SwagginsYolo420 t1_jbe4kom wrote on March 8, 2023 at 11:53 AM

Reply to comment by Dragoniel in How Reddit is getting simpler — and dealing with TikTok, with chief product officer Pali Bhat by BronzeHeart92

The bare-bones lightweight format of OG reddit was a major part of why the site took off over other message/image boards in the first place.

Nowadays it has the near-monopoly on web forum content to retain users despite newer horrendous layout design.

Companies hire a bunch of people who then need to find busywork to do all day to keep their jobs relevant. That results in continually redesigning UI that wasn't broken in the first place, usually for the worse.

Then you get "Make it look more modern" which ends up translating to "make the usability worse", by aping other companies' bad design that was generated by that very ludicrous process of unnecessary design worsening.

Sites and services that became popular in part or whole due to UI success, have a tendency to destroy that UI once they have achieved critical mass. The users become a captive audience and are stuck with it, and whoever runs the company by then time is usually completely clueless as as to how the site/service attracted users to gain any value in the first place.

It's a cancer that infects almost all of computing.

FugueSegue t1_jbehxec wrote on March 8, 2023 at 1:57 PM

ENSHITTIFICATION

RonyTheTiger t1_jbej9lu wrote on March 8, 2023 at 2:08 PM

This was the best read I’ve had this week, thanks!

flaagan t1_jbgcaea wrote on March 8, 2023 at 9:08 PM

>Nowadays it has the near-monopoly on web forum content to retain users
>
>despite newer horrendous layout design.

The funny thing about that is that I would likely never use Reddit for something that I would typically go to an existing forum for, you're not going to find the same type of community and interactions here you would find on a topic-dedicated forum, much less the granular level of discussion and information you'd likely be looking for.

SwagginsYolo420 t1_jbhlo7b wrote on March 9, 2023 at 2:26 AM

I agree with that generally. Though a big part of that reason I think is most mainstream special interest communities established their main forum sites/communities long prior to the existence of reddit and "web 2.0" social media.

I would say that newer communities tend to coalesce around reddit / twitter / discord first now, because it's the path of least resistance. Communities focused on newer technologies / fandoms / arts from only the last decade or so seem much less likely to have dedicated high-traffic old-school forums now.