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Comment by bigfartchili | Hacker News Reader

This feels like what happened to digg.

Reddit did their redesign right. Many people hated it and they gave the option to go to the old reddit immediately after the new version was released.

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Yeah the reddit redesign is horrific. Thankfully, they keep old.reddit.com up and will maintain it indefinitely, which I'll use... also indefinitely.

I've been using the new design for a few months and I quite like it, especially launching Comment in modal.

After revisiting the old site, I didn't think I'd miss it, but the old site is just much better in many ways.

I truly gave the redesign a shot for a week or so. I hate being the guy who is like "OLD STUFF WAS BETTER."

But the old site really is better. Especially if you use RES.

I also despise the new redesign. As much as I love them for allowing the option to stick with the old design I'm not sure how "indefinite" support actually means, for example subreddit designs are split between the new and old. Eventually subreddit admins won't bother to support both.

The new redesign completely melts down my MacBook (2016, so not outdated by any means) every time I try to load a page. It’s loading more shit JavaScript than actual content.

I’m not sure what is it that you find good about the new design? The old one did the job perfectly with the added bonus on working on less powerful machines.

The person to whom you're responding isn't calling the redesign good; rather, that reddit lets you revert it.

And they made it so smooth, too - just replace www with old! Considering, too, their incredible API, I have a lot of respect for the Reddit developers.

Not on mobile. I don't want to install the app, and the mobile site is basically a bunch of dark patterns piled on deliberately broken functionality. It's amazingly, and consciously terrible.

This. They really hate their non-app mobile users. Understandable but disappointed.

I use the old mobile site, it's fantastically light-weight: https://i.reddit.com

You can change the subdomain to "i" on any reddit page, or access the same version by adding ".compact" to the end of the regular URL (which can be more convenient, thanks to the ".com" button on mobile keyboards): https://www.reddit.com/.compact, https://www.reddit.com/r/CatsStandingUp/comments/7bcm79/cat/..., etc

Honest question: what's so bad about the reddit redesign?

It's very slow and unresponsive. Any time saved with not having to reload the page is wasted several times over in the clunky UI, and the lags in loading data still remain.

The information density is much lower. It's harder to scan a page for its content because everything is more embellished. It's less focused on text, which IMHO used to be one of Reddit's best features. (Design feature.) And it feels very generic, like a basic Bootstrap template.

Mobile is nagware until I enable JS or use desktop mode. Blocked for being some goddamn frustrating now. I was formerly a heavy user, about fed up with the astroturfing, but this was the last straw. Life is noticably better now.

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