Tell HN: Reddit Has Disabled i.reddit.com
Requests now appear to redirect to regular reddit.
It is so badly coded there was an entire subreddit dedicated to finding bugs for a year or two that they simply shut down after a megathread analysed the amateurish spaghetti code that made up the frontend; race conditions, code duplication and library hell was everywhere.
It's still super sluggish and the pop-over functionality is still so laughably brittle that it's a mystery to me how this was coded by a professional team.
* Details on the "holy shit" (as one user puts it) React code here: https://old.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/spbylv/reddits_new...
Having said that, I use my browser bookmarks to select those subreddits, rather than actually subscribing to them.
Old reddit is great on desktop, but new reddit looks more like an app.
That being said, the "old school" reddit users (probably includes you, me, and many people on hacker news) would still prefer the old ui.
This stuff has been A/B tested - these changes do not tend to be arbitrary.
I certainly believe the new interfaces have been A/B tested, and don’t think the changes are arbitrary. But I also don’t think the changes are beneficial for users, nor do I think that was the goal.
And its not like it hasn’t been iterated upon… they continue to change it and never for the better.
Speaks volumes about Reddit’s (lack of) engineering talent. Seriously don’t get why they don’t just contract it out to a talented person
Leading theory is that it's to push their mobile app (which is probably almost as bad).
The prerequisite for this is that they have a large enough userbase with enough of a network effect that relatively few users will move over the website crippling, the ads, or the mobile app (which I think is plausible).
Perhaps it's time to build an alternative on top of some federated protocol (not necessarily ActivityPub), then make a "bridge" between the two where you can add commends to a Reddit post on $ALTERNATIVE that compliant hybrid clients can render inline, which would allow you to bootstrap an alternative off of Reddit's existing userbase.
There's still the sidebar carried over from old that can be used for basic media ads and the banner for sponsored posts.
In-feed sponsored posts are also a carry over, but the new feed has fully expanded thumbnails instead of mostly text which allows for autoplaying media ads (which is one of the most profitable ad formats). Old in-feed ads are primarily text.
New homepage has the trending thumbnails up top which works well with the same ad format as the sidebar.
New comments section truncates comments and has more fully expanded thumbnail recommended content below, which is another placement for in-feed ads.
Awards are much more prominently displayed everywhere, which is another monetization feature since they can be bought or earned from advertising.
The technical currently unrealized benefit with all the constant rerenders is the ability to bypass adblock rules by dynamically changing the underlying layout until the ad renders successfully.
Of course the web version being bad to funnel people into first party Reddit apps also helps their advertising angle because you can't easily adblock in app and 3rd party Reddit apps don't render ads.
Nearly everything about reddit that redditors complain about is solved by using a 3rd party app or by using old.reddit.com, optionally with RES.
Fuck your app Reddit, I am never gonna install your app just because you nag so much. I will use Relay for Reddit instead.
Imagine working on a product that announced at every opportunity that it’s total dogshit and you should use something else.
https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-stev...
Seriously think carefully about what you look at or post on Reddit.
You can add .compact to any URL on old.reddit.com to get the same version that used to be on i.reddit.com.
I suspect the only reason they keep old.reddit.com alive is the is enough added content from users of that subdomain, while these users are also, at this point, the most likely to just stop using reddit altogether if it was remove.
I assume eventually that math with work out so that it makes more sense to just get rid of 'old' entirely.
The begging to install the app is intolerable. I don’t want their application. I don’t trust it. I have no interest in it. But that’s only half their problem. The other half is content - the comments are so low-quality, censored, unsubstantiated, and echo-chamber-y to the extent that it is not bearable or useful for discussion or knowledge acquisition.
Reddit will go down as having EEE’d forums and online communication as a whole. There are sufferingly few bastions online holding out from it.
I think I'm done. Maybe Teddit.
Edit: turns out the closed the backdoor into compact mode. Enshittification is now in full swing.
Generally as social networks age they skew older with the velocity of people leaving > velocity of people coming in = slow death by attrition.
Take AOL or when Yahoo had social features for example. The step before death was their transformation to online senior centers. Facebook is on that path right now.
Reddit has bucked that trend and is continually skewing younger. Teen related subs are some of the most popular on the site.
I also find the site terrible but I've never played roblox or minecraft either - the site is no longer for me, I'm too old for it.
But really congratulations to them for having an almost 20 year old social network that still gets avalanches of highschool kids coming in.
Deprecating the legacy interfaces will get us old people off the site and it'll probably help them - a teen party probably works better without some 35 year olds who are in the corner only because they've stuck around for 17 years.
And honestly we've all get better shit to do these days.
Yes, congratulations to them.
Unfortunately for them, high school kids rarely have any money to pay for the things being advertised on reddit, so their business model still doesn't work, because older folks don't want to sift through a shitty UI/UX experience with a bunch of high-schoolers who are posting mostly nonsense.
There are some nice subs that are excepted from this, mostly by staying small and well moderated by old-timers, but these small subs don't really pay the bills from what I understand.
The reality is you'll get weird spam posts even if you block links with just basically garbage text just because people can. So add an irrelevant cost to put it above zero.
Here's an example of the spam for no reason: I've got a vintage site for a project http://bootstra386.com with a vintage guestbook. Instead of filtering out spam, I filter it over to something I called spambook so you can feast on the glory of all the spam bots postings - it's so excessive and ridiculous - actually I think it's just erroring out from too much memory now. I'll fix it in a bit
e: I just realized this is about i.reddit.com and not i.redd.it, but my point still stands.
History thus dictates Discord will become a bloated, malvertisement mess in a few years' time. We'll see, I guess.
I'm waiting for that to change.
So why hasn't someone made an image hosting site that uses Cloudflare R2?
there are reasons to like old./i. but given reddit seems friendly with 3p clients like this one, Apollo and many others, guess it's time to move on.
Orion Browser (by Kagi) can still access i.reddit.com.
This is the only way I will use mobile reddit. I don't need an app for something that can be a simple, clean web page.
lynx -image_links gopher://gopherddit.com
export LYNX_CFG=$HOME/.lynx.cfgI just want to read posts, comments and answer them, nothing more, the nag screens telling me to download an app? the loading screens or whatever, just not... why is that i.reddit version so fast and the regular one so slow?