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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

At the risk of sounding like the "they changed it so it sucks" crowd, the changes Reddit keeps making to try and push monetization are slowly pushing me away from the site by robbing it of its simplicity. Contrary to others I was actually OK with the redesign at first, but now the forced chat, the opt-out animations/autoplay and the increasing slowness of the site are driving me mad.

If it weren't for Apollo on iOS I would have considered quitting Reddit.

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The mobile site is essentially unusable now. Anything NSFW? gotta have the app. Video? Gotta have the app. Want to view comments more than 3 levels deep? Gonna need the app for that.

I like Sync, but I preferred just loading up reddit.com. This has reduced my usage a reasonable amount.

At least we can use old.reddit.com, although I'm not sure how long that'll last.

That's totally unusable on a small screen though.

i.reddit.com used to work but it's mostly gone now too.

How is it mostly gone? It looks like its working when I try it. The only thing that doesn't seem to work are videos hosted on reddit (v.redd.it)

Disagree. I only use old on mobile and vastly prefer the information density.

I'm perfectly happy to zoom in. ZUI beats low density mobile design by a mile.

teddit.net is slightly better

This might sound like a troll, but what’s wrong with using the app? Do you not use any apps?

The real question is: what was wrong with the website in the first place?

I don’t use social media apps if I can avoid it. You don’t really know what information is being collected about you. Even the website collects an obscene amount of information. Combined with the fact that Reddit is full of incendiary content, it’s better to avoid being fingerprinted.

The reason they broke the website to push the app is to get more user data to sell to advertisers and to make ad blockers harder to use.

What data? Now that people can block the advertising tokens on mobile as of the recent android and iOS releases I’m not sure what the difference is browsing on web vs the app?

Advertising identifiers are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to data collection. Disabling them (which you could already do in Settings) would barely make a difference.

Must be news to Facebook who is running a campaign against apple for disabling them!

Facebook knows that only tech savvy users know how to dig into opt-out settings like that. When Apple makes it an opt-in, it has a huge opportunity to reduce Facebook revenue since it requires extra effort from every user to enable.

Not OP, but...why should I need an app to browse a website?

Pretty outside the scope of this discussion. There are lots of reasons apps exist, Reddit is no different than Facebook, Twitter, any social media app. Heck, Instagram and Tiktok barely even have websites.

> gotta have the app.

> Gotta have the app.

> Gonna need the app for that.

This is why I changed my Reddit avatar to the Digg logo.

All the while at reddit hq: "See! The numbers don't lie, people like using the avatars."

I'll be gone from Reddit completely the day they turn off old.reddit.com, which surely must be fast approaching.

Meanwhile, limited to subreddits of only a few K users still captures something of that original feel, but smart conversation has long since moved elsewhere.

This reminds me of the Facebook situation: https://jakeseliger.com/2018/11/14/is-there-an-actual-facebo...: lots of complaints on places like HN, but I'd bet they're carefully running a/b tests and watching user growth.

> watching user growth

Metrics can be misleading - I don't doubt they're seeing short term user growth or increased engagement (which is all the employees really care about, as their compensation is tied to hitting those "OKRs"). But wouldn't this just end up eventually going back to normal (as the users adjust) or even worse, push users even closer to the breaking point past which they'll leave the product completely?

Reddit is better and better as a source of obscure information (like a more complete and less restricted Stack Overflow), but the only way to use it effectively is by external search.

Reddit is worse and worse as a community or a place to find things organically, for all the reasons everyone lists, and I, too, find myself going there less and less, when it used to be a default destination for idle moments.

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