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Comment by gt565k | Hacker News Reader

Reddit UI slowly converged to the digg UI that killed it.

I use old.reddit.com

The newer UI is just so much bloat.

Bring back IRC style UIs that are data rich and don’t have a million pixels of white padding cause some UX graduate thinks it looks cool.

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That’s not even the worst part of the new UI - scroll for any amount of time on mobile or make a post and you get nagged to switch to their app.

When I built reddit's mobile website, I refused to add any mobile ads - I told the product owner that they could buy ads like anyone else. Literally the week after I quit, they added in mobile ads. lol

At some point recently they changed it to ask you every time you visit. There used to be an option to disable the mobile app ads. Funny that that's the only thing they've changed in six years (I left late 2016.)

There's an ever present orange button. There's the first visit pop up, there's the hey you're looking at something NSFW try the app (why??) pop up and so on.. It's a wonderful experience.

What's the difference between mobile ads and ads like everyone else? Why didn't you want to add mobile ads?

I am pretty sure he means ads from the mobile app division of reddit for free.

I believe they're saying that they were asked to add ads specifically for the mobile app. Their stance was that if the team for the mobile app wanted the app advertised, they could just buy any of the regular ad slots on the website.

An ad telling people to download the Official Reddit Mobile App. I imagine that's what they are referring to.

The idea is that "try the Reddit app" is an advertisement and so belongs in the advertising system (as a house ad) instead of as a special-cased popup.

Yup, this. I see how my statement was ambiguous.

Mobile ads are naggy popups, while regular ones feel like just another post.

Which person, or people, is responsible for the direction Reddit has taken in terms of increasing user hostility to drive growth metrics? I am wondering if they have a track record for this sort of crap, in previous companies.

Yea I got tired of that and switched to their app and it is horrific. I quickly deleted it and went back to site surfing. Maybe they can IPO with such a garbage app but why not fix it first?

They're user hostile in general. old.reddit.com also naggs you to go to the new version, just so you can accept cookies, every few days.

Respect my preference, or don't offer the better UI at all if you want to punish me for it, or needle me out of using it.

Best to use i.reddit.com on mobile. The default mobile website is just unusable on my phone with the way it handles comments.

It's truly baffling how Reddit changed from a fast loading & information dense UI to something that takes about 15 seconds to load on average and shows about 1/10th the information than before.

> It's truly baffling how Reddit changed from a fast loading & information dense UI to something that takes about 15 seconds to load on average and shows about 1/10th the information than before.

The compact mode on new reddit is actually slightly more information dense than old. Sadly it’s still a crappy, slow JS app, if it was performant I’d switch from old in a heartbeat.

edit: Checked the current state of New Reddit. Yikes! https://i.imgur.com/FnMDjmM.png

Yeah, I genuinely prefer the UI of new compact reddit, but the slowness is frustrating.

I just tried it and it doesn't display the thumbnails of any of the posts. On old reddit you get to see a small inline thumbnail for each post. New reddit's compact mode doesn't show this, so it still gives you less information over all. Also, it's still way slower than old reddit.

Huh. I could have sworn there was a version that looked almost like old, just more tastefully designed and slightly smaller. But I didn’t feel like checking it out after I had this [0] toxic experience within seconds of trying the current state of new reddit.

[0]: https://i.imgur.com/FnMDjmM.png

Yikers, that's just awful.

Boost app on Android makes the experience enjoyable again. As long as the API remains un-kneecapped.

Sync is also great, but I’m mainly a desktop user. I’d just like the improved markup and stuff from new.

You might say that... but Reddit is mainstream now. 99% of users are perfectly happy with the new Reddit (especially the iOS app).

If anything, the new UI changes are in service of an IPO, not the reason it would fail.

Except all the users that will pay money not to use the iOS app because Apollo is that much better. It's kind of shocking a few solo developers can make a better mobile experience than anyone at Reddit.

> It's kind of shocking a few solo developers can make a better mobile experience than anyone at Reddit.

Don't you rather believe that the reason why Reddit's user experience is worse is that Reddit has economic incentives (e.g. better options for ad placements; advertisers prefer this US; ...) to do so?

I bet they would really like to copy some aspects of apollo, but can't do it due to PR reasons.

I think that's part of it, especially how it prioritizes certain behaviors that are counter to how Reddit used to be driven. But deeper than that I think their management and engineering are firmly to blame. They've never had a good reputation for either.

Its like no one involved in the design used Reddit regularly. Reddit's best quality was the way it made forums work at scale, but they tried to copy content feeds at the cost of community. That's why old.reddit, Apollo, and RIF are the better experiences for using Reddit - you can engage in community more than just consuming memes and gifs. Certainly a part of that is incentives, but the job of good leadership is to push back and point out that Reddit isn't Twitter or Instagram.

And even if they wanted to make it like Twitter or Instagram they really screwed the pooch by having terrible stability and performance.

I've never tried the app, but that's pretty weird if it's actually good. The mobile site is notoriously hostile, and even the desktop site seems to completely fall apart on pages with lots of videos.

The iOS app is pretty good. Maybe not for a power user, but it's a solid consumer app that I imagine would make most normal users happy enough.

I was curious about traffic stats in regards to your statement. Reddit used to provide monthly traffic figures an various other data at https://www.reddit.com/about/ .

That now redirects to some low-content page with obfuscated numbers that haven't been updated in 2 years. And it's not for lack of updating. The one thing I did learn from that page is that they just hired a new VP of UX, yesterday.

Remember when people were embarrassed to admit they're on reddit?

No?

Not at all. Everyone that uses reddit fucking hates it.

I used to use reddit constantly and they've killed all the useful subs, made the mobile ux nigh unusable, and turned the user based in to a leftwing circle jerk.

So now I barely ever use it.

Same, I use old.reddit.com, with an adblocker enabled, and create a new account whenever I want to comment on something or argue with someone (which is relatively rare these days), thus only interacting with subreddits that don't require accounts above a certain age or karma level.

This limitation keeps me from getting too addicted to the site while still enjoying it. I used to have a several-years-old account that I'd spend hours arguing politics with. Complete waste of time. Deleted it.

And their mobile app is just so bad also :( I want to browse reddit on the web but the web app is doing everything they can to prevent me from browsing without the mobile app.

I use the old UI due to being used to it but the new UI has some advantages like a quick search to select a subreddit rather than scrolling through a long list.

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