Reddit is generally a pretty good website when it comes to its layout. You can search for and select a sub-reddit up top, and then once selected, you can scroll through your chosen sub-reddit’s feed. From here, you can also click on posts to enlarge them to see more. This main layout is not the issue, however. My main problem with Reddit is how they integrate their ads. While some of their ads are on the sidebar–which is perfectly acceptable–a majority of their ads are integrated into the feed and formatted to look like regular posts. You can even upvote and comment on them. And while there are a few things that distinguish these ads from the regular posts, you generally don’t notice it too much when you’re scrolling through.
The main issue here is transparency with ads. Even websites that annoyingly cover their page with ads at least have the decency of just having them out in the open–they know they’re ads just as well as we do. When a website tries to hide ads in the content that you actually care about, it seems insincere from a viewer standpoint; like they are trying to trick us into looking at the ads that we would otherwise not read. And I’m not kidding–often times, I’ll get at least part of the way through reading some of these ads before I realize that it’s not an actual post! And in my mind, that is a bad web design!
Just for irony’s sake, I’ll link you to r/assholedesign on Reddit so you can see this firsthand.
Arianna's Web 1 Blog 