- “Reddit did not succeed because it has a shitty UI,” Huffman said. “Reddit succeeded despite having a shitty UI.
I disagree. I don't think I need to explain why here.
- Huffman strongly believes the drop-off is due to the site’s design. “New user behavior is different from lurkers. For example, new users never go to communities because they don’t know communities exist. They don’t read comments because they don’t know comments exist. There’s a cohort of new users that are lost. I fundamentally believe that Reddit has something for everybody. If we get the presentation right and the experience right, the users will sign up. I make this claim that Reddit has something for everybody, but if you go the frontpage, it’s hard for somebody to find their home.”
I also disagree here. The users that they want to capture are having a tough time discovering communities for a reason, and I don't have a nice way to describe why. As these users are guided into the sites, they are going to change the communities they inhabit and drive the lifeblood of those communities out.
It seems to me that they want to Facebook without Digging in the transition.
The funny part was where he implied Reddit does now or ever has given a fuck about users. They care about clickthrough and outbound links. It's the only thing they've ever cared about. The only reason they're doing a UI redesign now is that their ancient shitty Craigslist-looking UI is actively off-putting for a generation used to HTML5, and the only reason they've been given any money for a redesign is that they have metrics indicating that their landing-to-leaving time is in decimal seconds.
It takes effort to comment on Reddit. But not that much effort. It takes effort to find cool sub-Reddits that appeal to you. But not that much effort. A little while ago, they had a thing called "Front Page" or something like that which was basically Reddit curated content without the Reddit features such as submitting, commenting, etc. I don't know how that turned out, but seeing as how I never see it mentioned anywhere, I don't think it was that successful. Makes me wonder if this redesign will have a similar impact, that is, near none.
It feels like now that the internet is so large, The Eternal September is a concept that can be applied to individual websites. Instead of a television series jumping the shark, a website experiences it's own ES event.They can select classic, but it's the new folk coming in that like card view that might be their undoing.
Yeah, I remember when it happened here on Hubski back in 2014.
Na I'm just horsing around. Every once in a while we have an Intermittent April rather than an Eternal September.
But ES was a term created for what happened to usenet.