Ggtfmhy

Alternative way to think about it: 10% of people are insufferable assholes. Do you want them to be happy with what you say?

I'm really excited about Ange at Spurs. Regardless of whether he's coaching a team I like, I've looked into the guy when his signing was announced and I'm genuinely inspired by his words, and I'm someone who is generally averse to inspiring fluff talk. Ryan Mason too, he has an appearance on some coaching podcast where he talks about his life experience and I actually feel inspired to go out and do things in a different way - also something that I don't feel often, much less feel from hearing some guy I don't know talk in an uplifting tone online.

Not directly related to the goings-on of an actual game, but it's been on my mind. I hope we get some fun football out of the team next season, I can't wait to be actually excited to watch their matches.

There’s more than just that to it.

I recently downloaded it so I can save some um research content for later research (I’d been off Reddit for maybe two weeks at this point, I wasn’t going to hurt my pride if I saw the app for myself). When I refreshed the front page of my research throwaway, all the posts were hidden and replaced with new ones. Refresh again, those are gone too, replaced by three or four stragglers. Final refresh and there’s nothing on the front page. They’re practically begging me to go to their algorithm page (popular?). It looks like an A/B test they’re doing, and it looked like others were annoyed at this from the feedback I saw on the official mobile app sub. It was an A/B test with no toggle or anything.

Normally, in an app made to give the user a good experience, this should be a feature you turn on and off. I remember a ton of people swearing by some kind of post hiding system, so, sure, this is definitely a plus for some people. But I’ve refreshed my Reddit home page for over a decade now. Don’t make it misbehave all of a sudden.

Their app, with all its bloat, can have some nice features. For example, during my research session, I was swiping through an album. When it was finished, it swiped into the next post. At first I didn’t like that, but a few posts later, I liked it, I got the hang of it. Decent navigation feature, fine. This isn’t so bad.

I tap into another part of the app a different sub I think, and now the only direction I can scroll is downwards, and instead of showing me the next (image) post, it shows me some random popular vertical video from a different subreddit. Literally just TikTok navigation for Reddit. Which again, would be completely fine, if it was a button I could tap to enter this mode, but not just haphazardly switching between different navigation UXes so that the app can quantify which one makes me see more ads. Fucks sake.

I didn’t even want to download their app, and the one time I find a new feature that I don’t hate, it gets turned off within the same session to serve me a feature I specifically don’t want. I don’t think vertical video is the death of the human experience, but it sure as hell isn’t for me, and it sure as hell is the last thing I want out of a site like Reddit.

These A/B tests infuriate me. I open Instagram every once in a blue moon, and I absolutely despise scrolling down my feed and seeing the same information displayed ten different ways in less than a minute. On one post, the likes counter is bold, on another, it has profile photos, on another, it’s an accented color… like that’s worse than just picking the worst option in my opinion.

But that’s the thing. No first party app will ever be designed to have a good UX first and foremost. That’s secondary. What’s important is their meaningless metrics that make the site worse, so they can charge more for ads (even if they make the site worse for paying users…). I understand that they’re trying to appeal to new people over on Reddit, I genuinely believe there’s nothing wrong with that. But if I stumbled upon it now for the first time, I’d think it was hot unusable garbage, and I would not have guessed this is site would have been my literal front page of the internet™ for over 11 years in another life. Probably would just assume it was a porn site with a weird news aggregator attached.

That said, isn’t that how leagues work in the US for most sports? The bottom teams are constantly given legs up to keep the winners cycling. That’s what the whole draft system is about, right? Full disclosure: I know close to nothing about US sports.

No disrespect to US sports fans or athletes but over there it seems more like the brand they care about is the league itself, as an entertainment product, compared to football teams in most of the world which are much more independent. Even just the name “franchise” says something.

Due to how haphazard it’s been with community growth, there’s always the possibility that another one will take off if spam or other issues start piling up here.

For now there’s a tiny amount of content at all, let alone spam.

Although I must admit, having the proper “Football” community instead of “Soccer” is nice.