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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure how many of the current admins read HN. I just know some of us old guys hang around here.

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.

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> 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.

Do people actually prefer the new interface [on its merits], or do they just use it because it's the default?

The is a big generation of lots of pictures = good. I am sure it is better to those users. Think pinterest uses and Etsy shoppers.

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.

I mean, you can just install RES...

What reddit should have done is to ship the RES UI with the old reddit interface.

With any online community the group who consumes is far larger than the group who contributes, and I suspect with Reddit the people who are looking for community (especially those participating in mostly text-based subs) are few and far between compared to the huge number of users who browse big subs / the front page casually for memes, entertainment news, and cat pics.

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.

> 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.

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.

old.reddit.com still have image thumbnails, and next to each thread you have an expand button allowing you to easily see the image in same size as the new reddit layout without leaving the page.

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.

Depends what you use reddit for. If you are just looking at news links then the thumbnails work best. On my ipad I only use reddit for searching for reference images/art so the big pictures work best for me.

>or do they just use it because it's the default?

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.

Zoomers find it relatable since it’s another facebook/instagram/twitter feed.

Downed but it’s true. Much easier to see the same recycled memes in a row if it’s optimized for scrolling through images over discussion

I hate the new UI but I have to use it daily to get the WYSIWYG interface. Otherwise I have to convert my google doc to markdown before pasting it in. But I only use it for posting and then go back to 'old'. Most of my browsing happens from Apollo (iOS indie dev reddit client). That said I'd put effort into writing my own google->markdown->reddit-poster-script in a heartbeat if it meant killing off "new" and going back to "old".

The "reddit enhancement suite" add-on gives you a WYSIWYG editing UI on the old site.

How much of this do you think is due to the redesign itself versus bad FE engineering decisions? Redesign aside, I find the new reddit often really broken from a FE architecture POV.

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.

The new interface is good for the pornography subreddits.

And that's really all that's going on at Reddit these days; let's be honest. It's a thin veneer over the world's largest porn portal.

I have a strong feeling that at some point Reddit is going to have internal struggles with this ala Tumblr. Their consistent amendments to what you can or can post, as well as culture policing in various subreddits is bound to create additional controversies.

One has to actively try to use Old. So, usage is being reduced by attrition (but attributed to design success). So, apathy looks like successful KPIs.

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)

Thankfully there are some browser extensions to redirect automatically, provided you're comfortable using them:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...

If you have an account, you can just flip a switch in the settings that disables the new UI.

yeah except "just" doing this doesn't work always.

Exactly!

I just signed in, I'm in the new UI, there is nothing in my settings to turn it off.

In new reddit, there's an "Opt out of the redesign" option at the bottom of the "Account" section in new reddit. Turn that on.

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.

It's not there. Maybe that settings isn't on the Mobile UI (which goes back to my point about frustration and apathy being measured as "engagement")

I've set all of these, and none of them are sticky enough to work all the time.

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.

False: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16865105

No, its true. I'm talking about the setting for your account, not the cookie one.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25308836

Reddit Management Read This!! If one needs an extension you get around the way you annoy your userbase be prepared for the userbase to leave. You are actively pushing them away. Thanks for coming to my TED talk

neither of these work with my browsers.

> Thankfully there are some browser extensions to redirect automatically, provided you're comfortable using them:

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.

From the article:

>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.

The simplest argument is that the default is usually... defaulted to. And the default is the redesign -- you have to actively go out of your way to revert to the old design; so the simplest takeaway is that the general public greatly prefers doing nothing, than reverting the redesign.

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).

Is it? You've taken two facts (1. Interface redesign and 2. 50% growth last year) and assigned causation to the first. In my persepctive, reddit has been digging into the cultural psyche for a long time and has been growing steadily. The news uses it to replace local journalism now. Anecdotally, a lot of people I know are now talking about things they saw on reddit (I've been a user for ~10 years). I think the interface design is not relevant to growth. If anything, it probably decreases it, although I think the type of users they are attracting now don't care as much as people who post on HN do.

Did you know that tax revenue almost always increases after a tax cut? Did you also know that tax revenue almost always increases after a tax increase? Aren’t statistics cool?

October was also an election month, so I would assume that more people were checking in to read the screaming matches.

I think it looks better. Better fonts, better element spacing. It just does not perform very well and seems to have a lot of "state" issues or inconsistent design elements. Reading comments and browsing is slower than it used to be, but I prefer the new look to the old one.

Good UI, bad UX.

Yes, exactly!

The main feature that makes me use the new interface is the ability to collapse a thread from anywhere. It makes reading through comments much faster.

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.

The complaint isn't that it's image-heavy, but javascript-heavy.

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

Fully agreed, the performance is atrocious.

But a lot of other critics feel like the person haven't tried setting the view to "classic" or "compact".

> The main feature that makes me use the new interface is the ability to collapse a thread from anywhere. [...]

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 only thing the new interface is better for is for scrolling through image-heavy subreddits. It's a lot better for that use case.

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.

> 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.

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.

>I'm not sure how many of the current admins read HN

there are DOZENS of us

Go home, you're drunk(en)!

I've been telling him this for years.

I've even tried malort. He won't listen.

Even just the direction and focus revealed by Reddit's constant pressuring toward the new design and behaviour, along with the failure to address long-standing architectural flaws in the site which render it useless for substantive discussion drove me off years ago:

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.

old interface was just way more information dense. That's my main complaint with new UI. Even with "compact" mode on the new UI, it's not as dense as the old one.

I agree completely. We intentionally designed the old interface to be information dense. When we made it slightly less dense, there was such a strong pushback that we had to add an option to go back to the more dense mode.

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.

The difference in information density really isn't that large. Here's a comparison of the current top posts (and not even using the compact view): https://imgur.com/a/WsI3pBj

I disagree. At least, if I load www.reddit.com/r/programming and old.reddit.com/r/programming, it's immediately apparent that new UI is much less dense:

https://i.imgur.com/2NPpxyw

According to your screenshots:

- 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.

> But at the end of the day they have to do what's best for the business

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?

Because they are a for profit business. As opposed to HN, which has a much more user friendly interface because this is not a for profit site.

> But at the end of the day they have to do what's best for the business

Why is an inferior UI good for any business? Unless it's about some dark patterns?

To the majority of users it is a superior interface.

just like the majority of americans voted for trump

That is factually incorrect, as he had millions less than each of his opponents:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidentia...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia...

And because half of the population didn't vote.

I forgot the /s.

Source? If you made old.reddit.com the default layout, how many users do you think would go through the same trouble to use the new.reddit.com layout?

No they wouldn’t seek out the new interface. They just bounce.

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.

I think this thread should be an important lesson for HN devs:

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.

You were asked for a source though. You've just expanded on your point but without a source.

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.

jedberg is the former chief architect and operations manager of reddit, fyi.

I'm guilty of not clicking through to the profile page of everyone I reply to

I wouldn't say that, and my comment wasn't an accusation.

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.

How was this measured? Because with the new layout then it’s incredibly easy to accidentally exit a thread (without leaving the site) and you have various dark patterns to force users to sign-up. For instance, whenever I open a reddit link through from a google search then I’m unable to view all comments without signing up, and I accidentally close the thread all the time. I see the exact same thing happen when a twitch streamer I follow visit reddit at the start of every stream (despite visiting reddit every single day using the new layout then he keep accidentally closing threads and getting lost on the subreddit page).

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.

If old.reddit is killed off I might have to resort to browsing through the rtv terminal client.. though this likely would be deprecated as well

Considering the original developer walked away from it in June 2019, I can see it being an issue.

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.

> I'm afraid those of us who like the old interface aren't large in number.

Count me among them! I do not like the new redesign at all.

How/can we (the users who like old.) help?

Seriously... like, do they want to consider open up some of the support for that UI to external contributions?

It _was_ open source, though they stopped updating the open source version a few years ago.

Here's the archived repository: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit

Presumably the best thing you can do is use it, to boost the metrics, and click through more adverts you see. Make it valuable for them

As a devoted i.reddit.com user, it's by far my favorite way to enjoy the site, but it's getting harder to use every year as the main site adds more features and gates that don't work in the i. site. The most annoying part of the new site is the embedded video player and there's no way around it right now.

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