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Comment by throwaway13337 | Hacker News Reader

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throwaway13337

The user experience on mobile is hilariously bad.

1. Google search turns up a reddit result.

2. Click link to AMP page.

3. Scroll to read comments and click another link to open real reddit to view all comments.

4. Get to real reddit domain and watch a long loading screen.

5. Click away 2 notifications saying you should use mobile app.

6. To read a child comment, click again to read below. Page reloads above the parent comment causing you to search the page again to see child comment.

Absolutely ridiculous but still I do this because most Google results are SEO garbage. Google disabled conversation only search. Reddit is unfortunately still the best way to get a real person's view on a topic that most likely not an ad.

Just like with digg, we need a new reddit.

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Number 3 is beyond stupid. Someone had the bright idea that people browsing Reddit want to see a bunch of tiles on mobile and "related content" all over the place. Just show me the effing thread! It's all text anyway. There's little bandwidth overhead for comments.

The worst feature of new Reddit was a thread opened as a title plus maybe the top 5 comments and further scrolling transitions to a frontpage feed. But they seem to be A-B testing it on old Reddit also now.

I guess it improves their user session time metrics but as a user the experience sucks and I feel Ellen Pao and earlier CEO's eras would not have sold out the user experience the same way (though maybe that's just because they lacked the dev resources to do so)

That's been on old reddit for years before the redesign and is opt out if you log in.

This is what we call metrics-driven development, the greatest antipattern there ever was.

Everyone involved in the decision-making process for this needs to be fired. They are obviously so incompetent it's hopeless. Have they ever even used their own mobile website before?

You see this sort of shit in a lot of places where employees can't be bothered to dogfood their own platform.

From their point of view, the website is evil. The app has better telemetry. They knew eliminating the site wasn't an option, so they made it just bad enough to push users towards the app. They did exactly what they were supposed to do, maximize income. And it's possible that was executed without any individual designer or programmer thinking they were doing anything wrong. Except the ones responsible for adding tracking outbound clicks, they're terrible people.

If you don't have a holistic view of the product as a designer or programmer that's almost wilful ignorance, especially with something as trivial as Reddit.

I wish Apple would just say to places that try to register an app, "no, you have a perfectly usable website", or at the least if you have a website and is found to have an app with functionality that should be on your website, your account is permanently banned, with no recurse.

I'll disagree with the old saying: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity".

What makes you think that the new design isn’t achieving their goals? That usability is a priority for them?

Or use old.reddit.com. It's annoying to have to delete 'www' and replace with 'old' every time. I don't stay signed in, otherwise there's an option to only use old.

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

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

Or https://www.reddit.com/.compact is ok.

There are browser extensions that replace the `www` to `old` automatically.

And there's Redirector which lets you make your own rules.

And then there is also moz-rewrite, which allows the use of regular expressions and also to rewrite not only the URL but also HTTP headers (both of the request and of the response).

Redirector can use regex too.

Thank you; I was unaware of that. Although I do not generally use Reddit (I think Usenet and Unusenet is better), sometimes when something is linked, I would find it. I have the moz-rewrite extension and can easily configure it to rewrite the URL like that (I do a similar thing for Twitter, which also is not something I generally use, to force the mobile version to be used).

That doesn't work on mobile with no extensions and googling something that turns up a reddit result.

I use the old.reddit chrome extension but I imagine most computer users do not.

Internet community communication should be free to see by the public regardless of the host. The commenter are providing content to other users but it is the host that owns it. Its just not right.

Use i.reddit.com on mobile

Firefox or Brave on Android will allow extensions.

For mobile there are good third party clients. I'm using "Reddit is fun", very no-nonsense app

I use the old desktop site for reddit on mobile. If you are using Google to search site:reddit.com, you can just select request desktop site first, then you avoid the amp nonsense too.

if you are logged in there is a preference setting. i havent seen new reddit in many months

I have this set. On mobile, this won’t work.

weird. works for me on iphone 8

It’s worked once but then it’d randomly stop. Dealt with trying to get it to keep working on and off for a long time before giving up. Maybe something has changed in the past few years, but out of curiosity, I went and did some searching to see if any others had this same problem. Turns out that the answer is yes.

Unless I get a reply from a reddit dev who can guarantee that it works on my phone, I’m just gonna stick with “it doesn’t work.”

i.reddit.com for the old mobile version.

What makes this even worse is how Chrome now hides “https“ in the URL box until after you click the box, so when you double click “www” to rapidly select and replace it, the first click shifts the “www” eight characters to the right and the double click highlights “https” instead and you are sent to a broken link like “old://www.reddit.com” and need to go back and try again.

You're going to love the fact that the next release of Chrome also hides the www then...

I regularly get to:

5. Resignedly click on “Use mobile app” because reddit.com is basically unusable on a small-screen iPhone.

6. App Store opens at the Reddit app page. I already have the Reddit app installed and, often, open. But reddit.com never sends me there. It always sends me to the App Store to download an app I already have.

You just put into words what I’ve been feeling for months now. If I want reviews or opinions about something, I always prefix reddit to the search query. But the mobile experience as you point I’m out is horrendous.. I pretty much only use it on my computer where I can block ads and don’t see amp.

That's because the internet has mostly become a cesspool of people trying to "get in on the google content pie". There are thousands if not millions of sites dedicated to each unique/specific topic that are just re-hashing the same content. It's a global-level markov-chain-like generator to create "realistic" or "real" textual content. And Google loves it because they're seen as "champions" of helping you find the content you need in this pool of non-sense, whilst simultaneously being the cause of the content-explosion due to the promise of ad money.

I'm subscribed to/r/RedditAlternatives for precisely this reason. Most of the alternatives are worse, either in design/functionality, user base, or both, but I hold out hope that something interesting will cross that subreddit.

I unblocked old Reddit from my ad blocker and would have paid a reasonable monthly subscription to eliminate ads entirely (hated Reddit gold solution though...). Their new site is full of trackers so they're back on the naughty block list.

The site isn't hard to make, but it is hard to get the users. If I could pay ~$5/month or something to get old Reddit without ads and with a completely open source stack, I'd do it in a heartbeat.

They have no motivation to improve the mobile web experience. The goal is to funnel everyone to the mobile app where reddit has more control over ads etc.

At 1/4th the information density and when your screen is 1/3rd full of ads. Its absolutely awful. I use desktop view on old reddit even on mobile, and when they take that away I will stop using it entirely.

Absolutely agree, the experience is terrible.

I hate the AMP page which is a poorer read experience, and to expand comments its now multiple clicks just to get back to reading the entire thread.

Even worse, now comment chains can't be expanded without logging in.

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