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Comment by ghostcluster | Hacker News Reader

This attitude to their rollout reminds me of the recent rollout of Twitter's maligned new desktop UI, the new YouTube Studio Beta, and reddit's new UI.

There is almost a meme of online platform service providers not understanding their users and their workflows, and rolling out new revisions that hamper or outright remove functionality that those users rely on.

I guess the canonical example would be that one Digg redesign that nuked the whole platform, or Snapchat's redesign a year ago that stunted their growth.

Luckily, we haven't had to experience this at Hacker News thus far ;)

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> online platform service providers not understanding their users and their workflows

In regards to the Reddit redesign, I think the people complaining that "they ignore their users" are stuck inside a bit of a bubble.

I have a lot of friends who recently discovered the site, and they much prefer the redesign to the old one.

I forgot where I read it, but I vaguely remember stats backing this up, or at least increase in engagement or a reduction in churn for new users following the redesign.

Something like 50% of Reddit users are on mobile, for which the redesign is targeted (I believe)

Re: Slack, I know many non-techies who struggle with markdown and would welcome a WYSIWYG editor with open arms and wide smiles.

Reddit also let's you still use the old version, which is great

Exactly... You don't have to expire the old front-end, you can build a new front-end on top of the old API, maybe introduce a few new functions in the API to support both old and new.

What are they using reddit for, though? Serious question. You can probably find 10x-100x the number of people who would use a site just for amusing cat GIFs vs. a location for actual discussion, but the users of each are looking for fundamentally different things. Reddit built itself on being a text-forward group of forums. The new redesign is, frankly, a dark-pattern horrorshow designed for eyeballs at the expense of deeper engagement. They're keeping old.reddit around for a reason.

I really wouldn’t mind the new UI, if it weren’t this goddamn slow (it’s at the point of unusable right now). My choice of using the old UI isn’t even a choice at this point.

It can’t be for people on mobile: the UI is buggy (especially back and forth navigation) and constantly nagging to download the native app. That’s super annoying.

I say this as someone who doesn't mind the redesign on desktop: The redesign is a shitshow on mobile. It's slow and constantly nags you to install the app.

> Something like 50% of Reddit users are on mobile, for which the redesign is targeted (I believe)

The re-design just launched on mobile last week, while it has been on desktop for a very long time, so it is way too early to say what mobile users think. Personally I think that it is even worse on mobile.

> There is almost a meme of online platform service providers not understanding their users and their workflows, and rolling out new revisions that hamper or outright remove functionality that those users rely on.

True, but there's also a meme of people screaming bloody murder over a redesign for a day, and then being fine with it, e.g. [0]. Some complaints are worth investigating and some are just who-moved-my-cheese griping that can and should be ignored. It can be tricky to tell which is which though.

[0]: https://theoatmeal.com/pl/state_web_winter/facebook_layout

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