Ask HN: Why are Reddit's webpage elements so slow to load? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why are Reddit's webpage elements so slow to load?

17 pointsbehnamoh10 comments

I have tried several browsers and I keep getting the same subpar UX. Everything is slow. I click on the Chats icon and it takes several seconds to load. Switching between chats also takes a couple seconds. When I send a message, it takes 3-4 seconds to show up in the chat.

With each update to the website, they've just broken more and more things. The legacy chat UI was much better and it allowed for deleting chats as well. Now you can just "hide" them.

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This is my nit pick with these SPA apps.

It's becoming a habit where it is _okay_ to split your UI into many components, and those many components are doing their own separate thing, but the problem occurs when those components are doing their own API calls.

Hard reloading Reddit and looking at the total ajax requests, I am getting between 132 and 140 ajax requests to load a relatively simple page; text and images.

It's absurd how they manage to get into this state and think it's _okay_.

On a slow internet connection it simply won’t load.

This should not be a condemnation of SPA, webapps, or anything of the sort.

It should be a condemnation of append-only marketing people guiding your web application.

130 ajax requests for a page?! lol

I was in a big bookstore inside an old building today. Tried using Goodreads.com and realized, due to my poor mobile connection, that every new word on the search bar was creating separate requests due to the dynamic search feature... sight

old.reddit.com

Then in Preferences make sure "Use new Reddit as my default experience" is unchecked.

There's probably many more incentives to add revenue generating features than keep the page load time under a par value.

They do it on purpose to frustrate you into downloading their app

The app is even worse tho so you're not missing out

Half of the available client bandwidth is loading piles of JS of questionable value....?

Bad engineering

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