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Comment by Retroity | Hacker News Reader

It is the worst redesign I've ever seen on a major website like this for a number of reasons. It's needlessly heavy on resources, it's slow, it's difficult to navigate, it's filled to the brim with ads, it's uninspired and takes away all of the charm of the old design in favor of making Reddit look like a more generic social media, it doesn't work with the wayback machine, and that's just scratching the surface.

It's such a awful design. I've explicitly opted out of the new design on my account, and I use old.reddit.com whenever I'm not signed in.

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It's also needlessly redundant. It has two completely different viewers for comments.

When you click the comments link on a story from the story list, it opens the comments in some kind of overlay on top of the story list. There is a "close" link near the top that dismisses the overlay to get back to the stories. The story list is still loaded in the browser, just not visible because the comments are in front of it.

Well, not visible to you. The story list is still visible to the browser's "search on page" feature, often making such searches useless. Also, scrolling in the overlay is way off on some browsers.

If you hit refresh, you get the more useful comment view. It's just the comments, without the story list lurking behind, and with unmolested scrolling.

They should just scrap this redesign, except for the fancier post editor. Port that to the old reddit and call it done.

My 2018 Macbook Pro i5 can't handle it. I get the "this site is draining your battery" warning far to often. I can't watch Netflix and browse Reddit at the same time anymore

if you think that's terrible, check out the mobile browser version... It's full of pop ups that remind you to download their app, and none of the v.reddit or giphycat links work :/

I’ve noticed that about the giphy and v.reddit links. It’s so ridiculous. Their OWN image and video embeds don’t work on their own site on a stock standard iPhone with safari.

This redesign has been years in the making and a solid half of the basic features used every day don’t work.

It’s probably the single worst redesign I’ve ever seen a major site do.

This is why I use old.reddit.com, or the compact version ( https://reddit.com/.compact )

Also accessible at https://i.reddit.com

Not to mention half the time you load a page it fails to retrieve any data.

It's just awful, I agree. The sad thing is that original Reddit was highly usable, even if it looked a bit dated.

That's a huge part of reddits charm for me.

Why aren’t you using old.reddit when you are signed in?

You can, but the problem with using old.reddit.com is that clicking on reddit.com links (e.g. from reddit comments) will take you back to the new design. With the opt-out, you get the old design no matter what.

I think people have even go so far as to make browser extensions to automatically rewrite "reddit.com" to "old.reddit.com".

The redesign looks... well, I don't even know where to start, but it's pretty clear that users aren't the focus and they've sold out completely to corporate interests.

I'd actually be OK with some of this if they were forthright and honest about this shift in focus, but they're trying to say that the new design is 'better', etc. That's nonsense and lies.

EDIT: Oh, yeah, just remembered: IIRC the failure to link properly to 'old.reddit.com' on links that Reddit have full control over was registered as a 'bug' instead of an obvious way to drive traffic to the redesign.

EDIT#2: This is also what drove people to write browser extensions. The value of reddit has always been in the communities, not the design (or whatever).

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...

Redirect extension to always get old.reddit.com. I've been using it for years without issue. It's one of the very few extensions I have that is enabled in Incognito mode.

But I still feel your pain whenever I'm on another computer without the extension and forget to type the old url.

You can actually set it in your account settings to default to the old design without needing to go to old.reddit.com

I opted out of the redesign on my account. That way, I use the old design on my account, even if I'm not using old.reddit.

I just append '.compact" to the URL.

Unrelated, but I also use m.facebook.com and the non JS version of gmail.

Oh god, JS version of gmail is unusable on firefox.

Takes minutes(!) to load(multiple powerful machines - i7 3770k, i5 6th gen and i7 7700, tested on fresh OS installs of both Win10 and Ubuntu) - it fakes loaded status usually by displaying your last viewed page - which is very annoying as it has no loading bar nor a throbber.

It is horrible when you are waiting for 2FA code in email, or when resetting a password.

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