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Comment by zacharycohn | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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