Normally I don’t express such strong sentiment on HN but I’ve been a Reddit user for 10 years and I genuinely like the communities, but not enough to suffer through the new website.
And FWIW I agree with you. I've been a 15 year reddit user (and employee!) but if old.reddit goes away, I suspect my usage will go way down. The good news is that the current execs know this, because I have told them.
But at the end of the day they have to do what's best for the business, and I'm afraid those of us who like the old interface aren't large in number.
Edit to add: I don't think they'll kill off the old.reddit interface. I think they'll just stop updating and more and more things won't work there, like i.reddit.com.
Do people actually prefer the new interface [on its merits], or do they just use it because it's the default?
Old reddit is more like BBS or old school message boards. People who grew up on this are a dying breed... probably also worth less to advertisers as we use adblock.
What reddit should have done is to ship the RES UI with the old reddit interface.
The things which drive me nuts about the redesign are mostly things that drive me nuts because I comment far more than I post, and participate in a lot of discussion-heavy subs. Navigating comment trees is more difficult, lots more is hidden by default. Far fewer topics fit on a screen with the card-style layout that has huge previews. The old layout is information-dense, readable with minimal clicking to expand things, and fast.
But those are exactly the kind of changes that someone just browsing would be indifferent to, or even appreciate. The images/videos they're scrolling through are now big, front, and center. Many probably don't ever venture into the comments to begin with, of if they do, they're just seeing if the top comment is a good joke or not.
Wildly different use cases.
It really depends on the type of consumer. I don't post to reddit anymore, but I'm not looking to consume memes and videos. When I go there I'm almost always looking to consume a comment thread about something (say some weird feature of some motherboard), and the new UI is atrocious for that. I either switch to old or I don't bother with it.
I definitely don’t think people preferring this layout are a dying breed, but I do agree that it’s easier for them to monetize the new layout.
Yes. My wife started browsing reddit only after the redesign. She had no interest the in the old interface. The new design really has a familiar look/feel for new users accustom to most common mainstream social media designs.
Facebook, for instance, has some similar design patterns, but generally the interface seems really well built. New reddit just breaks in all kinds of odd ways which kills the UX.
New UI sucks. Forgets settings, frequent load errors (which blank out an already loaded content) and hit-boxes for clickable items are small/overlap which increases page hits (cause you nav to the wrong page). It smacks of a hasty rewrite in $HOTFRAMEWORK.
I use reddit less because of it. And a result of that is I've also reduced spending to reddit.
Edit: reduced advertising spend, not award spend (which was already zero)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...
There's also "Use new Reddit as my default experience" if your looking at the setting in old reddit, and you want to turn that off.
Reddit user for 10+ years here, coder and designer for 20+. I know the site pretty well. If I can't figure it out, it's pretty fucked.
And if you're not, greasemonkey scripts that do that aren't hard to write. If you know how to code in any language and have a little knowledge of HTML, you can probably bash one together in an hour, even if you don't know Javascript.
>Reddit Inc. said it averaged 52 million daily active users in October, up 44% from the same month a year earlier
The redesign launched in 2018, so I'd say yes, the general public greatly prefers the redesign if they had almost 50% growth last year. Could there be other factors? Sure. But Occam's razor is a solid argument in this context imo.
Doing nothing may be for the reason that they prefer the redesign, but also numerous other reasons apply (including that they don't dislike it enough, or some key new feature, etc).
The main drawback is that it's really too heavy for what it does.
I don't understand the complains about the new design being image-heavy, or in general so much different from the old one. Once you set it (once) in "classic view", it's basically the same.
If I load an old/new reddit tab and go to 'about:performance', here's the comparison:
Old - Low impact - 22 MB memory usage - 4s to fully load on gigabit
New - Med impact - 70 MB memory usage - 10s to fully load on gigabit
But a lot of other critics feel like the person haven't tried setting the view to "classic" or "compact".
There is an add-on called "Reddit comment collapser" [0] that adds this to old reddit.
[0]: https://github.com/tom-james-watson/reddit-comment-collapser
The old interface is a lot better for discussion.
Unfortunately, any subreddit that does not ban memes/low-effort media gets flooded in memes/low-effort media, so scrolling through images is how most people use reddit.
Here's the archived repository: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit
Why is an inferior UI good for any business? Unless it's about some dark patterns?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidentia...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia...
When they first launched the new interface some new users got the new one and some new users got the old one. The bounce rate for the new one was lower and the signup rate was higher.
You are not normal. Even the fact that you are likely consuming this website on a computer with its own keyboard, is not as common as it might seem if you surround yourself with other software developers. What you want, and what the majority wants are not the same thing.
As it happens I am an old.reddit.com dinosaur that finds your argument plausible, but I'm interested to see the data as well.
If you want to be guilty of something, I'd say it was approaching the conversation adversarially rather than charitably. "You were asked for a source" treats the other commenter as an inattentive schoolboy, and coming from a place of curiosity with a question like "But how do you know that's actually what happens?" might have done the job just as well.
I wouldn’t be surprised if me reading a thread with all its 200 comments on the old version and then leaving the site is considered bouncing, whereas me reading a thread (or rather the 20 comments on the thread you make available) and then accidentally closing the thread to return to the subreddit on the new version is considered successful retention.
Count me among them! I do not like the new redesign at all.
https://github.com/michael-lazar/rtv/issues/696
The forks from it however keep it living for now.
Im waiting for the day when Reddit kills the version 1 API.
But there are a lot of users who don't care. And maintaining two interfaces is double the work of maintaining one, because you have test everything twice. And it's actually geometric, not double, because you have to test every new option combination in both interfaces.
- Height of post list with 8 posts, redesign: 855 px
- Height of post list with 8 posts, old: 691 px
- Height of thread with 7.5 comments, redesign: 1008 px
- Height of thread with 11 posts, old: 1054 px
That's ~24% more space taken in the post list, and 40% (!) more space taken for the comment thread.
I've noticed this drift is already happening. It's like there are two reddits. It can be really confusing as a moderator when you are looking at a different website from your users. Eg new sidebar and the old sidebar.
there are DOZENS of us
I've even tried malort. He won't listen.
Why? Why is this accepted in our society? Why do we have to overdo everything we do? To keep expanding in every way until we're met with opposition (of whatever form)? It is our nature as a dynamical system I guess. But why can't we just relax and chill for a change? Why do we work our lives away for things that do not matter?
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/8rq08y/i_wont_...
Yes, I (very occasionally) post. But it's absolutely in the spirit of "this is a horrible experience and I would prefer any viable alternative". Other options, even if (or perhaps because they are) much smaller, are emerging and preferable.
People have ben telling them this for years. They know and do not give a shit or at the very least they are powerless to do anything. The redesign is so bad I'll stop using reddit completely if they ever kill the old domain. Its almost like they intentionally tried to make the least functional website possible.
It only shows about 2 comments by default, and it's difficult to see them all (and often impossible to see them all at once), because you've got to keep clicking at the end of threads to see more, with each click triggering a full page reload.
And recently you can't even do that without logging in - as soon as you hit "More replies" a login prompt appears.
The only explanation I can think of for this behavior is sheer incompetence.
Maybe I am using wrong app for that though. I am using Relay right now. And it doesn't allow me yo select comments properly coming from Google search. I think I tried Reddit's official app and it didn't work very well too + the context switch of going from chrome to an app.
But yeah I get that they do it intentionally...
Removing Old reddit might be the single biggest negative change that can occur to my daily internet life.
It really is unusually heavy; even for a "modern" web-page.
[edit] If I open reddit in incognito then I can see the redesign, otherwise I can't. Maybe I opted out of the redesign at some point? Can't see anything about it in settings though