Hacker News Reader

Comment by whywhywhywhy | Hacker News Reader

That and the layout of their "new" redesign where you go to a post and it'll show the post, 2 comments (out of 500), not even the full threads of those comments either and then just some unrelated posts and you have to click on more links just to read the actual comments and you can feel your browser choke under the weight of whatever framework they use trying to render a few bits of text.

Noticed Twitter switching to the same pattern too, show 1-4 replies then just some random unrelated algorithm posts from elsewhere.

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I'm starting to despise UI patterns that discourage any sort of meaningful discourse.

This includes stuff like hiding comment threads and only showing one or two comments by people you follow on LinkedIn, or features like "canned comments" ("Congratulations, John Doe!"). I don't know why websites stopped respecting their users' agency, but my pet hypothesis is that some product team is being measured on some sort of superficial "user engagement" KPI and ended up optimizing for meaningless reactions instead of actual discussions....

They either optimize for sales (of something), ads, data mining, or something more ephemeral like "discourse control" or "discussion shifting".

You're seeing the latter two happening with reddit, probably other sites like tik tok.

I mean to a point these are good things, HN even has the "flame war" check where it take away the reply button for deeply nested threads.

Yes, but I'd argue that the "HN brand of discourse control" is more about keeping nasty impulsive human tendencies in check, like a forcing function preventing you from not thinking before you speak - while other kinds of "discourse control" actually reward exactly this sort of behavior

This design is just so damn weird. I only rarely find myself at reddit e.g. when some obscure search query lands me there and I am always extremely confused trying to find the actual content of posts and relevant comments. I still don’t even understand how it works and half the time I just give up and leave because I can’t figure out what to do to get at whatever I’m searching for.

KPIs go up – "Sufficiently Powerful Optimization Of Any Known Target Destroys All Value" https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/12/31/does-big-business-ha...

Change the www in the url to old. That'll give you a way superior ui.

Anyone else feel like Reddit is like AOL circa 2002? It's horribly designed, continues to be so despite numerous changes, yet we put up with it because of the user content that we can't find anywhere else.

And they get lucky with people continuing to contribute to their horrible platform for the same reason.

It seems web developers these days have forgotten the virtue of keeping things simple. Everything has to be smothered in javascript, and asynchronous requests, and fluid UI that changes on the slightest interaction. I'm guessing it is a case of having a hammer, in the form of the heavy javascript frameworks, a la mode, and using it to treat every simple implementation task as a nail.

HN is a great example of how playing to the strengths of web results in a great user experience (possibly the best of any forum type site). Unfortunately it might also be damn near the only example.

HN is good, but threaded NNTP/USENET is easily better than any forum (in Emacs GNUS, or even Thunderbird). There might be better forums (something topic/tag oriented).

It's easy to blame web developers. All too often they are using overengineered hacks to implement bizarre requirements from UX and product managers who don't and won't understand the web but absolutely must see their vision take form (reminds me of the Mad Men quote: "we employ more frustrated artists than the Third Reich").

Web Developers haven't forgotten anything. They're designing for more ads/profit, not for end user experience. That's what pays the bills.

> you can feel your browser choke under the weight of whatever framework they use trying to render a few bits of text.

Marketing is extremely pleased with the accuracy of the new metrics and analytics, even if the numbers are going down. Large ad-driven companies seem to prefer accuracy of tracking to user comfort

Yeah the new layout is super heavy even on a decent machine and the old one is too 2000's...

Don't get me wrong, I love simplicity like hacker news does. But reddit's old theme just rubs me the wrong way.

reddit’s old theme is great. And I love how different subreddits are able to customize the look.

It falls apart a bit on phones, unfortunately.

>And I love how different subreddits are able to customize the look.

I absolutely hate that. If you still have a Reddit account, it can be turned off in settings. Otherwise, add this to your adblocker:

    b.thumbs.redditmedia.com/*.css

Just posting in agreement. I've never been a fan of reddit, but have found myself lurking there far more often since the redesign (which admittedly is bloated). Old reddit was too wonky-looking and disproportionate for me to take seriously.

Wow I didn't even realize this is what they were doing. I've been so confused every time somebody sends me a Reddit link in the last year.

The "top" comment always seemed to be referencing some discussion or context I didn't have, and I thought there was always an inside joke I simply didn't understand...

They call it growth hacking because it drives some metric up. I call it betraying your loyal users.

Honestly, I hate how in 2020, every single social media service tries this hard to manipulate its users into spending more time with them. It's nothing but pathetic at this point.

I really hate that aspect of Reddit.

When does it ever make sense to hide thread comments?

Yeah but someone got a big raise because they're now seeing 4x as many clicks as before...

Old design + Reddit Enhancement Suite is the only decent way to use reddit right now.

The problem is that they don’t let you pay for the service.

They show that algorithmic stuff to increase engagement. Of course, if they show related content so close by, people are going to check it out more often. You can’t really argue against that.

What they could do is have a paid tier. Instead of paying with engagement, you’d pay money to have the better UI. But they don’t want to provide that option at all.

>What they could do is have a paid tier

Funny you should say that, they do https://old.reddit.com/premium and an in app currency too https://old.reddit.com/coins for some reason.

You wouldn't have noticed any of this if you're an old.reddit holdout though.

the weird thing is their old design is strictly better.

It’s admittedly a little clunky on mobile, but still preferable to “install app!”

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