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Comment by AlchemistCamp | Hacker News Reader

With their redesign and a few other choices, Reddit has gone from one of the most beautiful places on the web to the second most hostile UX that I put up with.

I don't want to "GET NEW REDDIT" as I'm urged to in the top left of every page because I don't want a card-based layout. The whole reason I and so many others left Digg for Reddit to begin with was for a highly skimmable, information-dense site!

Similarly, I don't want to install a mobile app. The page worked fine on mobile when I got my first iPod Touch a decade ago. Why do I have to see a huge USE APP button in the nav bar and then lose another 20% of the page at the bottom to a See Reddit In section at the bottom that's also urging me to install a native app?

Infinite scroll actually slows down my browsing experience too, since it no longer loads as many entries at a time and I have to keep waiting for pagination.

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How are Reddit’s marketing choices related to this article?

JavaScript. They use too much of it.

Javascript has nothing to do with those decisions. It is purely design.

> Javascript has nothing to do with those decisions. It is purely design.

How do you implement infinite scroll without JavaScript?

The theme tying all their choices together is costs they're willing to inflict upon their users. Bloated JS payloads are simply one example.

> How do you implement infinite scroll without JavaScript?

Technically it's possible.

Render the website server side as an image. Chrome 75+ supports native lazy loading of images, so a series of them stacked vertically is needed. Each image represents a new page, scroll through them to navigate. Click detection can be done with a <map> tag.

I think you can also just keep sending html. Send a page with page2.png at the bottom and keep the connection open. This is a sentinel image to detect scrolling — when page2.png is requested, use this as a command to tell the server to start sending html for page 2 on the original connection, which would have page3.png at the bottom.

This is even simpler. Forgot that HTML can be executed while loading.

JavaScript is now a marketing choice? Wow!

Can you even?

Skimmable design → shorter time and smaller space for ads → less ad revenue.

I wish Reddit ran something like Youtube Premium, a paid ad-free experience with actually comfortable layout.

If something is going to be ad free, it had better also be tracking free.

You can buy reddit premium so you no longer get ads. It's absolutely bullshit how much stuff they still track, though.

They lost me as a premium subscriber because they no longer offer a discounted annual subscription plan and instead expect me to pay $6/mo ($72/yr) for ad-free access to a site that is comprised of user-generated content. That's more than the subscription price of some actual news sites.

The article uses Reddit's Javascript execution times as an example

For desktop

old.reddit.com

or for mobile

reddit.com/.compact

Both are low nuissance and both still work for me, although I am not sure if that is region based.

> or for mobile

> reddit.com/.compact

I didn't know about that option. Bookmarked. Thanks for sharing!

> old.reddit.com

It doesn't put a big red "GET NEW REDDIT" in the upper left that does a single-click update of your account settings? What region are you in?

> reddit.com/.compact

I just tried that and the top 40% of my screen was spent on a banner telling me, "You've been invited to try out Reddit's new mobile website!" Clicking that lead me to a page where both the top bar and the bottom section harass me to install their mobile app.

> reddit.com/.compact

Desktop site [x]

I use a uBlock Origin rule to hide the upper-left button.

Indeed I overlooked the fact that I am also using ff+ublock.

I'd also recommend Apollo if you're on iOS and are happy using an App to get your reddit fix.

Fast, reliable and well designed. I really enjoy using it.

https://apolloapp.io

I second this, it's a decent app! Only wish they would stop obsessing over new icons and fixed bugs instead.

Thirded, this app is great and fixes all my problems with Reddit on mobile.

Alternatively set your account to use the old style, and then adblock-away the banner ad to switch to the new style.

Firefox and Chrome both have old reddit redirect addons that mean you never wind up seeing new reddit again.

i.reddit.com

.compact is a major improvement. Not as good as text.npr.org or lite.cnn.com, but a major improvement. Thanks!

Regarding card-based layout on the new reddit, you can change from card based layout in the top left corner on the new site.

Sweet! The compact view is even better than old.reddit

I use https://ns.reddit.com along with Firefox's Redirector add-on to make sure that I always stay on that domain... not sure how much longer it will stay around though

https://old.reddit.com is the "official" version of that, I believe. Here's a pretty popular redirector extension to go to that: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...

Completely agree. I use this extension to always redirect to the "old." reddit design:

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

The slowdown of the new design is really noticeable whenever I visit reddit on another browser or computer.

https://old.reddit.com is the only way to look at that site.

Reddit new style also eats way more cpu cycles than needed, which is very important when you visit the site on potato hardware

You can remove the nagware in your preferences on Reddit. Still unacceptable but it's there

https://reddit.premii.com/ - Works in the browser including incognito for your NSFW needs. No Ads.

> Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at https://www.reddit.com/r/all/best.json. (Reason: CORS request did not succeed).

> The resource at “https://www.reddit.com/r/all/best.json” was blocked because content blocking is enabled.

When I try to go to that URL in latest Firefox on MacOS.

Re mobile: use i.reddit.com. Have been using it for 8 years now!

Reddit in 2019 === Facebook of 2010

Check out tildes.net

Apparently it's invite-only alpha, but it is beautiful. Any idea when it will be open for general registration?

(Tildes is my site)

I don't have any specific plans about opening the registration up yet, but you (or anyone else) can just email me for an invite. It's not intended to be difficult to get one, I just want to keep the site's growth under control.

The address to email (and a lot more info about the site's goals) are in the announcement post: https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes

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