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Comment by ro_bit | Hacker News Reader

> We did a lot of experiments to try and get more people to look at the new page or new content

Is that what "best" sort is doing when browsing a specific subreddit? Occasionally I'll notice some crappy 1 minute old post on my feed that's out of place and realize the sorting was reset to "best" instead of "hot" instead

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You can also just sort by "new" i.e. chronologically.

Best is best explained here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20091210094533/http://blog.reddi...

It was actually created by the XKCD team, to be better than hot.

However, they may have changed how it works since then.

"Best" may include some new posts, I actually haven't checked, but the thing that stands out to me is how old many of the posts are. Ever since Reddit made "best" the default sort on the app I notice that any new subreddit I go to will show me at least some posts from more than two weeks ago. It's really baffling that Reddit seems to think it should be preferred over "hot".

I was going to comment I've never seen this before. Then I went to a subreddit and it hit me that I only use old reddit, which lacks the "best" feature.

I'm not sure why people tolerate the new reddit website. It is so slow, busy, and chock full of ads. When I open it on the phone you are straight up missing a lot of discussion comments, so it is broken too. You click a comment it looks like it has no subcomments under it. You click the permalink opening that comment thread in a new window, and there's still no subcomment under it. Now you prefix old. to the url, now you see the subcomments.

Makes me wonder how much discussion there is that is just not observed at all by a good fraction of the site who browses these same threads. Two universes on the same post.

I prefer the new design because the text is readable on my phone, and it has a native dark mode. I don't see any of the ads because I use an ad blocker.

Also, I have no idea what you mean about the comments thing. I can immediately see all comments other than the ones that have been collapsed due to having negative karma.

The funny thing is that all the reasons you listed to use the new design... existed before in basically any 3rd party app.

I agree, and I previously used a 3rd party app myself (Reddit Is Fun). The sad thing is that I actually completely understand why they shut down the free API access. The AI bot scrapers are absurdly aggressive, and bandwidth isn't free.

AI bot scrapers are still scraping just fine.

I don't know how else to describe it beyond what I've already done. Are you sure you are seeing all the comments? Have you tested with a post? I don't use the app fwiw. Only tested with the mobile website and it has been like this for years.

I still use old.reddit.com on the phone. Works fine with pinch and zoom. Super performant too, loads in a fraction of the time which is necessary with mobile connections and spotty coverage. I just saw the native reddit app for ios at least is like 450mb. WTF...

I don't use the native apps. They are bloated, disgusting messes. I just messed around with old.reddit and compared it to new reddit for around thirty minutes. I noticed no performance differences, and I noticed no discrepancy in comments. I don't know what to tell you. The only time I see fewer comments is when I use an incognito window, but that's just because it's not logged in.

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1tt034b/commen...

I open this link on my iphone and I only see the top comment by /u/TallGreenhouseGuy. Below that comment, there is a link to "more replies" but it loads this exact same page with only the parent comment, no child comments. Below the parent comment, is just random reddit threads, absolutely random, along with ads. Top 3: post from /r/ghanacitizen (I am not in africa no clue how that is there....), ad from cerave for oil control shampoo, then a link to some thread in /r/learnprogramming.

https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1tt034b/learn_...

This link however works fine and returns the all the child comments I was missing in that first link.

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