We are the Starlink team, ask us anything | Hacker News Reader

We are the Starlink team, ask us anything

reddit.com

86 pointscaiobegotti32 comments

Note: this starts at noon PST.

Is there some service out there designed specifically for AMAs? I can see billions of unanswered questions, which makes the AMA part just "asking" instead of "answering".

If anyone DID read through everything, does anyone know when they'll get down to the greater Redding, CA area?

They will start answering questions around 12pm PST (~1 hr 15 mins from now)

I can’t seem to read this without logging in, never mind the dark patterns trying to force you into downloading their app. Reddit hate their users don’t they.

You can give these two URLs a try:

https://old.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/jybmgn/we_are_the...

https://i.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/jybmgn/we_are_the_s...

Old reddit: loads instantly, pleasant to use.

New reddit: takes what feels like a minute to fully load while my laptop's fans are working overtime, and even once it's fully loaded it only shows a fraction of the comments. It is also necessary for them to use a tiny font so they can even fit anything on the screen, because they insist on having 60% of the screen as empty space. If you try to zoom into the page so you don't have to squint reading a tiny font, the experience becomes really horrible.

Beating a dead horse here, but new reddit is an embarrassment and the devs should be ashamed. It's awful. Do better.

If you do want to save your reddit addiction, and you've got iOS, I recommend the Apollo app. It's made by one guy and is 100x better than anything from Reddit itself.

> but new reddit is an embarrassment and the devs should be ashamed.

Do you really think the developers come up with the ideas to add a promotion banner for the app and other annoyances like that?

Bad annoying design may have been imposed on the devs by idiotic management, but that doesn't excuse their failure to even implement a shitty design well. There is no reason for it to perform like dog shit, no matter how ugly management demands they make it, yet it certainly does perform like dog shit. I honestly think any devs who worked on this should think twice before admitting it on their resume, because it really does reflect poorly on them.

I've witnessed enough developers excitedly implement dark patterns and justify doing so with convoluted reasons like it improves engagement, it's good for the company, or that users will have an enhanced experience using the app, etc.

> I recommend the Apollo app

Seconded. I used Apollo on iOS and now I use Boost on Android.

If you use firefox, I've found redirector[1] to be super useful for this. It just converts URLs based on regexes, so all links to www.reddit get turned automatically into old.reddit. Some other fun uses too, and you don't have to go through the hassle of making your own extension boilerplate and such.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/

Recently reddit started showing ads below the main post (above the comments), and it's almost comical how self aware they are.

"Our comment section takes almost a minute to load on mobile, how can we fix it?"

"Fix it? Seems like a perfect place to show ads!"

If you're on Chrome, I use the "Old Reddit Redirect" extension and it works great: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...

It's available for Firefox as well: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...

Fun fact — links to old.reddit still open in their mobile app. Have to manually open the url.

My wife has tens of Reddit tabs open on a 5 year old bottom of the line 12” mini MacBook. HN users seem to have a lot of difficulty getting their computers to evaluate JavaScript normally.

Here's a video of myself doing a cold load of the new reddit in a private tab: https://streamable.com/3qk7rw

It takes a good minute before the site even becomes interactive. If I was logged in it would be even worse with it having to load the text editor thingy etc.

Don't mind me typing "what?" in the search bar there, I thought the close button would just dismiss the bar at the top. Also note that I had uBlock active which blocked some requests. I don't even want to know how long it would take without it.

And for comparison here's old reddit: https://streamable.com/z2ath6

Do you seriously want to defend this?

The render looked fast. Perhaps the buttons have click events intercepted by an analytics library, and the async requests to load analytic libraries have to time out first? Can you network tools the load? I’m not saying the new site is fast or anything but it surely doesn’t take a minute to become interactive in most cases. Also are you using any dns based blocking like pi holes? Sometimes this can cause a network request to time out rather than instantly fail.

New reddit: https://streamable.com/o6wy2x

Old reddit: https://streamable.com/k99kuo

Looks like the reddit servers are just slow, but the old reddit doesn't need to load so many JS files to become usable. Even if it is only halfway loaded you can already interact with it.

Because of the amount of JS files that the new reddit needs, it's not even a contest.

The render looked fast.

Gigabit internet, super computers in our pockets.. and people think this is "fast". This is why we can't have nice things..

Pages don't take 1 min to load on my 2019 16" Macbook Pro, but the experience is worse than old.reddit.com. For example, scrolling isn't smooth.

You can't expand comments to look at replies on old.reddit without running their javascript. The comments with replies aren't visible on the i.reddit or the ceddit.com js interface. Compare this yourself by searching for "ipv4" on old vs i.

The only way to look at the contents of the replies to comments is to run reddit's arbitrary code. They've gone from document to application.

Try this link. It just replaces 'www' with 'old'. The day they get rid of old reddit is the day i never hop on that website ever again (though i never use it anyway)

https://old.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/jybmgn/we_are_the...

Yeah, the redesign is a mess than requires scrolling about 10x to see the same amount of posts. No quick 10 second browse of the newest headlines.

New Reddit is a great way to benchmark your web browser's memory handling or your operating system's responsiveness when you're out of memory. Other than that, it's pretty frustrating.

This is why despite having a more powerful CPU & GPU than ever and 10x more bandwidth than I did 8 years ago websites still seem to load at the same or worse speed as ever.

I like to call it "Digg-nified" as in reddit is fiddling with everything adding things members don't want.

Soon like digg they'll drive everyone away. The golden goose will be cooked.

Some extension to always redirect to the old site makes Reddit a joy again, e.g. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...

I've rarely seen a more total failure than their redesign...

I don't know if they hate their users or not, but after years of their "new design" (or it seems like it's been that long at least), it still is nowhere close to working properly.

Slower, content not loading at all, random inexplicable errors, half the time it fails to keep me logged in, etc. etc.

> Reddit hate their users don’t they

Users want to use the service but they don't want to be monetised for that use, seems like an antagonistic relationship.

I can read it just fine in incognito mode.

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