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/
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.
That’s why “fuck reddit and spez” are said
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.
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.
