r/announcements • u/simbawulf • May 31 '17
Reddit's new signup experience
Hi folks,
TL;DR People creating new accounts won't be subscribed to 50 default subreddits, and we're adding subscribe buttons to Popular.
Many years ago, we realized that it was difficult for new redditors to discover the rich content that existed on the site. At the time, our best option was to select a set of communities to feature for all new users, which we called (creatively), “the defaults”.
Over the past few years we have seen a wealth of diverse and healthy communities grow across Reddit. The default communities have done a great job as the first face of Reddit, but at our size, we can showcase many more amazing communities and conversations. We recently launched r/popular as a start to improving the community discovery experience, with extremely positive results.
New users will land on “Home” and will be presented with a quick tutorial page on how to subscribe to communities.
On “Popular,” we’ve made subscribing easier by adding in-line subscription buttons that show up next to communities you’re not subscribed to.
To the communities formerly known as defaults - thank you. You were, and will continue to be, awesome. To our new users - we’re excited to show you the breadth and depth our communities!
Thanks,
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u/Dargus007 May 31 '17 edited May 31 '17
I've already managed to snipe one of these, and subscribed to animals being jerks.
To unsub, I have to go to the subreddit and do it there.
Feature request: A second Click of the check mark, that appears after subscribing, unsubscribes you from that sub.
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u/albinobluesheep May 31 '17
Agree! I accidentally +'d r/WTF when this feature got pushed an hour ago or whatever, because I was 90% sure what that "+" was going to do...then I imidiately tried to unclick the "+" and nothing happened!
I know it's my fault for testing out the feature on a sub I really don't like going to at all, but it seemed like an intuitive feature if you suddenly changed your mind...
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u/jippiejee May 31 '17 edited May 31 '17
Too bad non-English speaking country subs are now no longer geodefaulted, they'll hardly ever show up on /popular, nor are they included in the discovery tool. So r/theNetherlands (after our Canadian friends the biggest country sub on reddit) goes from automatic subscriptions to being completely invisible to new dutch users...
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u/simbawulf May 31 '17
We understand your concerns, and working to revamp the geographic subreddit experience. Later this year we'll be testing new ways of showing users geographically relevant posts and subreddits, so that communities like r/theNetherlands will show up for Redditors in the Netherlands!
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u/HatesModerators May 31 '17
Is there an easy undo button if I accidentally click on it? It seems like a hassle to unsubscribe from something if you screw up and have to load the subreddit up to unsubscribe.
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u/bakonydraco May 31 '17
Thanks for this update u/simbawulf! At a little more granular level am I correct in my understanding of the current flow of information?
| User | Landing if directed to www.reddit.com | Landing if directed to www.reddit.com/r/popular | Landing if directed to www.reddit.com/r/all |
|---|---|---|---|
| No Account | r/popular | r/popular | r/all |
| Brand new user | New user tutorial page to guide to subscribe to at least 1 subreddit. | r/popular | r/all |
| User subscribed to at least 1 subreddit | Reddit home as it is now, that shows a multireddit of up to 100 subreddits they are subscribed to at a time. | r/popular | r/all |
Will r/all still be a thing, but not advertised? I don't see it in the top bar as shown.
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u/Pappenheimer May 31 '17
Can I turn off the subscribe button? I find them intrusive, there's a reason I'm not subscribed to those subs. Oh, and they're on r/all too.
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u/lozierj May 31 '17 edited May 31 '17
I think this is a step in the right direction, but the emphasis on subreddit signups on r/popular tells me that reddit is stuck on an old and, I believe, incorrect model of site usage. I'll explain.
For logged-out and new users, you want to present your best guess for what subreddits an average user will want to see. Landing on r/popular is exactly the right thing: users see every subreddit, except those that want to be filtered and those that users filter above some rate. Using blacklists instead of a whitelist plays to reddit's strength: the amazing variety of communities. Another strength of reddit is the rate at which novel communities form, and r/popular allows viewers to see new communities as soon as they become popular--without admin intervention.
This leaves what subbreddits to show logged-in users. Without user intervention, this should still be r/popular: after all, it's your best guess and you don't have any extra information yet.
Right now, the model appears to be:
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sign up
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while browsing r/popular, subscribe to lots of subreddits
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switch to reddit.com at some point
This has the same problems for logged-in users that the old frontpage had for non-logged-in users: even with dozens of subscriptions, it only covers a fraction of the site and it doesn't react well to new community development. It also creates a huge barrier to entry: creating a decent subreddit collection might take dozens or hundreds of clicks.
I think a better model is to encourage users to begin with a good starting point (r/popular) and then gradually modify it to fit their tastes by adding and removing subreddits. Adding is a no-brainer: a user's subscription to a sitewide-filtered subbreddit should cause it to show up on r/popular for them anyway.
Subtraction presumably requires more work, but I think it should be a core reddit feature. Subreddit filtering should be promoted to the same prominence and usability as subreddit subscription: the same list should filter both r/all and r/popular, it shouldn't be limited to just 100 entries, and it should have the same UI as for subscription: a "filter" button both beneath each post on r/popular and on each subreddit page and a central page to manage a user's filtered subreddits.
In this model, "subscribe" links beneath each post on r/popular aren't nearly as useful: there's never a reason to switch to reddit.com, so subscription does nothing to subreddits a user is already seeing on r/popular.
TL;DR: I'm proposing the following model:
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u/MajorParadox May 31 '17
This look really cool! A couple of questions:
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Will the subscribe buttons only show on actual unsubscribed subreddits? I know there was a bug with user profiles where it wasn't accurate because of the 100 sub limit for the page.
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Will previous "default" subs be considered subscribed automatically? Or do we have to subscribe to them manually now?
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Can you add r/DCFU to the recommendations in the tutorial page? I'm asking for a friend of course.
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u/WhyTeas May 31 '17
Will the in line subscription buttons work on the mobile app?
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Jun 01 '17
Will people who are already signed up be grandfathered in and still have all the defaults subbed to?
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u/fredandlunchbox Jun 01 '17
Question about your process: Did you guys test this onboarding flow in the wild? Or is the goal to commit to it and then optimize?
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u/Mad1ibben May 31 '17
Many years ago, we realized that it was difficult for new redditors to discover the rich content that existed on the site
Strange, I've been here 6 years, mostly surfing logged out to avoid the echo chamber effect, and the quality of content of the front page is the same trash we used to make fun of ifunny and all those other vapid sites for. So I've tried to combat that by falling into my echo chamber I tried to avoid , the thing is, it seems like the new users in those subs came to reddit for the shitposts that cover r/popular, and now there is a real quality issue in subs that have always attracted people that want to read a long article, learn something just for the sake of learning, or any of those things with more substance than a jpeg of a frog with some text overlaid over it. Let me be clear, this is not a response to reddit being hyper-politicized, I personally see value in it and am stimulated by it, this is purely a response to the very apparent change of feel to the site.
I understand if your target market has changed, so will you just be clear with us, is the goal of this site just to produce the most clicks now, or is there still some interest in being an effective and efficient online information sharing community, or honestly, any care to what kind of community you are creating?
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u/Georgy_K_Zhukov May 31 '17
So one the one hand, this is neat! Hopefully it will be an improved experience for users, allowing them to find the right 'niche' on the site.
On the other though, I'd like to raise a major concern I have from the Moderation end, namely regarding views and visitors. This is potentially a HUGE change in traffic patterns for many subreddits, and as about/traffic remains broken, Mods don't have a good way to track that impact. The implementation of Views on threads is a start, but short of painstaking manual tabulation, that serves little use for a macro view of traffic changes.
This has been a known issue for a long time, and I have heard in the past that it is 'being worked on', but there has been no explicit timetable on the fix, and it very disappointing to see something like this get rolled out before traffic monitoring for moderators is working properly.
So... when will /about/traffic be working properly!?
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u/PeacockPanzer May 31 '17 edited May 31 '17
I like it, but I REALLY dislike that '+' icon, it's really distracting. The worst part is that subs you're not subscribed to are in bold and in a darker shade of blue, bringing your eyes to the subreddit name instead of the rest of the post.
Edit: thanks for the gold, and have a nice day, anonymous :)
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u/Pootzen May 31 '17
.subreddit-subscribe { display: none; } .big-tagline { font-size: x-small !important; } .subreddit { font-weight: normal !important; }Adding this CSS snippet to RES fixed it for me.
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u/_depression May 31 '17
Does this mean that the onboarding process from the mobile app is coming to desktop too?
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u/Xaxxon May 31 '17
Can we please get more than 100 exclusions from r/all? at least for reddit gold members?
Feel free to look at my exclusions - they fall into a few major categories (sports, memes, etc), but there are so many subreddits popping up for each that I can't exclude them all with only 100 exclusions.
Really, subreddit categories/tags would be far better, so I could exclude "NBA team subreddits" instead of excluding them individually.
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u/[deleted] May 31 '17