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Comment by shaabanban | Hacker News Reader

Try to use reddit in a browser...

new.reddit.com - 327 requests, 8mb, 7 seconds - https://tools.pingdom.com/#5d1bf3f952400000

news.ycombinator.com - 7 requests, 22kb, .125 seconds - https://tools.pingdom.com/#5d1bf4a4f8400000

The hilarous thing is that if you put in https://www.reddit.com to pingdom's measurement tool, reddit returns the old site layout. https://tools.pingdom.com/#5d1bf3c4e3800000

edit: Just poked around a bit to find best worst examples. Unsurprisingly CNN is the worst I could find after a few mins - https://tools.pingdom.com/#5d1bf596ffc00000 543(!) requests, 9mb, 6 seconds. Just stroll through the list of bullshit it sucks into the front page...what a mess.

Try it with awwwards websites. A spinning wheel is almost a requirement.

For a real A+++ website you need a loading bar.

Also holy shit I just clicked on the first website I saw on that site and I'm getting about 3fps scrolling it and my desktop is a Ryzen 9 3900x with 24 threads, 48gb ram and an rx5700xt. You don't even get the excuse of "It works on my machine" because this desktop is literally as good as it gets. I just tried a couple sites and not a single one could scroll smoothly, one of them was live applying css transforms to about 30 images as I scroll.

They're nice and smooth on my Ryzen 5 4500U/Vega 6 with 8GB of RAM. Of course the 5 seconds of artsy chaos spinner each of them has on load is still absurd. But it's fine after that. Could it be the browser? I loaded them in Firefox.

No idea, I tried them on both firefox and chrome and things were pretty laggy. Some worse than others. I don't have problems scrolling on other sites.

Try old.reddit.com

Also, it's possible to browser Reddit through non-web-browsing applications that use the Reddit API.

The reddit API is a legacy feature that is on the chopping block any day now. Its only real purpose now is 3rd party clients which don't show adverts or insert tracking scripts. It has a small amount of use for bots but those are mostly a negative user experience and likely to be killed soon as well.

Reddit is pushing to become facebook without your real name.

> without your real name.

With extensive user profiles and now very visible profile pictures, I'm not sure that this isn't going to come as well.

I wouldn't be surprised if they started asking for your phone number as well, as so many privacy-invading sites like to do these days.

This seems very likely. Reddit admins have mentioned that they are trying to crack down on alt accounts and banned users signing up 2 seconds after being banned. A phone number requirement would solve that easily.

The day old.reddit.com goes away is the same day I completely stop using reddit. The main interface is actively unusable for me.

Ha ha, now we're back to secret incantations like when AdBlock first came out! You'd tell your friends and family, "Oh, you gotta get it!" for something whose "discoverability" is very, very low.

CNN Lite on the other hand - https://lite.cnn.com/en

OMG this is such a gem. There is someone in CNN actually understand a part of me, `mind.blown = true;`

Here's some more lean websites you might fancy on my directory (CNN Lite is in there as well)

https://www.leanternet.com/

Nice!!! - 8 requests, 120kb, .3 seconds - https://tools.pingdom.com/#5d1c094582400000

Try https://www.oilprice.com :)

Would love a CPU usage analysis of new reddit vs old reddit. You can feel your laptop choke under the effort it takes to render the post + 3 comments out of 200 it shows you vs the old loading the post and entire comment tree.

Trying to open new.reddit.com on my ~4 year old phone is slow enough that I have time to get a coffee before the annoying Install Our App popup appears. Imgur is even worse; it takes multiple seconds to load a webpage whose only purpose is to display a single jpg image.

Surprisingly, new.reddit.com on my 4 year old phone took about the same amount of time as my few month old computer to load. They are both unusable.

yeah, I've navigated there several times by accident on my phone while out and about. I never got past the loading screen. at least now you can just go to old.reddit.com and don't have to request the desktop site every time

New reddit vs Old reddit would be an interesting experiment. What if reddit asked you which version you want on your first load? How many people would go for new?

It genuinely feels like being on dial-up in the old days. I frequently visit reddit using Safari on my iPad and it often takes a good 3-5 seconds for the new page to load after I tap on a link. If anything, it at least dissuades me from wasting time on the site.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com