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/
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?