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Comment by somethingroma | Hacker News Reader

Cool. Maybe these guys should get in touch with the redesign guys and get them fired. Also fire any executive that thought it was a good idea.

Because all the hard work to serve ads more efficiently goes to waste when the site is a mess and unusable.

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Some of the issues I have had with the new design is pretty amazing. For example, when you open a specific submission it's opened in a "lightbox" which basically contains all the comment. If you click outside of the lightbox it's automatically closed which I guess is OK. So some time ago they made a new release and broke it so that if you clicked on the scrollbar to scroll down in the lightbox to see what people had commented then the lightbox with all the comments closed.

I submitted some complaint in their redesign subreddit but immediately random people replied to say that this was as designed and I should use keyboard to scroll, and not the scrollbar. But then the issue was that when the lightbox was shown it wasn't focused so I first had to use mouse to click in the lightbox to focus it and then use keyboard arrows to scroll.

Such a joke. Amateurs.

It really is a good example of everything that is wrong with the SPA approach today. Browser history abuse, skeleton/placeholder text rendering instead of actual content, never-ending loading spinner on the browser tab, problems with authentication between sessions. Just open up your network panel and try clicking around and watch your console light up like a christmas tree. Then switch to the old layout and compare the two.

To put a cherry on top of it, the new layout now intersperses ads into the post lists and styles them to look like posts.

Additionally, ever since reddit decided to host it's own media, it no longer possible to directly link to a video or image. I don't want to send a link to my friend of comments about a gif. I want to just send him the damn gif. For this reason alone I'll continue to use imgur.

I'll be really bummed out the day I can't click "switch to the old layout", but I'm sure the time when they're removing that is coming.

It looks like we're finally seeing a series of decisions being made that caters stockholders instead of users of the site. They managed to hold out for this long, but I guess the day has come where it has finally happened. The big difference between reddit and all the other sites that have done this, is reddit used to be the hip place people went to get away from these kinds of user hostile moves.

The only question left now: is reddit so entrenched in it's position that it won't lose ground to a newcomer from the fallout of these decisions? Probably, but I know I'll definitely be keeping my eye out for competition that is gaining steam.

Always good practice to rename 'bugs' and 'flaws' as 'features' and 'design'.

The redesign is terrible for usability, but it does one thing very, very well: punish you for using an adblocker (sorry, "software blocker," lol).

There are a few other dark patterns hidden in there too, all coincidentally pushing in a direction that's good for reddit.

I suspect that's the real purpose of the redesign and that all complaints will fall on deaf ears until someone actually manages to disrupt reddit.

>I suspect that's the real purpose of the redesign

I mean at this point I don't think there's any doubt whatsoever. Is there even a plausible other explanation?

I only lurk on reddit but it's rather comical how bad it's become. And not just the interface, the content too, /r/all is basically Facebook with a slightly younger audience and you have to get deeper and deeper into niche subreddits to find worthwhile discussions.

Reddit has just gotten too big. So much of the bigger subs are fluffed with surreptitious sponsored content, reputation management, etc. I would have thought that that was where Reddit made the real money, by providing a back-end to make ads look like organic content, by helping moneyed backers influence discussion toward their monetised and brand-building ends.

If Reddit isn't charging and managing those using their platform for that purpose -- not an insignificant number, surely -- they are fools.

> you have to get deeper and deeper into niche subreddits to find worthwhile discussions.

Which raises the question wouldn't that be better served with a forum...

I think the issue with many disparate forums is discoverability.

This seems to be the key/blocker for a decentralized internet, well social apps at least. If someone can solve discoverability, it'll make a lot of things possible.

How does it punish you for blocking ads? Honest question.

It punishes you by not working until you give it an exception.

I remember when Digg was bigger than Reddit and then after a certain Digg site redesign they lost a significant number of their users to Reddit and never really recovered.

Where are people going to go this time? I feel like people usually copy their competitors which is why they consider redesigns worthwhile... but which Reddit competitor is Reddit copying here? I don't think there is one.

Obviously Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/Snapchat kind of worry them, but then again, I feel like people are "done" with "social media" so I wouldn't be _really_ worried if I were Reddit. They have the advantage that they can give the user very interest-focused information; when you follow a friend on Facebook, you get their programming advice, baby pictures, and political rants. With Reddit, you get to skip the baby pictures and political rants.

Just because you think people are "done" with "social media" doesn't mean Reddit execs do. They are definitely changing look and feel to be more like instagram and facebook hoping to poach users or at least widen their userbase by lowering the barrier of entry. One of the primary goals of the redesign was changing look and feel to make the site more approachable to a wider audience. They claimed after extensive testing that the old site scared off many potential users because it was "hard to use" (IMO it just looked old, and therefor bad/lame).

I think the underlying problem is that people want a platform for self-promotion (hence buying followers on Instagram), but most subreddits and maybe the site itself prohibit self-promotion. As a result, many people will never be interested (including me; I use it for pictures of cats, but nothing important).

I mostly went to HN. My own migration was Slashdot → reddit → HN. I'm on lobste.rs too, which feels like it's in the growth stage. Fewer comments, but fewer bad comments still. HN is nowhere near reddit levels of decay, which is nice.

Lobste.rs looks really interesting. Is there a way to get an invite to join?

If memory serves, the primary driver of reduced traffic to Digg 4.0 was the fundamental shift in how their submission mechanism worked, not in a change to their layout. I recall some kind of promotion mechanism where superusers gained some amount of control over their "front page" equivalent.

Also, unlike Digg, Reddit hasn't been bleeding members to another site for some time now, so there's nowhere for Reddit users to go if they become dissatisfied. Does anyone have any ideas about why that is? Reddit is not, fundamentally, a hard product to emulate, and yet I know of no site even remotely as popular nowadays (HN aside, of course). Slashdot, Fark, and sites like those all seem to have mostly been consumed by Reddit. Is it the strong network effects that Reddit has, or does Reddit's moderation system provide a unique way of hosting a community that no one has reproduced?

There was post on here awhile ago from an engineer working at digg during the v4 launch that was pretty interesting. https://lethain.com/digg-v4/

I think Discord has been siphoning off some of the users on the gaming related subreddits, but it fundamentally serves a different purpose so its not a wholesale replacement.

Network effect is one for sure. I'm not a fan of the redesign (and submitted my thoughts several times), but the content is there, and it's a reasonable platform overall.

I feel like that would have happened this time if there were a viable alternative. I know if they kill the ability to opt out of the new redesign I will be looking a lot harder for one.

old.reddit.com or i.reddit.com on mobile.

I don't have to do that when I'm signed in. It is in the preferences.

The pref setting regularly breaks for me and many others. I had to install an extension to reliably get old reddit. Most won't bother.

Never really recovered? That event wiped out Digg completely, and is exactly what skyrocketed Reddit.

Hasn’t reddit front page become really bad? When I joined there were a lot more textual posts, now it’s all images and memes. More 9gag-y. Maybe taking askscience and atheism and all these subreddits out of the FP was a really bad idea? I wish there was another category next to hot, all, new: an interesting one with a pre-selection of mostly textual subreddits

I still don't understand how come the CEO of reddit is okay with the redesign? It's worse enough that I had to install plugin to redirect to old.reddit.

If you have an account, you can use the old version of reddit by default by unselecting "Use the redesign as my default experience"

But for how long?

It's all but guaranteed that if Reddit removes old Reddit and forces new Reddit on everyone third party web clients with ads that generate money for someone else will pop up and fill the gap.

Sure until they change the api and/or api terms of service. See twitter.

That didn't work for me and many others. I had to install an extension.

It looks like that option is only available on old reddit. If I opt out of both beta tests and the redesign in the "Account settings" section of my user settings, I go back to old reddit by default.

This is one of the most frustrating things for me. Two weeks ago they'd set a cookie to redirect www. to old., then they removed that and now all of my old links take me to the redesign.

Has the CEO ever defended the redesign?

Maybe they are planning for the audience they want rather than the one they have? Or maybe they just feel safe since there aren't any alternatives?

"Maybe they are planning for the audience they want rather than the one they have?"

That's definitely a reasonable possibility since it appears to me to be formatted for the Instagram crowd.

"Or maybe they just feel safe since there aren't any alternatives?"

Possible as well but ironic since its creating a space for an alternative.

I like this sites design. Clean, simple, and nothing superfluous. Seems to understand people are here for the user shared content and not the site itself so it stays out of the users way.

For me the bigger irony is all that work to serve adds and the adds are all for clickbait websites and/or scams.

This was my opinion until I spent a week using it. Now I don't even notice the redesign. I'd even go as far to say that I like the "infinite scroll" and the way topics are displayed on the same page as the feed.

However, the reddit mobile experience leaves much to be desired, and I will never install their app.

There have been multiple threads on Reddit where people pick apart the new design and I've never seen somebody from Reddit show up to defend their changes. Not just opinions on design, but low quality javascript code. It makes me believe they know it's shit too, but it's all they have.

What are the actual complaints with the new design? I've been using it on and off and I can't say I've noticed any major issues. Though I'll admit most of my browsing is one on the mobile app these days.

First and foremost it's unnecessary and is not fixing anything.

Second, it forces learning a new layout and system. I don't understand instead of gradual changes in UI to improve experience they went with whole new thing.

Third, it's slow, bloated, and really hard to navigate through. Old version can display more pertinent information per screen resolution.

In a nutshell, hinders user experience without any noticeable improvement.

Finish product is bad design because initial idea was bad design to begin with (i.e. the idea to fix nothing and break everything).

I like the aesthetic changes to the UI, it definitely looks more modern and less cluttered. But it's the severe cut in features that annoys me.

* No way to easily access personal multi-reddits

* Saved/Hidden/Blocked have disappeared

* A lot of information in the subs sidebar doesn't show up anymore (things like related subs, wiki and so on). Now it's limited to rules and welcome message.

The multi-reddits thing is especially problematic to me. If you've subscribed to many subs, it becomes unmanageable without them.

I get obnoxious multi-second lag when entering text into a comment box on my phone, even on a thread that only has a couple comments. It's... befuddling how this made it to production and remains. And no, I don't want to use your stupid app. I'm not a fan of loading 1000's of shitty apps on my phone when a simple web page is sufficient.

Somehow the scrolling is also broken on their mobile site, and that can't be by accident. Is it some sort of javascript middle finger to urge users to move to their app? I've never experienced scrolling issues like that on any other site, ever.

That they make their mobile site intentionally unfriendly and frustrating is infuriating.

I get scroll lag on the redesign with my desktop computer. But that seems to have been resolved as I just checked.

Still, the interface is much clearer on old Reddit, new Reddit really shows the optimization of watching pictures and videos instead of articles and comments.

For me whenever I visit the new reddit, the fan in my Macbook Pro spins up and sounds like it wants to launch into space.

The old reddit is buttery smooth in comparison. I really don't get it

It's very slow and very unreliable.

Its slow and sluggish.

I've never noticed because I never opted-in to the new site design. That was a pretty sane default, thankfully.

There was some wonkiness where my profile preference to have thumbnails not shown kept getting overridden for some reason, but that seems to have stopped.

> Because all the hard work to serve ads more efficiently goes to waste when the site is a mess and unusable.

Also: all the hard work to serve ads more efficiently goes to waste when it get's blocked by a simple ad-blocker.

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