Reddit Enhancement Suite is now in maintenance mode | Hacker News Reader

Reddit Enhancement Suite is now in maintenance mode

old.reddit.com

Once Steve Huffman told me at a conference that the developer who developed Reddit Enchantment Suite(RES) worked at Reddit upon asking him why reddit user interface was so terrible when there were already things like RES to take inspiration from.

According to him the employees at reddit were not allowed to use RES so that they could strive to make reddit better rather than making Reddit with RES better.

We never saw reddit get better in terms of UI, it only got worse with new reddit UI they came up with. They might as well let their people use RES since improving the user experience was clearly not their priority.

> improving the user experience was clearly not their priority

Basically. Reddit's updates are meant to drive ad engagement. The redesign makes it harder to browse without identifying yourself (requiring an account to see comments, making your online status visible by default). Pushing people to their app just means they can have unblockable ads and better analytics.

Clearly it's working, as 70-something percent of their traffic comes from apps now, and their advertising revenue has become significant enough to start talking about going public.

This is of course a cycle we've seen repeatedly with internet communities -- indie > popular > fully monetized.

While the comments in some of the larger subreddits can be less than engaging, I think there's still a lot of value to be found in many of the more niche communities that are well moderated.

New reddit ('the redesign') is a disaster, and old.reddit.com + RES is what makes the site usable. It's going to be a tremendous loss if (when) they are no longer available.

lemmy.ml (no affiliation) looks interesting and it's one possibility for where to go next, but there is currently very little activity there for some of my interests.

I’ve never seen anyone talk about liking the New Reddit, but surely the team must have statistics or data to show it increases engagement and ultimately ad clicks.

I want to say the real loss will be when Reddit removes their API and kills off 3rd party apps, but then again look at how successful Twitter is without 3rd party apps.

I like the new reddit design. More whitespace, cleaner, and opening threads just opens them on top of the list of threads. But I also only have very performant machines with tons of memory and snappy processors on a fast internet connection. So I might be singing a different tune if that were not the case.

> More whitespace, cleaner

Yeah, only whitespace and only a minor of content sandwiched between the said white space. Even just two a bit longer than Reddit likes comments would be hidden at "click here". Maybe that would work on the mobile, but on mobile they nag for the app anyway and not on mobile I have a FullHD monitor which they treat as a iPhone 4 or somewhat similar.

/rant

I don't think they promote 'old' - presumably the userbase is stagnant/slowly declining; whereas users of 'new' will always be growing, because they don't know old exists

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