More personalization: Reddit bids farewell to the "front page of the internet"
New accounts on Reddit were previously shown a page with the platform's most popular posts by default. Now it's supposed to become more personal.
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Reddit wants to push the default homepage r/popular into the background and instead display "better, more relevant, and personalized posts" for users. "r/popular sucks," said CEO Steve Huffman of the popular social news aggregator at the announcement. With this, the portal also bids farewell to the unofficial "front page of the internet," as Reddit, or at least r/popular, has repeatedly been called. This is where posts that have received the most likes on Reddit land; you can see the page, for example, when you access Reddit without being logged in.
Huffman justifies the planned change with the development of the site since its founding 20 years ago. The claim of showing everyone the same homepage has long been outgrown. Every Redditor has different interests, and the site should adapt to that. r/popular gave the impression that Reddit had a platform-wide identical culture, which is not the case. Therefore, the page will no longer be displayed to new users in the future. Those who do not open it regularly will also have it removed from the list of most important subreddits. The changes are to be implemented in part starting this week.
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In the long post, Huffman further announces that individual users will only be allowed to moderate a certain number of subreddits with many visits in the future. The size of subreddits will also be displayed differently in the future: the number of subscribers will no longer reveal more than the age of a subreddit. Instead, Reddit will in the future show how many accounts visit a subreddit per week. A list shows that the most popular subreddits here reach more than 10 million. Incidentally, Huffman also writes that Reddit is now visited by 116 million people per day.
(mho)
