“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.

kleinbl00:

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.


posted 2353 days ago