Doom Desire

Understanding Reddit’s design change to keep up with you swiping

person holding phone with reddit app

Reddit, the front page of the internet has an interesting relationship to the rest of the social media platforms. While being older than Snapchat and Twitter, it resisted the push to mobile and stayed desktop focused well into the 2010s. Even today as reddit resides in the top 10 sites globally in terms of traffic. The split is pretty even on Mobile vs Desktop.

I write this article not in praise of Reddit even though it is where I spend a number of hours per week (A number that I am too ashamed to admit.) I write this article to bring pause and use Reddit as an example of the way social media channels incestuously share features in a near copy and paste format to “compete” for attention-share. This leads the platforms to be differentiated on audience and content alone.


Michael McLuhan’s prophetic quote “The medium is the message” rings especially true in the internet landscape we find ourselves in today. Each platform has a distinct purpose depending on the platform you inhabit. A post on Facebook for keeping up with specific circles of friends, that same post on twitter is taken as people’s knee jerk reactions of a moment in history, on YouTube it is a blog update to a legion of followers, if it’s from TikTok the context is stripped away and what’s left is soaked in a vat of attempted virality. The list goes on. 

Preferences Change 

I became aware of this with Snap. Prior to 2017 the company differentiated itself as the clumsy, raw footage shared with the intention of being deleted. Their ethos of not ephemerality was a novel concept to the perpetual backlog of the images and videos on a person’s profile. They added the “Stories” feature, a video broadcast that only lasts 24 hours, but allows you to swipe from story to story in a near-endless loop of content. From there, Meta in the Zuckerberg fashion rolled out a stories-like feature to Facebook and later Instagram to compete. In doing so, Facebook undercut snapchat’s novelty and kicked off a wave of vertical videos sapping away more and more attention from their users.

 

The ability to jam more and more ads into the video feed more seamlessly caused all of the free-to-play social media titans to lean in the direction of where the ad dollars were going. The mindless scroll has been a dopaminergic super cycle of mine, one where I catch myself no longer looking for anything specific, just hoping for anything worthwhile. I look up after not catching any fish and realize I have just lost half an hour of my time. The User Experience is so low intensity that the brain shuts off and people can doom scroll with one hand. 

 

How does this relate to Reddit. Before their March 2024 IPO (which was delayed more than once) the platform’s core interaction was a great sorting machine. Content would either be created onsite or imported from a cross post from another social medium. That post would then be shared and eventually find its way to its proper or related overlapping categories. The profile you built on the platform is a series of subreddits to follow about any topic, specializing down to the most obscure fandom you can think of. A place for product reviews that are, trolls aside, more or less ranked on community favor.

Priorities shift

Today, I am comparing the latest version of Reddit (December’s APK  v2024.51.0) to Reddit (October v2020.38.0) a version before the social media cohort adopted tactics to compete with TikTok. The traditional landing page has been updated to keep the a fresh aesthetic, but upon closer examination the advertisements from the modern version of reddit has de-emphasized the “Promoted” tag allowing it to blend more seamlessly with the rest of the content posts. While 2020.38 uses a locked icon to indicate that the user cannot interact with this post and a highly visible tag denoting this an ad. Sometimes I even have to do a double take at the post’s owner to realize I just slid into an advert.

watch-and-see

The more fundamental age is the addition of these newer navigation options at the top of the screen. “News” and “Watch” shows a different function of how the Reddit user is intended to consume content. “News” similar to other news platforms I.e. New York Times and Google News divide Reddit’s pages populated by Legacy media platforms into a permanent feed consisting of top stories of the day. “Watch” is where one can truly see the influence of the doom-scrolling TikTok UX. Watch is a portal into the video content of any given subreddit. Switching up the ubiquitous vertical scroll for a horizontal one yields the same result, swimming in an endless lake of video content, thumbing casually from one post to another while threading through multiple different related subreddits. Before pressing the close button to bring your head above water you can forget what the first video was that took you on this maritime voyage.

 

This interaction has become widely adopted by the design team at Reddit. It is how mobile users have interacted with the millions of subreddits for years (at least since the 2020 versionI tested). With the addition of the Watch tab this video content hose can be turned on by full screening any video from any subreddit. This change was definitely a deliberate way to boost time on the platform  as the videos can last anywhere from ~10 seconds to the admin limit of 15 minutes. 

Profit Follows

And it’s working. Daily Active Users are up 47% from Q3 2023’s numbers and according to Reddit’s third quarter 2024 earnings report, 90% of its revenue comes from the ads on the platform. Reddit Premium, data licensing for AI, Reddit Gold and avatar skins make up the remaining 10%.  

 

These are incredible growth numbers! Especially for the 9th most popular website in the world. But this faustian bargain comes at a cost at your expense. Doom-scrolling has proliferated in our plugged-in lives humanity has lost countless hours looking for nothing with just as much to show for it once we snap back to reality. Our attention economy is no longer set up to benefit long-form, mentally stimulating information. It is passed around from one short dopamine hit after another. In the current race for eyeballs, companies become a homogenous attention vacuum expertly designed to distract us from more important things in our lives like physical social relationships with friends and family and deeply engaging in learning new skills that take hours of concentrated effort. 

 

I hope that this article sheds some light on how the industry is changing before our eyes, transforming how we browse the internet and monopolizing leisure time. This subject sits on a Venn diagram of my great passions, design, business and how we navigate a consumer society. 

 

It’s not a conspiracy, it’s just business.