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Comment by Lazare | Hacker News Reader

It's really inexplicable. Old Reddit was fine, not great, just fine. The new Reddit UI is hideously bad. It was terrible when it launched, it was terrible months later, and it's still terrible now.

I'm honestly at a loss. Is this some galaxy brain "let's make the web experience terrible to force people to native apps" strategy?

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  Is this some galaxy brain "let's make the web experience terrible to force people to native apps" strategy?

Yes. If you browse it on your phone they even make more annoying by displaying footbar "launch on our native app"

For all the shit that the desktop web experience gets, the mobile web experience on reddit is a 1000 times worse. It sometimes blocks you from viewing certain (cough NSFW cough) subreddits unless you use the app, umm what??

Heh, they are probably assuming people would be more ashamed to complain if the block is NSFW only.

Even worse that most communities, even safe for work ones like gaming communities are locked being using the app. I can't access any of my favored subreddits on mobile without visiting the old site.

The good thing is that refusing to download the app has cleared me of my reddit addiction

Use a third party app. They use api access and universally offer a better experience, without content blocking.

Which app do you recommend? I tried Apollo, Narwhal and Comet and didn't think any were as good as the native Reddit app.

Not only that, they also have some A/B testing in place which makes email id mandatory if you signup via mobile browser; of-course email id is not needed for mobile app.

I also found that the mobile dials home quite regularly when in background.

I think Reddit could throw away all of the new stuff and be better off.

Everything they’ve done after maybe 2010 could just be thrown away.

An enormous waste of programmer effort and time for something that is a lot worse than what they started with.

Better off for the user but no doubt worse off for corporate profits. The redesign seems to be clearly better at inserting adverts and tracking the user. They also seem to be making a big effort to remove 3rd party links. These days most reddit posts are links to reddit hosted content or are news articles where no one reads the article.

> An enormous waste of programmer effort and time

You've just described a whole lot of programming work.

The developers and designers had to justify getting paid, and they do that by producing features and a new "user experience". And if it's slow and rough, even better, job security for the foreseeable future until you fix the stuff.

Throw in the second-system effect they fell for in my humble opinion, and you got your explanation of what's going on.

Next up: Rinse and repeat.

I mean, we're talking about a website frontend that was what, 10 years old? At this point all frontend code was probably legacy and noone in the company knew how to maintain it properly, so they started over.

That's what happened to del.icio.us after it was bought by Yahoo. Kind of ridiculous that web code ages out that badly, but I guess in startup world as long as it lasts till the IPO or acquishutdown that's all that matters.

They could have spent the time they used to produce the current mess to learn about the old code and improve on it, or document it and then use it as a starting point for their new stuff and then improve on it.

10 years isn't necessarily bad either. Just look at HN. Functional with minimum of JS, 2.0kB transferred to load this reply page, tho it will not win any fancy design awards anytime soon. But all in all, great user experience. If you wanted to inline the reply form into the comments pages, that can be done easily in under 1KB of unminified js.

Loading the reddit frontpage (not signed in, adblocker): 21.8MB transferred (11.7 without media and fonts), 501 requests (183), 20+ seconds to load, 11667 ms of scripting. What the actual fuck.

old.reddit.com: 2.7MB transferred (2.1MB), 100 requests (24), <2seconds to load, <300ms of scripting.

> Everything they’ve done after maybe 2010 could just be thrown away

Honestly I'm pretty sure this could be said for the entirety of the web and we'd be better off.

> Is this some galaxy brain "let's make the web experience terrible to force people to native apps" strategy?

It is exactly that. Apps are proprietary, so they can be closed, filled with ads or spyware (name one app that doesn't ask for access rights to everything), and branded. Even the groceries store down the street would likely force you to use their own crappy app - so you would have their logo on your home screen - rather than a generic browser that won't tell anyone you buy from them.

Was fine? It still is old.reddit.com. You can set your profile to use it by default. Just don't accidentally click the "Get New Reddit" link in the top left else you have to edit your settings again.

It's fine until they discontinue old.reddit.com at some point in the near future.

By then hopefully reddit alternatives like Lemmy[1] become viable

1 - https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy

Yeah, I didn't think the Lemmy project would go very far when I first saw it. But the implementation is very impressive (performance seems comparable to HN), and the self-hosted model seems like it could be quite amenable to communities staying in control.

That seems like the exact same design as new reddit.

Similar UI, but really different UX.

How do you make such a thing distributed? Seems to be using a database. If you host on one domain, how does it send the changes to other nodes?

Yep not looking forward to this day.

They must have usage stats.

I think they are well aware that a lot of older users (some likely heavy _content_contributors_) will simple walk away if they do this.

You can't sell ads if you don't have original content that drives traffic to your pages.... old.reddit.com as well as '.compact' are the price to pay to prevent a digg type exodus.

Somewhat happened a few days ago. Reddit in the browser (ie. M.reddit.com) got a redesign which has screwed loads of stuff up (can't even see usernames of those who have submitted posts on /hot) which makes everything cartoonish, moved the "share" buttons to where voting used to be, and is overall just a bit crappy - without mentioning some of the bugs they have such as a giant white bar on every page.

It sucks because I love reddit, but it will be EOL for the people who made it what it is in about 3-5 years

The use-by-default setting never seems to stick for me. But so far it’s still been possible to substitute old in the URL.

Yeah, they forcefully unset it every few days.

One of the more insulting parts of their UX.

I bet forcefully unsetting it bumps their usage metrics for the new site though.

Mine never unsets, unless i accidentally click that damn button. I often mistake it for the reddit homepage link.

I set a custom uBlock filter to be rid of it.

It has never unset for me.

I've created a Firefox extension that allows you to change Reddit subdomains easily (without having to type). Unfortunately because of covid, the queue for approval can days or weeks right now.

It sometimes logs you out and resets to the New Reddit. These extensions (Old Reddit redirect) are life savers:

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

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

Thanks for that. I don't browse reddit as a rule, but I occasionally land there when applying google-fu to a problem so this removes some tedium from my life.

I just feel deeply grateful to the person who has made the decision to keep the old UI available and to Tom Watson - the author of the "Old Reddit Redirect" Firefox extension.

Reddit does offer the option to "use old Reddit" if you're signed in. I only learned about this recently, maybe it's common knowledge.

I often browse Reddit with Safari and there haven't been very many extensions available for it. Certainly none to do something simple like this, since it would have to be made available through the app store.

PS: Apple has announced that FireFox and Chrome extensions can be made available for Safari in Big Sur, although it seems like they have to go through a convoluted process and probably pay $99/year for the privilege.

Part of it is definitely that, and it's worked. I finally did install the Reddit app on my phone which makes me much more valuable to advertisers. It's user-hostile, but there's a business method to the madness.

There are alternative clients that lack some features but are very lightweight, open source and don't have ads.

RedReader and Slide come to mind.

Edit: that was on Android, I guess there are alternatives for iOS too, even if less likely to be open source.

If you are on iOS I can highly recommend using the Apollo app instead of the official app. It is better in basically every way.

So true. Loads very slow as well compared to the old version. I still use old.reddit.com when on desktop and Slide app for Reddit on my phone.

Mobile app is even worse.

It really is. If it wasn't for Sync I'd have left Reddit altogether.

Definitely have a feeling its days are numbered, they'll eventually start disabling bits of their API.

Then I'll eventually stop using reddit.

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