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Comment by wozer | Hacker News Reader

For me it looks like the "old" reddit design is especially affected by the outage. "new.reddit.com" works fine for me.

I tried to use new.reddit because it is the only thing working, why is it that when I'm reading comments that 50% of my 1440p screen is just black background on the left & right? You can kind of fix the front page by putting it into "Compact" view, but the comment section has nothing akin to that.

This is such a usability disaster relative to old.reddit, and it hasn't been fixed for years. Who is this for? I still remember when Reddit had one of the best mobile websites, before they had an official app and then mysteriously the mobile site started to lose previously working functionality.

I'm fairly sure this is some "design paradigm" or something. I've complained about it for years but I've never heard it described by anyone as an "issue" that's going to be fixed, as much as "a design some old people don't like".

I think the paradigm is called “use a ton of javascript to do something really simple”

At a strategic level, surely the website is bad in order to drive people to the mobile apps. Simple enough.

But I wonder how this result was actually accomplished - are there Reddit developers deliberately adding JS bloat so scrolling is choppy? Are there KPIs that pages must not load in under N seconds or videos must not play successfully more than N% of the time? It's bad enough that it can't be an accident. I'd love to interview one of the devs of the new UI.

Ye ... I mean so called dark patterns are so common nowadays that it would not suprise me at all if they made the website shitty on purpuse.

It is like login in to Gmail on a new computer. It has some 2fa that begs for my phone number and the other options just don't work half the time.

Another "single page app" design that is slower than the thing it replaced.

its for kids who think there phone is there only computer an jus trynna see memes doring class

I didn't even think of using new.reddit.com when old had trouble! I used the API and that worked fine. I'll have to keep the new.reddit.com trick handy in case it is needed sometime.

Can't wait for this to be one of the reasons the hard deprecated old reddit :(

Maybe the cause and effect is reversed. We're seeing errors because the old reddit is deprecated.

It will suck when they do that, but at least I’ll get whatever time I spend on Reddit back to funnel somewhere else.

As long as the API exists, so can your reddit consumption.

Is there a way to use this on desktop? I’m not sure I care enough about Reddit to worry too much.

Tbh I look forward to the day I can cut that time sink out. I just can’t peel myself away entirely.

If you want to read - sure. Here's an example.

https://api.reddit.com/r/programming

Stellar and Comet are popular clients for MacOS. They're both pretty nice, from what I remember.

Legere for Reddit has been recommended by my colleagues that use Windows but I can't vouch for it personally.

I just use some home cooked python scripts on desktop, but I think there is a gnus.el client somewhere too. On my phone, Red Reader is great. It's on F-droid.org.

But probably not.

I believe they are planning API changes though, with restrictions that make alternative sane apps like Apollo not or barely functional.

I’m giving up Reddit for lent, and would be somewhat pleasantly surprised if they did this while I’m gone. It would make just never, ever using it again much easier.

Tested, old yields 503, new shows the normal content. I need a tin foil hat.

There's very understandable reasons this could be the case, like the "old.reddit" code base just being untouched as an important API changed.

Which is amusing because the "new" reddit has consistently been loading 10x slower than old over the past few weeks.

I didn't find this to be the case, took a few tries on both, but at least the old one provided an error message

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