Hacker News Reader

Comment by tdeck | Hacker News Reader

I always wondered how Reddit justified the old.reddit effect. If your new design is so awful that a large percentage of users refuse to use it, and prefer the (more performant!) version from more than a decade ago, shouldn't that be a strong signal that you've made some mistakes? Why not try making the new version more appealing by investigating and fixing the issues that cause people to use the old one.

I guess credit to whoever fought internally to keep old.reddit running all these years. I'm sure it's been a candidate for the axe many times.

View on HN

I mod a reasonably popular subreddit for work, and, looking at the stats as a die hard old reddit user, I was floored at how few of us there really are.

Numbers please

Here are stats from from a 100k member subreddit with 15k unique visitors a day.

* https://imgur.com/UTJyyl8

So the takeaway is there’s a lot of members but only about 15% are active daily? And of that 15% it’s unknown how many are human vs bot?

Unless bots subscribe to the subreddit they wouldn't count as members.

Most people accept what is given to them and won’t go through the effort to change it.

Are there any stats on account age as well? I wonder if Reddit figured the old Reddit user problem would be solved through attrition as people naturally left and new users join the site only knowing the new interface.

I mean, I used the old design for a couple years, but now I genuinely prefer the new design.

I mostly view Reddit on my phone, and new reddit is much more mobile friendly. I have to pinch and zoom and scroll all over the place on old reddit.

I know that's an unpopular opinion around these parts, but I also hate viewing this website on my phone so I use an app. This website really needs a mobile redesign, but I can't imagine the shit fit that the users would throw.

I found an extension for Safari called SinkItforReddit and it does an ok job of making old Reddit usable on mobile. I still fatfinger some clicks, but I’m stubborn and refuse to use the new site. My main gripe with it is less about the UI and more that the content ordering feels more obscured, whereas old site shows me the fairly basic heuristic algorithm for content order.

Also want to add, the new design is now after at least 5 - 6 years of iterations on React, is finally useable and better.

Much like all decent JS front end / React based Web site, it takes years to polish to make it work to certain standards. I am not entirely sure why we have to do that and what benefits does it actually brings?

Just to clarify: I think an older version may have used React, but I just double-checked and current Reddit is definitely a Lit app built with web components. You can tell based on the comment placeholders used by the rendering engine as anchor nodes and by the prevalence of dashed-elements in the markup. Here's an example:

  <rpl-tooltip placement="top" appearance="neutral">
          <!--?lit$003985561$-->
          <span slot="content"><!--?lit$003985561$-->Send a GIF</span>
  </rpl-tooltip>

They seem to call the current architecture "shreddit" internally for some reason.

Probably "shhh" don't tell anyone how bad this version this is

they put a bunch of their stuff in shadow dom. A lot of the decisions of course are not based on usability but monetization incentives. If the current decision makers could, they would have made reddit a walled garden like facebook but the transition is a little awkward seeing as it used to be a free and open site. looks like they are close to cutting the cord on that openness.

They used to offer a more reasonable mobile website but they got rid of it. Using the old design now is just the desktop version which doesn't work well for the reasons you said.

I like the look of the new design (mostly, there's some cases where whitespace can get a bit excessive), but I still don't like the technology behind it. It's funny that modern javascript based sites were built to make things feel more interactive and snappy, but at least in Reddit's case completely failed at that and the old HTML based site feels way more responsive and fast, if a little ugly.

If there was an option to use the modern CSS with the old technology that would be the sweet spot for me.

Discussion websites should not encourage usage from devices optimized for mindless consumption.

Is this comparing old.reddit to reddit.com? I am using the normal url but still use the old design. I just toggled a setting in preferences to use the old design without needing to go to old.reddit, only reason I ever use old.reddit is if I'm logged out. That might be even more niche though, it seems like most people actually use the other url which always confused me when there is a toggle.

That's not clear, from the reported stats. But from my own experience, as of several years ago (I closed my subs some years back), "old" was a small fraction of total usage. This despite the fact that I actively promoted its use for my subs (site design which I intended, and hope, greatly increased utility and readability).

>it seems like most people actually use the other url which always confused me when there is a toggle.

well, I for one had no idea there was a toggle until just now.

Yeah, in preferences there is an option by beta options that says: "Use new Reddit as my default experience".

Once it a blue moon it doesn't seem to work and going to old.reddit then back to reddit seems to fix it.

I didn't know this existed. Pretty neat, especially since Reddit recently started redirecting old.reddit.com to reddit.com when clicking internal links on the site. Thanks.

In my experience as a pretty frequent Reddit user, Reddit is really bad at "forgetting" that you want the old design and flipping you back to the new one.

There's a Firefox extension called Old Reddit Redirect which automatically sends you to old Reddit. It works great!

That's weird, I've never experienced that, and I'm also a pretty frequent Reddit user.

Reddit redesign strikes me as a convenient excuse to enforce infinite scrolling by a company looking to IPO.

I read it as management only knows how to evaluate and reward change even if its just for the sake of the promotion process

Reddit has already IPO'd

I was thinking from a timeframe when redesign was introduced.

While I do use old.reddit and genuinely think it's better UI-wise, in the general case users tend to be resistant to any UI change because it breaks their habits and muscle memory. This is valid but applies even if the new design is easier to use/better in one way or another.

I'm not really a regular user of Reddit, but I'm reminded to use old.reddit every time I open a Google result and can't quickly skim or search the comments. That was an issue for years before LLMs so I'm not sure what the justification is for such a poor experience.

> While I do use old.reddit and genuinely think it's better UI-wise, in the general case users tend to be resistant to any UI change because it breaks their habits and muscle memory.

It's funny how often people say "it's just habit / muscle memory / etc." in response to these kinds of discussions, as though it were somehow a counter-argument, and not something that corroborates the argument against making sudden, drastic UI changes.

It's really weird how common it is for people to say "well, Y is only true because of X" in response to "Z doesn't work because of Y", and thinking they're somehow defeating the argument against Z. If you acknowledge that X exists and causes Y, and accept that Y isn't compatible with Z, then you are conceding that Z does not hold!

I don't see it as a persuasive argument so much as resignation that quality doesn't matter (in this case, and in many cases of incremental enshitification)

My point is that it's not an objective measure of design quality, i.e. how well does a person who hasn't used the software before use it, or how quickly do they learn it. Whether that matters more than your existing users is up to you

There are no objective measures of design quality. Every aspect of interface design can only be measured in the extent to which it facilitates the user's access to the functionality of the software, so the only metrics that apply are ones that reflect the users' subjective experience.

And that experience is determined as much by the users' own expectations and prior experiences -- yes, including habits and muscle memory -- as any quality of the interface or the design of the software.

It's not merely a matter of optimizing the new-user experience for your own particualy software, either, as new users to your software will still be bringing with them the expectations and habits they've acquired through experience with other software. We're not in the '70s anymore, with new users likely never having used any software before, and where you're starting from a clean slate. People today have lots of particular expectations of software, informed by conventions evolved over decades and their own years of experience.

Except in this case, it’s seeing complete threads without clicking vs clicking many times to achieve the same thing.

Also, clutter…

These are measurable things, not moody things.

Like I said, I also prefer the old.reddit UI, I was more speaking about the general case that user feedback isn't always a good indicator depending on what you're trying to do (especially early in a platforms life, when you'll have much more future users than current users)

Enshittification is the answer. Old Reddit doesn’t make any money. Users block what few ads there are and it’s free so there’s no subscription revenue otherwise.

New Reddit is full of ads plus social media engagement-bait garbage. New Reddit makes money. Reddit the company wants people to use New Reddit.

So why does Old Reddit still exist? Because that’s where the content creators live! Old Reddit is a cost centre but a necessary one to keep the old guard of high-effort posters around. Alienate them and the New Reddit users won’t have any new content to engage with.

I wonder how new Reddit users manage to post nowadays, given that many default subreddits have karma restrictions. You need esoteric knowledge, like knowing that /r/askreddit allows you to build initial karma via comments, to be able to do that.

Why couldn't old reddit make money? Just going by my napkin math, serving 125M DAU compute and storage shouldn't cost more much than $2M/mo in cloud hosting.

If I serve a single adsense banner at the top of each page at a low ($2) RPM, I should pull between $15-30M/mo off those 125M daily users depending on engagement. Realistically this type of lazy ad integration could be much higher.

Given the maturity of the platform, salary spend shouldn't be more than another $5M/mo (realistically this could be even lower). That would net me a cool $8M/mo minimum.

I really don't understand how old reddit couldn't make money.

Infinite scrolling + algorithmic ads. That's how Facebook, Instagram, and Tiktok all make their money. You get way more ad impressions per hour than from people who click on links and read / participate in discussions (which is what Old Reddit is all about). Young social media addicts can scroll hundreds of ads per hour because they scroll so fast.

Except that Facebook has a rather nasty problem where friend-based social media is a soft monopoly (which they try very hard to enforce https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433) and its CEO already has a bad reputation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122 and the product does not work on top of that (people miss messages, message requests, and posts, all the time)

"Addictive business model" is one thing. It's annoying, we should highly discourage it, but - some are worse than others

Reddit had to make a business decision.

old reddit - wasn't bad before the age of mass scrappers of LLM labs.

now - yeah - they need to put everything behind a wall. LLM scrappers don't contribute, steal traffic.

I agree, but I'm not sure how this is a response to my comment?

If we time travel back to, say, 2020, it was still weird that they felt the need to keep two parallel versions of their site running because the new one was so unappealing to people who knew what the old one was like.

According to stats on a relatively small local sub I mod, most people interact with Reddit through the mobile app these days. All of the web interfaces make up a small percentage of visits, and old.reddit is even smaller.

Very few people use old.reddit, I believe it's like 1-2%.

I think there is a possibility that this is simply someone's ego trip that has evolved into a monster. One "nepo hire" in the correct position of power is all it would take for something like this to happen. I believe that's what occurred with the GitHub refactor too. That happened way too early to be attributed to the AI/Copilot stuff.

If business was truly driving the ship a lot of these bad ideas would have been killed and buried on day one. The React tribalism was unbelievably hot for a while there. Not going along with it was a great way to not get hired at a lot of places. This is still the case.

The reason the business tolerates this bullshit is because they are so afraid of losing certain people. I'm watching it happen in real time for two smaller startups right now. The business would be much better off if they simply fired the "revolutionaries" right now (i.e. today without warning or preparation), but they've become convinced by the propaganda of these very same people that their removal would be catastrophic to the business. So, these people get to torture all of the employees and end customers with their ridiculous schemes (ego trips) and the business covers up for them. As long as everyone survives to the weekend, no one seems to care enough to change anything. The customers in this case are other businesses who are also sucked into the scheme (they don't want to look stupid for signing a contract), so the issue propagates ever deeper.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com