Hi there redditors,
Today we have lots to share—new quick actions on chat, progress on the ongoing effort to improve Reddit search, a few small changes to make your Reddit Daily Digest more fun, and an update and apology on Reddit’s video player.
Here’s what’s new July 14th–August 3rd
Reducing spam and making it easier to manage group chats and invitations
Over the past year, the chat team has been collecting feedback from the community and two things that consistently come up are (you may have guessed it from the title above)... reducing spam and improving the ways you manage group chats and invitations.
One of the first steps to fighting spam is making it easier for people to mark messages as spam, so our systems can identify and address bad actors more quickly and efficiently. Now, on iOS and Android, you can mark invites as spam, ignore and accept them, or block them from quick action menus that are revealed when you slide left on each invite.
And on the web, in addition to the ignore and an invite, invite screens will now present a third option to mark as spam.
This is just the beginning of many changes in store for chat in the coming months, so head over to the original post in r/changelog to see more details about the updates and hear about slash commands, new filters, and other upgrades coming soon.
Improving Reddit search to be more relevant and easy to use
In April, we made an announcement about our plans to improve Reddit search, and last Tuesday the search team was back with an update on their progress. The TL;DR is that new relevance experiments, features, and humans (we’ve brought on an entirely new frontend team) have helped bring about a few significant improvements.
- More relevant search results
We’ve run a series of experiments to improve search results by including results with less restrictive matching, considering search intent, and adding spelling suggestions. - A simplified design
Keep an eye out for design changes to better distinguish posts and comments from communities and profiles, and a “Safe Search” toggle that lets you choose whether to show Not Safe for Work (NSFW) results for any given search. - Community search and new filters
Thanks to those of you who took part in the survey back in March, we’ve prioritized changing how community search on desktop works so that it defaults to searching within a community instead of searching all of Reddit (this change is out now and being tested), and adding more filters.
Check out last Tuesday’s search update to read all the details about how the relevance tests did, see a sneak preview of the design updates, and give more feedback.
Addressing the new video player
Yesterday, in an announcement over in r/changelog, we went over the very buggy rollout of the new video player, owned up to our mistakes, explained why we're making changes to the player in the first place, and gave an update on what's next and how we're going to fix it.
While trying to make the player better, we made some things worse. And one of the biggest things we dropped the ball on, is making sure commenting and engaging with the comments works for everyone. What we’ve heard from all of you is that the new video player makes it harder to comment and discuss what’s happening. This isn’t good and was never the intention, so we’re going to fix it ASAP.
The following changes to address this launched last week:
- You can access play/pause and mute controls when the comments thread is partially open.
- The video pauses when the comments thread is fully open.
- The “next comment” widget is back (the thing that looks like three upside down chevrons).
- Tapping on the post title in your feed opens up the video with the comments thread partially open.
And we have additional changes on the way. To get all the gory details about what went wrong (a series of cascading unfortunate events, that started with a HUGE mistake that rightly pissed off a lot of people) and learn more about how we’re fixing forward, check out the original post.
A few updates that require less explanation
Bugs, tests, and rollouts of features we’ve talked about previously.
On all platforms
- Now you can easily share your avatar. Just create your avatar the way you always do, then hit the Share button and select Share this Avatar to get a link you can share wherever you’d like.
- For those of you subscribed to the Reddit Daily Digest, an email newsletter with a roundup of posts from your favorite communities, we’re rotating in a few fun features such as a daily meme, today in Reddit history, cats, and completely random posts we hope you’ll find fun.
- As was announced last month in r/modnews, we removed a number of dormant communities and made their names available for future community creators. The first wave of removals was last week, and the second wave is now. So keep an eye out for new community names you may want to resurrect.
On Android
- We’ve been testing a new way to discover communities on iOS for a while and now it’s Android’s turn. Starting tomorrow, redditors on Android may see a new tab called Discover. The new space has a few familiar features like a list of communities you follow, along with some new things such as a way to browse posts by topics and a scrollable feed with a mix of content. Keep an eye out for the new experience or check out a preview of what it looks like in the original changelog post.
- Icons in the mod actions menu look good in Dark Mode now.
On iOS
- You can see post flair while creating a post in Dark Mode now.
- The custom feed page won’t automatically scroll after expanding descriptions now.
- While editing a post, the “Do you want to discard your changes?” pop up won’t show if you haven’t made any changes.
- The community tab header won’t cover content anymore.
- Images and videos will load faster if you have a large photo library while creating a post now.
- Thumbnail images will show a resized/smaller version of the image instead of a placeholder image.
- Voting on polls has consistent design/UI now.
- Header colors on collection posts won’t change if you leave the collection and then come back.
Phew, thanks for hanging in there. We’ll be sticking around to answer questions and hear feedback. And for the next few updates, we’ll also be asking your thoughts about these updates themselves. Do you find them helpful? Would you like more information about long-term projects or better ways to give feedback? So far people have asked for more information on bug fixes, let us know what else you’d like to see and hear by filling out this quick survey.
Please let us link directly to a video so I can share it without forcing people into the comments.
Being able to share videos directly on messaging apps would be nice, like literally every other content hosting platform lets you do.
All my friends are greeted with “open this in the app?” Message because the modern internet is a travesty
Because then reddit doesn't make money from the ads. The same reason imgur went to shit and makes it so difficult to direct link images now
We're working on adding this functionality now, so keep an eye out for future updates.
I would love the ability to search by time. Like on my profile I o ly see the 200 most recent posts/comments, but I really want to know what my first ones were
We've been looking into adding a way to filter search results by date and time but I'm not sure if the team has thought about adding this functionality to profile yet. Great idea! And it helps to hear the context. I'll pass it onto the team.
FYI u/BurritoJusticeLeague, the next comment widget is really only useful if you use your phone right handed. For us left handed phone users, it might as well still not exist. Being able to move it like the standard next comment one would be really helpful.
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The lululemon official account followed me. It felt dirty to have some corporate overlords spying on me and I couldn’t do anything about it
Any word on when it will be possible to block followers, or better yet, to turn that off entirely? It's opened whole new avenues for abuse.
Yup. Let us refuse followers!
I'm not a fan of the video player in general as you are encouraging freebooting and content theft. You hurt creators by taking their revenue when Reddit was designed from the ground up to SHARE the sources you have found.
An old example now, but one I can use, is a gaming related subreddit /r/rainbow6. At first people could share their content they created without any fuss. Then they changed it so you couldn't post YouTube links (because they have the potential to be monetised). People however could take your vids, turn them into gifs, or just rip the entire thing and use the native player.
I've seen videos get tens of thousands of upvotes. Yet the original creator can still end up with only a handful of views. I understand that you want to get in on the video hosting market for whatever reason. It's clearly a top priority for Reddit and this latest change highlights this further.
Though prone for abuse you may want to trial moderators of subs being able to update a video to direct to the real source. The amount of viewbots for example in /r/videos is out of control that will rehost a video that was popular then submit it while spamming it upvotes.
No one reads the comments after all in the grand scheme of things.
So stop killing new and upcoming creators. Let Reddit be what made it great in the first place. Let it be the place for people to SHARE what they find and not just steal it.
TL;DR: Reddit encourages freebooting/screws over creators.
That aspect of the player pisses me off to no end. There's absolutely zero reason for not allowing proper linking, embedding, sharing other than straight up greed. It's so hypocritical and disgusting, they don't want to have people leech off their video player by embedding it or linking to it (in Discord for example). They NEED to have you go to the actual site to watch the video.
And yet the entire thing encourages, or in some subs' cases depending on rules REQUIRE you to leech the content. It's the exact same dogshit as Facebook. It's anti-creator, anti-consumer, and encourages bad practices, and it's extremely annoying. Sure someone might link the credits in the comments but that's hardly helpful when 99% of people will never click through anyway because they just watched it on Reddit.
I can't tell you how many times I just don't bother sharing a video I found on Reddit because I know how much of a pain in the ass it is to engage with for the person I'm linking it to.
Woah, another update about useless shit no one cares about. It's weird to see you responding to the comments when 95% of them in these threads are about how we dont want these features at all.
Take chat for instance. Never have I ever wanted to chat on reddit and the ONLY chat messages I see are spam. Just disable it.
Yall put so much effort into these avatars. Why? who has even made one? who even looks at other peoples? why would we want to share something so worthless? you guys paid a developer to make that feature, which might get used by like 0.5% of users.
Seriously, the whole draw of the platform is your relative anonymity, and being able to browse so many different kinds of interesting content without it turning into the shit fest chans are most of the time.
Not once in my many years have I thought about make friends, chatting with or actually getting to know any individuals on the site. Why would I want to engage long term with another redditor. Yech. There are seriously memes about how awful most are.
It's like the devs have no idea who their average user is or why they come to the site. Perhaps they should stop while they're ahead.
I remember when I thought avatars were a temporary thing for April fools. And then it became a way of locking stuff behind premium.
But I want to mention, you all are shitting on chat but I think you guys also forgot that they added a million fucking useless awards. And my little conspiracy theory is that they added those awards (silver and the millions of shit reaction/outdated meme awards) to make people use those instead of gold or platinum. Because gold and plat actually have the function of giving premium, which they don't want you to get because then you aren't paying for premium.
They probably prefer when people buy premium awards like gold and plat, but have found that the price is too high for what most people are willing to spend to tip someone for a contribution to reddit. Other awards are cheaper and increase interaction while also indicating content that may be high quality. You might not be paying for premium, but someone is, they don't care whose account it comes from.
I hate those avatars. They bring no value into any discussion ever. And I don't care what stupid pants and hats you put on your Snoo or whatever it's called. Nobody cares. It's a waste of space on screens, on servers, everywhere.
I've used RiF and reddit enhancement suite with old reddit and it's great - I've never even SEEN a reddit avatar. You should also jump ship. You can get browser extensions that make all reddits and reddit links be in old reddit
You can set your Reddit account to automatically go to old.reddit, no need for other extensions.
I get the distinct feeling that if reddit could, this would be some second life-esque hellscape in which subreddits are 3d chat rooms and they can monetize the shit out of our appearance.
I have no idea how much of the founding team remains, but certainly not enough for them to give a shit about why reddit exists or what it's for.
Awww, come on. Maybe /u/rdhwxs1359210 really IS a horny teen who needs a guy to watch her get off RIGHT NOW.
Like half the comments on other posts are “wHY CaN’t wE hAvE beTtER SeaRCh??” They’re giving us better search and the comments are “wHy CAn’T yOu gIVe Us UpdAteS wE aSK fOr???”
Old Reddit with RES is still better.
Messages are better than the new "chats" which don't play nice with 3rd party mobile apps.
Imgur is a better image hosting platform than Reddit and it's much more user friendly.
Google is still better at searching Reddit than Reddit is at searching Reddit.
It's been like this for 9 years. I'd suggest emulating the options 3rd party groups have made that people actively seek out rather than trying to make reddit into a traditional "social media" platform.
And that's saying something given how archaic it is.
The worst part is that it isn't just better in terms of my personal preference, I legitimately engage with the site a lot more when using old reddit + RES. You know, the very metric the business major idiots wanted the new design to drive up?
The new design is still slow as molasses even on a high end desktop system, and actively gets in the way of my ability to use the site normally by constantly interrupting the flow of whatever I'm doing.
I truly believe we peak interface design was achieved somewhere in 2012-2014.
It's been a steady decline ever since Facebook jumped the shark, with most big social apps following suite. All these redesigns have one thing in common : they're space inefficient.
Looking at new reddit is vomit-inducing. It literally uses 1/3 of my 24" monitor, and shows like 3 threads, unless there's pictures, in which case I'm down to 2 threads.
It's pretty clear they don't want us using any of these sites on a PC, because they know PCs have adblocks and other tools to block their invasive tracking. They make the Windows versions so shitty and clumsy to use, you just can't help but use the mobile version, which they very often have full control of. I can't otherwise understand why the windows versions are so fucking horrible.
Everything is optimized for vertically scrolling on phones now, even desktop sites. I have a 16:9 monitor, but I only get to use the center of it, apparently.
Dude it's not even a surprise. New reddit is fucking unusable. Want to read a post's comments?? Here scroll through 8 other irrelevant posts before you see the rest of the comments.
What asshole approved that UI??
Oh is that how to see the rest of the comments? I never bothered to scroll that far.
That "archaicness" is why it works. There's something nice about an interface that doesn't get in the way of the information being presented.
Can you allow people to opt out of followers, or at least do something to clamp down on cyberbullying? Was a big stack of transphobic cyberbullying/trolling through follower names a few weeks ago, and I know that there are cases of it being done to women by putting sexist slurs in usrenames. I don't want to imply finding a solution is easy, but needs to be done so we don't get mass transphobic campaigns.
Maybe actually play test new features on different devices before rolling them out? 5 minutes on the recent changes would’ve shown you how untenable they were, especially the video player, and especially on recent iPhone models. There’s a saying about a rhino being a unicorn designed through a committee, and there’s frankly far too many rhinos when it comes to any sort of changes.
Oh also get rid of awkwardtheturtle, that shit is just stupid.
I have a question about old Reddit if you don't mind answering. I've tried several times adapting to the new Reddit, but the old one is just... vastly superior imo. I still to this day do not understand why the principle of "if it isn't broken, don't fix it" wasn't applied to the Reddit design. Here's the thing I suspect though but I just want to check if it's true - was it due to phones?
99% of Reddit for me is on my PC. 1% on the phone. See... I noticed that the new Reddit - which is horrible for seeing a lot of posts at once (you can read 20 titles in 2 seconds with old Reddit). Seem to be catered towards phone screen.
So yeah... just a conspiracy theory of mine, but I'm wondering if the Reddit design was butchered due to phones? I'm just curious because I always suspected this but I've never been sure.
As a web dev I can tell you that the system they've gone to is just the modern standard. Development is done mobile first, and targets as many different sizes of screens as it can. Old Reddit is a superior experience because it's based on a standard that's tried and tested for a desktop experience.
Delete this tab NOW. Or at the very least have it take up the space were Chat it. Just give me back my easily accessible community list!
I know this isn't really the appropriate forum, but is there a way to opt out of new Reddit, like, harder?
I type in 'old.reddit' to get here, and I have "use new Reddit as my default experience" unchecked in my preferences, and still I'm constantly clicking links people post, or just things on my front page that direct me to a new Reddit page. What else do I have to do to make sure this isn't happening?
We have account settings in old reddit AND new reddit and they aren't always in sync.
https://new.reddit.com/settings/account
"Opt out of the redesign" near the bottom
When you are logged in you should not have to use old.reddit.com.
Oh, thanks!
So I found that setting. It's visible in chrome on my PC, but isn't available on chrome for Android (is skips the beta tests section on mobile, and jumps right from connected accounts to deactivate account). The "opt out of the redesign" is already selected. Is there anything else I could try?
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Old.Reddit.com for life with res
When they inevitably kill those two things off that will likely be when I break my Reddit addiction.
Yep. The instant I'm forced onto "new" Reddit is the instant I stop using Reddit.
Honestly, I kinda morbidly hope they do it soon because I know I can live a healthier life without this site. But it's so bloody hard to not look stuff up.
Same. The new design isn't just annoying, it actively makes me hate using the site because it constantly gets in the way of normal use, especially trying to read comment threads.
I honestly forget anything else exists.
Bring back the message option and get rid of chat!
I hate chat with a passion. The message option was far better.
The stupid chat thing makes Reddit even more like Facebook.
You don't have send user a message function anymore?
I've used RiF for like 7 years now it's great no stupid live guitar videos, no follower or chat bullshit, no new reddit shitty new ui.
Why do so many people never bother to use any of the Several apps that all existed before the reddit official app and that are ALL better than it?
On desktop (where I mainly do anything internet related) I use old.reddit and sometime in the last month or so the message function was removed. Now it’s chat only.
On mobile I use Apollo.
I was referring to Reddit itself, not any third part solutions since, no matter what third party option you use, this is still Reddit and it’s a change to Reddit itself.
You can put a small block v8 with a supercharger in a Yugo, but it’s still a Yugo.
comparing new reddit to a yugo is an insult to the mighty yugo
Wait does new reddit not have messaging?
It's been slowly being removed. For a while there was messaging and chat, but now messaging has been removed from most accounts.
So how do users communicate with others that have blocked chat?
(On old version myself without chat enabled)
Yes, that is the idea.
And it's a very bad idea.
Chat and the ungodly online status thing.
Can you make the video player not restart 6 times after 3 seconds of playback before finally loading at 480p?
Watch complete video -> Open comments -> Video (annoyingly) restarts -> Attempt to pause -> Video starts again -> Wait a sec because you know the video will restart a few more times before its safe to actually pause -> Pause the video and scroll down to finally read the comments.
I'm tired of this song and dance. If I already watched the video on the main feed, please don't restart it when I open the comments :(
Jump straight to comments, find link to actual source video. That's how it usually goes for me.
Don't worry, I'm sure they will get right on making sure the comments are in the right place next to the video player. And bring the next comment widget back. And all the other things they mentioned in their post while completely ignoring the actual issue of the freaking video player NOT PLAYING VIDEOS!
That's why you look for that save video comment and download it to your device. You might even save data by not having to redownload it every 8 secs when the video stops and goes back to the start.
Yours restarts? I want that functionality.
Tl,dr:
First, I'd like to thank you for working on the video player.
Second, I'd like you to know that, while I'm sure many of you are wonderful people, I hate you all for the ridiculous dumpster fire of a video player you have inflicted upon us for years now.
Can you stop making me beta test all the attempts to converge Reddit with the features of other social platforms people are here to avoid? Thank you.
What about mod harassment? Dealing with serial ban evasion? Blocking followers? Literally any of the things that moderators have been asking for instead of a video player?
I’m sure this means mods being harassed, but do something about overzealous mods, too, Reddit.
And also we don’t want chat, but you already knew that.
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Then I would at least appreciate it if they'd lean into it. Stop asking for our opinions about every dumb new social media feature that no one asked for and no one wants. Are there mods filling out those surveys in a positive way? Like who, exactly, are the admins talking to, who are giving them these Brilliant New Ideas?
They have to pretend to care so they can maintain a certain level of plausible deniability.
As a mod, I would appreciate if the admins handled these harassment stuff and actually implant tools to help us prevent harassment and ban evasions
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They mod 1000 subs and a very long history of acting like that, they are almost assuredly a shared admin account. The admins are not going to do anything to one of their plausible-deniability accounts.
They wouldn’t ban volcatrez or whatever until he was outed in the media so don’t bet on it.
Think you're thinking of violentacrez
Naw Reddit would rather continue to try and be like Facebook and not actually give a shit about things like this.
we can all individually ban them from our client.
not exactly the same, but it's a start.
u/awkwardtheturtle*
wtf is that account. Mods 1000 subs and all I can see in their comments is "u mad?!"
I don't know anything about any of the arguments he/she is in but Jesus, that can't be a happy life.
I am new to this topic. Why do you want to ban the mod? What’s the backstory?
This is how it all started. Don't really know what's been going on since then.
I think the solution is to limit the amount of users you get to lord over, if you mod a sub with a million users then that should be your lot.
Can you please do something about mods running many subreddits at once? /u/awkwardtheturtle is not the only problem amongst the mods…
The Minnesota sub had to split because the head mod is on a power trip banning anyone who doesn't agree with him.
He also mods nonewnormal, so lots of people don't agree with him...
Seriously, fuck supermods.
Here's a thought: guys who go out of their way to run as many subs as they can don't have the interpersonal and social skills required to manage other people.
Soudns silly to some, but yes, this place is big enough to require some level of democracy. Right now is a mess when the mods are not in the mood,, theres no way to appeal because they are both judge and jury
I'm thinking:
Limit the amount of subs one can mod.
Limit the amount of mod appointments mods can make to three a year or so. Use it or lose it system. And that's global - three across the entirety of reddit, not just per sub.
Users must be able to vote on mods. You've got polls, reddit, might as well use them for something besides harvesting user data.
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His thinking is exactly why a vote won’t work lol , anything moderated by majority turns into a cesspool fast
Seriously? Most mod actions are anonymous. You can't tell who removed your post or banned you unless they leave a comment in response, and often they'll just use throwaway accounts specifically for moderating.
Not to mention the potential for brigading. How would you feel if you had a nice little liberal community, and suddenly a million Trump supporters (or vice versa, a small conservative community and a million Bernie bros) decided to mass subscribe, vote all the moderators out, and take over the sub?
Any democratic system that has the power to do anything useful, will also have the potential to be abused in a way that requires personal action from the admins.
... also getting paid and paying other mods to do so.
Looking at you, r/news mods
How many times do I need to turn the sound off on videos before it stays off? If I'm scrolling in public and a video starts playing, I don't want people around me to hear it. This issue is directly contributing to me using the app less.
Literally any other Reddit app is better than the official Reddit app. Just pick one.
On desktop - how do I kill the fucking chat pop up - forever and ever and ever.
uBlock Origin extension and right-click "block element".
Holy shit! I had uBlock origin already installed but it was turned off for some reason.
Looks like that'll do the trick! Thanks very much my man/woman!
No worries. Spread the word.
Use old reddit?
I do...thanks for the suggestion though!
If you're on Desktop and on old reddit, there's no reason you shouldn't be using RES. It has a LOT of useful shit.
I feel like the biggest issues right now are with mods. Yes there is the u/awkwardtheturtle thing, but also look at (for example) the mods of r/medicine just arbitrarily deciding to block discussion of substack content for literally no other reason than //because they don't like the ideas being expressed.//
What's being done for power tripping mods like u/awkardtheturtle? You need to be dealing with more tangible stuff like that right now.
This exactly. It's time for some serious, consistent site-wide standards for mod behavior that are enforced.
We have a nutjob using r/minnesota to spread anti-vaxx misinformation. No amount of admin complaints have produced any kind of responce.
There's the subreddit of a certain scifi TV show that ban anyone for any discussion that isn't glowing praise of the brand. I can't even say the name here because they ban anyone who even talks about it anywhere on Reddit.
Did he delete his profile? It’s been 15 minutes since your message yet the profile won’t load for me on iOS
I bet I spelled it wrong
Yeah theres a typo at the start. Found his profile and had a read.. how is this guy a mod of a huge sub..?
A mod of *1,000 subs, including several large ones.
Easy, Reddit obviously doesn't care
If you want chat to be a reliable and usable experience you're going to have to open up the API. I'm not going to shoot someone a chat message because I know there's a 50/50 chance they even get to see it. I myself don't see chat messages on my phone because my third party app cannot support it.
I realize why this is, you want to get more people over on your official app. I think it's fair to have exclusive features. But when that features usefulness is directly linked to how many people use it, you're shooting yourself in the foot by making it first-party exclusive.
Chat will never become truly popular as long as a large amount of your users are unable to use it.
Any chance you could just admit that new reddit is a terrible mistake and move back to old reddit?
There are people not using old reddit?
I would bet that most people who started using reddit after new reddit started use new reddit, because they don't know any better, probably don't even know that old reddit exists.
Good point. I guess I just find the redesign so awful that had it been my first experience with the site I would've just not bothered with it. It's a complete visual mess.
A lot of mods/admins of subreddits have shared the traffic data that point out old reddit being a very small percentage of users. A large majority of the traffic comes through mobile apps, followed by mobile website, then new reddit followed by old reddit.
Here's a suggestion - everything you've done lately? Undo it.
It mostly sucks.
And start policing your mods.
On mobile, the place where I used to go to find the places I'm subbed to is now this god awful idk wtf you call it but it shows a ton of videos and gifs of stuff I have no interest in. Makes getting to my subs take longer. No one asked for this. Why implement something like this with no way of opting out.
I can still hardly play videos for more than two seconds without buffering in Android... It's been like this for years, and honestly why I keep the desktop version up. That takes priority for me.
But have you tried chat?
I wanna opt out of the broadcast and live stuff
…And chat.
Reddit has nowhere to go but down from
hereten years ago.You can turn chat off already
Use RES on desktop and Apollo on iOS.
Relay on Android is great too
What does RES do?
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If you go into settings, you can disable broadcast and live stuff.
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Don't use the official piece of shit app
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Using old.Reddit.Com ?
RES is the only true way to subvert all the dumb shit that reddit has done to itself over the years.
Where is that at? I cant seem to find it
On desktop, click your username and select user settings.
Go to notifications and scroll down to Recommendations. Turn off broadcast recommendations and trending posts to disable them from popping up.
Can we have a way to just remove chat altogether?
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What about the ability to see who is following/friend you for PC platforms?
When is /r/all going to be returned to it's former glory or at least replaced with something that isn't /r/popular
How about a new /all+ being the original /all with the content the way it used to be?
Is there a way to opt out of chats entirely? I like reddit for the features it LACKS. You're just adding shit that aids cyber-stalking.
So tired of you adding bullshit we don't want while the search function remains one of the worst on the internet.
The "followers" thing is weird lads. Throw it into the bin there.
Who the fuck uses the chat feature when PMs are so so much better?
For real, this is a forum and should function like one. If I wanted to live chat with random strangers I would put my phone number on my reddit account
I don't want to implement emoji flair in any of my subreddits because on mobile they don't render and therefore look really awful. Mobile web is a really big chunk of visits and you're giving them a pretty bad experience when it comes to emoji and flair. Can you prioritize fixing this bug?
I don't give a fuck about how you're growing your company. Reign in your mods. It isn't that hard.
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Mods and breaking site rules are like butter on toast at this point.
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YOU KILLED SECRET SANTA AND REDDITGIFTS FOR THIS GARBAGE?!
Check out /r/newsecretsanta for the upcoming replacement
The player sucks. The search sucks. Your chat sucks. Reddit, can you just stop sucking for once? Oh, nope. You'll just add awkwardtheturtle to your payroll. Fuck.
I thought I would put together a handy “field guide” for newer users to Reddit Admin behavior when confronted with months after months of negative feedback, so you can better understand what they mean when they finally say “oops, my bad” about the new video player… and promise to do better… here’s the dirty little secret. They won’t.
The exact same pattern repeats itself:
Step 1: Reddit decides to upgrade/rebuild/redesign/add something
Step 2: They do it, but instead of designing it to function similar to the original product and then iterate from there, they try to jam in as many “hot in the moment” feature and designs as they can and completely change the user experience.
Step 3: Current users are confused and angry about this sudden change in everything that fundamentally made the thing work in the first place
Step 3.5: Things break, because they changed things so drastically
Step 4: Radio silence. Admins will either not acknowledge that there is an issue at all, or try to blame it on “old” users resistance to needed upgrades. I mean really why aren’t we all super happy they gifted us these amazing new features (that no one asked for)? /sarcasm.
And now our current step for those playing along at home:
Step 5: After an overwhelming amount of negative feedback on every admin post, and even negative articles written in tech blogs or news sites, a few admins will finally post in one of the several hundred places where admins make announcements (will anyone see that post in r/blog? Maybe, maybe not, but who cares right?) and say how sorry they are and that they are here to take their lumps… maybe they might even roll back a few super bad things… not the whole thing of course, just a few peripheral features here and there. Don’t worry, those will all come back… just after people move on a bit.
They will then praise themselves for learning from their mistakes, and how closely they listen to feedback and take it to heart. They will then pat each other on the back about how quickly they jumped to fix the issue (that they created!) and how from now on they will never make this mistake again!
Bonus step 5.5: I neat little trick that happens with the admin that draws the short straw to make this announcement, they will then just disappear for a while after getting huge downvotes. I like to call it ghosting(™). For example, /u/KeyserSosa hasn’t posted in over a month after getting savaged for announcing the cancelling of Reddit Gifts.
Right before the ghosting stage, they will try to answer a few cherry picked comments… nothing too in depth though, because after all they aren’t really changing or fixing anything, just a few band aids to placate everyone until they forget about how bad it was and move on to the next broken new feature. I believe they do this to make themselves feel somewhat better about having to trot out the same old excuses over and over before they start the ghosting(™) step.
Step 6: Repeat
So there ya go, please use this handy guide to apply to the next sht storm, and for extra fun look back to all the past fck ups and follow along with each step.
Tagging /u/BurritoJusticeLeague for visibility... wishful thinking I know
OK, cool. Now actually fix the video player and remove chat.
reddit: becomes DIGG
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBAdbxjbTM0
FTFY
Yes but can we opt out?
Something else honestly very needed is to provide tools for subs to moderate the moderators from their mods
For example a simple voting system and certain requeriments (activity, time subbed etc etc) to avoid diluted votes or troll/bot votes would be nice. Simple, yet effective, that way peopel could vote to ban a mod if needed, after all they are there for the subs, not the privileged mods.
Otherwise you have to rely on other mods (which usually do nothing) or move away which is just plain sad and encourages bad behaviour
Is there any way to unbreak google searches? You used to be able to filter google results for reddit threads by date and keyword, but the "related posts" section on each page forces irrelevant results into Google searches, and the google date and reddit post date don't match anymore so you can't accurately search by date. These problems didn't exist a few years ago
The admins apparently can’t fix this without Google:
https://www.reddit.com/r/bugs/comments/g5ct70/reddit_is_at_risk_of_being_deprioritized_by/
In the meanwhile, I recommend Pushshift redditsearch.io website, which is a faster and more customized Reddit search with date ranges.
(Social media researchers created the Pushshift API to extend on the regular Reddit API)
https://github.com/pushshift/api
It’s useful for quickly finding posts or comments that contain specific keywords.
It displays the full comment like Discord, instead of having to click “more” on every Reddit search result, or only seeing the partial Google meta-description with site:reddit.
https://camas.github.io/reddit-search/ is another search based on Pushshift.
(extra tool: F5Bot is useful for getting email notifications when keywords are mentioned.
The cloudHQ “Share via link” extension puts all the selected emails on a single page so it’s easy to Middle mouse autoscoll).
Wow, thanks for the explanation! At least now I better understand the source of my frustration lol. I do use and enjoy the Pushshift website for certain searches, but google still seems the best for quickly finding the most relevant results.
At least, it would be if it weren't for the keyword/related-posts problem. Even if Reddit manages to fix the post date problem, there's still the fact that a list of google search results might have two threads referencing your search keywords, and 10 threads that don't but link to those two relevant threads in their related posts sections.
But anyway, thanks again for the links and workarounds in your post, I think they'll help a lot of people who stumble upon this thread in the future.
The video player update made me make the switch to Apollo. Don’t know why I didn’t sooner. It’s way better. I suggest everyone make the switch.
Just pay the Apollo creator to be your official app designer.
Look at how reddit is rolling out these updates. They don't want to provide a good service for users. If they did, blocking followers would have rolled out with followers existing at all - and they still don't actually have it rolled out for everyone yet.
Their goals are antithetical to those of the people behind Apollo. Apollo aims to give users an experience the users want. Reddit wants to give users an experience ad buyers want, the rest is third or forth priority.
[deleted]
Exactly. They already killed AlienBlue. Leave Apollo alone.
RIP AlienBlue
No thanks, that's what happened to /r/alienblue
Seriously. Reddit’s webpage and app are hot garbage. I’m amazed anyone uses it
please no. reddit's incentives for making an app completely different than christian's (the apollo dev). reddit doesn't intend for the app itself to be a revenue generator and drive dev goals. it's simply a vehicle for collecting and monetizing user data.
as an independent app, apollo is the revenue generator. so development incentives are aligned with putting the user experience first.
the more likely scenario is that reddit nerfs 3rd party apps.
cool but FIX THE GOD DAMN VIDEO PLAYER
The only fix is a full revert.
i don’t even care what they do to it, they just need to make it not complete fucking dogshit
Thank fuck. Also forgot to mention this is changing it back to the way it used to work.
Good seeing you guys blocked /r/MGTOW, but how about blocking /r/NoNewNormal? Place is a fucking dumpster fire.
IMHO the only thing that can make chat better on reddit is to delete it.
Do you have plans to get multi-image posts fully working in old.reddit? Right now, if you use old.reddit, and have disabled custom subreddit CSS, you're unable to see images from multi-image posts.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a huge disconnect between the users of the site and the developers. It’s like the devs don’t use the website they make.
When are you going to get rid of this new video player garbage?
https://media1.tenor.com/images/89972971d5c3b2b733be0086f2128466/tenor.gif?itemid=13352243
How do I disable chat? I don’t want to see it at all.
Will the new video player, you know, play videos?
Has anyone addressed the issue that was happening on iOS where it made our devices run extremely hot as if they were mining Bitcoin? It was causing extreme performance issues across the entire device; was posted about in r/redditmobile without much response. Was that related to the video player saga?
Knowing these jokers, it was probably was mining Bitcoin on your device.
What's the point of stupid features nobody wants if the very concept of open dialogue and freedom of speech doesn't exist on the platform anymore? That's what will ultimate kill Reddit, not lack of some banal features.
Just ask google to make your search function for you. It's embarrassing at this point.
Here it is, everyone. The semi-annual "we are gonna improve reddit search we swear" post.
Sun shines, birds sing, Reddit tries to monetize the making of promises rather than the keeping of promises.
Hi, I have a few suggestions that mods like me would appreciate if added
The ability to pin group chats
The ability to not send a community invite twice
Bugs I’ve found
Community invites doesn’t send the custom message I made nor a link to my community
new reddit is shit
can you ban r/nonewnormal already? The friggin sub is a hive of misinformation and harm!