Something about the new site just somehow puts me off. While I could mindlessly browse the old site endlessly, something about the new actively makes me want to close the tab.
Either way, a good thing.
It’s not that people are stupid, sometimes you’re simply talking to a teenager with no life experience. Often it is because people are kind of stupid. My national (r/Denmark) subreddit has devolved into a vile place for instance, I’d compare it to t_d, it’s the best “quick” comparison there is, but it’s obviously not as bad, at least not yet.
I think /r/space is the only major subreddit that I don’t dislike, and most of the smaller ones have been abandoned.
The new design being horrible was just what tipped the iceberg.
/r/Australia isn't particularly racist or astroturfed but there is still a lot of times I'm amazed at what gets upvoted. /r/bjj is a good place for jiu jitsu content but the same stuff is posted across every network and the communities are so small we all know any news pretty quickly.
Maybe I just got older and care less about reading or discussing the same topics all the time. I've had the same trouble with Facebook recently where so many lies fill any comment section.
This cycle of social networks starting lesser known but higher quality and ending popular but rubbish is inevitable because the bottom 25% of users have far more capability to drag a social network into the dirt than the top 25% could ever drag it back up.
Every time I visit HN I read something interesting. I can’t remember the last time I read something that interested me on Reddit, outside of /r/space.
I mean, I know it sounded arrogant to say I was the most knowledgeable, it simply happens to be true, but it only applies to Reddit. It’s extremely rare that I feel like that anywhere else, even Facebook is much better in that regard.
Maybe I’m just using Reddit wrong, but it hasn’t always been like this either.
1. It looks like a mobile app. I hate most of the mobile ecosystem for its horrible information density and dark UI patterns.
2. You cannot find shit. The only way to open a subreddit's wiki in the new UI is to append "/wiki" to the URL, from what I can tell.
3. It looks like a social network (i.e. a waste of time) and less like a forum/message board (i.e. a productive community).
www.reddit.com: 4285 kb
old.reddit.com: 1888 kb
i.reddit.com: 802 kb
Assuming 5 kWh per GB of data[1], and 14 billion reddit pageviews per month [2]
# i.reddit.com
5 kWh/GB x 1e-6 GB/KB x x 1e-9 TWh/kWh x 802 KB/view x 14e9 views/month x 12 months/year
= 0.67 TWh/year
# old.reddit.com
= 1.6 TWh/year
# www.reddit.com
= 3.6 TWh/year
And for what? What did we gain from this?
[1] https://aceee.org/files/proceedings/2012/data/papers/0193-00...
[2] https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/reddit-stats/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
2. Everything is clickable. On a crappy touch pad I misclick so much stuff.
3. Resource usage. I bought a lighter laptop. It sacred me actually because embedded YouTube was lagging on the new site. This was even worse because everything is ckickable problem.
4. It took a lot of clicks to see a content. There might be an expand / collapse but I had a hard time finding it consistently.