199
submitted 1 week ago by overdevs@lemmy.world to c/reddit@lemmy.world

This has broken the random functionality on my rdx for Reddit app and possibly other apps. They keep breaking one feature or another and it's getting hard to maintain the app now.

They also removed these other features:

1/ Subdomain subreddit redirect: This is where “.reddit.com” is currently redirected to “reddit.com/r/”, 2. r/random, r/randnsfw, r/myrandom, and reddit.com/random 3. old.reddit.com Snoovatars 4. Saving posts and comments with category or by subreddit.

The don't even announce it on announcements. This is the post https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/1fojw02/cleaning_up_some_lowusage_features/

top 27 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[-] PlasticExistence@lemmy.world 106 points 1 week ago

It’s painfully obvious that IPO means the death of quality. Once there are shareholders, the sociopaths move in to horde wealth in any and every way possible as though destroying good things is some kind of sport.

[-] AtariDump@lemmy.world 76 points 1 week ago
[-] slazer2au@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago

Not to mention a mod for /r/jailbait.

[-] thenextguy@lemmy.world 74 points 1 week ago

The enshitification will continue until morale is extinguished.

[-] FourPacketsOfPeanuts@lemmy.world 17 points 1 week ago

Can't even tell what could possibly be gained by removing /r/random? As in from a ghoulish profit driven soul draining point of view. Is it that they literally want to remove any sense of carefree random discovery? It's not like it makes much of a difference? Surely they want people to stumble across new things to be interested in. Or is it just that they don't want any competition for some 'AI' driven suggestion panel.

Enshitification certainly, but this one doesn't even make sense.

[-] aaaa@lemmy.world 21 points 1 week ago

From a project management perspective, if this feature was causing frequent test failures and required extra developer time to regularly debug these failures, then removing the feature is cheaper than maintaining it.

If very few people use a feature that has a measurable maintenance cost, then it would make sense to remove it.

It seems unlikely that new features or updates would affect this one, but we don't know. It hardly seems worth lamenting though, since we've already left Reddit.

[-] Monument@lemmy.sdf.org 12 points 1 week ago

But now Reddit will know every subreddit you visit will be entirely your choice. Removing the random button improves the quality of user analytics.

It also allows for algorithms fined tuned to keep you engaged not to be waylaid by some random sub that gives you a “well, that’s enough internet for today” moment.
Purely speculation, but would not be surprised to learn that subs that don’t encourage more scrolling or interaction (subs that are reading heavy, or direct people off site and keep them there) are shown less frequently than others. A random button breathes life into subs like those, whereas an algorithm-driven feed would slowly strangle them.

Ah that makes sense

Just so sad isn't it? Could have been one of the great cornerstones of the Internet, a lightweight even handed open discussion site. Instead it's being whipped into another dopamine addled, page view grabbing ghoulish bullshit machine. Why do investors spoil everything?

[-] T00l_shed@lemmy.world 40 points 1 week ago

That's why "fuck reddit and spez" are said

[-] Draegur@lemm.ee 36 points 1 week ago

Does this functionality exist on lemmy yet? I would like a random and a random-nsfw feed that samples the entire fediverse.

[-] aeharding@vger.social 14 points 1 week ago

Yes, on the next release! I requested it a while back and it was implemented, but it just barely didn’t make the cut for the current release

There’s no random NSFW (yet), but you can get random for local communities, which would work on an NSFW instance

[-] MimicJar@lemmy.world 11 points 1 week ago

Not sure if it's just per client but Voyager has a "random community" button on the search tab.

[-] aeharding@vger.social 7 points 1 week ago

It’s a little cludgy because it’s a hack, it really only works well on lemmy.world. There is a new API end point in the next version of Lemmy though, and Voyager will use that if your instance is upgraded.

[-] scsi@lemm.ee 5 points 1 week ago

Starter idea: it could conceivably fit in the Sort Type dropdown - respects the other settings (Subscribed/Local/All, Posts/Comments) and just throw results through a RAND() (sic) function.

[-] kratoz29@lemm.ee 2 points 1 week ago

It does with Sync for a Lemmy, sadly the app is busted with most instances I guess.

[-] adarza@lemmy.ca 22 points 1 week ago

r/random used to be my bookmark to get there back when i used the site.

[-] HakFoo@lemmy.sdf.org 29 points 1 week ago

I'd think random was probably both cheap to inplement (once you have a database, ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 1 is easy) and great for engagement (encourages repeated gacha-pull behaviour looking for an interesting new sub).

I wonder if it portends a degradation of the subreddit concept as a whole-- why let people navigate to a focused section directly when they should be looking at an algorithmic feed that delivers "almost what you're looking for" in a way that maximizes scrolling.

[-] Sconrad122@lemmy.world 13 points 1 week ago

I think that's absolutely it. I'd bet reddit has a metric that shows that their "front page" algorithm is much more "effective" at retaining eyeballs and clicks than users who view subreddits directly, so disposing a feature that reduces friction on the less "effective" method of engagement will drive more users to the front page and the algorithmic capture that drives up Reddit's metrics. Probably harder to serve ads on individual subreddit too because sponsored posts look more out of place when the content is less heterogeneous

[-] abbadon420@lemm.ee 4 points 1 week ago

I wonder when they'll drop subreddits

[-] kubica@fedia.io 2 points 1 week ago

But the real users are now counted so...

[-] lazycouchpotato@lemmy.world 13 points 1 week ago

Unfortunate.

I made a subreddit https://old.reddit.com/r/RandomButton/ a decade ago to showcase subreddits I discovered via /r/random. Kept it updated for about a year.

[-] jakeyounglol@lemm.ee 6 points 1 week ago

yeah. they also removed new.reddit.com (new ui pre-2024) because they want to force us to choose between massive sidebar wasting space or no large thumbnails

[-] overdevs@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I will make a little script and fix the button for now for rdx but I don't know what they will break next.

[-] Boozilla@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago

Back when I still enjoyed reddit, I loved /random. How very reddit of them to continue down the road of making it a worse user experience. Because it hasn't been about the users for a long, long time. They do it gradually enough that the average reddit schmuck barely even notices.

[-] ech@lemm.ee 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Jeez. What does this even improve? Why does it matter if it's "low use", or even "no use"? It was already implemented. The only thing the achieves is denying functionality to users. What a fucking crock.

[-] kratoz29@lemm.ee 2 points 1 week ago

Just confirmed random button is not working in Sync for Reddit what a shame, but well, what did I expect about Reddit.

[-] jol@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 week ago

They did announce these changes months ago.

this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2024
199 points (97.2% liked)

Reddit

17802 readers
14 users here now

News and Discussions about Reddit

Welcome to !reddit. This is a community for all news and discussions about Reddit.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules


Rule 1- No brigading.

**You may not encourage brigading any communities or subreddits in any way. **

YSKs are about self-improvement on how to do things.



Rule 2- No illegal or NSFW or gore content.

**No illegal or NSFW or gore content. **



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-Reddit posts using the [META] tag on your post title.



Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.

If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



:::spoiler Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS