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Comment by danielvaughn | Hacker News Reader

God yes, the older reddit interface was so much better. I don't give a shit how pretty the UI is.

Craigslist is _the_ case study on how an ugly UI can survive over a long timeline. There are many techies and UI designers that are just disgusted at the UI of craigslist. For some, aesthetic is more important than usability. Luckily, for most, it's not.

Yes exactly. CL is probably my favorite website on the internet, for the sheer reason that they have virtually not changed at all since they first launched over 10 years ago. It's fairly incredible. I can't think of another website that has done that.

http://rinkworks.com/

holy shit

This still exists?! It's still being updated?!?! So much more content than when I last checked it, which would have been 2004 or so. My faith in the internet is restored.

CL is only ten years old? I always figured it was from the 90s — maybe a bias originating from the design.

It's over 20 years old, it launched in 1996. Time flies.

oh wow, I stand corrected. I always thought it was 10 years old because I discovered it around 2008. Sheesh.

Remember Windows XP?

Fun fact: we're further away from its first release (2001), than it was from Windows 1.0 (1985).

Remember Windows 7?

We're further away from its first release (2009), than it was from XP.

Win7 certainly has some rough edges in retrospect, but I occasionally interact with old systems and so many things are so much snappier. I'm sure the modern frameworks in Win10 allow for "new experiences" but the plain old desktop experience was well served by Win7.

And those of us who do remember Windows 1.0 (not using it, though, but I do remember the ads), are probably mostly closer to retirement age than to the start of our careers... I feel old now.

Craigslist was a true innovation when it started.

I don't think the Berkshire Hathaway site has changed much:

http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/

Amazing

> I can't think of another website that has done that.

Hmm, I'll give you a hint. You're looking at it.

> I can't think of another website that has done that.

https://news.ycombinator.com

I think craigslist survives _despite_ its ugly UI just because of market lock-in/inertia. the ui is awful from a utility/ux, pov - it’s limited and hard to shop/browse with.

Definitely - there used to be a bunch of sites that scraped craigslist and put their listings into more browse-able formats (e.g. Padmapper), but once they got too popular, CL started sending C&Ds and filing lawsuits.

Not to forget amazon.com. I am actually in awe of their boldness in completely ignoring UI design trends.

I think that has a lot to do with Bezos saying "no" when it matters, like Jobs did at Apple.

they probably follow the money instead of trends.

Amazon has purposefully broken their search and navigation, but probably in an anti-consumer metric-driven way instead of designer-driven.

Ebay is the pinnacle of broken search and navigation! They should be winning awards, industry accolades, Webbies, the works!

Yes, both Amazon and EBay are bad examples.

They are old-school because they are lazy about it, not because something is already optimized.

Whenever I hear about how great a Amazon is as a company, I just do a single search and am dumbfounded.

Example:

If you type the name of a product - even when it is in their catalogue - it may not come up.

Search for 'mousr' on Amazon and you only see PC mouses.

The only way you can get to the mousr product is by typing the company name.

It's ridiculous.

Tip of the iceberg.

I find eBay search more predictable than amazon. When I use amazon I feel that they show to me what they think I should get instead of what I want.

Ebay removed substring search years ago, and this basically collapsed a whole bunch of industries that were using Ebay as their marketplace. Think hundreds of thousands of similar part numbers. This is why you see pages of part numbers blasted over the listing details.

Ebay's one job is to connect buyers and sellers and they fail miserably at that.

Not even a local minimum, a global minimum. Not a platform, a gated swamp.

I can sort by price on eBay. On Amazon, I have to jump through a bunch of hoops to finally be able to sort by price, and the results I get are far from exhaustive.

I find eBay search pretty fine for my purposes. They could allow for more fine-gained structured descriptions, though.

Amazon search is in comparison much more... approximate.

Well, minus their shit video streaming site, I agree.

Amazon's interface is pretty bad, though, especially in the video and kindle areas. I know I'm constantly frustrated using the site, and as far as I can tell, they don't appear to be very interested in reducing user's pain.

Amazon's website comes to mind, also

apod.nasa.gov is the classic example for me

The Drudge Report is another one.

Wikipedia would make this list as well.

Craigslist is _the_ case study on how an ugly UI can survive over a long timeline.

I wouldn't call the CL UI ugly. It's certainly not beautiful, but I'm not sure how it could be described as ugly. There's something in between, right?

It's not aesthetically polished, but it's well though-out. So it works.

That’s the strange thing about reddit’s new design: It not only lacks functionality and performance, but also white space and clean aesthetics. It feels dated already.

it was designed to make it easier to integrate ads

It's also slow, unresponsive and breaks all the time. The dark mode toggles back to bright mode randomly, posts sometimes don't render... It takes multiple seconds to render the comments in a thread. It's a mess.

The thing is that the new interface can take seconds to load whereas the old one was instant.

How is this an improvement?

It's better for them, not necessarily for you.

Reddit wants lots of growth (they are taking new money now I think) and that means lots of new users that don't know the old UI. The new one is designed with those users in mind, not ones that know the site inside and out already.

It's sanding down a barrier to entry that was already fairly low, in my opinion. They haven't really made it much lower either.

Integrating RES into the main site would've been most of what they needed to get going...

They aren't going to care about what anybody on HN has to say about it because we aren't the audience they are after.

They need hundreds of millions of new users and those have to come from Facebook and probably on mobile.

> and probably on mobile.

The site isn't mobile-friendly though, is it?

It's slow, bloated, and has repeated interstitials demanding you get their app if you deign to use mobile.

There is an old mobile interface which is very quick and also easy to use.

https://i.reddit.com/

imo the killer feature of RES is that it makes it extremely easy to manage arbitrarily many sockpuppet accounts. there are other nice features of course, but the ease of managing multiple accounts always stood out as one of the biggest perks to me.

in the current political climate, it's not hard to see why reddit might be cautious about implementing such features. of course, the real reason might just be that most reddit users don't even have one account to manage.

I tried the new interface, and even after a couple of minutes I still couldn't find where my saved posts were. Went straight back to `old.`

The old mobile reddit site [0] is _amazing_! No whitespace, no padding!

[0] The one which you can still reach by adding '.compact' to any reddit url

> so much better

In particular, faster.

I need to have a supercomputer to scroll past the first few pages.

I use ud.reddit.com

Although anytime I mention this I fear they'll take it away...

Just out of curiosity, why "ud"? It seems like any two letter subdomain works in the same way.

Honestly, I think that was just one I bookmarked at some point and there it is in my history ;)

It's actually old.reddit.com but they probably have some sort of a wildcard rule.

Thanks!

This is probably it : any two letter combination seems to work.

Testing it out I found something interesting. You can put in subreddit.reddit.com and it redirects to reddit.com/r/subreddit. But any 2 char prefix works sends to old.reddit.com (a.reddit.com -> reddit.com/r/a)

e.g. hackernews.reddit.com -> reddit.com/r/hackernews

Why does this subreddit exist?

> hackernews.reddit.com -> reddit.com/r/hackernews

> Why does this subreddit exist?

Considering the prevalence of the rebuke "HN is not reddit" on HN, probably for people who want to talk in a more reddit-like style.

It was (originally) for localization: ja.reddit.com would (for example) give you a Japanese interface. Eventually they realized what a horrible idea l10n is for a community-oriented site, and dropped the translations, but kept the `lang` that it would apply attributes. Eventually subreddit moderators figured out that you could use this to provide multiple variants of the per-subreddit CSS, such as dark modes, custom filters, and other silliness[0].

[0]: For example, see /r/CrappyDesign with (https://old.reddit.com/r/CrappyDesign/) and without (https://of.reddit.com/r/CrappyDesign) Comic Sans.

Other than "np", as in "np.reddit.com", which is used for "no-participation mode", I think the other two-letter sub-domains are used for language codes. I think at one point in reddit's history doing things like de.reddit.com could give a german site, and so on. I'm not sure what "ud" would refer to, but I assume it's similar.

Maybe "undefined"/"undetermined"?

np is implemented as a language code. Subreddits have to change their stylesheets for that language for it to work.

I have no idea what ud is, I use old.reddit.com

Try https://reddit.com/.compact

Given how aggressively reddit push their terrible no good very bad interface, I figure there has to be some advantage to them to my using it? I don't know what that could be, maybe users struggling to use the new interface looks like engagement to ads?

The new UI isn't all that pretty either...

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