What Happened to Reddit?

In terms of the UI/UX use old.reddit.com - I honestly don't understand how anyone uses the new default version. Comments are hidden, there are ads and other threads content on the page. It's literally impossible to use. It's such a disaster I can't understand how it ever passed testing.

The community itself when you get away from the big main subreddits isn't too bad. The best experience is had when you unsub from all the main subreddits and only browse the smaller niche ones. Although they can be pretty toxic too. If you're looking for better quality in depth discussion on a hobby or topic I'm sure you already know better forums, but if you want beginners guides and more superficial meme chat it's a great resource on the whole.

Honestly, despite the UX changes, Reddit has stayed remarkably consistent over the past decade or so I've used it. Big, generic subreddits are trash and always have been, but small, focused subreddits are great. Reddit is still hands down the best place on the internet for product recommendations, candid product reviews, niche hobbies, and discussions about TV shows, movies, and games.

Edit - to prove my point further, take a look at the top 1000 posts on r/all from 10 years ago.[1] Does that look like quality content to you? Once again, the front-page of Reddit and the large subs have been hot garbage since day 1. Nothing has changed in that respect. You've always had to go the smaller subs for quality content.

[1] https://www.redditarchive.com/2012-05-25.html

I can think of a couple major points that have caused massive culture shifts on reddit (some might say for the worse). There have been other temporary shifts/events, but I think these ones were longer lasting

* The "Digg invasion", when Digg 4.0 came out in 2013. This is when reddit turned into mostly memes. Before that, the frontpage was closer to slashdot, but much more open conversation around it. (of course there were still ffuuuu comics, but we dont talk about those)

* The pandemic in 2020. It seems like your typical Facebook user started using reddit. Reddiquette is no longer a thing -- if you don't agree with something you downvote. Alternative views aren't supported, people don't want their views challenged. I think this has been the biggest culture shift and probably what you're getting at. It's people looking to kill time rather than adventure to learn something new.

There was a thread the other day about how every community is bound to lose its identity once it gets big enough, and it likely can be applied to this. Once Reddit caught the attention of the advertising world to the point where people with high karma were being asked to sell their accounts, the entire platform devolved into people reposting each other's content to farm karma.

In the last couple of months people have even been spotting "organized bot groups" that not only repost old popular content, but also immediately populate said reposts with the popular comments of the previous thread.

It's hard to generalize about Reddit because each subreddit is kind of its own world. If you want good discussion, go to where the good discussion is. What is terrible about the UX? Are you not using old.reddit.com?

If you're judging by /r/all, sure, it's not much better than YouTube comments. As much as I hate this word, it's mostly "normies" with "normie" views. The cream rarely rises to the top, except on humor threads.

But other than that, I don't think Reddit has changed too much for the worse in the 14 or so years since I've used it. The demographic has gotten more mainstream, and arguably dumber, but that's just a microcosm of the Internet. It's still better on Reddit than many other places.

I would argue that reddit never was really that great. It has gotten worse (the really aggressive advertising and dogshit UI is fairly recent), but karma farming is as old as time, is pretty much fundamentally unavoidable with their current model, and is probably one of the biggest issues with discussion on the site. I avoided the site for years because of the tendency toward low quality high engagement posts, and I know plenty of people who felt the exact same way. I can't speak to what it was like around 2010, but when I started looking a few years after that it was a lot of what I described above.

The only true fix to this is either firm AND benevolent moderation (really only works for small stuff, like HN), or just ditching usernames and internet points altogether. 4chan was, for the most part, low quality discussion, but people at least had a reason behind their post that wasn't ego-flaming to save face on their pseudonymous internet account/getting internet points to feel like they had some clout.

Sounds like another instance of the Eternal September [0]. Reddit has grown and larger communities are harder to moderate. Of course, each subreddit is its own world. There are some that are well moderated (size factors in here for sure) that are quite enjoyable to participate in.

As for UI I think we all agree, it's horrible. That's what old.reddit.com is for, it's still a sane UI overall. On Mobile I use Apollo (iOS) but anything but the default app is a huge step up.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Reddit was great for the brief period of time after internet search engines like Google nosedived in quality thanks to blogspam, and before companies realized people were relying on Reddit for reading honest opinions. Whenever there's some economic interest involved in a Reddit thread (like product recommendations), companies are now flooding it with disguised ads, which is low quality content like all ads.

> Terrible UX

If you're browsing on a desktop, configure your account to always use the old reddit experience. If you lurk without an account, use old.reddit.com. If you can, install RES, it's a game-changer.

If you're browsing on mobile, don't use the official reddit app. It's garbage. Use one of the many 3rd party apps. Personally, I use Bacon Reader.

Don't bother ever browsing /r/all. Tailor your subscriptions to the subs you actually care about.

Try to find more niche subreddits. Subs like /r/AskReddit are just massive karma farms.

All really good forums, in my experience, have attentive and firm moderators. (HN for example.) A few years ago, I moderated a developer forum (not on Reddit) and by posting clear rules and enforcing them consistently without being a jerk about it, the forum was indeed evolved into a useful place for conversations. But it took constant attention; and I think most Reddit moderators don't have the inclination to do that work day in and day out for the sake of the community--and so the quality progressively deteriorates.

A bit of both. It's clear Reddit hasn't made the best technical decisions via the redesign, and the constant drive to get people to use the app has likely driven away some veteran users.

But it's also because Reddit is growing more and more popular, and eventually the demographics will to match the population as a whole rather than a self selecting, more dedicated sample of it. Hence ypu get the same idiocy as in other situations and on other large social media services.

The leaders, managers, engineers need to do something to justify their promotions. They are growing because the internet is centralizing. It's succeeding despite all the bad user decisions being made, but at some point it will catch up with them.

Reminds me of Meg Whitman running ebay into the ground while collecting billions and eventually getting wrecked by Amazon. They're still around but a shell of their former relevance.

It’s troubling that Reddit doesn’t really have a lot of competition, and the new user hostile UI on mobile shows their leadership knows it. I still remember when Digg made those big changes that caused a bunch of people to migrate over. But there isn’t a credible alternative to Reddit. It feels like most of them focus on anti-censorship or little moderation which means they get taken over by fringe groups.

We have old.reddit.com for now, but I feel like that’s just temporary sugar for the medicine to go down while people get used to getting pushed to the mobile app. If they took that away, and there’s really no guarantee it’ll always be there, I don’t know what else I’d use. There’s Discord but it’s such a different interaction model that it doesn’t feel like a valid alternative.

Given enough eyeballs, all content is shallow.

For most of the past decade, Reddit have pursued a growth path, with features and changes designed to hook and keep on-site an ever-growing number of eyeballs. Put the blame for that squarely on Conde Nast / Advance Publications / Steven Newhouse (CEO).

This has had corresponding impacts on the quality of discourse. My own response, as noted at my personal subreddit, is to take my time and attention elsewhere, which seems to be widely reflected across other subreddits I've followed. (See: https://teddit.net/r/dredmorbius, particularly pinned posts.)

HN has remained one of those places --- moderation, search, and a reasonably-well curated membership seem to help. It's not ideal, but it's dramatically better than typical online forums, and has maintained a remarkably even keel for going on two decades, all but unheard of.

For various reasons, progress to implementing an independent blog have lagged.

As a lark I created a new account that blocks idiots, though I've not used that sufficiently to determine if it has a positive impact on S:N ratios, though I suspect it might. The idiots are, however, legion.

If anyone else wants to try that practice and report on results, I'd be interested in how well it does or does not work.

I've started using Reddit less and less. It used to be a great place to interact with other people who were deeply engaged and knowledgeable about hobbies, interests, and even professions. But over time the average response to my questions and comments on Reddit has dramatically lowered in quality. I think the demographic has skewed much younger, with more teenagers and kids than before. Which means that when I ask questions, particularly ones that might be even slightly technical, it's met with dozens of answers that come straight from the first page of Google...

I feel it's probably just a reversion to the mean effect. As more people adopt the Reddit platform, the platform becomes more and more like facebook.

I find searching reddit for niche things to be at least useful enough to point me in the right direction on some topics. But wow, discussion, even the small subs can be pretty toxic. It's sad as I'd love to have better discussion around various topics but every post feels like I'm walking on egg shells.

My theory is just that if anyone can join, and everything is anonymous and there is no barrier to entry [1], quality of communication will just be low. Makes me think about how some Ham Radio enthusiasts want to keep Morse Code as a requirement to get a license even though it's not really needed, it simply acts as a good filter for keeping less prudent people out of the eco-system. For web boards, maybe September will never end [2].

Hope this all isn't too cynical and please speak up if it sounds so.

[1] I realize HN is easy to join but is often seen as having far superior discussion than Reddit. I think there's just something about heavily technical article titles and topics that make it a bigger lift to want to jump in with trivial but aggressive arguing. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

I first started using Reddit around 2009 when I was in college and use it more today.

I browse old.reddit.com because I think that text feel is better.

I think it probably depends on your subreddit or area of interest? For my making hobbies I find it to be the best forum out there. Extremely good for my sports and television discussion as well.

I have observed a few things.

-Obvious bot activity has increased, probably coordinated by troll farms warming up accounts then pushing public opinion.

-The Overton Window has slammed shut. Speech on both the right and the left has been massively curtailed. It has been decided from high up that the US population needs a cooling off period which makes all conversations quite bloodless.

-The real organic user base of people willing to invest in participation has dried up. Many niche subreddits that previously had lively and interesting communities and subcultures are now ghost towns. For example I follow some VR and travel subreddits where the participation has absolutely cratered.

My guess is that the above have scared off the high value users that drive novelty and engagement and that the whole platform is a shell just waiting to crack.

From my point of view, the quality of discussions is generally getting worse, including here (you could, for example, make a statistic of how many comments start with "I" and do not refer to the referenced article at all). It likely also depends which subreddit you're in; e.g. r/ProgrammingLanguages has generally good contributions and discussions, r/programming not so. Concerning the UX: I'm using https://old.reddit.com/ which is OK and remains constant.

Every community worth some money was captured by a specific interest group. All the organic growth got turned off and the places that still nurture organic growth are front ends for shopify/unreal engine/alibaba, ect.

The real sense of community which enabled so much valuable information flow was stamped out. Community was replaced with politics, auto mods and feudal lords crushing dissent instead of leading discussion.

I think the more visual look of the new design works well for some communities that are more about image/video sharing.

But you're right, it's slower to load and generally slower to navigate, although opening and closing a post is a smidge faster for me in the new ui. I think Reddit got enough VC capital that it has to try to make a return on and they still haven't really come up with a great way to monetize the communities they host. So they're blowing money on engineering and probably seeing more users.

I'm not a product person, idk what the real answer is on what Reddit should have done. I agree I dislike a lot of what they added to it, but I'm just not a product person. I guess having steady growth and a reasonable amount of ad revenue just wasn't cutting it after a while.

This is subjective, no? I have no clue which subreddits you frequent. I work in IT and as such follow a bunch of related subs. Those subs are perfectly fine if not helpful in a lot of cases. It depends on what you're consuming like..most things.

>mostly useless answers (most replies to posts are either poorly sarcastic or not replying to the actual point)

You are in the wrong subs

I agree though that default /r/all subs are overly politicized and most of them are utter thrash

Reddit has actually clearly improved; they’ve grown so large they no longer are a community and are just everyone on Earth posting stuff.

Usually this would be bad, but not when your old community was the dorks on Reddit. So they no longer have the problem where the first reply to every post is a long chain of bad puns and the second one is the answer.

Some of the default subs did seem to get all their content replaced with Facebook memes, and AskReddit shows me a teenager posting a new “how do I get the ladies to like me?” question every day, but that’s life.

> Terrible UX

old.reddit.com -- You're welcome.

> mostly useless answers

Any sufficiently popular platform degrades like this (including the entire internet itself).

> or it's just unavoidable to get this degradation after the userbase grows too much?

Pretty much. HN has pretty ferocious moderation, which is required unless you want every other response to be "sigh unzips." You see this in individual forums in general...once they grow past a certain size, the original intent is watered down, discussion suffers, etc etc.

That said, there are plenty of places on reddit that are still great.

As an avid user, in my personal opinion there are multiple factors, but the most significant one is that during lockdown and school closures, a lot of kids, blue collar workers and amateur investors (/r/wallstreetbets) were suddenly attracted to reddit due to the abundance of content, community and opportunity. In the reddit community, this used to be called summer reddit when kids were on summer vacations, but this time it seems the userbase has been retained.

It’s kind of the same thing that’s happened to the internet. Everyone is now there instead of self-selecting smart, hacker types.

It’s a balance between making things easier to use while also that letting in everyone. And the hoi polloi are just regular people.

Not to sound snobby, but different people like different things. And McDonalds is a $200B company for a reason.

So now they’re on Reddit just being interested in regular stuff and raging and whatnot.

With the masses comes company attention and fake accounts and SEO so the corporate content is low value but prevalent.

I still use Reddit for my subreddits and get good info. But it’s harder to weed out things.

Finally, I had a curious interaction with a company trying to take over my subreddit. I started /r/grass fed years ago when I was interested in this. Not a lot of activity. Some marketing company for an unnamed company petitioned to take it over as if it was abandoned. When I responded that it’s not abandoned, just not very active and that they were welcome to post as much as they like the sub stayed with me as a mod. But they didn’t post anything. Makes me wonder what kind of company wants to mod a sub in order to participate. And how common this is.

Some of reddit is good: many smaller subs feel genuine and have great discussion that I can't find anywhere else. Also, the product is less engaging than other social media networks, which is better for using it in moderate amounts (as opposed to more addictive products like twitter or tiktok). Some new innovative features like predictions.

Some of reddit is terrible: relentlessly pushing people to the mobile app, garbage notifications system.

>Terrible UX

VC chickens coming home to roost, the inevitable ultimate fate of every single VC-funded startup

>mostly useless answers (most replies to posts are either poorly sarcastic or not replying to the actual point)

1) reddit format is vastly inferior to classic forums for serious discussion. everything except for a couple stickied threads is ephemeral

2) the culture is dominated by repetitive low-quality humor and insufferable soapboxing that spills over into topical subreddits

Dead Internet Theory (DIT)

TLDR: Large proportions of the supposedly human-produced content on the internet are actually generated by artificial intelligence networks in conjunction with paid secret media influencers in order to manufacture consumers for an increasing range of newly-normalised cultural products.

https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-...

This is a very low-effort subjective post with no data to back it up. You're just asking people to rant on their own gripes about Reddit.

What I find truly troubling is the loss of message boards elsewhere online. The bigger ones I was apart of years ago are gone, or with a much reduced and aging user base. Often the time sink that these homes were have been replaced by social media. Instagram, tiktok, and obviously reddit. It causes me to feel a sense of loss.

On the plus side Reddit search has improved the last five years or so.

I don't use Reddit's mobile app, which is awful; I use Narwhal on iOS, don't see any ads, and am reasonably happy with it.

I'm one of about two semi-technical Reddit users in the world who doesn't mind the new desktop browser interface.

I guess I carefully curate my Reddit feeds, but I don't find it hard to find quality posts. I may just be good at ignoring the bad ones.

For the Terrible UX, try https://old.reddit.com/

For the content degradation, I find that creating an account, unsubscribing from all the default subreddits, and subscribing to niche subreddits works well. There are still plenty of great smaller communities within Reddit.

Am I the only one on HN who likes the new desktop look'n'feel?

From the smattering of comments I read here today... it seems like it

I also find that the subs I'm in are of decent-to-high quality - though none are especially large/high-traffic (ie they're all pretty niche)

The turning point for me was when they canned Victoria from r/ama. My experience with it got progressively worse thereafter. I might sign in to it once a year now (using old.reddit.com when I do). When I read posts there, I first convert the link to teddit.net.

Unfortunately I think it's a combination of popularity and exposing what happens in upvoted systems as opposed to discussion forums; the lowest common denominator rules.

"Both sides" fallacies, typically having a political meaning, are naturally going to get exploited on social media sites where both sides upvote the poorly baked, emotionally charged fallacies.

It is alarming to me as a statnerd that the NBA and NFL communities seem to be getting dumber as time goes on, not smarter, but I'm not positive this is a Reddit problem (but possibly, due to how mainstream it is now).

Reddit is a psychopath corporation. It actively promotes clownish propaganda, misinformation and conflict to make money from clicks. The homepage is thousands of people screaming hate at each other. I can't think of a corporation that has done more to degrade US society than Reddit.

When they go public soon, they're going to lock all the user-generated content behind their mobile app, and remove access from the website and APIs. Thanks for the content, suckers!

The thing I hate most of it is that every community turns into a caricature of what it is like in real life.

The UK ones are all bizarre in-jokes about stereotypes that are not at all realistic of people in the real world. It’s like people feel they have to say weird things so they fit in.

“Does anyone else love tea? Ho ho ho, I really don’t like the television programme Miranda that hasn’t even been on for 9 or 10 years. Oh god, when people try and talk to me on the tube I just die?!”

It's simply degradation (if we're talking about early adopters) and growth (if we're talking about the demographics Reddit is now targeting).

such a generic ask. plenty of recent/not-so-recent threads that get into this, especially gripes about the UX , a long known issue, many here just live on old.reddit.

It was always weak as far as posts and activity in the larger subreddits etc due to the natural effects of huge numbers of random users. The quality of users has declined enormously because of memes and just general public use, but that's the way it is.

Reddit is not really that special, it had explosive user growth due to lack of options out there and ease of use for most to just engage and/or run small forum-like communities. It was almost dead! Back before some big missteps by other players made it get really lucky in user growth. A momentum boost from a fluke.

And that's where the value/real stuff is: the rest of it - all the countless smaller communities -- reddit is basically a forum system for them, and they with the help of dedicated mods etc, people that care about the connections and community, it works great. That's it. That's all it is.

My philosophy is to never browse reddit as a "whole" but instead just go to specific subreddits for what I need. It's been 10x more "normal" and each subreddit has a better balance between full of snarky replies (r/programmerhumor) or more helpful (r/rust) rather than the more popular ones (r/funny, etc.)

I actually found the old reddit (pre-2016 or so) hard to use and full of even more useless content than it is today. I personally don't understand how people continue to use the "old" reddit interface.

I spend a lot of time reading incredibly engaging and useful content on reddit (web/official app) these days.

Here's a very valuable sub-reddit, which lists other sub-reddits, that have pictures of cats. I think we're at ~800 cat reddits.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Catsubs/wiki/index/

You're welcome! :-D

Mods. Whenever you see community/forums take the wrong turn - it's always mods. Reddit is now extremely leftwing, to the point of pushing communism and banning everyone with even slightest conservative view-points, and that's where mods come in - mods can ban account for life sitewide. This was the first mistake

Second mistake was banning and removing subs that were controversial and might or might not have been frowned upon by advertiser.

Old Reddit used to break news first, now reddit is just 9gag

Basically the same thing that happens to most forums like this. It was always better when you originally joined, and if it is particularly popular, you get more and more individuals who are simply not of the quality of a smaller self-chosen group.

Do you have data to support your positions?

I think it's gotten better, not worse. Though the variance between subreddits is high, so if you're not subredditing well, ymmv.

My only complaint are their dark patterns pushing the mobile app.

Anybody looking for a platform that resembles old Reddit should check out Lemmy https://lemmy.ml/

The answer is that your friends, family, and colleagues are a narrow strata of society and Reddit is not a strata it’s a core cross section, or perhaps a core sample.

Reddit is good if you want to buy something, or are starting a hobby, for anything professional or academic its mostly terrible, mostly because the of the jannies.

I agree with the terrible UI/UX, but I never noticed the degradation of usefulness. I think it highly depends on what subreddits you are active in.

The key word is “monetization”.

Entertainment (aka funny) makes money. Useful information can make money but not nearly as much as entertainment.

At least their KPI's went through the roof

Funded by the advertising industrial complex, captured, gamed, and manipulated by all industrial complexes including political and tyrannical, and take a peek at the last investment rounds and % of those rounds they took hold of.

My favourite subreddit?

https://www.reddit.com/WatchRedditDie

The big communities have always been susceptible to lower content quality and mis/disinformation campaigns. Every forum that gets huge is like this. Facebook descended into this. Slashdot was not panacea before Hacker News and (ironically) Reddit stole much of their traffic.

Hacker News is _still_ not like this because:

1. Their subscriber count is relatively low compared to, say, /r/pics 2. dang and co are basically benevolent tyrants and are ultra quick about removing low-quality discussion 3. The topics are more-or-less consistent, largely due to (2) but also community response that has been shaped by (2) over time

Many of the less popular subs and all of the SUPER-well-moderated large subs (/r/History, /r/askscience) are like this. /r/COVID19 was an extremely important component in the race towards the vaccine, for example, while /r/coronavirus was doomscrolling on tap with lots of disinformation. Both are large communities.

New Reddit aside (old Reddit is safe for now), I don't think much about Reddit has changed in the 10 years I've been on it.

Investors want their fair share at the sad cost of the UX that made it so great.

They don’t have paid staff moderators so sub moderation is chaotic.

Reddit was always terrible, it's most likely you who matured.

I just don't much care for the crowd on Reddit. Too much political mono-think, and never any good answers for things that don't align with the common political philosophy.

In other words... kind of a waste of time, for a lot of topics.

I’d argue the latter.

Reddit was fine till Chinese invested in it.

Remember what happened to Digg?

A new generation's 4chan.

old.reddit.com

You call it degradation, Reddit calls it "explosive growth".

The UX redesign was hugely successful in attracting new users, users who could then be monetized.

The "useless answers" are wildly popular responses because people generally prefer to meme, not solve problems.

Your complaint essentially boils down to, "Why do people not behave how I want them to?" and that, my friend, is a question as old as time itself.

From the HN guidelines, but it also applies to Reddit:

> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob[0] illusion[1], as[2] old[3] as[4] the[5] hills[6].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=926703

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=633099

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=582513

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=289254

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=253657

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=66057

[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13852