I can't blame them too much for trying to monetize, but I wish their strategies were more inclusive of the way I use reddit
I used to have "Compact Reddit Redirect"[1] on my phone browser. But it got more and more broken in the last two years.
Now, I use RedReader[2][3] on my phone which is open source and gives "an 'old' reddit feel".
It is really sad to use an app to access a website :( . I need to accept that I'm not the target audience of that website anymore...
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/compact-reddi...
[2] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.quantumbadger.redreader/
[3] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.quantumbad...
Yes, it'd be nice if I could auto-open reddit links in my client of choice, but it's like a two-or-three tap thing. I use it increasingly often.
It's like I got scammed by one of those indian grandma-targeting call centers, but only out of like 50 bucks instead of a few grand in iTunes cards.
I haven't thought about that in a long time.
Though it still sucks, and hopefully whomever got that charity can grow from it and eventually 'pay it forward'.
Which should make the change from Reddit even worse :(
The best gift my wife got (she is an avid dead tree book reader) was a book she had on her list. But the secret santa bought the book and illustrated it magnificently (using the book's empty pages) before sending it to her.
That's the type of gifts you just cant price.
Is there an equivalent today?
I enjoyed using Reddit for years, then used it without (tbh) enjoying it much for probably a couple of years, and finally have almost fully disconnected. There’s no denying it has many more years worth of genuinely useful information on it, so I’ll still use it as a resource for community recommendations when searching.
However, the actual _news_/curated feed mechanic I’ve long sworn off. Is there anything new coming up atm that isn’t just a Reddit knock off?
Edit: side note, thinking about how long ago the Digg —> Reddit shift was has actually filled me with a bit of existential dread. When you stop and think, Reddit has had an incredible run as a popular platform so far.
Interesting that you want something that is specifically not just a reddit knock off. I actually think that a Reddit knock off focussed on discussion (say, like hacker news, but with subreddits) would do well.
This comment isn't using these labels incorrectly - the people on most of the alternatives post blatantly anti-Semitic and/or legitimately racist content (not ambiguously or twitter-classified racism, but full-on, hard-R et al, good old fashioned racism), anti-vaxxer mobs, doxxing, calls to violence, etc.
And yes, much of the time this sort of content is the majority.
Oh, enhancing user experience sounds good: so they'll reinstate the old reddit UI back as the default, the one that doesn't block viewing threads in a mobile browser half the time?
You also make the strong assumption that executive staff/founders actually care about the survival of the company or the product: If they cash out at some point, they still win in the transaction.
The cycle is always predictably the same:
1. Found the company
2. Get an initial round of investment
3. make it seem valuable (i.e. growth at all cost)
4. Second investment round (people now have FOMO "this could be the next Facebook!")
5. Continue growing (by now initial investors and founders have cashed out with profit)
6. Another investment round/sell/go public.
7. After going public, people notice that you don't make any money and have no way of ever making money (think WeWork)
8. Company's stock tanks/Company goes bankrupt.
At no point in that process has the product or the company ever mattered: As long as you can make it seem like it works, you can make a profit.
This is why venture capital is almost always a red flag: The investors make money not through quality product, but through growth. They can sell a great product that nobody knows about or they can sell well marketed crap that grows fast and makes them billions. By chance one or two of these companies will survive despite this and have a lasting impact, which breeds even more hype for the next round.
I mean, the new UI is not to my taste, but it is also just really buggy, slow, and full of things that straightforwardly don't work (videos, search, etc).
Now, I'm not an MBA, but I don't really get how you make money by paying developers to degrade your service.
Getting teenagers in high school addicted to Reddit is a huge part of their strategy, and it's very evident in the way the front page content has shifted in the last decade.
The bigger issue is that while a lot of older users remain in the niche subs, I find that there aren't great alternatives to Reddit for threaded sub-specific commentary.
I think I first saw the usage of this term either from Yahoo (wrt either GeoCities or Flickr) or Google (wrt Reader). Definitely around that era. IIRC it was on some company roadmap presentation that basically say "These services are scheduled to be sunset by <date>". Heck I even think those slides were leaked and not officially presented.
I like to think the first audience to encounter this usage of the word was similarly perplexed. "When you say 'sunset' you mean 'termination', right? What about the teams assigned to them?"
"'Termination'? Oh goodness, no. When we say 'sunset' we mean we leave them alone to naturally drive into a beautiful sunset."
No less perplexed, they put emphasis on their second question. "What about the teams then?"
With the cadence of a well-rehearsed actor, the facilitator responds, "Hey, sunsets. Very peaceful, very relaxing---who doesn't want those? You won't get that from staring at your computer screen all day!"
Only makes sense in that context though.
Before that it was the community doing something fun together. After that it was just yet another advertising opportunity and I noped right out.
It’s a shame because this was what endeared me to Reddit among other things a long time ago. They should think of this as an investment just like Netflix throws money at content to get users. Someone over there is not making good decisions, first the new UI, definitely takes away user experience and now this.
On a much smaller scale, I was in a similar position once.
Ran a very active online community. Each year we had a big (well, for us) in-person meetup. Everybody loved it, looked forward to it, etc.
In retrospect I'm not sure it was the best use of our extremely limited people-hours.
On the plus side, the gathering/convention was great the 0.1% of our active users that made the trek each year and I believe there was a harder-to-measure positive "halo effect" from it that benefitted the community in general.
On the downside, the "staff" for this site was basically "me working part time, plus community volunteers." The site's infrastructure needed major work and I lacked time to properly market the site, etc.
TL;DR --
Given our limited resources, a LOT of necessary work went undone, in favor of this yearly event that directly benefitted only a tiny fraction of our users. I suspect Reddit just came to the same conclusion.
> So you took over someone elses project years ago, made some money off of it and then killed it. Yikes.
