Tell HN: Reddit removed i.reddit.com and reddit.com/.compact

As the classic saying goes, "well, there's your problem!"

Work expands to fill the available capacity, regardless of whether it's beneficial to others besides the ones doing it, because those who are being paid will always try to justify their existence.

The "solo indie dev" is, just by virtue of being limited in capacity, not going to add complexity where it isn't absolutely necessary, nor spend countless amounts of time on redesigning something that already works well.

Over the years I've rewritten a lot of internal sites (after the relatively large teams responsible for their maintenance were cut) and turned them from huge monstrosities that would definitely require a large dedicated team to maintain into small, fast, simple ones which could almost be treated as a side-job.

Easy, no PMs!

That seems to be a new new web reddit, build on web components via lit and it seems rather performant in contrast to whatever stuff reddit is using now. I’m no convinced about the UI choices, but at least they seem to recognized that the "new reddit" wasn’t the best. Hope dies last.

(In my dreams there would be a real Apollo for Mac OS. Real as in AppKit, not UIKit/Catalyst. Won’t ever happen, of course. As productive Selig is with Apollo for iOS, there are limits.)

They have different goals. The solo indie devs are performing horribly on the metrics the internal dev team is judged by, and vice-versa.

HN is still the ideal UX model for Reddit style sites (besides comment formatting + images/video submissions + long comment threads + native search integration). and anything that adds to that via JS/async should start from there and improve it by loading it faster. Like a lot of redesigns its 2 steps forward in one direction and 2 step back as a whole.

Things like speed of opening threads and video thumbnails etc were a big improvement but they weren't better than the 5yr old RES extension on top of the much simpler base of old Reddit.

The previews beta Reddit that came out a few months ago had a way better search UI and nice redesign but also made the comment UX way worse requiring hitting "load more" 10x more often favouring non threaded comment threads (scrolling > interaction) which is not how Reddit works IRL.

They don't outperform them, they have a different goal. The indie devs develop for the user. The company develops for the money, meaning more revenue, and whatever metrics for success they have.

Because the UI for the first party apps have to be approved by MBA types who have different goals than 'make it good for users'.

I really can't believe their site was so bad, and yet it was.

Yeah, it still works here.