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Comment by ghostpepper | Hacker News Reader

The one that really baffles me is:

1) Navigate to a subreddit of interest 2) Start a search 3) The default behaviour is to search the entire site, not that subreddit

There's a checkbox there to 'search only this subreddit' which is disabled by default.

I am now wondering if there is some userscript I can inject to change the state of that checkbox by default. The fact that such lengths are even considered by your users should be a massive red flag.

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They are either lacking product management or squeezed the re-design into a period where not all the work could be reasonably be completed, yet that didn't stop them from trying. One other common broken flow is refreshing the webpage. Sometimes, you'll be presented with a logged-out experience (despite having proper cookies; a few more refreshes and I appear logged back in).

It's some sort of organizational failure.

The redesign is 3 years old at this point, so I don't think you can blame it on time pressure.

I presumed it was because pushing people back to Reddit-wide serps led to some conversion goal.

How else could something so stunningly opposite user intent persist this long?

It is customer-hostile but something to get away with.

They never fixed the bugs; they either didn't budget to do a post-beta bug bash or something's amiss with their quality leadership. No matter how you dice it, their engineering organization isn't in a healthy state. If it's not time, it's a lack of resourcing.

There isn't even a checkbox on the new reddit UI as far as I can find; you have to do the search, then tell it you only want results from that subreddit.

> There's a checkbox there to 'search only this subreddit' which is disabled by default.

I've always wondered why that checkbox is even there. Why are they even the same search box to begin with? If I go to a particular YouTube channel, there is a global search box at the top and a channel-specific search box a under the channel banner. That's a much more intuitive layout IMO.

I always have the checkbox checked, but that could be the Reddit Enhancement Suite addon doing that for me

I'm not 100% certain because I'm not a mod, but I believe the subreddit owner controls that behavior.

I think that is set by mods. Some subreddits default to searching that subreddit.

Where is that set? I've been a mod on subreddits for a decade and I'm not aware of any such setting. I just checked 'subreddit settings' for one of my subreddits, and I see nothing about defaulting to subreddit-only search (which is a setting I'd definitely like to enable!).

If it is I couldn't find the setting for it (didn't look too long), but I did discover the site will remember (per subreddit) if you checked the box or not the last time you searched, so that's nice I guess.

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