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Comment by Sebguer | Hacker News Reader

This is a pretty weird assertion - Voat doesn't have to worry about literally any of the scale problems Reddit does.

Reddit has usability problems by design. Reddit want to make it as obnoxious as possible to use on a mobile phone, so that you’ll download their stupid app. They also push you to login to view more content, so they can track you.

Reddit is just a cesspool, and it’s by design. Absolutely nothing to do with scaling problems.

Ever since they’ve started nagging to get the app, nagging to log in, not letting me read more comments without logging in, I’ve stopped using Reddit. I came here instead. I opened Voat one time because I found some people in a ~6 year old FOSS Reddit thread who had used a script to replace all their comments essentially with ‘Screw Reddit, I’m going to Voat.’ That place is a _cesspool_.

Old.reddit.com still exists, and is a lot more usable.

Ed: to be clear, I use it logged in. I don't know how dark-patterny it is when logged out.

Old.reddit.com is not usable on mobile.

I use it on mobile. Still better than the new site. Chrome has bugs with the "text scaling" feature but if you turn it off then old.reddit.com works fine.

Like the sibling commenter, I use old.reddit.com on mobile - but the key being that I switch the browser into Desktop mode.

In posts with embedded pictures, I have to remove the "old." in the URL in order to be able to see the pictures, switching to desktop mode doesn't solve the problem.

i.reddit.com is a fairly fast mobile interface.

i.reddit.com works plenty fine.

The site that pushes you to the app is just for your average idiot to find. A lot of the garbage we find obnoxious is training wheels for those idiots, and they love apps for everything as well. The persistent app nag is a benefit for the target user.

I'll remind you that not everyone who is not very computer literate is not necessarily an idiot. Lots of them just have better (in their opinion) things to do with their time. My uncle who has 2 doctorates is quite intelligent wouldn't know the first thing about reddit and he's certainly no idiot.

It works fine via third party apps with direct API access, and Reddit Enhancement Suite on desktop. No ads, everything loads fast. My Reddit experience is basically unchanged from 2013.

The design of your website in Reddit's case has nothing to do with scale. Shitty UX will always be shitty UX no matter how many users are on your platform.

>The design of your website in Reddit's case has nothing to do with scale

Sure it does. Once you reach a large enough scale you kind of need to do stuff to attempt to not be losing money on the development & hardware costs of such a large platform.. so you end up changing, even if it's not 'for the best'.

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