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Comment by notyourwork | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

Reddit's video player more or less does not work

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

but yeah in a vacuum it blows

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 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.

> 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 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.

>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.

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...

Why not just use a 3rd party client?

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

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.

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!'

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.

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_...

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.

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 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

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