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Comment by jazzypants | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

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