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lrae

What's so much worse / "toxic" about the new user-interface compared to the default old. one?

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Literally everything. I've used it for a grand total of about 3 minutes but from what I remember:

* Defaults to some stupid instagram wall-like view where every link takes half the page

* The whole thing is now centered in a tiny slice of the screen

* Threads open in some weird modal mode where accidentally clicking outside of the content takes you to the previous page

* Opening a direct link on a phone loads like 5 comments, then it continues with endless irrelevant content

* You can't open random subreddits that have been set as NSFW on the phone because "This community is 18+, please open it in the app"

Every time I had the displeasure of interacting with the new design there was some upsetting regression compared to old Reddit.

> Defaults to some stupid instagram wall-like view where every link takes half the page

Which is changed with a single click in the top right of the feed and it never defaulted back for me. (At least not the last 2+ years.)

> The whole thing is now centered in a tiny slice of the screen

If you're talking about the feed, it's not. At least not in classic or compact mode. Besides that, depends on your screen / windows size of course.

> Threads open in some weird modal mode where accidentally clicking outside of the content takes you to the previous page

Guess that's a matter of taste? I like it, I know there are people who force similar behaviour on old with plugins, so... - The implementation is still wonky though and the overall still existing, at least at times, slowness of the redesign (/api) fucks with it.

Last two points are less of an UI more of an UX thing and Reddit pushing their app. Still sucks of course. For mobile I can only recommend using third party apps - better than the mobile view and the official app.

The amount of critical thinking has plummeted and the amount of kneejerk judgement has exploded across the site in the last 5 years. Reddit has become the kind of place it used to make fun of ten years ago. It is little better than Twitter at this point, although my engagement with Twitter is limited, as I have never had an account there.

That has less to do with the user interface though :) But in general, and for many subs, I agree.

It depends - the UI could act as a filter, just like it does on HN.

The new UI, by virtue of its very low information density and pushing or irrelevant crap definitely encourages quicker & shallower interactions.

It's interesting to read comments like this because this sentiment has literally always existed. When I used Reddit in 2014 people used to say the exact same thing, yet nothing ever changed from my perspective. It was always bad.

The fact that they have purposefully sabotaged the mobile web interface to block you from reading new comments to push you into installing their data slurping app is up there.

I mean, yes that's stupid, but also makes the site pretty much inaccessible in the first place and I wouldn't put that under an "user interface" complain. That's also not the redesign the op is talking about. (Unless he's using his mobile browser in desktop mode... then he afaik won't run into that restriction and it's a 100% better than the old. desktop version.)

If you see a link to a post using the default user-disrespecting site, you see the article text and maybe 2-3 “hot” comments, and then a bunch of stuff made to look like the same article but which are not. I literally cannot find how to get all of the comments for a particular topic in a threaded view while not logged in on a phone or iPad browser. The “old” site meanwhile presents exactly that.

Infinite scroll is one of the most obvious. Infinite scroll promotes content consumption and not creation and is one of the most addictive patterns in web and app design. It's also less dense and totally irrelevant to what made reddit great, which was niche discussions and not image macros or whatever.

Compact and Classic mode aren't less dense - you can switch to those in the top right of the feed.

But I do agree with the infinite scroll point, or at least the way they implemented it.

Information density is worse and the design is too heavy/bubbly.

Some what true for comments - that is if you always just go with reddit's old theme and not custom sub ones. But also way nicer to read, that might of course be personal choice.

Not true for the feed though. If you switch to the compact feed on the redesign you'll even see more posts than you'd see on default old.

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