Comment by 2pEXgD0fZ5cF | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 2pEXgD0fZ5cF | Hacker News Reader

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The reddit redesign is still a marvel of technology, in a negative way. I can not comprehend how it is even possible to make a piece of software, be it online or offline, that mainly just has to display text (and the occasional video, thumbnail or image), so incredibly slow and bug ridden.

It's truly baffling. The editor for comments is buggy, regularly posts comments twice, can't handle copy/paste properly, "there was a problem" and "you broke reddit" error messages on refresh are a common occurence, and just opening a thread takes more than 5 seconds on average. The video player does not work most of the time.

Then I saw the official reddit app, and it manages to be low quality in all kinds of places the website redesign managed to miss. Being on the mobile web version constantly nags you to download the official reddit app, and the nagging popup causes the position you were in the comments to be reset, for extra annoyance.

Without old.reddit or 3rd party clients I find Reddit unusable.

The "you broke reddit" type error messages are so ridiculous it's not even funny

My favourite bug there (unless it's actually a feature?) when people post links reddit will intentionally break urls by actually inserting "/" in the link url especially if the urls have "_" to separate words in it. so this_is_an_example becomes this/_is/_an/_example.

When you use their "app" it works, but if you use a browser it breaks.

This is definitely a feature. It's intrusive, obvious, and has been around for a long time. It creates friction for users of old reddit with plausible deniability.

As far as I know, that's because way back when they introduced "new Reddit" (the redesigned web UI) they made the bizarre decision to use a slightly different and incompatible Markdown parser. So ever since then, posts and comments have looked different depending on which version of the site you view them on.

The URL escaping syntax is one difference, but another one is that the two renderers support different syntax for monospaced code blocks. As you can probably imagine, that wreaks havoc on the formatting of posts in programming subreddits.

At least you can tell the users who are using new.reddit or the official app, and bully them for lack of elementary taste.

I would love to read an interview or AMA from the developers of Reddit's new site. Just to hear their side of the story. I also cannot believe how one could make a site so uniformly terrible in all ways, but I'm willing to at least give them the benefit of the doubt and hear them out. The top two explanations (to me so far) are either 1. the developers are totally incompetent or 2. they are deliberately sabotaging the site, possibly to dissuade users from using it. Nothing else makes sense, but I'm open to a logical explanation.

i'm baffled too. it's so slow and unusable in almost every way. old reddit is so much snapier and usable. It feels like reddit devs are "innovating" to justify their salaries imo.

I doubt it's the devs. It was likely a change of product manager (or something similar) and the desire to impose their vision on things.

yeah you're probably right on that... shame.

I was checking the schedule for a local event. The website was designed so that the schedule items would appear as you scrolled. On desktop there were photos and stuff alongside it, but on mobile it was literally just text with some styling. The performance was sad for such a simple website. All jittery. If it had been plain text, CSS and images, it would've loaded and rendered just fine.

Also why does the mobile site try so hard to get me on the app? Why do they care? They have my eyeballs either way but they seem to take umbrage when I use my phone's browser.

Why they thought anyone wanted an online status indicator is beyond me. I mean I know the answer: it's not for the users. But still.

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