They have deployed an AI reply system into the comments, probably to make up for the decrease in traffic that could hurt their IPO.
I don’t think it even needs to be them for it to be a huge problem. People have been automating the process of gaining karma to sell accounts for years and years, I would imagine this process is accelerating with the rise of LLMs and the bottom falling out from under all the mod tools.
In Lebanon, “Handy” means a cordless landline.
Lord forgive me for what I’m about to do
You’re telling me you don’t like putting on on your most ridiculously offensive Yeehaw Hollywood American accent when asking your phone to set a timer?
Alternative way to think about it: 10% of people are insufferable assholes. Do you want them to be happy with what you say?
96% is the best layout. All the convenience of not having a bunch of dead space between your arrows and nav cluster, with all of the convenience of having a numpad with all the nav keys your heart can want. Yes I want Home and End right there on the first layer, I’d have to go mad not to.
You only need to choose one key to sacrifice, and I happily tucked Insert one layer under Delete. Print Screen is non-negotiable.
I’m always so surprised to see how unpopular 96% is.
My only gripe with using FMHY as my main.
Edit: looks like it’s been fixed! Thanks FMHY admins!
I just hate how “toxic cesspool” is the default. I was just watching a short video on YouTube about the US city of Baltimore, a place I heard about from an old family friend who studied at Hopkins many years ago.
The video was about the city’s decline, with the primary cause (according to the video) being the hollowing out of the manufacturing and logistics industries. The channel, Forgotten Places, doesn’t strike me as one that toxic people would be flooding to (those channels exist).
Can you guess what every other comment is about? Hint: it’s not the abandonment of productive industry. A small number of comments name more historical industrial employers that have left the city, but by far the comments with the most upvotes are “we all know we can’t discuss what happened to Baltimore 😉😉😉😉😉”
There’s more than just that to it.
I recently downloaded it so I can save some um research content for later research (I’d been off Reddit for maybe two weeks at this point, I wasn’t going to hurt my pride if I saw the app for myself). When I refreshed the front page of my research throwaway, all the posts were hidden and replaced with new ones. Refresh again, those are gone too, replaced by three or four stragglers. Final refresh and there’s nothing on the front page. They’re practically begging me to go to their algorithm page (popular?). It looks like an A/B test they’re doing, and it looked like others were annoyed at this from the feedback I saw on the official mobile app sub. It was an A/B test with no toggle or anything.
Normally, in an app made to give the user a good experience, this should be a feature you turn on and off. I remember a ton of people swearing by some kind of post hiding system, so, sure, this is definitely a plus for some people. But I’ve refreshed my Reddit home page for over a decade now. Don’t make it misbehave all of a sudden.
Their app, with all its bloat, can have some nice features. For example, during my research session, I was swiping through an album. When it was finished, it swiped into the next post. At first I didn’t like that, but a few posts later, I liked it, I got the hang of it. Decent navigation feature, fine. This isn’t so bad.
I tap into another part of the app a different sub I think, and now the only direction I can scroll is downwards, and instead of showing me the next (image) post, it shows me some random popular vertical video from a different subreddit. Literally just TikTok navigation for Reddit. Which again, would be completely fine, if it was a button I could tap to enter this mode, but not just haphazardly switching between different navigation UXes so that the app can quantify which one makes me see more ads. Fucks sake.
I didn’t even want to download their app, and the one time I find a new feature that I don’t hate, it gets turned off within the same session to serve me a feature I specifically don’t want. I don’t think vertical video is the death of the human experience, but it sure as hell isn’t for me, and it sure as hell is the last thing I want out of a site like Reddit.
These A/B tests infuriate me. I open Instagram every once in a blue moon, and I absolutely despise scrolling down my feed and seeing the same information displayed ten different ways in less than a minute. On one post, the likes counter is bold, on another, it has profile photos, on another, it’s an accented color… like that’s worse than just picking the worst option in my opinion.
But that’s the thing. No first party app will ever be designed to have a good UX first and foremost. That’s secondary. What’s important is their meaningless metrics that make the site worse, so they can charge more for ads (even if they make the site worse for paying users…). I understand that they’re trying to appeal to new people over on Reddit, I genuinely believe there’s nothing wrong with that. But if I stumbled upon it now for the first time, I’d think it was hot unusable garbage, and I would not have guessed this is site would have been my literal front page of the internet™ for over 11 years in another life. Probably would just assume it was a porn site with a weird news aggregator attached.
That said, isn’t that how leagues work in the US for most sports? The bottom teams are constantly given legs up to keep the winners cycling. That’s what the whole draft system is about, right? Full disclosure: I know close to nothing about US sports.
No disrespect to US sports fans or athletes but over there it seems more like the brand they care about is the league itself, as an entertainment product, compared to football teams in most of the world which are much more independent. Even just the name “franchise” says something.
“Guys I know the instructions say I can use any odorless cooking oil, but is there anything wrong with just buying the $89 Apple oil? I want to have a matching set”
That’s in the Canary Islands, for those of you like me who don’t know where Fuerteventura is.
TIL the Canary Islands have a population of 2.2 million (!)