old.reddit, a clear example of don't fix what ain't broken

That might actually be an active strategy.
Making the UI worse so people have to click around more. Makes opportunity for more advertising, and makes it look like people are engaging more.
Never really thought about it that way.

You say that…

I still use the app for 1 specific thing and let me tell you the iOS app (presumably their largest audience) is GARBAGE. And it gets worse every single release.

The latest release has a dead zone (!) in the list view. You’ll click a row/item and nothing happens. It only occurs after using the app for a bit and only in certain vertical place (about 20% down from the top). You have to scroll the list to be to click that item. Hilarious.

Of course all of this is on top the numerous other bugs.

Chrstian - ONE FUCKING GUY - made a superior app by himself. What did PewDiePie say, “it’s evolving, only backwards.”

its peak enshittified, but i guess they can make it like tiktok, where you get interrupted every other AD posts/ai.

They should try alienating a bunch of their most active, long tenured users.

Only thing left to block are logins.

You forgot banning your userbase left and right.

That damn “better on the app” popup completely freezes Firefox Focus on iOS.

There are times where I search something, there appears to be a reddit thread with a descriptive answer so I tap on it, I scroll down a couple swipes and boom, popup freezes the app. Can’t do anything to make the back button appear after scrolling hid it. All I can do is force close.

also thier reddit app and thier new REDDIT UI on browser is very non-intuitive to use.

If 80% of their advertising revenue comes from logged in users and they mandate login, soon 100% of their revenue will be logged in users. It won't be more dollars than it is now, but they will have successfully stopped those other 20% from seeing ads.

Their whole philosophy is bizarre. Instead of letting a random from a Google search get lost in a series of recommended topics, browsing the sub, or searching for more stuff inside Reddit until they see an opinion they just need to respond to, they instead want to put up barriers to new user acquisition.

If I were a stockholder, that'd be cause for me to sell. Reddit's main value comes from the fact that it's constantly acquiring new users, primarily from search engine results. Keeping users is easy enough (there are still people logging into Facebook every single day), but consistently gaining more users than losing year over year is an incredibly valuable metric to an investor. Mandatory logins would immediately bottleneck that incoming stream of users, does little to retain existing users, and is likely to scare off a statistically significant amount of existing users. This would be a huge red flag for me to dump my Reddit stock.

True. I used to launch Firefox in private mode to see if they had shadow banned one of my posts again (WAY too often, the answer was "yes") and just about a week ago I could not do that any more and began insisting on a log on.

For other reasons, though, I've since committed a reddit suicide, insisted on a permaban (that was harder than I expected) and found y'all. I'm loving it.

they practically forced it, old reddit wont stay long for logged in people.

I guessed "scambling" which is gambling, but also a scam.

Yep end stage capitalism produces absolutely nothing of value for anyone but the .1%.

Both

why not both, gambling and scamming.

That's an astute observation!

Every businessman knows, you leave meat on the bone for your partners (meaning be generally a good faith business citizen that doesn't need to have all the cake) or eventually you don't have partners and you don't have business either, because your greed has razed the ecosystem.

people arnt going to look past the AI overview thats why.

But 0 click hacks, mostly centered around invisible prompt injection is a thing now. So hackers have made AI work, don't give agents write access to your entire system. It's a can of worms.

What I wonder is whether Google's ad revenue was doomed or not.

It seems like they shot themselves in the foot by having a LLM answer when you did a basic web search instead of just showing the websites. But, my guess is that they think that nobody wants that, and that if they only offered old-style search all their customers would switch to using OpenAI or Anthropic's "web search". At least by offering LLM garbage themselves, some people are still searching on Google, so there's a chance they'll see an ad.

I don't know. I am not a normal user, and I'm out of touch with what normal people want. I have things set up so a firefox dynamic bookmark / keyword search thing uses the "udm=14" trick to go straight to the "web" tab in the Google results and not show the AI overview. But, I'm probably among only 0.001% of users who have done something like that.

Hey, its rude to expect spaz to think that far

You're already paying for the hour Betty. "It's $10 for a BJ, $12 for an HJ, $15 for a ZJ.

Don't listen to them Reddit!

They just want to stop you WINNING - keep going where you're going.

Content is terrible too. I guess when the bots learn from bots, that's what you get.

More than half the posts are all reposts too

What's really annoying is that /r/all used to be all posts from around the world, not whatever's popular locally. Now the only equivalent to that keeps trying to show me local stuff that I don't care about. I'm sure if I was willing to have an account I could curate that, but I'm not doing that.

But, even with that forced local focus, India-related stuff is more and more popular. It seems to me that Indians are using Reddit more and more. More Indian users will probably end up driving off the more lucrative American userbase.

Listen to some of their q3 earnings report if youre bored. Its obvious this little forum admin spez is way out of his depth/ competence

It's a pseudonymous Facebook. I still think that the Internet is better when people aren't using their own real names.

They also don't let people lurk anymore.

We really do need to get back to a tech landscape where evil ceos are shunned and their products not used. We have tolerated the spez, musk, thiel, zuckerburg, ellison, bankman-fried, elizabeth holmes, Kalanich (uber), baszuskis (roblox) types for way too long. They are all a bunch of mega pricks and their companies should pay a penalty for their being openly evil.