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 “<anything>.reddit.com” is currently redirected to “reddit.com/r/<anything>”, 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/
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
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.
Not to mention a mod for /r/jailbait.
The enshitification will continue until morale is extinguished.
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.
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.
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?
Does this functionality exist on lemmy yet? I would like a random and a random-nsfw feed that samples the entire fediverse.
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
It does with Sync for a Lemmy, sadly the app is busted with most instances I guess.
Not sure if it’s just per client but Voyager has a “random community” button on the search tab.
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.
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.
Just confirmed random button is not working in Sync for Reddit what a shame, but well, what did I expect about Reddit.
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.
That’s why “fuck reddit and spez” are said
They did announce these changes months ago.
r/random used to be my bookmark to get there back when i used the site.
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.
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
I wonder when they’ll drop subreddits
But the real users are now counted so…
I will make a little script and fix the button for now for rdx but I don’t know what they will break next.
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.
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.
