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Comment by Jestar342 | Hacker News Reader

old.reddit.com is still there and removes a lot of the dross. There's also extensions to ensure you always get redirected to it from any reddit link you follow.

But it's still a dumpster fire of hate, bots and/or paid-for responses, for any sub that reaches critical mass.

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i.reddit.com also works amazingly better than the redesign on mobile, it loads easily 10x as fast, has better usability and doesn't force you to log in to browse by subreddits.

Given how far they're willing to go with dark patterns to con people into installing an app I'm actually amazed that they still bother to maintain this legacy versions. Seems like it would've been easy to let them bitrot into being unusable.

Interesting that quarantined subs cannot be used on i.

I imagine that's more through lack of maintenance than deliberate choice

I imagine lack of maintenance is a deliberate choice.

All quarantined subs have been banned now though?

Not all quarantined subs got caught in the banwave. I'm aware of MGTOW still existing, I'm sure there are others.

Opening posts with videos will redirect you to the new design unfortunately

> I'm actually amazed that they still bother to maintain this legacy versions.

According to my traffic stats (moderating ~400k subscribers), old + mobile web frontends make up about twice the traffic of new frontend. Apps are by far the most popular, about ~3x of all web frontends combined.

I do not know a single person that moderates a 100k+ subreddit using the redesign, everyone still seems to be using old + modtools + enhancement suite. Personally, I believe this is the only reason they didn't kill it already.

Edit to add: The new frontend is the default for logged-out users, and it still makes up half of old. If that isn't a failed redesign project, I don't know what is.

Wow, those numbers are astonishing. I think "defaults matter" has been one of the biggest themes in modern tech. Countless inferior products have won out simply by being the most discoverable and least friction option. That the new design is still failing despite that massive advantage is damning.

You don't actually need old.reddit.com, as I commented above, you can change your account preferences to turn the redesign off.

e: I just realised, you may need old.reddit.com if you don't sign in.

On mobile it reverts you every few days whether you want it to or not and you have to set it again.

There are a few extensions around for each browser that fix this, but every time it happens it makes me angry at whatever person thought this was a good idea.

If they rely on metrics for old vs. new this 'feature' obviously distorts the reality.

Strange, mine doesn't revert that frequently. I think over a month since the last time.

I think they do experiments, I used to get reverted daily, and so changed all my bookmarks to old.*. And at some point, they removed that behavior, and now remembers my prefs. The day they stop supporting old, I'm out of reddit.

I use the boost client on mobile. It's quite nice.

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