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Reddit Surpasses Facebook To Become the Third Most Visited Site in the US: Alexa (thenextweb.com)
According to Alexa, the Amazon-owned web traffic analyzing platform, more people now visit Reddit than Facebook in the US. From a report: Spotted, of course, on Reddit by user IamATechieNerd, the stats will be a big boost for the social sharing platform, especially with many users still irked about the recent re-design. It's important to note that analyzing web traffic using a tool like Alexa is not an exact science, but it's interesting that it has now put Reddit ahead of Facebook. If the stats are to be believed, Google is still the most visited site, followed by YouTube, Reddit, and Facebook, with Amazon rounding out the top five.
It amazes me that, after many years, Reddit has not improved its web site design.
Thanks for that small mercy, compare to Google's improvements to google news. But Reddit recently did fiddle with the presentation and made it worse, with fewer comments per screen.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I'm an old(er) fart who has been watching the absolutely fascinating phenomenon of social media for decades. (Yes, I do mean decades -- Google "FidoNet" for interesting reading if you're into that dusty historical stuff. I arrived a little late in the game with my pokey 300-baud modem, but I was there. I even bought my first domain name when Network Solutions -- colloquially "NetSol" -- was still the only game in town. Network Solutions charged $70 a year per domain name and offered a horribly unintuitive user interface -- faugh!)
I've accumulated a few observations from watching the long rise of Google and Facebook as well as the rise and fall of other successful or not-so-successful social media and web search platforms such as AOL, MySpace, AltaVista, GeoCities, Twitter, Snapchat, etc., etc., etc. Shall I include hoary old Usenet in that list? It's virtually a tautology to attribute the wild success of the web to the absurd simplicity of posting a simple website with basic HTML tags. Nor does the swamping of the modern web with extremely complex frameworks meant to overcome profound design flaws in the web detract from this point.
Anyways. For whatever it's worth, I've noticed that once a web service, be it a search engine or a social media platform, moves beyond obviously useful and non-confusing features into self-important "lookit what we can do now" frippery, it starts losing its original appeal and eventually its regular visitors. Facebook currently holds immense power as the default destination for hundreds of millions of people, but the company isn't immune to the fickle mindsets of customers for its brand of free and paid services (advertising in particular). The recent antics of the ultra-liberal leaderships of Google, Facebook, and Twitter in subtly or obviously silencing prominent conservative and libertarian voices and thereby gradually alienating a wider audience constitute only one of several serious problems.
Possibly more critical to the futures of these companies is the constant, ruthless manipulation of their audiences for maximum profitability. Mind you -- I say "maximum" profitability and not an enlightened "optimum" profitability. The former is the attitude of a greedy robber baron, and the latter is the attitude of a cautious business that knows what its customers want. Put simply, Facebook and Twitter in particular have become seriously annoying. Google isn't all that far behind. Their hundreds of programmers scamper here and yon in an unending effort to add features with little regard to how they clutter up the user experience. Hey, they've got to justify their salaries. Students of private and government bureaucracies learn this in Governance and Corporate Culture 101.
Most people want to talk to their friends and share pictures and videos without having to fight and kick and struggle against manipulative, intrusive, self-serving algorithms that keep nudging and prodding them into buying this and that or forcing them to interact with their friends in certain ways and not others. Let's not even get into the absurdities of a grossly oversimplified "like" system at Facebook that permits no subtleties of approval or disapproval. Beyond a certain point -- don't ask me where that point lies -- they silently and almost invisibly become ready and willing in their tens of millions to to suddenly abandon an old, familiar platform for a better platform that does exactly what they want it to do and nothing further.
Please note the concept of "non-confusing," which isn't quite the same thing as the older and more limited concept of "user-friendly." "Non-confusing" encompasses everything about the user experience. It means the platform only does what it absolutely must for the mainstream experience while making side trips like photographic manipulation as obviously simple as possible -- in and out and done. Visual triggers are okay but only if they quietly hover in the background with nil annoying behavior like flashing, blinking, sliding, jittering
A truly excellent pizza parlor is a delight unto the heavens. Treasure the sauce and the toppings!
As a frequent user of reddit I can tell you that while its upvote/downvote system is very good, Slashdot's is better. Reddit's vote system encourages simplistic views (simple agree or disagree), penalizes unpopular opinions disproportionately (to the point that people will delete comments to stem a tide of downvotes) and tends to reward popular ones disproportionately in the other direction.
Slashdot's system caps has specific moderation reasons, out at +5, and bottoms out at -1. It encourages thoughtful moderation with limited numbers and distribution of modpoints (even though a lot of people interpret "+1 Insightful" as "+1 Agree") and limits piling on votes with hard caps, encouraging moderators to spend their points on a more diverse spread of comments.
I don't think Slashdot's system of moderation could be just transplanted into Reddit (not without even more stringent bot controls) but I do think it might improve the discourse somewhat. If moderator reports in r/BestofReports are anything to go by, a lot of users would like to be able to say exactly why they downvoted a post, instead of just using the report button like a "super downvote" and choosing a reason why.