to close or become compliant.

A lot has been written about the social and legal difficulties of running such a site (how much do you enjoy looking at child porn all day so you can ban the people posting it? How many mass-shooters would you like to have post their manifesto on your site?) But I think the real issue is just money. Even if you keep things pretty stripped down, as 4chan or the original reddit did, hosting still costs money. And if you ever catch on, it's going to cost a LOT of money. Where is that money going to come from? Your users? You don't have a commercial product people are willing to pay for. Advertisers? Not in a post ad-pocalypse era; they don't want to be anywhere near a free, anonymous platform. And keep in mind that eventually you'll have to pay for ddoss protection, a security and moderation team, and probably legal as well. So unless you're wealthy enough to just pay for the site out of pocket indefinitely, any reddit or image board clone is doomed to failure from the beginning. It has a ticking death clock that will expire when the owners finally realize they can no longer afford it.

The Reddit mobile web experience is so obviously bad that I can only assume it's intentional.

There must be some huge incentive for Reddit to push users toward the mobile app. Most likely, the app allows for higher or more accurate monthly active user counts and enables more targeted advertising, both of which are critical to increasing advertising revenues.

Reddit is in a difficult spot because they're mostly an ad-supported business but their users are vehemently opposed to advertising and any forms of tracking. They have to tip-toe around all of the advertising and user tracking that they do. Strangely, their users mostly seem to give them a pass on the tracking. Their users are relatively trustworth, viewing Reddit as far more trustworthy of a company than Facbeook, despite the two companies having largely similar business models.

There is also a bug with the AMP pages such that the submission dates for the threads are often wrong. For example you're searching for threads that have been posted in the last month, some of the results will say something like "7 days ago" until you click and see it is actually 5 years old.

speaking of their google results, let's also draw attention to the fact that they lie about post dates in google results to get you to click on a result from this week, only to click through and find that it's a post 7 years old

Every time I get annoyed by something like this, I go to the front page if Reddit, see that 90% of the posts are political advertisements disguised as viral content, and realize it’s a minor problem in the grand scheme. I just wish communities would make their own message boards again instead of coalescing on subreddits that they have zero control of.

Reddit's design is what actively pushed me to Hacker News, the Risks Digest, and a healthy mix of paid news (WSJ, FT, Bloomberg, etc). The site is really being redesigned to enable astroturfing and user manipulation on a commercial level. Ads are made to look like posts, and sometimes the posts themselves are just ads.

I've come to the opinion that it's impossible for any free social media platform to avoid this unless the people running it are doing it as an act of charity. If you want to make money, you either make users pay or you sell access to / information from the userbase itself.

Have you tried https://old.reddit.com ?

What annoys me even more is that they kinda block the ability to read more /all comments when you're not logged in, at least this has been my experience so far.

I've tried alternatives, and I keep going back to i.reddit.com for mobile. I've also installed extensions to deal with the bullshit on desktop.

My number one gripe right now is when using Google to search for stuff on reddit and use the time filter ("last week"), Reddit does not accurately report dates, and you get 4 year old threads showing up as "last week".

Oh - it's even better than that - I've never got the "open in app" to work, it just opens the app store, despite having the reddit app installed.

I hate the fake folksy conversational tics like "Ouch!" Oh are you hurt? And who is the "you"?

Reddit is literally the worst use of AMP I've ever seen, and honestly probably plays a great part in why a lot of people dislike AMP. It honestly has no place using AMP in the first place since it isn't really a static page.

You can avoid this by using old.Reddit.com, which doesn’t nag about an app and avoids all the real offensive UI design decisions.

Do yourself a favor and install a third-party app: Apollo, RIF, Boost, Infinity whatever. A few are available on F-Droid. No ads or other bullshit, web links open in the app, which loads must faster than the website.

As long as Reddit maintain their API and keep it free, I'll keep using Reddit. If they ever drop it, there's not much chance I will.

The AMP page is mostly the same as the normal "new." Reddit mobile page... except worse in the AMP-specific ways.

So why does Reddit use AMP at all? I can only understand AMP being good for some news site where it gives you them a mobile site design "for free".

I should write a thank you email to the guy who did the redesign, I know he's on HN somewhere. Nothing worked for my reddit addiction like that did.

It truly is incredible how a site that was perfectly usable over a decade ago has been massively updated to become unusable and with zero desirable features.

I guess now there’s video embedding, but it’s the worst embedded video I’ve come across on a major site by far.

Yes and:

I just don't understand reddit's UI. I'd probably use the subreddit's I join a lot more if their forum features were more like HN & lobsters.

> ...it does a full page reload, now showing you only that subthread!

Some times expands in place, some times link to new page. Since I can't predict what will happen, I rarely drill down into threads.

I lurk on r/awww and the like. (Mental therapy during the apocolypse.) I have no idea why OC is shown or not. Further, the UI for submitting posts is turrible. I legit have no idea what will happen. So I've stopped trying.

I wouldn't mind using a native or 3rd party client. Shit, I cut my teeth on CompuServe, BIX, FidoNet, etc. They had thriving ecosystem of offline clients. But the reddit clients I've tried just haven't gelled with me. (Didn't care enough to think about it too much.)

Now that I'm using Firefox regularly again, I may try Reddit Enhancement Suite again.

change the url from www to old.reddit.com and you can bypass most of the bullshit.

Question is how long it'll last.

old.reddit.com is not mobile optimized at all, but still infinitely better than reddit.com. Alternatively, get one of the non-official apps (on Android I use rif).

I just found that there is setting checked in the menu (for anonymous and authenticated users) called "Ask to Open in App." I find it kind of curious that they would offer an option. Who would actually want this setting to be enabled? Maybe some developers snuck it in so they could use their own site without contracting cancer.

Not Reddit per se but I find it hard to wrap my head around the app thing for Reddit or similar. HTML5/CSS3 is so sufficient for this... The web gave birth to an economy going away from itself. And. Ow everything is there twice or thrice.

Surely there's some good economical or political reason it. Maybe systemic (any large market will create redundancies.. I don't know)

Yay to old.reddit.com

I did download the app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andrewshu....

Worked flawlessly and never had to see those crappy dark patterns again :)

Been using it for a decade and it does everything, even mod stuff. Simple and clean interface.

From what I know, reddit is not entirely to blame on its own on this. Apple's policy only lets the first party app open certain domains, like YouTube (please correct me if I'm mistaken) and Twitter. Overall, a decent workaround is an app called Opener (link to follow) which lets you switch to specific apps from the share sheet. Apollo also has this feature for reddit links specifically.

However, I do agree that reddit's behavior beyond that is obnoxious.

Opener link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/opener-open-links-in-apps/id98...

Honestly, paying for API might be a better monetization strategy then just actively shitting on their users.

Edit: apparently I’m misreading the traffic page and third party apps are not included. So disregard this paragraph. I really doubt they’ll kill API access. From the stats on my (medium sized) sub a full third of uniques (desktop and mobile combined) are from unofficial clients.

And that’s not to mention the number of near-essential bots used by many subs for community management.

Now, what they are doing is not putting new non-core features into the API, like chat and RPAN. But while that’s still irritating, it is a bit different than killing API access.

The fact that their new features (RPAN and chat) aren't available via the API is telling enough in my eyes.

You left out the moderators. Some of what they do is useful tending of communities, but some of what they do is provide free labor that addresses a hard problem.

Reddit bought Dubsmash last year, too. I imagine the app will eventually operate almost similar to TikTok: funny picture, advertisement, cat video, person live-streaming. Whether or not they can attract more of these power users to use the official app to upload short videos and livestream remains to be seen. I don’t think they’re able to on third-party apps. I’m not able to on Apollo, at least.

Exactly. The lurkers are where their growth is because they likely outnumber posters 10:1.

They sell ads and DATA, and probably pull in major dollars from a tiny group of whales that spend on digital stickers.

> not r/programming or other communities from which to derive some enlightenment

Some obscure subreddits remain a source of emerging thinking on esoteric areas of focus.

The trick is an app that lets you exclude everything else, fully under your editorial control, with no dark patterns.

On iOS, I use Apollo (RIP Alien Blue).

> quit any and all digital activity that's a bottomless well

I’d add “short form ‘content’” to that.

At least once a quarter try to not pick up or browse any short form content until you’ve read 1 - 5 books, however many it takes to get past any agitation pulling you out of the reading flow, till you can again read for hours at a go.

It may be easier to start with one or two fiction, then switch to two or three non-fiction. Something like:

  - airport novel
  - philosophical fiction / literature
  - pop non-fiction
  - topical non-fiction
  - textbook or research book

You can pick back up short form once your brain is willing to absorb an entire research book.

Yeah I stopped using Reddit a couple of months ago and I’m way less stressed out and I’ve just went back to finding forums to post at for discussion the way I did before Reddit. There was a time when I think I did get some intellectual discussion from Reddit and this is why it overtook my forum use and replaced it. Those days are gone, it’s now just a shitty Facebook clone with extra steps and every sub, even r/programming, is a bunch of people who are just memeing 90% of the time.

In all seriousness, this is what made me finally quit Facebook a decade ago.

They made it annoying enough to use the product I wanted that the barrier to quiting was drastically decreased.

I only begrudgingly got a smartphone last year - after watching everyone else get addicted to them "from the outside" and I've fallen right into the trap with them. Finally made an account to ask, can you be more specific about what qualifies as a bottomless well? I have Messenger for talking to my family but never use the rest of Facebook. Does that disqualify it? What about only using Youtube for channels like Techmoan or Mark Felton?

So what do you do when you don't really feel like thinking about anything, like after a long meeting or while drinking your coffe after lunch, or waiting for a build to finish?

I feel like this is my main problem. Sometimes I just want to turn off my brain a bit or I have to do something boring and then I pick up my phone but get stuck on it for too long.

“…quit any and all digital activity that’s a bottomless well…”

Thank you for that. The past few weeks, I’ve started asking myself, “am I watching people I don’t know arguing about something, assigning points (likes) and considering jumping in?” to break myself out of the worst time-wasting and pointlessly agitating stuff, but you’ve given me an even better target.

For someone who has completely quit the endless “dopamine drip” of digital content, what have you replaced it with?

If you access Reddit via https://old.reddit.com it's always the better UI. Bonus is that this works even if you're not signed in.

There's a handy browser extension for automatically redirecting you if you click a link to Reddit's other domains: https://github.com/tom-james-watson/old-reddit-redirect

If you'd like to disable custom subreddit styles even if you're not signed in, you can add these custom filters to uBlock Origin:

  old.reddit.com##^link[ref="applied_subreddit_stylesheet"]
  old.reddit.com##^#header-img-a
  old.reddit.com##^.infobar.listingsignupbar

How does it keep forgetting? I just change that in settings and it’s never forgotten or reverted for me.

Sounds more like you have cookies being cleaned.

> the toxic hate it engenders on all the subreddits.

I always see people saying this and I have to wonder what subreddits they're subscribed to. My experience is basically fine, sure there's some shitty discussions or a few hostile idiots lurking about, but it's no worse than message boards generally, and most conversations seem rather good.

Part of me wonders whether some posters are just extraordinarily sensitive, and intentionally dive into the most downvoted top level comments so they can get their daily dose of outrage at the things trollS say.

I openly say I work for Reddit. I even actively try to convince people to work here as well!

I openly admit to working at Reddit. In fact, I got hired after reading a post in the monthly hiring thread here on HN.

As a product manager, here is what I would do if I was in Steve’s shoes. Instead of employing dark patterns that take advantage of casual user’s trust, I would actually listen to users and evolve the site in the direction users are asking for.

Reddit just killed their Santa Program, this year will be it’s last. The Secret Santa program was amazingly popular but perhaps complicated to manage so instead of improving it, they killed it - favoring dark patters to drive mobile adoption, lol.

Why not double down on the things the community has already indicated it wants. My analysis says they should evolve into a marketplace to drive more peer-to-peer activity between users while enabling monetization that could scale significantly.

Reddit seems to be mentally stuck in the Advertising model and lacks vision. Encourage more peer-to-peer interaction, make it a marketplace, drive real economic activity between users, adopt cryptocurrencies as well as conventional payment mechanisms to enable commerce between users. Think different.

So, of course my suggestion might seem naive given I don't have access to the numbers or knowing exactly the stack or employee numbers, etc. but it's a good exercise.

So:

I would basically copy Patreon in service of getting content creators paid.

In support of that:

1. A lot of the structure already exists so it shouldn't be a lot of work. For instance, there are already personal subreddits, there is already a payment gateway, there are coins that can be used for microtransactions, etc. I need to implement sub-only features and paying for individual content.

2. I can cite Patreon/OnlyFans etc revenue and MAU.

3. I can cite how many users have links to their Patreon/OnlyFans in their profiles. Beyond individual users I can make the case that organizations might want a piece of this too.

4. I believe in this vision which means I can sell it to the team, to the users and to the public better. It's also a positive vision around which people can rally.

5. Then I expend the rest of my political capital pushing this through and stake my job on it. I'd be OK doing that since I'd be doing something I really believe in.

6. If it doesn't work, there's two possibilities. Either it didn't work in a suitable time frame but there is traction in which case I can demonstrate that we are making progress and perhaps buy more time. Or it didn't work at all in which case I've failed at doing something I believed in.

7. If it does work then I've regained all my capital and much more. At which point I can go further into becoming a platform where content creators can get paid. Think Gumroad, TeeSpring, Etsy, etc.

Come up with some innovative ways to monetize, beyond just the usual ads and tracking and dirty tricks to boost engagement. The article has a few decent directions.

I'd start with adding an option to set up paid private subreddits. Like, the creator specifies that you have to subscribe to that sub for some monthly cost in order to see / interact with the content, with a percentage skimmed off the top. It seems like it'd be really easy to implement the most basic version of it and see what users do.

There's already a ton of stuff kind of like that. Tons of people pay for a creator's content on Patreon and various special-purpose copycats, and many of them include access to a private Discord in that. No reason why Reddit couldn't take over a chunk of that, since it's convenient to have all of the content and all of the community discussion features on the same platform.

Lots of ways to expand if it catches on, like multiple subscription levels, different levels of permissions for different subscription levels, etc.

I think this is the way Reddit supposes their power users to have the old reddit experience. If they didn't care about power users, they'd completely decimate old.reddit.com months after deployment of the new design, just shove it all 'em mouth. They always leave ways for power users to have the most authentic reddit experience.

Recently, Reddit has changed their algorithm to filter out contents of pornographic subreddits from the front page r/all. They didn't touch the communities. But they made it much harder for average users and new users to accidentally discover porn contents on Reddit. They didn't want to do another 'tumblr'. But this, consequently, has impact on promotion and expansion of those subreddits. This is a smart move (that other platforms have the same trouble should learn). Change hurts, but it is barely felt.

They've recently (1-2 weeks) changed it so that you can't reject non-essential cookies from the new (non-old) reddit. So you go there, you say no I don't want your damn tracking crap, and then 2 days later you mysteriously get the prompt again; every 2 days.

Been on reddit for over 11 years, but I'm reaching the end of my patience for this shit too.

redreader is awesome as an android reddit client

> The main questions: Considering all the bad practices, why people keep using Reddit and what makes it so great? Why people make custom clients instead of looking for a full-fledged alternative?

Critical mass, and inertia. Reddit has already captured by far the largest share of foum users, and that isn't going to change any time soon.

I'm only an occasional user, generally arriving via a Google search, and it's the sheer quantity of posts that keep my searches hitting Reddit. Doesn't mean I like the UI/UX or their dark patterns tho - I can't bloody stand them!

They have good content and good comments. Funny junk is interspersed with news and occasional trivia and life stories. The thoughtful comments really are great and have helped me understand some POVs and hear about other people’s lives.

This just does not happen on Facebook for example. Most groups and posts are run into the ground by junk comments that make discussion impossible because there’s no downvote that eventually hides them. In a way Facebook is more equal but unfortunately not every commenter is equally decent.

It just has the most users of all link aggregators. If you want to discuss subject A, or news story B, or product C, it's the best place--because of the users, and despite the increasingly trash design. It got those users by being best-in-class a long time ago when things like Digg were futzing and fumbling around the same way Reddit is now.

As soon as some non-user-hostile site gets enough people Reddit will go away.

> Considering all the bad practices, why people keep using Reddit and what makes it so great?

I think it's the sheer amount of content they have and the fact that the average user is much less tech and privacy savvy so they just register.

And the official app still sucks.

> Sorry anyone here that's a Reddit engineer but something is going terribly wrong over there.

You shouldn't need to apologize to the Reddit engineers. They are the ones building it this way! I wish a Reddit engineer would respond here to help people understand why on earth the site's quality is so poor, but we know they can't/won't due to confidentiality. Whenever I browse the non-old Reddit, I can't help but think it's impossible to have such bad quality accidentally. They must be deliberately making it this bad. It would be fascinating to get a glimpse at their bug tracker, to see what tickets they prioritize and which ones they ignore.

> small subreddits are quite good

Sure, there is lots of decent content on it.

RedReader is a fantastic reddit mobile client for Android - they are rolling out a new version right now with a ton of community contributions (both bugfixes and new features).

https://old.reddit.com/r/RedReader/comments/o7oxdu/version_1...

I forked old reddit redirect plugin to redirect to teddit.net: https://github.com/0xbsec/teddit-redirect

Third scenario: People keep using it in anger until something better shows up, and by that time there will be enough unhappy people to spark a growing community in the New Place.

If I can't access it, I can't share the posts nor will I click on ads. So it's not a clear easy win for them.

The non-monetized user would still give content and attention to reddit. It seems to me that reddit moved from growth to monetization / exploitation.

Correct, and as addendum:

> How can this be good for them?

> This is the question that keeps bothering me.

Only thinking of short-term benefits aka typical behavior of publicly owned companies and VC.

That's a very good characterization.

But an anonymous user can still click on ads.

Does anyone end up on reddit through google searches?

Apollo is the best.

> I have this bad habit of clicking my mouse on the whitespace of any web page I visit (I guess I am the only one).

That makes two of us. I agree but don't stay away, I use old.reddit w/reddit enhancement suite, doesn't fix incognito for me as I don't let addons run there, but using containers on firefox instead helps.

> In desktop Reddit posts are actually modal dialogs...

This is just shitty UX but not dishonest though. But I hate it too since I click as well. Plus, you often lose the scroll position. :\

Downvotes would be fine if I ever managed to post anything. Most subs have automated post removal when the post doesn’t follow whatever requirement they have but you only know this requirement after you’re done making your post. Thanks a lot for letting me talk to a wall, Reddit.

Reddit wants pictures to make a bottomless well of content. Your question is a speed bump causes people to stop scrolling.

> However, because of the bug in the app, people can view the GIF properly

*can't

Honestly, all suggestions from the original post is the epitome of "If everyone is stupid, then why aren’t you rich". The moment he suggested OnlyFans model on Reddit, all of his suggestions lost value. Do you know that OnlyFans even doesn't want to be OnlyFans anymore?

So non-techy non-privacy conscious people do which is what they're looking to accomplish.

That's it'd be interesting in looking at their data.

That's a false dichotomy though. There are popular platforms that no one bitches about the UX such as Twitter. Yes, I'm sure there are people complaining about some of the stuff (like having no edit feature etc) but I'm sure it's not remotely close to Reddit-level.

If I don't have to spend money on advertising engineers, PR to keep my company nice for advertisers, ect, then I don't really need 1700 per user.

Facebook is a database and a UI with ten billion dollars worth of ad exec salaries glued on.

I’m confused how many people don’t seem to realize this has nothing to do with experiencing the site.

The App gets a ton of personal data they can’t get on a website.

That’s all this is. Data collection. They need you to install the App so they can access your advertising ID, better link your IP and location to your account, get you to click permission allowance, etc.

Shooting their own experience in the foot is an acceptable sacrifice.

I forgot about the app nags because I've entirely stopped browsing it on my phone.

I used to do that as well, but I really don't want to use them at all.

> This whole rant post is about reddit requiring users to register to use their (free) service.

Yes, in part, but your comment disregards two things.

1. The dishonest things they're doing to require that.

2. The fact that they're requiring registering to consume content others have created.

> If you wish to use it, register. If you don't, don't.

I don't so I didn't. And I wrote why and what I would have liked to be done differently.

buy new phone

It's not requiring an email that's bad. It's making it look like it's required but not saying that it's not.

Imho twitter is a far bigger problem for hiding things. A) tweets often get embedded in news articles - meaning sometimes context is left out of an article and you can't even tell if it's click bait or maybe the article is being harsh /vicious B) reddit is supposedly about community discussion so it would actually make sense if individual subs had the power to only show content to logged in permitted accounts only - that way banned accounts can't snoop on users?

> UX is as incompetent

I don't agree with you there. Their UX is very competent it's just not pursuing the "correct" X.

Reddit has pathetic ad revenue per user versus every other social media platform. Part of this is likely due to anonymous users that they lack data on for proper targeting. This is their attempt to "fix" that.

I really hate that Reddit insists on you using an app. I tried to share a Reddit post with some friends recently who aren’t on that platform. To my dismay they reported that they couldn’t see the post at all because of the GET THE REDDIT APP in your face bull feathers they were presented with. Reddit, you are a website. I want to use my normal browser tabs to use you, not your app. Please make it web-first.

Why must every app monetize through ads? Why can't they provide features worth paying for?

Why do all this complaining and ignoring instead of just downloading an app like "rif is fun", logging in once, and then having great reddit experience on mobile?

Everyone here is aware of the dark patterns on reddit. We know they're not going anywhere. We continue to read reddit posts every day, so why not make it easy on yourself instead of endless misery and complaining about things that you know won't change?

Gifts and currently rewards are just much easier and much much shittier versions of a marketplace and Patreon.

Yes, Tildes is great, it is also a non-profit. The creator of Tildes, Deimos, also used to work at reddit and modded some of the better subreddits.

As an aside, the site is currently down for some updates for the first time in at least two years. Virtually 100% uptime, incredible.

For anyone that wants a good iOS client, Apollo is the one to beat (and the spiritual successor to Alien Blue, the OG best Reddit app which was acquired by Reddit).

That being said, I stopped using Reddit consistently (go on a few times a week now, used to browse daily / on my phone / etc) a few years ago, and I feel that decision has been a major contributing factor in improving my mental health.

So if you're finding the Reddit experience garbage, maybe just... stop using Reddit. No amount of UX fixes provided by a 3rd party app can compensate for how toxic interactions on Reddit trend.

Individual content creators through RSS.

Well, I mean I get what you're saying but that's my whole point. Reddit isn't (yet) providing a service worth paying for and I suggest things that I might pay for.

Secondly, there's plenty of free (as in money) things we complain about.