Hacker News Reader

Comment by k__ | Hacker News Reader

I like, how the "improvements" for Reddit are negative, lol

The Reddit redesign is far and away the most sluggish, unresponsive major site I've ever used. It brings my fancy $3,000 laptop to its knees.

The sad thing is, the front end stack they use (React/Redux) is great. But it's an abysmal example of the tech. I turned on re-renders in the React devtools, and this is what it looks like: https://i.imgur.com/Sm1U24M.gifv

Makes me sad.

Oh no that is bad.

I'm usually very pro-SPA, but Reddit messed up theirs so bad, it's plain unusable.

Most interactions using a 2018 iPad Pro w/ Safari take seconds to execute. This device can handle anything I throw at it except reddit.com.

The new web app is a plain regression.

I feel like they're pretty strongly incentivised to not improve it. They want to push people to the app, and they have enough traction and community lock-in that they're not really worried about losing traffic

This is indeed the correct reason. The app is much more usable.

That’s why I switched to teddit.net. It’s much faster, resembles the old Reddit layout and supports dark mode.

TBF the entire concept of an SPA for Reddit is insane to begin with. There are no complex split-second interactions or anything. It’s a case study in what does not benefit in any way from spas.

I have pretty much the same thoughts about discourse, which I loathe.

I imagine the ads benefit from it.

Author here: ah well, you win some, you lose some. This is just v1 that's shipping with M91, we've already made improvements since then and there's plenty more low hanging fruit to pick, heuristics to tweak, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com