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Comment by chmod775 | Hacker News Reader

The new reddit is an embarrassment.

Old reddit load time: ~0.5 seconds / ~1-2mb transferred

New reddit load time: ~15 seconds / ~14mb transferred

After those 15 seconds new reddit threw a popup in my way, asking me about my interests. Once I dismiss it I'm in some weird information-scarce hellscape where I need to scroll to even get past the first submission.

It's inexcusably bad. It's throw it out the window and try again bad.

Any somewhat experienced developer would be embarrassed if that was their weekend project. Reddit had how many people work on that for how long?

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Talented frontend engineers have for many years given Reddit information on how to address this; Paul Irish did one in 2015[0] and they are still suffering from problems he outlined.

I could do one for them to keep it current, but I could also just pipe it to /dev/null for how much action I expect to come from it.

What's fairly horrifying are the mobile call to actions trumpeting "this page loads faster in the app." Cool: so you agree this is slow.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20150705021035/https://github.co...

> "this page loads faster in the app."

And then a link to "Open in App" which just sends you to the App Store and not the actual content, in the app, which I've already got installed.

Ironically, frontend engineers are exactly why we ended up with this problem in the first place. The rewrite of the frontend wasn't about engagement or dark patterns (those could have been implemented just fine with the old UI), it's that they had a significant dev team (& managers, UI/product designers, etc) and needed them to do something, so a rewrite was kicked off, and now it's too late to turn back while saving face.

They would've ended up in a better position had they just given these people one year of PTO instead of having them "fix" things that aren't broken just to keep them busy.

I think there's a reason you NEVER see people on HackerNews admitting to working at Reddit.

It’s much worse than the infamous Digg redesign that drove many people to Reddit, but I guess things have changed in ten years, and anyway most users these days consume Reddit via the app.

> much worse than the infamous Digg redesign

Having used reddit on & off since ~2008, it's amusing to see them make virtually the same mistakes as Digg. I'm surprised that there hasn't been a similar exodus.

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