Reddit seems to have let this AI demand go to their heads.
I had multiple Reddit accounts, simply because I did not want my more "professional" account linked to the other accounts (some for more controversial opinions, some for more adult talk, etc.) Apparently that's a problem for them. So they banned most of my accounts. If I really was up to no good, I'd have used VPNs, etc. to hide my activities. But I just wanted to segregate my personas. e.g. I like discussing local SF and California politics, and often times take controversial positions. I don't want my activities as a respectable(?) member of the Linux Kernel group to be colored through my activities in these other groups. But now I can't do that.
Oh, and back in the day Reddit (when it wanted to pad its user numbers) didn't care for an email address or a phone number. Now, 15 years later, it suddenly wants to confirm the email address!
And don't even get me started on the moderation at Reddit. Typical example: "Hey! We deleted your comment. If you have any questions about it, email the mods." except ... they deleted the comment and now I don't even know what was wrong with it! :-D
New Reddit is too. They were A/B testing it for a while, but now you can't use it without the login pop-up after a short timespan. The funny thing is, it has nothing to do with how much content you view. So if you really want to read something, you can hit F5 and scroll back down every time the pop-up is shown. Still not worth it. But honestly, Reddit content has taken such a plummeting nose dive over the last few years, this just feels like a final reminder that it's time to move on.
Cynically, I think the purpose is to inflate page view counts. You refresh 10x to read the comments, they report 10x user engagement, and high five each other over successfully meeting their KPIs.
I think gradual rollout is underrecognised as the utterly devious way of implementing user-hostile changes that it is. It doesn't take a lot of scrolling through the comments here to find instances of people who are unaffected by some change or another being inexplicably hostile towards posters who are, implicitly accusing them of anything from incompetence to drama-mongering and misinformation. In that way, some of those who would complain about a change are worn down early on, and by the time the change is rolled out to more people they have already resigned and moved on, preventing a critical mass of opposition from forming.
Yes, it's a kind of boiling the frog where instead of slowly cranking up the degree of enshittification you do it with the number of affected users instead. In both cases the goal is to avoid a critical mass of user outrage.
A/B tests in general should require informed consent just like any other study on human participants. But then most software developers don't care about ethics so this is nothing new.
That's the magic of A/B testing. You get to send an entire "B" group into paranoia and upset about the change they didn't want/like while everyone in "A" gets to gaslight B that B isn't experiencing what they're getting and that it would never happen to A...
To what end? We're discussing this on a post about the equivalent for another platform being (hopefully temporarily) shutdown so this will never be a reliable long term solution.
All the time? It wasn't working for me using tor-browser, nor Brave. I was only a reader of Reddit. I'm on fediverse/Lemmy, mainly https://old.lemmy.world which feels very familiar!
I've not taken the effort to understand fediverse yet, but it feels very old-internet.
(as a logged-in user) I just stopped using it the day they banned 3rd party apps and I don't miss it a bit. I visit some communities still, but only on PC with old reddit. Once that is gone, I'm gone as well.
spez is a problem. And if it's not spez, then enlighten me. But they've taken years of built up network effects and absolutely wrecked it. It's so hostile when companies do this. They just ignore their users, straight up. That should be a firable offense. The customer is NOT 'always right', but you can meet them halfway
> The customer is NOT 'always right', but you can meet them halfway
Reddit users are not customers. The advertisers and AI labs are the customers because they're the ones paying. The users are the cattle in the pen being sold to the advertisers and the monkeys at the typewriters whose output gets sold as AI training data.
I understand this, but the distinction is academic
The people using their product. The people who, if the product were shit from day 1 - as Reddit wasn't - would have never signed up for it. Who have been effectively and literally lied to
“Users” is a misnomer that sheepishly cloaks the relationship with a little feint of dignity. You are not the customer merely because you use the thing. Where the service is free, your attention, metadata, and by extension, susceptibility to influence are the value being sold; the advertisers are the customers.
As the saying goes: “If it’s free, you’re the product.”
Existing Reddit users aren’t affected by this regi wall UX because they’re already logged in. And as much as I hate the UX too… Reddit user numbers have grown a ton in the last few years. It’s difficult to make the argument that these changes are a failure.
Yeah they have grown because it's the only thing Google ever shows when you want people's opinions or search for something and want to see what people say. The only forum or community they ever show is reddit and nothing else, not even Twitter nor Instagram nor anything else.
Twitter, Instagram, Facebook are all closed [too, like Reddit], Google SERPs should have preferred reddit as a source people could access. I don't see it that much; probably country or personal search effects.
> Existing Reddit users aren’t affected by this regi wall UX because they’re already logged in.
I am an existing Reddit user, but don't want to be logged in everywhere and always. Sometimes I had a few free moments and wanted to kill some time, so until recently I could go to Old Reddit on my mobile phone and just see what the 'general human zeitgeist' was discussing: from something serious in /r/worldnews to some pop culture news story.
What kind of users though? OnlyFans models, porn addicts, LLMs and child groomers... maybe.
I could be ignorant because I'm not the target user for their brave new vision but no one I know uses reddit anymore. And with the locking of old.reddit and forcing sign-ups they probably lost the last few old timers who were still there for what was supposed to be an open forum to freely exchange ideas.
> Reddit is the worst for this. I hate the disgusting, low class UX design where they let you read about 10-15 seconds of a page before locking you out.
When this happens I use uBlock origin to remove that popup and the grey background behind it.
Scrolling and loading more comments remains usable (unlike Facebook)
Though I think Pinterest takes the cake for being just the ugliest example of this.