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Comment by SheinhardtWigCo | Hacker News Reader

When old.reddit.com dies, it’s over.

I agree. The new UI is utterly obnoxious on mobile - they keep trying to force me to use the app, including making it impossible to read the rest of a forum without using the app instead. It's horrible.

If you're on Android, I can't recommend RedReader enough [1] . It's open source and customisation (also installable via F-Droid). I browse with a compact display and thumbnails turned off.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.quantumbad...

And for iOS, Apollo[1] is delightful. The most thought-out app I know about in general.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/sk/app/apollo-for-reddit/id979274575

No. I do not want to install an app to read a website. That is what my browser is for.

While I agree with your sentiment, Reddit is becoming less and less a website over time.

I wonder how long the API will remain supported. It's really not serving the master's will. Then all these open source readers will be dead as well.

the day they stop supporting RSS feeds I'll be really sad : (

Reddit Sync Dev is the best reddit client on android imo. It has a lot of features I didn't know I would need, and the developer regularly pushes updates every few days.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.laurenceda...

It's obnoxious on a giant screen, too. I get 10 headlines on the old version, but the new version only shows me one story -- so much scrolling.

I prefer the old version too, but have you tried using the classic or compact layout option on the new version? I personally use the classic layout and have been much less frustrated with it.

https://imgur.com/a/SBifQIB

The problem is the conversation threads. You can't read them in the new format. They constantly elide them so you have to click on them and it jumps around on the screen.

In the old view, I can read a page full of threaded comments on a thread I've clicked into. In the new layout, you get maybe five comments, and a scroll to the next thread. It is awful.

I don't get what you're mentioning. If you open a thread (in a desktop browser tab), you get the discussions just like before.

Not true at all. It'll only show some of the comments others will be hidden until you click on them, making the screen jump around the screen as gp said.

old.reddit.com alleviates this but not for much longer I'm sure.

Then the lovely firefox will periodically decide not to allow 'trusted site exceptions' disallowing you from visiting old.reddit.com. All in all I find it's too much work most of the time.

I don't see it. For example I just loaded one of the top posts now ( https://imgur.com/a/qTUuPOq ), and I can scroll through the whole thread, without any click.

I agree, hence why I live on https://i.reddit.com on mobile. It lacks some of the features of the new UI, but I don't use those anyhow since I just lurk/read.

I also find the new UI to be awful on desktop. Just disastrously slow. I hardly use Reddit anymore part of it the community and me just having different priorities but the other part is this new Mobile first mentality. I’ll use old.Reddit.com until they finally kill it.

The new version of reddit bogs down FF to where I have to restart if I want to keep scrolling. This is on a TR3960X with 64GB of memory. I haven't checked the resource manager when that happens but I probably should.

RedditIsFun is a fantastic app with a great dual pane mode. It almost feels like the desktop and having multiple tabs open.

I don't understand why they're doing this:

1. Why are they forcing me to use their app so much? it's just not practical: for example if I quit the app and come back it doesn't return me to the page I was looking at; worse it often doesn't display comments for me (infinite loading).

2. Why is the web redesign so bad? Who are they trying to cater for? There's just so much friction in reading comments from multiple posts now, when I click on a post to read the comments an then outside it scroll back up to the beginning. Why can't I read comments if I'm not signed in?

I prefer old reddit for the same reason as you, I like to read and comment. But I can tell you who they are catering to: People who scroll through subreddits scanning photos. If you go to meme focused subreddit, the new version is pretty good. If you go to a discussion focused subreddit, the old version is better.

Try https://www.reddit.com/r/Watches/ in an incognito window to see it in the new Reddit, then try it old reddit.

I fucking hate it. The redesign is actively harmful to the quality of subreddits. It makes the subscribers the ones who dictate the content, not the community members. The vast majority of subs don’t participate in any meaningful way, they just upvote the funny picture in their feed, haha, while the people who frequent the subreddit and dictated most of the content prior to the redesign are completely disenfrachised. I’ve seen a bunch of subreddits go down the shitter because low effort memes and blog posts-like pictures conquered the front page after the redesign.

I understand it in the sense that I can conceptualize it. I just have a hard time believing it is really best for business. They determine how much money they make per user and find that signed in users make more money. Signed in users on their mobile app (users inside of their walled garden) make the most money. If they lose a couple users trying to convert everyone to using their mobile app, so be it.

Having an account and using their mobile app makes it easier to track you, easier to show you ads and likely worth more per advertisement.

> There's just so much friction in reading comments from multiple posts now, when I click on a post to read the comments an then outside it scroll back up to the beginning.

It's much more bearable if you always open posts in a new tab (I'm talking on desktop; on mobile use a third-party app). You can configure it in the feed settings. Then the view is very similar to old Reddit, and you keep the posts list unchanged.

Metrics: It is easy for them to keep track of metrics, including the following:

* did someone pause on a post, mark it * time on page, * whatever other crazy metric you can show to advertisers * in-line advertisements

Also, the walled garden makes it so you get the endorphin hit of clicking the button and it can algorithmically entice you back with notifications and other engagements.

They are catering to children, literally. I've been using the site for a few years and have noticed more often than not when a set of comments seems especially naive its because I've been talking to teenager.

I can't tell you the number of times I thought I was having a meaningful conversation only to find out, after asking, that the user was a kid.

it's fair to say that if you thought that you were having a meaningful conversation, that indeed it was a meaningful conversation regardless of their age

Same for me, and for people using mobile, not for me. Screen to small, and I will not get into spywhere on smart phones.

So, if I cannot get to old.reddit, I stop going there, very simple.

I am glad hackernews/ycombinator still has what I consider the best WEB/Comment setup I have ever seen.

Old reddit is still superior to hacker news. It was the perfect forum. Now it's a social media laced whale driven place filled with a single viewpoint. To the point that negative comments don't even show up anymore.

https://i.reddit.com has been around for a very long time and hasn't changed at all. It can't play video but you can browse threads and it's lightning fast. Especially without thumbnails.

This is my goto. It's just so much faster!

As someone who spends too much time on reddit, I do hope they do that soon, so that the UX disaster of the new interface discourages me from spending more than 2 minutes per day there..

If you have to force your users into a new UI, it's a shit UI

I have started using old interface since yesterday because the new interface is extremely slow on Desktop. I just don’t understand how showing bunch of images can be this slow.

I keep hoping some of the cool communities would be willing to move to ActivityPub based aggregators.

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