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Comment by notatoad | Hacker News Reader

>they'll all be inexplicably inferior with even worse UI

basically, yes. but their developers don't think their UI is inferior. because there are legions of developers around the world with replacements lined up, but all of their replacements are built with opinions about the bits of reddit they like. and while everybody can agree that the reddit UI sucks, nobody can agree about how it sucks, and everybody who sets out to fix it fixes it in a different way that everybody else hates.

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A perfectly good UI exists. It's called old.reddit.com.

the problem with old.reddit.com is that it actually is a terrible UI. If you make a site that pixel-perfect mirrors old.reddit.com, the only users you'll attract are the vocal fans of that UI. i've been a reddit user since digg died, and i remember when we could all agree that reddit's UI was the worst. the fact that the newer redesigns are somehow even worse than the old UI doesn't make the old UI good.

a social site populated entirely by contrarians who think old.reddit.com is peak web design is not a site that anybody will want to visit.

Those "vocal fans" represent the potion of the user base that actually publishes most of the content. Drive them off and who's posting content for you to slather ads all over? At that point you're just another 3rd rate Digg knockoff.

the power users post because they have an audience. take away the audience of normies, and you've just got a bunch of nerds trying to entertain each other.

that's basically what lemmy is right now, and it's no fun.

> the power users post because they have an audience. take away the audience of normies, and you've just got a bunch of nerds trying to entertain each other.

Sounds like another orange site I know, that starts with an H and ends with an S ;)

It might be "terrible" but it is the only functional UI available for who doesn't have a tiktok/9gag addled brain

> the problem with old.reddit.com is that it actually is a terrible UI

I know I'm pretty bad at UI/UX, so could you explain how the old.reddit.com is terrible? Like it's not usable on mobile, but on desktop I have no issues with it.

> since digg died

Remind me what caused that again?

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