The app is not much better to be honest. Sure it works, but it doesn't feel optimized at all either.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21738571
"The site lacks basic optimizations like virtual scrolling to keep the browser from crashing after a few pages of content. There are also entire npm packages being pulled in instead of any tree-shaking, or browser-specific polyfills."
I fucking hate virtual scrolling. Twitter is particularly bad at this - it breaks search. Twitter's built in search isn't the strongest, so I previously just went with some generic hashtag I knew I used and then used ctrl+f to find the Tweet from my archive. With the "redesign" this use case is totally shot.
For Reddit, I can go to "Saved posts", load as far as I reasonably need, ctrl+f and find what I need.
Not just twitter! Discourse has this "feature" too, breaking search as well. They "helpfully" provide overrides to the built-in search function, but it's a) restricted and b) not what I want. It's not what I want because it does NOT search inside the topic only but inside the whole website. It's restricted because I can't search for some word/phrase within a post. My browser also allows me to highlight searched phrases, but that requires the browser search to be triggered in the first place.
For a while you could circumvent it by pressing / which on Firefox triggers search, but guess what, Discourse "helpfully" redirected it to their broken search as well.
It's a disturbing trend that Discourse is being deployed so widely, replacing older, better working, alternatives.
If you have a property like Reddit, people will fight through a bad experience to keep reading their stuff. So sluggish turns into "improved session duration" and shitty nav turns into "more pageviews / engagement". Deceptive content looking ads turn into "higher conversion".
If Reddit had been envisioned from the begging as requiring a special app for access, I would feel differently, but it’s a damn website that should be cleanly and effectively accessed through a browser.
[1] Should always take you to i.reddit.com
- For HN you only have an optimized HTML page as well a short javascript download.
- For Reddit you have a truckload of files which then dynamically load content piece by piece, and also loads ad content from elsewhere (c.amazon-adsystem.com in my case).
Reddit's full content is bigger than HN's, but that isn't really a problem. The real problem is that everything is loaded by tiny chuncks, which adds loads of latencies for a total of a few seconds to load the page. If everything was in one big file it would be (and feel) way faster.
I have so many questions for their engineering department.
Either way, I still access reddit via old.reddit.com and it's snappy as ever.
Simple things like, not showing me the entire thread and forcing me to like "View Entire Discussion" and then sometimes that will jump to a totally different vertical position in the webpage resulting in confusion, frustration, and anger. Unbelievable that things could be this horrid. How can it be so difficult to consume content when the website's sole purpose is to consume content?
Although I do wonder how new users view the new design. Is it as bad as I made it out to be? I'd be curious to hear their thoughts. Am I simply an old, raggety, grumpy user shaking their fist at the clouds?
But it is probably also time to look for something new - I am on that journey too. I was once a super heavy Reddit user but the environment has become so toxic and twitter. It followed a destiny similar to many conventional news sites. Even generic subs like 'news' or 'today I have learned' are infeced by personal agendas of a few monds.
Once a month I still check a few niche communities with mostly work based discussions. For the rest it has become completely unusable. I think astroturfing and political 'outreach-campaigns' have killed that site for me.
I'm sure there was a celebration when the project was "completed", however the user feedback to date indicates the celebration was not warranted.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/c821s/why_is_red...
If you have Android, try Relay for Reddit.
I see stuff like this a lot and it bugs me.
Reddit doesn't hate their users, there's simply a financial incentive to convert them over to the new site, either because it's easier to serve ads, or they need to justify to management that millions of dollars of work was worth it. I'd be willing to bet most unpopular UX/redesign decisions can be traced back to some financial incentive.
Use
old.reddit.com