Hacker News Reader

Comment by gaoshan | Hacker News Reader

I agree that Reddit is doing a good job of harming its usability (and the overall experience with mods that wield the ban hammer for the slightest disagreements, for example) I do not understand this sentiment for old reddit. I've been on the site for over 15 years and while I do pine for the old days (when comments and content were of much higher quality) the old UI holds no such sway over me.

View on HN

Well, for starters, old.reddit.com on mobile safari doesn't put an overlay telling you to use the app instead when you get a deep link.

Also it loads much faster. Imagine if HN were re-done with a lot more glitz and current HN was turned into old.news.ycombinator.com? I bet a lot of HNers would prefer the old interface especially if there were some annoying UI patterns in the new one.

That’s an idea for a HN April Fools joke.

Have you used the “new” ui directly? For me the gallery links somehow manage to crash Firefox on mobile more often than not. Links to comment threads also load only 2 threads deep and I have to constantly click on load more buttons to continue the conversation. On top of all that there’s a ton of space wasted on the sides to just have the thread be in the center?

If I was using Reddit solely to view images it might be an improvement but it’s nearly unusable if you are using it primarily to read comments

With RES it's it's truely nice to use the old UI.

Yep. It's mostly a information to screen usage ratio thing. There's so much useless "noise" on modern reddit, even if your customize it. Res + old reddit is much better at letting you see what you want to see and move on.

That said, I'm at the point where i'm just converting everything to rss feed readers. I'm sure that's going to be blown up eventually as well, but in the meantime it's probably the best way to just get whatever information you want, quickly, and not be stuck navigating websites.

New UI feels very sluggish. For whatever reason it just struggles performance-wise.

It works without JS.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com