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Comment by system2 | Hacker News Reader

The day they turn off old.reddit.com reddit is dead to me. I've been on reddit 10 years and it was hard to understand why they chose this new disastrous design.

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What is it with modern UI and the tendency to be slow, to have a ridiculous amount of whitespace, and to have a copious number of round button-icons that are not intuitive? It's fucking insulting.

Several years ago, I went to a tech roundtable hosted by a well-known company, and this topic came up.

Half the devs in the discussion sincerely didn't believe the new sluggish UI trend found on various social media and news sites was slow at all, because their metrics (presumably which measure some sort of server compute time) said they were not slower. It's some sort of religious fervor.

"Who are you going to believe? Me(trics) or your own lying eyes!?"

It seems that, at least in reddit's case, the issue is preloading a lot of stuff that on the old website wasn't preloaded. Like videos.

Ben Awad[0] made a quick technical comparison between the two websites and this was his conclusion.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jkSiIBDDZ8

That's also what makes it pretty much unusable when you are on a slow mobile connection

It's that companies let the designers design without any constraint on usability.

Typically these designers are just fashionistas following the trendy crowd.

It is slow because very few people can write effective and fast React code. And then they use WebGL to do fancy overlay animations

That's their objective, to get rid of users who they can't monetize. Including veteran users with ad blockers who refuse to use the new site or any of its features.

It's not just the design, it's the fact that it's buggy and frequently unresponsive. If it was well done I might be able to forgive them, but my phone tells me I have messages I can't see on the desktop even after I refresh the page.

It’s more buggy, less responsive, has less features and consumes more resources. Literally its only pro is that it looks pretty.

It looks "pretty" in the crappy modern way though where there's loads of whitespace and everything is hidden in a menu or tab somewhere.

Give me "ugly" plain-ish text that is information dense.

The post-view in compact mode is actually denser than before (thought it has some ugly spacing issues at the top). It’s amazing. Sadly, there seems to be no compact mode for comments, so those look horrible.

And well, considering how slow it is to use, I wouldn’t even use new Reddit then. New Reddit is really only for people who have a high tolerance to slow sites.

> Literally its only pro is that it looks pretty.

Which is very subjective.

New reddit is certainly more modern than old reddit, but I find it kinda ugly.

fewer features

I thought it is one of these “don’t end sentences with prepositions” weird rules no one really follows.

The prepositions one was invented after the fact, it has never been a real grammatical rule.

“Fewer” versus “less” for countable things is more of an actual rule (but of course that doesn’t mean you’re obliged to follow it).

Reddit has had 5 second page loads for over a decade. Extremely embarrassing of them to be honest. I can understand them not fixing their search because that increases engagement, but you always want your site to be fast. I guess they don't because they know they have no competitors.

>I guess they don't because they know they have no competitors

There are lots of clones, but they typically become havens for the ones who get the boot from reddit (remember the chimpire?), who proceed to drive away the users who don't agree, or they are either trying to lure reddit's current demographic (i.e. not very technical) or are super niche and could easily be served by a traditional forum.

The worst part of reddit killing so many forums is that there used to be plenty of places to go to discuss fairly niche interests. Now that they're gone, many communities have no fallback if their userbase is mostly old reddit users aside from trying to migrate, and that will inevitably result in many just leaving the community entirely.

> "I can understand them not fixing their search because that increases engagement..."

Do you have any citations for this?

I may be alone, but I prefer the new design. On the old reddit I didn't like how I had to click into a post to view its contents. On the new design most of the post contents are right there on the list page.

You use RES for that. It shows everything and plays every video.

Get RES

It isn't hard for me to understand their reasoning at all;

1. Appeals more to the mainstream, and to new users who are used to Facebook-style feeds. 2. Easier for them to disguise ads in user's feeds.

I think Reddit knows it too, that's why old is still around. The Digg fiasco was a long time ago but must be still in their corporate subconscious.

They wanted to give Digg some company.

Same.

old.reddit.com + RES is still the best Reddit.

RES is godsent.

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