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Comment by sorenjan | Hacker News Reader

Reddit is searching for something, but I don't think they've introduced a single feature that makes it better since they added subreddits. They've added and removed community chat rooms [0], they still have some other kind of chat that I don't know if anyone uses, when I happen to visit new Reddit there's some kind of streaming broadcasts that I don't see anyone liking. And of course the redesign, but I suspect that their metrics show that a majority of users like it, so it's just old users like med that are put off by it. Recently they introduced Topics [1], but it's not supported by the API, so you need to use their apps.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/jwme40/deprecating...

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/kb99yk/introduci...

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I mean, a sizable enough number of us continue to use old.reddit.com that it seems like they realize they can't force us onto the new design and are relegated to maintaining the old one for essentially forever... which to me says something incredible about just how badly their design failed.

The redesign was a massive success. The goal was to turn reddit into a typical social media property, and it worked. Real conversation was pushed aside into niche subreddits, and was replaced by typical social media filler crap, like r/funny and pics and wholesomememes, etc. It was bad before, but I just feel like the redesign made it 100x worse. Try opening the reddit homepage, new design, no account, and tell me with a straight face that that is a place where serious, well-thought discussion happens. The content on the front page is exactly what I would expect to see on my Facebook timeline or on the Instagram explore page, which I see now was Reddit's goal from the start.

> Try opening the reddit homepage, new design, no account, and tell me with a straight face that that is a place where serious, well-thought discussion happens.

This has nothing to do with the new design. If Reddit was ever a place for “serious, well thought discussion”, it hasn’t been that way for the past 10 years.

Perhaps for you. I joined in 2013, and wouldn't know half of what I do if it weren't for conversations on r/webdev and r/web_design. Such topics would have been shut down on StackOverflow because it broke some cardinal rule that nobody except people that spend all day on SO would know about.

That's just for work related things. In terms of having conversations about relationships, or sports, or new phones and tablets, I wouldn't even think of having these anywhere but Reddit.

Granted, I don't spend time on r/pics, or r/teenagers or whatever is on the front page. But I don't click the "Trending" tab on Youtube either.

It really depends on the subreddits. The smaller and more engaged the community, the better the discussions. As subreddits scale in size, the discussions get proportionally worse.

I learned Swedish by browsing r/sweden for about two years

>tell me with a straight face that that is a place where serious, well-thought discussion happens.

I only recently started reading HN after many years on Reddit, and even though a portion of what gets posted here is too technical and techy for me, I truly appreciate the thoughtful nature of the comments. It's quite a relief just to communicate with people who seem basically sane, mature, and intelligent.

This has always been a thing; way before all of this, default subs had the same effect, to the point where subs that were getting big would actively jockey to not become default and get ruined by popularity.

It would be interesting to sort the highest rated comments and group them based on if they originated from old reddit or new.

I suspect all of the high quality content comes from old.reddit.com.

> forever

I suspect a Reddit PM is watching a usage of old.reddit.com metric and waiting for it to hit a certain threshold before canning it. Perhaps the migration has taken longer than they planned but I have no doubt in time old.reddit.com will be retired.

The day reddit drops old.reddit.com is the last day I ever visit. The redesign is that horrible for anything but mindless scrolling watching clip videos.

> The redesign is that horrible for anything but mindless scrolling watching clip videos.

That's not entirely true... the redesign has some moderation and content submission improvements. But, if you don't mod or submit content then you might not notice those improvements.

That said, like digg, the redesign is also missing a lot of features that old.reddit has. So, if they don't want to digg v4 themselves (which is what made Reddit popular to begin with) then they have to at least keep old.reddit around until there is feature parity.

They will definitely shed a lot of users when they drop old.reddit but anyone who uses particular subreddits for their hobbies and interests may bite the bullet and get used to the redesign if they like the community enough. Hopefully Reddit Enhancement Suite makes a lot of improvements when that happens because RES makes reddit so much better.

>That's not entirely true... the redesign has some moderation and content submission improvements. But, if you don't mod or submit content then you might not notice those improvements.

But the only reason that is true is because they consciously left those new features out of the old interface. The improvements for moderators could be added to the original layout just the same.

For actually using the site the old design is about 100x better in every way except for mindless scrolling.

> they consciously left those new features out of the old interface

Sure. But to be fair, that is true with most new versions of any software... the developers could always commit resources to adding the new features to the old version too, but they're trying to migrate users to the new version so they don't have to commit resources to two versions.

> That said, like digg, the redesign is also missing a lot of features that old.reddit has. So, if they don't want to digg v4 themselves (which is what made Reddit popular to begin with) then they have to at least keep old.reddit around until there is feature parity.

It was less the features or lack there-of that drove Digg users away with v4, and more the change in culture around news websites being "official" and auto-submitting their stories.

I guess it probably varies by user then. Some of the features I used everyday were gone so I finally decided to have a serious look at reddit. I had never taken it seriously before because it looked awful by comparison. But, once you got past the poor design aesthetic, it was a much better community. So, as much as I like old.reddit, I don't blame them for improving the design, it is a turnoff for anyone who is design savvy.

To be frank, everyone complains about the design of new Reddit, but my biggest problem is just how incredibly slow it is.

Plus, it feels like I get CDN inaccessible or server busy errors daily.

I just tried loading both websites in private windows on firefox and ublock origin:

old reddit loads in 1.75 seconds, 77 requests, and 10 things blocked by uOrigin, and I can see 8 pieces of news on the page which take most (75+%) of the visual real estate

new reddit loads in 4.75 seconds, 177 requests(!), 13 things blocked by uOrigin, and I can see one(!) actual item, which takes roughly 20% of the visual real estate

The new design also leads to one error in the console as my browser blocked a font ("downloadable font: rejected by sanitizer"). I can't imagine using their new design at all, and I'm not sure how they can justify the gap in these metrics for a company worth billions, unless a complete lack of useful information taking 3 times longer to load is what's trending.

edit: and it's not just me, pretty much any online tool I found gives similar outcomes.

https://www.dareboost.com/en/comparison?reportIds=a_25fd7b3a...

Reddit's video player more or less does not work

It makes me wonder what's going on at a technical level, that it's still broken after all this time. I would have figured that a dependable native video player is a solved problem.

Every now and then a play a video on Reddit to see if it works yet, and the answer is always no.

Sometimes the first second or two plays though.

It works, but the video restarts at least once, sometimes two or three times, before it finally plays correctly. Its very annoying

It works as a content rip-off machines, which is exactly what it was designed for...

but yeah in a vacuum it blows

I wonder if there's an opportunity here for someone to snag a domain such as oldreadit.com (it's available right now) and set up shop, ready to offer disgruntled old.reddit.com users a new home when it's inevitably turned down/broken further -- or earlier.

Perhaps use Lemmy, which is trying to evolve into a distributed (federated) architecture:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy

The gimmicky name would not be needed, of course, if somehow the old.reddit.com community could use some decision making tool to agree on which alternate reddit implementation/domain to settle upon. Is someone working on solving this coordination problem?

The absence of a reddit competitor on the open internet despite reddit's flaws suggests that the technically advanced users have already reassembled somewhere on an .onion domain. If the old.reddit.com users had the means to start something new, they would have done it a long time ago.

I very much doubt the conclusion that a lack of clearnet alternative means people have assembled on TOR. That's ludicrous honestly.

There have been a number of reddit alternatives over the years, typically the result of some act of over-moderation that drives angry people to alternatives. These always become cesspools of hate & racism because they advertise as 'free speech' alternatives (due to swinging too far in the opposite direction that drove people there in the first place).

I think most people who want to use the old interface are simply just using the old interface. Until they completely drop it I don't think that will change. Because anyone can start a reddit clone but it's useless until you can convince a mass amount of users to switch & stay there, which is extremely difficult.

Why not just use a 3rd party client?

If they’re going to deactivate old., I imagine they’ll kill the api too.

I expect features to just stop working on old.reddit as we get further away from the redesign, whether it be updates internally or full new features. This will continue until it gets unusable and then they'll kill it because 'nobody uses it!'

With the recent new features they have been adding, I would consider old.reddit not supporting them as a feature rather than a bug.

As others have said, none of the new features they have added have been desirable.

I noticed polls don't work on old reddit. Then don't even show in the feed. If you visit the poll directly it expands as some sort of embedded new reddit.

On mobile they already limit how many comments you can view and force you to sign in otherwise.

Signing in doesn’t remove the limit. They want you to download their app.

They've already started taking small steps in this direction. For example, about a year and a half ago they added the option for subreddit moderators to "lock" an individual comment to prevent others from replying to it (previously it was only possible to lock entire threads). They deliberately avoided exposing this functionality through the old Reddit UI.

https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/brgr8i/moderators_...

I think you're right. Part of the clue is in the name 'old' which in the IT world is often associated with something you'd want to remove, tech debt, baggage, staleness. What they'll be looking for is the right messaging to force a migration to new.

In a similar vein, there is Adobe Lightroom Classic. There are still people who aren't giving in to Adobe's predatory subscription model, but at some point the "Classic" will be deprecated in favor of "Cloud"

Exactly, when the cost outweighs the revenue benefits for the deprecated solution it is easy to justify killing it.

Indeed, and at which point, I stop using reddit. Perhaps as a search extension (ie, "site:reddit.com topic") every so often.

I 100% understood that, which was in fact the background of my thesis: it looks like they are going to be forced ("relegated", even) to maintain old.reddit.com forever because, explicitly, so many people aren't upgrading and the new design isn't succeeding in motivating these people to upgrade (even years later!). I mean, someone else on this thread noted that the new design seems to only have twice as many page views as the new design?! LOL

They aren't forced to do anything, if a small enough minority of users goto old.reddit.com they will willingly deprecate it due to the cost reduction. Sometimes a small hit is beneficial even if it harms your customers because of the reduced operational cost. Simplifiers allow you to do a lot of things faster.

https://i.reddit.com still lives

Recently learned about Teddit.net on HN. That's now my go-to... Better than old.Reddit.com

However, teddit is limited to browsing. Can't reply / comment on it

> However, teddit is limited to browsing. Can't reply / comment on it

Maybe a feature, not a limitation.

It's definitely a limitation. I subscribe and participate in a number of smaller/niche/hobby related subreddits. Not being able to participate makes it completely useless for people like me.

There are great places and discussions on reddit once you filter out all the popular subs.

I agree. I visit Reddit and HN to engage with other people.

If I just wanted to read, I'd directly subscribe to a select set of blogs.

I think the redesign worked exactly as well as it was supposed to. Looking at this graph for a subreddit with approx. 4 million subscribers, the unique pageviews are quite high on the redesign. The official mobile app, however, blows them both out of the water.

https://i.imgur.com/o80v09J.png

Given how much they were pushing to convert everyone to the new design, and how undiscoverable the old design is to new users, I'm very surprised that the new design has only twice the unique pageviews of the old design.

Am I missing something here? old reddit on iphone is just unusable- need to pinch zoom for everything. I so much prefer the new one at least on mobile.

> I don't think they've introduced a single feature that makes it better since they added subreddits

I think they've added plenty.

* Text only posts.

* Polls.

* Being able save individual posts instead of just threads.

* Friends. I use it to follow a few people who make stuff outside of Reddit but post intermittently on their respective subreddits. I don't use it at all for following my actual friends.

* Various features that prevent one subreddit from raiding others. np links are one, but there are others.

* Subreddit CSS.

* Mods being able to hide scores and the downvote button on their subreddit. It's a shame this isn't something done at the API level, as it means apps just ignore it.

* Suggested comment sorting. Can mitigate the natural tendency for a group to become an echochamber.

* Some of the features of reddit Gold are pretty good but considering you have to pay for them, they ought to be.

* Buying rewards is probably the least bad monetization scheme they could have come up with.

* While their image and video hosting is kinda crappy, it is there and it seems like imgur had to get less aggressive about forcing you to get an account.

Multireddits is a good feature that has been introduced after subreddits, because there is a limit of how many different subreddits you get on your frontpage (wich goes up with gold IIRC).

On of the worst thing they did (excluding the new design obviously) was removing the upvote/downvote counter.

Fun fact, multireddits existed very early on after publicly created subreddit launched, they just didn't have a UI for a very long time. But you could always do multiple reddits with a + between them. That's how we constructed your front page on the backend, we just didn't expose the URL.

Oh yeah I forgot about that, it still works!

I think Reddit would be better if they removed the karma counters completely. They can still use votes as a signal for sorting, but having numbers attached to posts and comments seem to affect people's opinions on that content too much.

For sure. It's like going to interview someone with the previous interviewer telling you every has hated them so far.

Text only posts were launched after subreddits. That has lead to some of the best parts of reddit.

Eh, to be honest I don’t mind the broadcasting.

I’ve watched/listened to a few people for 10-20 minutes at a time. I know that’s not much in the grand scheme of things, but I’ve never been even the slightest bit interested in watching streams.

The live thread feature is alright.

The stickers you can give out is a cool monetization.

RPAN is pretty cool.

I've been a Reddit user for about a decade and I really love RPAN, the streaming broadcast you refer to. I often find really interesting music made by talented artists, and I appreciate that the performances are done in a kind of off-the-cuff, low-key way.

Yes, I have never been much into the whole streaming thing, but for some reason, for now at least, RPAN seems to be hitting just the right amateurish tone to keep me engaged.

Though I dread the day when the people who made the new front page UI turn their attention to RPAN...

Reddit is an example of a product I'd pay for less of. Give me basic functionality, simple UI, and no growth hacks. I'll give you an annual subscription.

As sad as this is, this seems to be true. I am thinking hard about what reddit has introduced. Cannot come up with anything.

I do like their mobile app though

Don't forget very awkward video clip hosting.

I don’t think Reddit needs any major feature other than search. When I search google, I basically append ‘Reddit’ to my query. It’s where all the real answers are, there are no more websites (who would have thought, the real rival to google is Reddit).

I don't either, but that's not how VC backed companies work. It's not good enough to stay usable for the current users, you need growth, and preferably as much as possible. I don't know what kind of service they're aiming for, but it's basically a meme feed now, with some political echo chambers thrown in.

I’ll address your last point. I think when you talk about scale, the fact will arise that a lot of the internet are just kids. Take a look at TikTok, at scale, you’re just going to get a lot of more kids using the thing. It’s probably one of the reasons we all gravitate to HN, because for better or worse, people here are working adults or on the cusp of it (college). I really cannot deal with a bunch of k-12/college kids discussing something. I have no clue how Reddit can solve this as they want growth (you need the kids).

On the opposite side of that, why should Reddit make their search better if everyone already knows not to use it?

Google works just fine.

Spending the money to improve and code a new search function doesn’t gain them anything. They’d just lose money on the implementation.

> Google works just fine.

How do you search by most recent on Google? What does that even mean in the context of searching for web-page content?

Google's search is severely lacking because it's targeting a platform that has no uniform index. This is part of what keeps the public misinformed.

I fairly regularly use the “search tools” option in google to filter results to within the past day, or month, or whatever.

Thats not the same as ordering by content posting/creation. Thats by indexing pass.

I’d disagree. I get my best answers with a ‘Reddit’ tacked on to Google, or searching YouTube for an answers video.

Their presentation would have to model the behavior in a way that feels fresh, but the raw value of their content is already validated. The situation right now is that people’s muscle memory is tied to the verb ‘googling’.

Pushing ‘search.reddit.com’ will not appear different enough to people. They’d have to brand and present it uniquely. It’s a lot more ambitious than pushing their mobile Reddit app, so it’ll never happen.

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