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Comment by aluminussoma | Hacker News Reader

Ever since the site redesign in May, popularity has been falling (source: Alexa Top Websites): https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/reddit.com

I hope that affected the amount of money they raised. As a reddit fan, the site redesign has not been pleasant. The mobile experience, too.

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It's also interesting that the "over 330M active monthly users" number somehow hasn't changed in over a year now. Their site has it here, as "Last updated Nov. 12, 2017": https://www.redditinc.com/#section-3

Their official blog posts continue using that same 330M number: https://redditblog.com/2019/01/23/health-fitness-on-reddit/

The TechCrunch article does as well.

Either their number of active users hasn't changed at all in over a year, or they're actually shrinking and deliberately just staying with an outdated number that looks better.

I would actually be OK with the new site design if it didn't tank performance and have some really weird caching issues where I have to refresh the page to see updates.

That's good news. I hope it makes them rethink their relationship to their users.

Well, otherwise, tildes is looking great.

Every time I see someone mention tildes as an alternative to reddit I check it out to see if I can create an account yet. For [edit] almost a year now the answer has been "no."

It's quite easy to get an account if you want one. Just ask.

Tildes only started last May. Where were you checking for the several years before that?

At least we can continue to use old.reddit.com for now on desktop. On mobile, I refuse to use their own app since it's hot garbage and stick to Apollo, which works pretty well so far.

Unfortunately the way that comments are rendered depends on which view you use. There's probably a subset that works for both but many [new.]reddit.com users won't realize that their post doesn't render correctly for old.reddit.com.

Given this design, I suppose one must suffer: [new.]reddit.com adoption or the experience for old.reddit.com.

Could you elaborate? I've managed to avoid the redesign completely, and I haven't noticed any comments that appear to be rendered incorrectly.

The one that keeps coming up is how 'code' is rendered. Old reddit uses four leading spaces for a code block and IIRC new reddit uses triple-backtick. It's probably slightly different, not-quite-100% compatible markdown dialects.

Admittedly it's a problem more common on the more technical subreddits.

Ah. I have noticed that one actually, but I chalked it up to someone confusing Github/SO/Reddit markdown. Didn't realize that Reddit itself was inconsistent.

Yep, as soon as they stop offering the old design I am out.

For now. Other issues with old.reddit is that it blocks web.archive bot, and their new design doesn't work for web.archive.org's captured content. It shows white page when page loaded.

Yeah thank god.

Even if it's uglier, I much prefer the experience of using old website than the React redesign.

Not because it's a single-page app, but because it's slower and has many usability problems.

I hate it because of the tracking, scroll around with dev tools open and see the activity. Call me paranoid but I bet they're building a psychological profile on each user by watching how they interact with topics. I hate it so much I did something about it.

https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/8ra9y6/i_hate_the_...

You can disable the redesign. Its also somewhere in the preferences.

http://old.reddit.com

But "somehow" it forgets my preference constantly and I have to 'opt-out of redesign' several times a day.

And, if you follow any links, it sends you straight back to the new version.

I think there's an option in your account settings, you don't just click the "return to old site" banner, you have to toggle a setting.

Whenever I'm logged in it's always the old version. RES helps too!

There's a Firefox add-on that rewrites all reddit URLs to use old.reddit.com. Absolutely indispensable.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...

There are also browser extensions that force the redirect everytime. I haven't seen the redesign since it was released.

I had that problem for a long time but eventually it stopped occurring. I assumed someone had fixed something.

They fixed that a few weeks ago.

I still get it constantly. Whatever they did doesn't seem to be universal. Don't know if it's accounts, platform, or something else.

I have had to reset that flag NUMEROUS times now. I do it in my profile and a few weeks later, poof, back to slow/poorly designed UI.

If you take a look at https://pushshift.io/, comment/post activity has seen significant growth in 2018. Of course, this is a completely different metric from unique visitors. I mod a large-ish (top 20 by subscriber count) sub so I can see traffic stats for the sub. Our monthly unique visitor count barely grew over 2018 although that is not very representative of site activity as a whole either.

The team at Reddit has all the data. They will know how to leverage/present them in order to raise more money. Web ranking is not the only thing used in valuation.

In case someone missed it: replace "www" with "old" to get the old design back.

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