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Comment by john-radio | Hacker News Reader

To self-reinforce my participation in the strike, I logged out of reddit and disabled Reddit Enhancement Suite and the Old.reddit Redirect add-ons, and looking at the front page without those improvements (which I'm sure a minority of users use) it's shocking how terrible the site's UI is for the uninitiated. For the "front page of the internet" it sure looks like a bad Twitter clone.

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I don't get it. If I log out and go to reddit.com I see it he "Popular" view with a pretty good looking UI, 4.5 "cards" per screen height, I don't think that's what someone could mean by

> it's shocking how terrible the site's UI is

On the other hand old.reddit.com is just this super dense early 2000s kinda looking UI that I'd never use.

Am I just in the minority here on what is considered good UI? Am I looking at the wrong thing?

On Apollo, I have the UI configured to omit previews of images and videos, it’s also high density. It basically looks like HN.

That’s how my old.reddit.com looks too.

The new reddit UI has - and has always had - compact options. I often suspect that the old.reddit.com sticklers never bothered to check the preferences.

I tried the new Reddit and it’s compact options near the rollout and a couple of times after; it wasn’t satisfactory. One was one of many reasons to keep using old Reddit and third party clients.

This is what I see: https://i.imgur.com/ueQfJsc.png. Huge cookies popup, I don't even see one full post immediately. When scrolling the feed I mostly see 2 posts, sometimes a bit of a third one. With old.reddit.com it's a compact list where you see a lot more content at once.

Also I found reading comments in new UI to be terrible, they load maybe one comment from 2-3 levels down, and everything else requires you to click to load more: https://i.imgur.com/C6DXttC.png.

And what are those posts on the right? I _just_ opened a post that I'm interested in, do I have to be shoved samples from completely irrelevant communities.

Also, try opening a post on new Reddit and then go back (in history) — for me the previous page loads from scratch, all the way on the top. Old reddit behaves as expected.

The list probably goes on, but I never spent more than 5 minutes I did now to find out all the issues. I'm pretty sure one of the issues Reddit has with 3rd party apps is that they let you browse Reddit with old.reddit philosophy — see lots of content, choose what you find interesting, and make it easy to dig into the discussion. As opposed to shoving the content in my face and pushing me to only read one top-upvoted comment on each level

You're right, the comments being collapsed is annoying. The sidebars you can get rid of though iirc.

And when you use RES[0] there are hundreds of other tweaks for the old.reddit.com that makes it a million time more easy to use.

[0]: https://redditenhancementsuite.com/

It’s just a tiny minority of nerds complaining about how what they think is theirs has changed

The thing I think this conversation should be about is how horrible their site is.

I don’t think the third parties costs Reddit money, I think if anything they keep the user base inclusive of people with disabilities and allow people who wouldn’t deal with their trash UX to still generate content for those who do.

The lack of UX investment on their end is shocking.

> I don’t think the third parties costs Reddit money

What is this based on? All of the third party clients that I've used don't show reddit ads, so as long as I'm using the client, it's a cost sink for reddit. I don't contribute content.

>For the "front page of the internet" it sure looks like a bad Twitter clone.

The worst part is that they try to enforce it. Back when I used Reddit, I set old reddit as default in my settings, but Reddit would randomly switch me to the new interface in an attempt to wean me off the superior interface. Makes you wonder how profitable Reddit could be if they didn't spend so much money ruining their UI.

I just deleted my reddit shortcuts. sigh

And when I went to log out of reddit, I got https://www.redditstatic.com/youbrokeit3.png

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