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Comment by iblaine | Hacker News Reader

Reddit seems destined to follow in Digg's footsteps. The negative feedback on the reddit redesign and the reddit app has been building for years, and they continue to push it. The motivation is puzzling. Are executives knowingly pushing the need for advertising at the expense of users? Do Product managers have too much free time?

For anyone else annoying by the reddit redesign, you can use the Redirector chrome extension to fix it w/the following...

    redirect: https://www.reddit.com(.*)
    to: https://old.reddit.com$1

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Their new, but not really new anymore, redesign is so adversarial that the site is frustrating to use unless you use the old version or a different mobile app. Comments section cut off by a news feed, nested comments require loading a new page, but going back doesn't save your location because it was collapsed to show the news feed. The news feed preload lags way more. The new search basically has never worked.

It basically feels like you are constantly trying to fight the ui to show you what you want while trying to dodge the buffet of churned content they throw at you to try and keep you in the social media vortex. Like everything else that becomes mainstream popular, the demographic has shifted away from people who care about these things.

The content also feels to have shifted from a somewhat rational tone and caring comunity to a focus on much more violent and hateful content and an emphasis on people antisocial behaviour

Depends on the subreddit, though. There are still good, very specialised subreddits. But yeah, stay away from r/politics or so.

It is being weaponized.

The mobile design isn't puzzling at all. It's infuriating, but easy to see why they're doing it. They want to force everyone onto the app because it's easier for them to advertise on.

Also people are easier to track if they use the app.

And easier to monitor and track all aspects of a person privacy such as precise location, altitude, Wifi ID, device type and characteristics, screen size, and so on.

Not arguing with that, but why they still allow 3rd party clients then?

I don't see them closing down their public api. It's pretty hard to police such things when you have one.

To keep the power users happy, I guess!

If you're redirecting, might as well redirect to https://teddit.net/.

- Favors privacy by proxying everything - Works without javascript - No account, so no voting/commenting/posting but also no tracking

Teddit is to Reddit what Nitter is to Twitter or Invidious is to Youtube. There are even extensions taking care of redirecting those most common tracking websites

Wow, this is very refreshing, thanks!

Came here to post this. At this point I just redirect to teddit on my desktop. The only regret is that I can’t automatically reflect websites on ios safari, but it doesn’t take me long to manually tap the address bar and replace “reddit.com” with “teddit.net”, normally as soon as I try to view a nested comment and reddit asks me to sign in.

Active users have been exponentially climbing. The redesign is awful in comparison to what once was, but it's been incredibly successful as a vessel to make reddit into a Facebook replacement. Facebook users are a lot easier to profit off of than reddit users, and they're higher in volume.

> The negative feedback on the reddit redesign and the reddit app has been building for years, and they continue to push it. The motivation is puzzling.

The feedback is minimum, and the users who are complaining are not the users who make Reddit money. Like if you're not making them money they're not going to want to improve your experience. They're going to want to make it worse and push you into a better experience. Their motivation for this is clear, and I am confused as to why anyone would be puzzled why Reddit wants to control how people use their app, especially since if you use the app, you have to see ads and you are getting tracked. There are also notification possibilities to push more content to you. This all makes a lot of sense, and I am pretty sure revenue-wise, it's working.

People keep talking about Digg but Reddit has already had their Digg moments and are still standing and there are countless clones and countless apps that just mirror their content. Use them.

I prefer https://i.reddit.com

Yes! This is what I have been looking all along!

For reddit to follow Digg there has to be a viable alternative. People fed up with Digg could go to reddit. Where do people who are fed up with reddit go?

Check out this list of Reddit alternatives: https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/km9468/...

They want to increase engagement by forcing a newsfeed type experience, but I hate it.

what? don't need an extension it's simply a user preference to always use old.

Lots of people lurk without an account or go private for a bit. The web app is basically crippled in those cases.

Just type old.reddit.com

It gets tedious having to type it manually.

lolwut? just erase the 'https://www' and replace it with old.

just drag and over what you want to remove and add the '.old'

I also left reddit years ago but need it for certain things like builds for small/niche games or less popular programming/computer subs. The problem will be when they get rid of the '.old'.

I seriously think it will be soon, but then also wonder if it's possibly keeping so many old users at least visiting the platform they don't want to shoot themselves in the foot...but then I remember the redesign decision and all logic goes out the window.

Edit- after posting this I thought maybe this person was right, maybe they visit so many subs it does get tedious, so I apologize.

Then I thought, maybe a good solution would be some kind of browser add-on that could add '.old'.

Then I founds this [1] ,but as with all good addons now, it's for desktop only. Still, maybe it can help you!

Man firefox used to be the shit, now it's just shit ;(

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

If you're using Firefox on the desktop you can try out an extension that I wrote that allows you to change the version of reddit instead of changing the subdomain manually. I used it extensively on mobile but a couple of updates ago they only allow reviewed extensions to be installed.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/reddirect-new...

Reddit likes to throw traps to pull you out of the old design, even with their preference toggle.

"does a company need money?"

the answer is yes.

I have a slightly controversial rewording:

“Does a company need more money? No. Does a company want more money? Yes”

Doesn’t matter if they wouldn’t know what to do with the extra money, or if they were sustainable before, they’ll want more.

Companies exist to maximize profits. If the owners don't think that's being done management will be replaced. In that way I think t's fair to say companies need to make money.

The mobile amp.reddit.com link-throughs from google results are even more obnoxious than any other way of viewing a thread. You're linked into some kind of snippet of a thread with other unrelated threads glommed onto the page. Terrible. It feels like an outbrain-style visual assault. For extra fun, see what the mobile amp links look like with javascript disabled. It's a sight to behold.

It's the worst. It only shows a few comments so 99% of the time you would need to load the normal page anyway. It also messes with the way Google indexes the date of the page, so the date of the page according to Google is almost always wrong for old threads.

The same extension is available on Firefox... but when you use the "old" or "ns" sub-domain, there are some reddit features that don't work like surveys

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