I’ve never seen a single site design repel me more quickly. I depend heavily on the simplicity and information-density of the old design (e.g. being able to pick from a dozen link titles that all fit on screen at once). I also depend on the pinch-to-zoom simplicity of focusing on exactly what I want, which only works well in the “normal” web pages of the old design. The new “design” breaks everything that made the old design convenient in these respects, and is almost impressively bad. It is so astoundingly different than what made Reddit work originally (i.e. its simplicity) that it quite honestly feels like someone tried their best to sabotage Reddit.
And all of this, I must say, is before I even mention the ridiculous spam-like additions they made. I think the new design finds no fewer than 3 places to shove something in my face like “USE APP / Better in app / HEY DID YOU KNOW WE HAVE AN APP!?!?!?”. Who is that for? Does anyone like this kind of crap? It virtually guarantees that I will never download the app.
Reddit’s days are numbered if it keeps this stuff up. I’m actually surprised that, historically, Digg died for much smaller redesign “sins”, and I think it was primarily because Reddit was an alternative. What’s the alternative?
Exactly. I went on reddit for years until the redesign. Now I can’t stand that site. The reddit redesign is so astoundingly bad and nonfunctional it shocks me to this day.
The network effect has a positive influence on curation but an often profoundly negative effect on conversation. The smaller reddit spinoffs tend to have users that are more passionate about the topic at hand, don't "shit post" as much and the comment threads aren't plagued by low-effort puns. A casual observation of this might have you believe that the engagement is low, but a closer examination often reveals that the conversations are much more on-topic.
if you use reddit mostly on mobile then there are many unofficial apps to use, and some people might not even notice the redesign.
- It's much slower/bulkier. I don't want a modern machine just render webpages.
- Infinite scrolling designs are good for addiction, but not actually good for reading. If I have to reload the page, my spot is gone.
- Much less content actually fits on a page, and I suspect this is done to encourage scrolling, similar to facebook's strategy. Increase addiction, tracking, and ad impressions through engagement.
- There seem to be a lot more emojis and post flair.
- There seem to be A lot more promoted posts
There's probably other stuff I haven't noticed. Between the redesign, the enhanced user tracking, their desire to go public, and tencent's investment, it's pretty clear that it's getting to be time to abandon reddit completely.
Neither do I like being harassed by various banners to switch to redesign (recently sliding banners for "amazing" dark mode and infinite scrolling) or even finding it was loaded by force randomly during browsing random content and that seems to be happening way too often to count it as "accident".
I get the idea behind this: they set themselves a goal of luring in new people by making UI more attractive to the audience who's familiar with social network interfaces and such way of providing content (the default card is just same as twitter, facebook and instagram feed view). Still, they should still respect users who want to stay on faster-loading old interface and provide it as an option in preferences (old domain is just half-assed way to do it), not assuming that everyone will be enjoying this new UI.
The fact that they've called it an `onboardingbar` is not exactly reassuring.
And it's enough unpleasantness to keep me from going back to checking it regularly. I hope they keep it.
This was happening to me too. I've switched to a add on to FF that forces everything reddit to old.reddit.com
I feel like the redesign wasn't for "Us". It was for those people used to a Facebook like feed. People that enjoy or easily digest pictures and videos more than they do words.
I have a friend that uses RES to view all images on the page. And basically scrolls past any threads that would have a text title. Doesn't even read the title unless an image catches his eye. And never EVER reads the comments. I feel like the redesign was for people like that.
I don't see why Reddit shouldn't just publish its retention/cohort metrics. Of general interest to the community and certainly not a trade secret.
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reddit-enhancement...
The Reddit one is barely usable for me though, I’m not sure if it’s the JS heavy front end buts it’s really laggy and hard to use on a 2015 MBP with Safari so I just switched to Apollo app as the only way to use it. The desktop site got unusable for me.
It's clear what it's optimized for and the user or the user expereince is not it.
What's especially annoying is that the mobile website is unreadable since they use growth tactics at every step to try to funnel you into their native mobile app.
I pretty much still browse on old.reddit.com.
It might look slightly easier on the eyes (debatable) but other than that, actually using the redesign is worse in almost every way. It's slower than the previous version and there's way less information on a page, yet this is the app you'd get if you followed all the "common wisdom" about building a web front end in 2019.
Compare this to something like craigslist, or pinboard, or HN, which are all theoretically "ugly" but all very fast and very easy to use. Content notwithstanding the user experience on craigslist is infinitely better than the one on new Reddit.
So yes, I like the redesign, but only in the sense that is has highlighted all of the bad parts of modern web design to me in a very concrete way.
I've made a very simple open source extension to automatically redirect all reddit.com and www.reddit.com links to old.reddit.com.
- https://github.com/aaomidi/reddit-fixer
- https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reddit-fixer/boahh...
- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/reddit-redire...
I've gotten into the habit of using old.reddit.com whenever I view it.
I also finally caved and downloaded their mobile app because I got tired of all of the nagging. I feel like they intentionally broke their mobile experience to push users to the app so they could increase ad revenue. I'm sad I caved, but I just couldn't take the BS experience any longer.
Makes me sick.
It's actually clean, and configurable enough that I can set the right information density for myself, and I dont get all the banners and ads bugging you to use reddit's official mobile app. Plus an actually consistent dark theme is a massive bonus.
Now, even if you're following links from elsewhere, you'll get the "old" experience. No need to go to "old.reddit.com" any more.
That theory fits with how obnoxious the reddit mobile webpage is in it's attempts to onboard you to the native mobile app.
Isn't it amazing that its possible to make this slow on a fast computer?
I used to love the very simplicity of old Reddit; by making it more Facebook-like, they infantilised a great site, and the moment they take away the ability to visit "old Reddit" my usage will drop right down. But I suppose this infantilisation is just right for the social media generation. Sigh.
Some commenters have mentioned the great Digg redesign fiasco; here's a link from August 2010 that talks about it. The internet was a very different place in 2010.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/pda/2010/aug/31/digg-...
And Facebook itself used to have a very simple and lightweight layout.
But at least they didn’t digg it and kill the site outright, and instead just started to see how much nagging and annoyance they can pull their faithful user base through before they break.
Their new design is a vast improvement, but in my opinion they didn't go far enough and missed the mark on improving the backend capabilities. Why can't I easily apply arbitrary sort and filters to subreddit content? Why is the messaging system unreliable and lack basic organization capabilities?
If they cared about usability or user experience, they wouldn't have 3 different reminders to use the Reddit app or redesign each time you visit the site, each interrupting flow or completely blocking the visible page itself. Certainly the web app wouldn't "forget" that you opted out of the redesign or log you out if they cared about user experience.
It's very clear that the redesign was an effort to more efficiently push ads to users and drive their valuation up.
Also, I use reddit the most in bed, on my phone. It is a great aggregation service for news and interesting articles, but they have intentionally slowed down their website and regularly make it worse and more annoying in an effort to force users to use their app. I am sure that the app is fine, but I like the browser because I want to be able to open links in new tabs and then have those tabs available on my desktop the next day for further reading.
As for why? Well the new one is slower, fits less information on the page, keeps trying to force me to use their mobile app, etc. It just keeps getting in the way with no real benefits provided in return.
- You can't seem to persist the "old reddit" design any more. It keeps switching you back to the new design
- It's just much slower to load content. The old site was fairly snappy
- Comment are CONSTANTLY failing to load in most of the threads I open
- The autoscroll is also regularly failing to load new items
- Using the mobile site, I'm nagged by numerous attempts to get me to install the native app
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...
On reddit, go to your preferences. Down under beta test you'll find "Use the redesign as my default experience"
Disable it.
It does seem quite buggy in places though. Especially in regards to login flow & 2 factor authentication. Seems to get stuck and gets in limbo where it acts like it's logged in but it isn't.
However, I do hate the mobile 'experience', it's borderline unusable with all the banners and attempts to get you to install their app. If the links would take me to my third-party reader like BaconReader (iOS) then it'd be more tolerable but it only works with the official Reddit app.
Is anyone or any company actually improving their website?
What is the cause of this? Any one have insight? I have a theory or thought, but I'm interested if anyone has some real insight or reason?
Edit: The constant use our app banner and nag is the worse.
It feels like a group of fresh ux grads built it. Trendy and cool, with the latest js crap but with Zero functionality or friendliness.
Endless Scroll basically destroyed my productivity for a week until I figured that out. I switched to Old Reddit and my life is back in balance.
Just one of those subtle little things nobody would've anticipated, I guess.
(quickly hides before old Reddit fans come at me swinging)
What is the population that Reddit was redesigned for and how does that redesign cater to them?
it would have been a good April Fools prank to launch a "HN redesign" in the same style
It's much heavier on my machine, for one thing, and I hate the new user pages - not the bio/avatar, or the fact that you can post there, but just how the messages are displayed. It's noisy. The context provided is not worth the space it takes on the screen, and AFAICT comments from deleted thread only appear on the old overview.
I felt like all I was doing was watching loading spinners for the content to come in. Lots of last-minute DOM element readjustments that felt super broken and I never quite knew how to use anything. Add to that, links were replaced with icons in a lot of places so I never could find what I was looking for.
Blessing in disguise, really. I started using HackerNews and I love the community here.
But I want nothing to do with any of that. I go for the interesting conversations in 3 tiny subreddits filled with thoughts I don't get to read anywhere else.
Of course I hate the redesign. When I want to browse twitter, I'll just open twitter.
I avoid it constantly.
The old design isn't very sexy, but it's super efficient easy to read information dense. They haven't improved on that.
Other than sort of looking like GMail, I cannot imagine what drove the folks behind it. It’s almost Reddit and Tumblr are in a race to product the worst 2000s era social website ever.
(referring to the way-too-common reddit ads with the goofy looking guy, and to Tai Lopez's cringey "here in my garage" self-help-success videos)
BUT after a few months of having the new design being pushed in my face, and forced to engage with it, I've kind of mellowed out. Infinite scroll is annoying, otherwise I find the look and feel is reasonably pleasant, and a little more "2019".
It does feel like a pretty unnecessary redesign though. Does anyone know if Reddit has published any stats showing what the redesign accomplished? I'd be curious to know.
Also I think it's a huge shame how much customization they've taken away from the subreddit styling. Completely custom CSS was way better, the new design seems to allow for some basic elements to be styled along with the banner. That is a major downgrade.
It's a disaster. It is slower has worse UX than the old Reddit. Whoever thought making a SPA with React was a good idea was wrong. Reddit is a terrible use case for a SPA.
Design wise it's not terrible, but the chosen fonts have less readability than the previous fonts (I believe good old Verdana).
I will keep using old Reddit with RES for as long as I can.
Is it just me or is the quality of Reddit posts on any mainstream sub going down? If feels like its going the way of Digg.
If there was a night mode setting in the old version, I'd use that in a heartbeat.
The old design is ugly, but it works.
The new design is prettier in a messy way, but I much prefer the original UI.
Unless you really, really understand why your original design was so successful in the first place and you make sure you keep those things, but Reddit's just seems like generic web design of nowadays.
I ONLY use https://old.reddit.com/ to access the site now.