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Comment by basicallybones | Hacker News Reader

Frontend frameworks developed in response to the need to develop/maintain very complex browser-based applications like Facebook across a large team of developers. AirBnB/Reddit have dramatically more complex user behavior and are much more input- and media-oriented. You cannot wait on round trips to the server for user interactions, and you cannot just do hybrid client/server the old jQuery way on big applications because you get spaghetti code.

Comparing Reddit and Wikipedia is like comparing a motorcycle to a bicycle. They are different, with specific strengths and weaknesses. Both design/engineering paradigms have a place, imo.

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You cannot wait on round trips to the server for user interactions

Old Reddit still works fine, and I’d argue better than new front end heavy Reddit. You are right it may be for the benefit developers, but Reddit isn’t complicated enough that a heavy front end provides much benefit to the users.

Old Reddit is significantly faster than new Reddit and I found it far nicer to use, but people in general didn’t like the “old, clunky” UI. Old Reddit was much maligned for how how it looked compared to modern sites.

> Old Reddit was much maligned for how how it looked compared to modern sites.

By young people, probably. Me and my friends that I know still use it prefer old.

I do much prefer the look of new reddit, but the performance is painful. I don't see why you couldn't have a nicer looking UI, but with the performance of old reddit.

Yeah, I cannot even begin to imagine what it would be like to develop AirBnb without some sort of front end framework. I used to write pure JS and jquery back in the day, and it was super easy to end up with a rat’s nest of spaghetti code. And those apps were several orders of magnitude less complex!

The alternative to SPA frameworks is not spaghetti jquery and vanilla js and full page reloads.

As mentioned everywhere around this thread, the way to do server side rendered apps has also evolved. Hotwire, htmx, Unpoly, Livewire, etc, etc, etc.

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