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Comment by _nickwhite | Hacker News Reader

Trying to use Reddit without the app is maddening. I am aware of old.reddit.com- but it is so annoying to have to change 'www' to 'old' every time I want to read something. On IOS/Safari, visiting any Reddit page results in a full page prompt to use the stupid app. No, I don't want to use the app right now, which is why I'm using Safari! If reddit wants to do anything for their future, they should address these basic usability issues.

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Those usability issues are intentional dark patterns. The web site is supposed to suck to drive app usage where they can mine more detailed user data.

> annoying to have to change 'www' to 'old' every time

You can stop that from being necessary:

(1) Go to https://new.reddit.com/settings .

(2) Enable "Opt out of the redesign" ("Revert back to old Reddit for the time being").

(3) Visit https://reddit.com/ and you should then have the same experience there as when explicitly visiting https://old.reddit.com/ .

That requires having an account and logging in, neither of which I particularly wish to do

I might be remembering wrong, but you forgot a step. You need to change/delete the referer header. When Reddit detects that you came from Google, for example, it will not render all of the comments and instead try to do a similar rendering of suggested other posts.

Of course, this is not something you can turn off in your preferences. You need to use a browser plug-in to do this.

Anecdotally I don't have any such browser extension and it doesn't show me the "partial rendering with suggested posts" view when I'm opted out of the new reddit.

> but it is so annoying to have to change 'www' to 'old' every time I want to read something

There's an add-on to fix that! So whenever you click a reddit link you are automatically redirected to old.reddit.com.

I use the Firefox one, it works great:

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

https://github.com/tom-james-watson/old-reddit-redirect

Apparently there is also a chrome extension but I haven't tried it so user beware:

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

There's also a general purpose regex based redirector if there are other sites you'd like to redirect:

https://github.com/einaregilsson/Redirector

I use this addon, it's great:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/privacy-redir...

Supports:

Twitter → Nitter

YouTube → Invidious

Instagram → Bibliogram

Google Maps → OpenStreetMap

Reddit → Libreddit

Google → e.g. DuckDuckGo

> If reddit wants to do anything for their future, they should address these basic usability issues.

They did: they decided they are their future.

They've straight up started banning certain subreddits from the mobile website, forcing you to download the app. As I write this, I just noticed it was an A/B test and I'm able to go on the subreddit in question again ... Argh!

If not for Apollo (third party Reddit app for iOS), I'd have dropped Reddit long ago. Every change the company makes only serves to worsen the service.

> Trying to use Reddit without the app is maddening. I am aware of old.reddit.com- but it is so annoying to have to change 'www' to 'old' every time I want to read something. On IOS/Safari, visiting any Reddit page results in a full page prompt to use the stupid app. No, I don't want to use the app right now, which is why I'm using Safari! If reddit wants to do anything for their future, they should address these basic usability issues.

You could write a userscript to automatically change all intra-reddit links to old.reddit.com, and redirect you to old.reddit.com if you land there from somewhere else.

I had done something similar long ago when I actually used reddit.

I’m right there with you, but it can’t be “usability” oversight, can it? It’s so bad.

I have to assume it’s a very deliberate effort based on some business metric that the risk of losing people from the site is less than the profit gained from people on the app.

Which would be fine if the app wasn’t garbage. Constant bugs with data loading and swipes, and no way to disable all the “suggested” bs (I get why you can’t disable promoted items, but the rest should be removable).

And of course the new site is so modern it takes 10 times as long to render 10 times less content. Truly an example of progress.

If you’re ok with an app that’s not Reddit (so no ads), try Apollo.

Plus Google amp pages for another pointless unnecessary click.

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