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Comment by ProAm | Hacker News Reader

For me I've moved from Reddit back to Digg, Reddit seems to be the worst parts of Facebook combined with the worst parts of Twitter. The redesign is horrendously busy, the comments are trite or vicious, and the v.reddit videos either autoplay or never play when you click on them.

View on HN

Not much to do about v.reddit, but you can disable the redesign in your user preferences, and as for comments- unsubscribe from the default subreddits and then go subscribe to specific, smaller subs that catch your interest. /r/SubredditOfTheDay, /r/TinySubredditOfTheDay, and /r/Serendipity are great ways to find out about about new subs.

(Unfortunately, there's not much to do about the mobile app, which is pretty bogus... although there are a few third-party apps which are less obnoxious.)

Disabling the new design still requires you to be signed in, though. I don’t sign in most of the time I’m using Reddit. (Which makes for poor monetisation, and even being able to disable the new redesign only when signed in is a win for them over the current situation.)

Not signing in to reddit is the surest way to experience the online equivalent of a table next to the bathroom.

"table next to the bathroom"

This is a phrase I'm not familiar with. What do you mean?

Was trying to understand this myself. I guess the table next to the bathroom is the most undesirable location for a table since there are smells/foot traffic/noise? Whether parent meant reddit is the bathroom, or the restaurant, I'm not sure.

Reddit is a restaurant. If you winnow your subscriptions you’ll have the best seat in the house. If you leave the default subscriptions in place but log on your jammed three deep at the bar wanting a classic cocktail but having to settle for a miller lite. If you dont log on you are seated at the table next to the bathroom where a stream of drunk sorority girls and fraternity boys stand in line waiting to piss and yelling woo hoo! Everytime the door opens you get a waft of stench that puts you off your food.

I'm guessing it's like getting the table next to the bathroom at a restaurant; A second class experience.

You have been waiting all week for this occasion. You made a reservation at this great restaurant with someone you are really excited to make a closer connection with. Finally, the moment comes, and you are led to your table.

Unfortunately your table is within 2 meters of the bathroom. Every time the door opens, the bathroom light casts shadows on your silverware and lights the back of your head highlighting the thinness of your hair. This is followed, a few seconds later, as the smell of urinal mints wafts over and mixes with the delicate anise and dark plum notes of your $26 glass of wine.

I guess you have to have been there :|

Signing in puts you at risk of getting sucked into pointless internet comment arguments though.

Not signing in and curating your subreddit subscriptions all but guarantees you will only be exposed to the most populist content on the site and will never see any of the deep, niche, and interesting stuff on it.

> Signing in puts you at risk of getting sucked into pointless internet comment arguments though.

....says a person signed into HN engaged in pointless internet comment arguments....

I don’t have a problem. I can quit anytime I want

Not always. I don’t go to Reddit.com, I always go to Reddit.com/r/motorcycling, or r/leathercraft, for example. You don’t have to be signed in for that.

You do not need to sign in the disable the new design, you can just use old.reddit.com.

Or with old.reddit.com in the URL. There is probably a browser addon or JS for that.

You go to old.reddit.com There is also a firefox addon that redirects all links to old reddit.

> Disabling the new design still requires you to be signed in, though.

old.reddit.com works fine when logged out, for me.

I'm in the same boat, but I didn't go to digging, but came back here. The new redesign, coupled with the realization that I spent far too much time with the same arguments showed me that Reddit is broken now.

Why can't I just have a nice link aggregator with decent discussion? HN is great, but it doesn't have as much content as other platforms. I just want to discuss politics, hobbies, and lifestyles with the same level of discussion we have here, why is that too much to ask?

> "...why is that too much to ask? "

because it's bloody hard to create civil, thoughtful communities. HN is interesting since the general user base seems to have learned to self-moderate, buuuut, it has made HN a pretty dry place (boring maybe?).

I have found some absolute hilarious gems on Reddit. The wit and humor of some users really catches me off guard sometimes, but the issue with Reddit is that there is just so much low effort garbage to sift through to find anything interesting/funny. Reddit seems to have converged on to a low effort meme-fest for the most part. I've gone to the effort to customise my sub-reddits to match my interests, but each community seems to very quickly become a repetitive echo chamber, so there are not many new/unique POV to explore. For example I sub to /r/Australia and it's basically the same content re hashed over and over (NBN sucks, Libs suck, House prices suck, magpies are annoying, here's a picture of a Kookaburra etc.)

So Reddit isn't really for me any more and I spend little time there. Maybe I'm just getting old, but I find that I get more out of just sitting in the sun and letting my mind wander.

You can go to https://old.reddit.com to get the old design back.. for now.

I suppose the quality of the comments very much depends on the subreddit(s) you read. I mean, something like r/haskell is bound to have a different commenting culture from r/funny.

reddit is only usable if you have a plugin like this

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...

which will auto-redirect you to the old-design

Can't you just use old.reddit.com ?

I end up landing on reddit from search engines and this automatically loads the old.reddit.com as it will revert to the new UI by default. I do not log in and have not been active on reddit for a long while.

You can also just change that in your account settings to use the old design.

"and the v.reddit videos either autoplay or never play when you click on them"

So it's not just me? I quit using Reddit because this happened on my phone all the time. Don't they test this sort of thing, or pay attention to abandonment stats?

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