Reddit seems destined to follow in Digg's footsteps. The negative feedback on the reddit redesign and the reddit app has been building for years, and they continue to push it. The motivation is puzzling. Are executives knowingly pushing the need for advertising at the expense of users? Do Product managers have too much free time?
For anyone else annoying by the reddit redesign, you can use the Redirector chrome extension to fix it w/the following...
redirect: https://www.reddit.com(.*)
to: https://old.reddit.com$1
Their new, but not really new anymore, redesign is so adversarial that the site is frustrating to use unless you use the old version or a different mobile app. Comments section cut off by a news feed, nested comments require loading a new page, but going back doesn't save your location because it was collapsed to show the news feed. The news feed preload lags way more. The new search basically has never worked.
It basically feels like you are constantly trying to fight the ui to show you what you want while trying to dodge the buffet of churned content they throw at you to try and keep you in the social media vortex. Like everything else that becomes mainstream popular, the demographic has shifted away from people who care about these things.
The mobile design isn't puzzling at all. It's infuriating, but easy to see why they're doing it. They want to force everyone onto the app because it's easier for them to advertise on.
- Favors privacy by proxying everything
- Works without javascript
- No account, so no voting/commenting/posting but also no tracking
Teddit is to Reddit what Nitter is to Twitter or Invidious is to Youtube. There are even extensions taking care of redirecting those most common tracking websites
Active users have been exponentially climbing. The redesign is awful in comparison to what once was, but it's been incredibly successful as a vessel to make reddit into a Facebook replacement. Facebook users are a lot easier to profit off of than reddit users, and they're higher in volume.
> The negative feedback on the reddit redesign and the reddit app has been building for years, and they continue to push it. The motivation is puzzling.
The feedback is minimum, and the users who are complaining are not the users who make Reddit money. Like if you're not making them money they're not going to want to improve your experience. They're going to want to make it worse and push you into a better experience. Their motivation for this is clear, and I am confused as to why anyone would be puzzled why Reddit wants to control how people use their app, especially since if you use the app, you have to see ads and you are getting tracked. There are also notification possibilities to push more content to you. This all makes a lot of sense, and I am pretty sure revenue-wise, it's working.
People keep talking about Digg but Reddit has already had their Digg moments and are still standing and there are countless clones and countless apps that just mirror their content. Use them.
For reddit to follow Digg there has to be a viable alternative. People fed up with Digg could go to reddit. Where do people who are fed up with reddit go?
The mobile amp.reddit.com link-throughs from google results are even more obnoxious than any other way of viewing a thread. You're linked into some kind of snippet of a thread with other unrelated threads glommed onto the page. Terrible. It feels like an outbrain-style visual assault. For extra fun, see what the mobile amp links look like with javascript disabled. It's a sight to behold.
The same extension is available on Firefox... but when you use the "old" or "ns" sub-domain, there are some reddit features that don't work like surveys
Reddit is one of a few websites (Twitter, LinkedIn) whose design has gotten progressively worse for as long as I can remember. I really wish someone would come along and execute on a clear design vision for the company. It's insane to me that it is this poorly built.
Reddit is leaning in to the 90/9/1 rule. The 1% of content creators know how to circumvent the barriers and are probably using an app anyway. The 90% of users just stumbling in from google get assaulted with prompts to login/download/read ads. They're the revenue providers.
It’s intentionally built - the purpose is to funnel people into the app which has an extremely high ads to content ratio compared to the old site, or most other social media platforms.
Their design vision is: more ads, more user tracking, more selling of user data.
All of this to the detriment of the actual content, readability, and user satisfaction. They’re betting it doesn’t matter. I for one hope they’re wrong.
The design is fine, but you can't make money by showing ads to a bunch of anonymous users and non-logged in visitors. Hence the dickbar for mobile users. Reddit have big investors now, and they are under pressure to monetize. Unfortunately their ad product is garbage, and the Reddit audience is notoriously ad-unfriendly.
Reddit web/mobile is painful to use, slow, ugly, and full of dark patterns so I get that. But why do you think Twitter is bad? Yeah they force ads on you, but the app itself is nice imo.
Even worse, when I clicked on "Continue in App" it didn't actually open the relevant page in the app, instead taking me to the product page for Reddit on the iOS app store.
I already have the app installed.
Native apps and URLs are like peanut butter and mayonnaise, they just don't go well together.
Dunno how many 3rd Party apps do this, but on iOS, Apollo has a share extension that lets you open the page in that App. It can’t claim Reddit URLs because of Apple’s limits on devs, but this is a decent workaround that keeps 3rd Party apps viable.
haha that last line made me chuckle because there is an older guy in my office who swears a PB and Mayo sandwich is the shit. I will never try it, but he's been bragging about them for years, no joke.
From what I remember of a class on mobile development during Uni, Android has things called "Intent(s)" which can also capture opened links to open an app, a specific view in an app etc.
My Reddit opens fine. However, and Google Maps links always go to Safari instead of the app installed on my phone. I don’t know what changed. It works fine on my partners iphone. Please fix Apple!
I browse in iOS Safari private mode. Reddit has now started to entirely block many subreddits from my view. It pops up “Continue in app/ go back to r/popular”. I do not know how it determines which to block; newer and less-popular seems to a pattern.
I have been finding ways to bypass their blocks, so my apologies if they decide to make it an entirely private site.
Similar to how quora forces you to sign up if you click a link coming from a Google search. I just avoid these sites altogether. Unfortunately, I’m but a drop in the ocean.
Apollo is the app that lets Reddit shine. The difference in polish and UX is night and day. One man vs. an entire team. Talent and passion vs. boring dayjobs.
On top of that their deeplinking doesn’t even work. It’s completely broken. It takes me to the App Store when I already have the app installed and it’s literally impossible to go from a google search to a reddit post in the app smoothly. It absolutely blows my mind that an app where deeplinking is particularly important (google search results) is so broken. If you don’t want to build your own deeplink framework, then there’s plenty out there you can get to integrate like branch.io
The phrase “deep linked content” might lead some people to ignore this as comments have been blocked for a while now, I wouldn’t have realized this specifically meant post content & toplevel comments from the title without coming from the Windows 11 design conventions thread.
- It's unusable on mobile and always has been. Don't bother trying. Use unofficial apps, not the Reddit app. For example, Apollo on iOS is excellent. It's an indie app with a really great, responsive developer. Pay real money for an ad-free app like Apollo.
- For desktop, set your user settings to always visit old.reddit.com. Yes, this is an official setting that's part of the user profile settings. If you want to stay logged out, there are lots of Old Reddit redirect extensions.
- Always use Reddit Enhancement Suite on desktop, you're missing out if you don't.
I believe Reddit's leadership knows that a decent subset of their longer tenured audience values old.reddit.com, but at the same time I wouldn't want to necessarily blame them for wanting to get new users on the app and using the newer website.
For everyone that thinks they're "yet another Digg," I don't think so. They have deliberately made it so that their existing users are allowed to use Reddit in the old way that they want to.
We can get upset about the dark patterns, but it's also true that social media customers are categorically not willing to pay for that kind of product. If Reddit charged even a small fee like $10 a year they'd have probably 1/10th of the visitors they do now. It just doesn't make business sense not to run off of the "data vacuum" model. Sorry, the MBAs are right in this case.
As an example, there's a common Internet meme where people joke about how nobody in their right mind would pay for YouTube Premium, even though it's on many levels an excellent product and a fair business model to pay for the service without seeing personalized ads.
The dream of the WWW is fading. Welcome to the new consumer network of siloed phone apps stewarded by Apple and Google. For a moment there was hope with PWAs but Apple snuffed that one out.
Not only are they forcing users to use their app, it's also a pretty low quality app.
A website that advertises itself as "the front page of the internet" should allow it's users to stay in their internet browsers.
I personally don't care for local dedicated apps for every little site or resturant I eat at. There's a large group of people that don't want load up their phone with Cheesecake Factory, Bestbuy, Sonos, and Reddit apps.
I went cold turkey from Reddit recently after realizing my frequent usage was impacting my life and relationships.
Was harder and easier than I expected. I kept catching myself opening it in a new tab unconsciously. I learned to stop myself before I’d read a single link, or I’d get sucked in.
Deleted my 10+ year accounts a few weeks ago.
Hardly use it now, and have been able to use it more responsibly.
I noticed this the other day and wanted to scream. I pay for Apollo, the very good iOS Reddit client and love it, but the official app is just terrible. And being forced to use the app when trying to quickly browse things (or to want to maybe browse things without logging in) is just the worst sort of UX decision to try to game app usage I can think of.
Quite aside from the scummy behaviour, the assumptions behind it are a real bugbear. Just because I'm on a mobile browser it doesn't mean I'm able, or want to, install apps on my phone. What if it's a friend's phone, or I don't use Google Play, or it's an out of date version of Android, or any number of reasons.
[+] [-] iblaine|4 years ago|reply
For anyone else annoying by the reddit redesign, you can use the Redirector chrome extension to fix it w/the following...
[+] [-] ayngg|4 years ago|reply
It basically feels like you are constantly trying to fight the ui to show you what you want while trying to dodge the buffet of churned content they throw at you to try and keep you in the social media vortex. Like everything else that becomes mainstream popular, the demographic has shifted away from people who care about these things.
[+] [-] colinmhayes|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rakoo|4 years ago|reply
- Favors privacy by proxying everything - Works without javascript - No account, so no voting/commenting/posting but also no tracking
Teddit is to Reddit what Nitter is to Twitter or Invidious is to Youtube. There are even extensions taking care of redirecting those most common tracking websites
[+] [-] caslon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] that_guy_iain|4 years ago|reply
The feedback is minimum, and the users who are complaining are not the users who make Reddit money. Like if you're not making them money they're not going to want to improve your experience. They're going to want to make it worse and push you into a better experience. Their motivation for this is clear, and I am confused as to why anyone would be puzzled why Reddit wants to control how people use their app, especially since if you use the app, you have to see ads and you are getting tracked. There are also notification possibilities to push more content to you. This all makes a lot of sense, and I am pretty sure revenue-wise, it's working.
People keep talking about Digg but Reddit has already had their Digg moments and are still standing and there are countless clones and countless apps that just mirror their content. Use them.
[+] [-] tootie|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MrMember|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ping_pong|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisArchitect|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cyanydeez|4 years ago|reply
the answer is yes.
[+] [-] lvs|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Black101|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pg_bot|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tootie|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taurath|4 years ago|reply
Their design vision is: more ads, more user tracking, more selling of user data.
All of this to the detriment of the actual content, readability, and user satisfaction. They’re betting it doesn’t matter. I for one hope they’re wrong.
[+] [-] jl6|4 years ago|reply
For you.
Forcing users into an algorithmically-controlled scroll tunnel is probably great for their advertising sales though.
[+] [-] rchaud|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1270018080|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duckfruit|4 years ago|reply
I already have the app installed.
Native apps and URLs are like peanut butter and mayonnaise, they just don't go well together.
[+] [-] gabetax|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SllX|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dhatch6|4 years ago|reply
Long press the “continue in app” or Reddit “open” button depending on how it displays. A menu pops up and you can select “open in “Reddit””
Doing this once completely solved the problem for me. It was driving me crazy. I hope it helps!
[+] [-] cryptoz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikeg8|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rchaud|4 years ago|reply
When I get the mobile page on Reddit, clicking "Open in App" on the popup works fine for a third party Android app (Now for Reddit).
[+] [-] Lev1a|4 years ago|reply
Is that the same on iOS?
[+] [-] lostgame|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw03172019|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moistly|4 years ago|reply
I have been finding ways to bypass their blocks, so my apologies if they decide to make it an entirely private site.
Edit: using the www prefix, not old or i.
[+] [-] gruez|4 years ago|reply
>I have been finding ways to bypass their blocks, so my apologies if they decide to make it an entirely private site.
using the i.reddit.com subdomain should work.
[+] [-] LegitShady|4 years ago|reply
It’s not as convenient on mobile but reddit now is hostile to lurkers so it is what it is.
[+] [-] rubatuga|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway2048|4 years ago|reply
I guess this is what they did with the results.
[+] [-] TimSchumann|4 years ago|reply
https://old.reddit.com/
[+] [-] andrewmcwatters|4 years ago|reply
Must have been some MutationObserver hook to prevent people from fiddling.
I was pretty turned off after that. Anyway, that being said, browser perf is so bad with the new Reddit, you basically have to use the app.
[+] [-] emsy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spiderfarmer|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wtetzner|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jds375|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] finiteseries|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dangus|4 years ago|reply
- It's unusable on mobile and always has been. Don't bother trying. Use unofficial apps, not the Reddit app. For example, Apollo on iOS is excellent. It's an indie app with a really great, responsive developer. Pay real money for an ad-free app like Apollo.
- For desktop, set your user settings to always visit old.reddit.com. Yes, this is an official setting that's part of the user profile settings. If you want to stay logged out, there are lots of Old Reddit redirect extensions.
- Always use Reddit Enhancement Suite on desktop, you're missing out if you don't.
I believe Reddit's leadership knows that a decent subset of their longer tenured audience values old.reddit.com, but at the same time I wouldn't want to necessarily blame them for wanting to get new users on the app and using the newer website.
For everyone that thinks they're "yet another Digg," I don't think so. They have deliberately made it so that their existing users are allowed to use Reddit in the old way that they want to.
We can get upset about the dark patterns, but it's also true that social media customers are categorically not willing to pay for that kind of product. If Reddit charged even a small fee like $10 a year they'd have probably 1/10th of the visitors they do now. It just doesn't make business sense not to run off of the "data vacuum" model. Sorry, the MBAs are right in this case.
As an example, there's a common Internet meme where people joke about how nobody in their right mind would pay for YouTube Premium, even though it's on many levels an excellent product and a fair business model to pay for the service without seeing personalized ads.
[+] [-] qalmakka|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] holler|4 years ago|reply
- realtime: every post has built-in slack quality chat w/markdown support.
- open: the site is completely open for anyone, if you want to chat, creating an account is a breeze w/no email required
- minimal: focus is on conversations w/low friction, designed so both tech and non-tech people can post, share, and easily join in a conversation.
- clean design: mobile/desktop web friendly
- new features dropping regularly
Most importantly, you don't need to download anything to view a post!
[+] [-] cutler|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mastrsushi|4 years ago|reply
A website that advertises itself as "the front page of the internet" should allow it's users to stay in their internet browsers.
I personally don't care for local dedicated apps for every little site or resturant I eat at. There's a large group of people that don't want load up their phone with Cheesecake Factory, Bestbuy, Sonos, and Reddit apps.
Browsers are really cool.
[+] [-] hypnoscripto|4 years ago|reply
Deleted my 10+ year accounts a few weeks ago.
Hardly use it now, and have been able to use it more responsibly.
[+] [-] filmgirlcw|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] afandian|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diveanon|4 years ago|reply
Personally though I think you would be better off just avoid reddit, that place is horrible for people.