Basically it's jQuery mobile version of reddit, and it's super fast compared to whatever framework they are using for the regular mobile site.
I just want to read posts, comments and answer them, nothing more, the nag screens telling me to download an app? the loading screens or whatever, just not... why is that i.reddit version so fast and the regular one so slow?
For now. Reddit is clearly, and has been for several years, on a mission to make the web version as terrible as possible so that people will install their app instead. It’s the only reasonable explanation. But I will continue to use Reddit in the web browser until the day they make the web version completely unbearable. And then I will just leave.
Funny you say this as their app is also pretty bad. Their image slider is one of the most poorly made features I’ve ever seen in an app - with it never being clear what a left swipe, a double tap, or a right swipe will do.
They don't want you to use the app because it's better for you, but because it allows them to collect much better and more fine grained information about your usage (to sell to advertisers and use the target you) and you can't block ads.
I suspect the only reason they keep old.reddit.com alive is the is enough added content from users of that subdomain, while these users are also, at this point, the most likely to just stop using reddit altogether if it was remove.
I assume eventually that math with work out so that it makes more sense to just get rid of 'old' entirely.
I’m somewhere between your last two states. I used to turn to Reddit frequently for results on topics I was unfamiliar with, since typically they have communities that are very passionate about nearly any imaginable topic. However, I hardly ever visit the site anymore.
The begging to install the app is intolerable. I don’t want their application. I don’t trust it. I have no interest in it. But that’s only half their problem. The other half is content - the comments are so low-quality, censored, unsubstantiated, and echo-chamber-y to the extent that it is not bearable or useful for discussion or knowledge acquisition.
Reddit will go down as having EEE’d forums and online communication as a whole. There are sufferingly few bastions online holding out from it.
This isn't working for me. I'm yet to find a way back to compact mode. Which basically means Reddit on phone is unusable. The information density is terrible on a small screen without compact mode. All pictures shouting for attention.
Edit: turns out the closed the backdoor into compact mode. Enshittification is now in full swing.
old.reddit.com/r/something.compact still seems to give the i.reddit.com interface, but it's probably a matter of time before it disappears. I'm also a daily i.reddit.com user (during commute).
they're probably slowly rolling out the update over time, but yes, it's all going to be gone.
The i.reddit and .compact interface was so good. It is excellent design for mobile, low javascript/page weight, and has consistent UI for all subreddits (instead of the often custom CSS/layout stuff that i don't want).
I still find it fascinating how bad the "new reddit" was and still is.
It is so badly coded there was an entire subreddit dedicated to finding bugs for a year or two that they simply shut down after a megathread analysed the amateurish spaghetti code that made up the frontend; race conditions, code duplication and library hell was everywhere.
It's still super sluggish and the pop-over functionality is still so laughably brittle that it's a mystery to me how this was coded by a professional team.
New reddit makes me feel flustered and annoyed. So much crap on the screen, and the content is just 1 thing at a time. With old reddit I can quickly scan titles for what I want to look at. Maybe you can fiddle with new reddit UI, I haven't given it much of a chance -- I just stay with what works.
Digg committed suicide and reddit filled the vacuum, and was actually great for a while (it hasn't been for a long long time, but it was great when it started). Fingers crossed something good will arise to fill this vacuum?
I was on the digg to reddit move, and hn has replaced reddit for me now. I still enjoy the compact views with longer, more thoughtful posts. I worry about when more reddit-type content hits this site and maybe new management changes the styling.
I prefer HN to reddit overall. But what I like about reddit is that you can select the subreddit(s) of your choice and get rid of all that other extraneous stuff. That doesn't appear to be available in HN.
Having said that, I use my browser bookmarks to select those subreddits, rather than actually subscribing to them.
When you see "modern" looking sites (with the font style, ui orientation, etc) and it feels more disorienting than old reddit (more text, cleaner beaks between section, etc) its bc the new site is catering to mobile view ports, not just desktop.
Old reddit is great on desktop, but new reddit looks more like an app.
The problem isn’t in a lack of testing, but in the metrics used when testing. If the A/B testing prioritizes “time on site”, then a design that shows you the user discussions you want to see and clearly indicates when nothing further has been posted will score lower than a site that intersperses ads into user content and fills a feed with “suggested for you” garbage.
I certainly believe the new interfaces have been A/B tested, and don’t think the changes are arbitrary. But I also don’t think the changes are beneficial for users, nor do I think that was the goal.
It amazes how a client UI, which could be easily implemented by a single good engineer manages to come out so terrible with a supposed tech company backing it.
And its not like it hasn’t been iterated upon… they continue to change it and never for the better.
Speaks volumes about Reddit’s (lack of) engineering talent. Seriously don’t get why they don’t just contract it out to a talented person
Too many people put in "teams" that should be a couple people, and too many graphic design people calling themselves "UX engineers" and making things "pretty" by some weird modern design metric rather than usability.
> I still find it fascinating how bad the "new reddit" was and still is.
Leading theory is that it's to push their mobile app (which is probably almost as bad).
The prerequisite for this is that they have a large enough userbase with enough of a network effect that relatively few users will move over the website crippling, the ads, or the mobile app (which I think is plausible).
Perhaps it's time to build an alternative on top of some federated protocol (not necessarily ActivityPub), then make a "bridge" between the two where you can add commends to a Reddit post on $ALTERNATIVE that compliant hybrid clients can render inline, which would allow you to bootstrap an alternative off of Reddit's existing userbase.
It has to be deliberate. I browse old.reddit.com, but old. seems to constantly kick you over to www. against your efforts, so I often get to see the www. trainwreck. Whenever I see www. I can't believe that a competent developer can actually make a site that bad, unless they were doing so deliberately. The latest egregious www. bug is that videos with sound go silent after 2-3 seconds (desktop safari). I don't remember any time in the past when reddit's video player worked 100%, despite video being a solved problem for what, 10 years? So this isn't be a surprise. What's surprising is how bad their developers managed to make the product, and how it gets worse over time rather than better.
I have a redirector extension in my browser that changes all requests to www.reddit.com/* to old.reddit.com/star so I literally never see it on my home machine. I am always startled by how awful it is the few times I ever open a reddit link at work
New Reddit is for ads. If you turn off adblock and compare old and new, you'll probably notice that there's more prime screen space for "recommended" content with media support.
There's still the sidebar carried over from old that can be used for basic media ads and the banner for sponsored posts.
In-feed sponsored posts are also a carry over, but the new feed has fully expanded thumbnails instead of mostly text which allows for autoplaying media ads (which is one of the most profitable ad formats). Old in-feed ads are primarily text.
New homepage has the trending thumbnails up top which works well with the same ad format as the sidebar.
New comments section truncates comments and has more fully expanded thumbnail recommended content below, which is another placement for in-feed ads.
Awards are much more prominently displayed everywhere, which is another monetization feature since they can be bought or earned from advertising.
The technical currently unrealized benefit with all the constant rerenders is the ability to bypass adblock rules by dynamically changing the underlying layout until the ad renders successfully.
Of course the web version being bad to funnel people into first party Reddit apps also helps their advertising angle because you can't easily adblock in app and 3rd party Reddit apps don't render ads.
I think there's a clear path to grab ad revenue and not alienate power users. Reddit follows the standard 90/9/1 law that 90% never log in, 9% do, and 1% actually post most of the content. Anyone who stumbles on a reddit page from search or gets sent their from another social gets the ads. Anyone who posts, should get a usable website.
Yup, but I think the website sucks because it's built to cater to their terrible app. Funny thing is half a dozen independent app makers have done it better. Hopefully Reddit doesn't try to block them at some point.
The entire strategization plan of Reddit as a product seems to be a box of hot shit right now. While the new UI in my POV seems to be shitty and slow, they also crammed in many shady practices like "this content is only available on the Reddit app", "this content loads better/faster on the Reddit app", "Open this page in: Reddit App, Chrome (magically assume all browsers are Chrome and that the users are foolish to not notice lol)", and... there are buttons everywhere that keep nagging "Use Reddit App".
Fuck your app Reddit, I am never gonna install your app just because you nag so much. I will use Relay for Reddit instead.
The do it intentionally. Don’t feel bad for them, they get paid hundreds of thousands each to fuck up your user experience and waste your time and that of a million other people.
Zero sympathy for Reddit and devs. I solved the hostile front end issue by never looking at Reddit anymore. You can't really trust that website anyways due to past privacy problems:
Image hosting is a brutal, mostly thankless job that loses tons of money. I remember when Photobucket was the thing, then Imageshack, then tinypic, then imgur. Each one was meant to be simple photo hosting done right, but all eventually become the thing they were trying to replace - bloated websites with intrusive ads.
e: I just realized this is about i.reddit.com and not i.redd.it, but my point still stands.
It's already well on it's way imo. If I don't fire up the desktop app for a few days, when I do I'm greeted with an update, then a bunch of Nitro ads and other such cruft/nags added to the interface.
I would love to know their metrics for the different user experiences. I generally do not mind what they've done with the main page, and android app. The reactions on hackernews clearly do not share that sentiment, but I have to wonder how much of their user-base we really are.
And in turn, I have ceased using reddit on mobile after a 17-year streak. Guessing old.reddit.com will be the next to go, and then it's goodbye for good.
The new site is designed for actual children and it's mostly worked.
Generally as social networks age they skew older with the velocity of people leaving > velocity of people coming in = slow death by attrition.
Take AOL or when Yahoo had social features for example. The step before death was their transformation to online senior centers. Facebook is on that path right now.
Reddit has bucked that trend and is continually skewing younger. Teen related subs are some of the most popular on the site.
I also find the site terrible but I've never played roblox or minecraft either - the site is no longer for me, I'm too old for it.
But really congratulations to them for having an almost 20 year old social network that still gets avalanches of highschool kids coming in.
Deprecating the legacy interfaces will get us old people off the site and it'll probably help them - a teen party probably works better without some 35 year olds who are in the corner only because they've stuck around for 17 years.
And honestly we've all get better shit to do these days.
> But really congratulations to them for having an almost 20 year old social network that still gets avalanches of highschool kids coming in.
Yes, congratulations to them.
Unfortunately for them, high school kids rarely have any money to pay for the things being advertised on reddit, so their business model still doesn't work, because older folks don't want to sift through a shitty UI/UX experience with a bunch of high-schoolers who are posting mostly nonsense.
There are some nice subs that are excepted from this, mostly by staying small and well moderated by old-timers, but these small subs don't really pay the bills from what I understand.
What we really need is a reboot of USENET in some magical way where there's no incentive to spam + micro nonzero cost to give them a reason not to, something like 100 posts for $0.01.
The reality is you'll get weird spam posts even if you block links with just basically garbage text just because people can. So add an irrelevant cost to put it above zero.
Here's an example of the spam for no reason: I've got a vintage site for a project http://bootstra386.com with a vintage guestbook. Instead of filtering out spam, I filter it over to something I called spambook so you can feast on the glory of all the spam bots postings - it's so excessive and ridiculous - actually I think it's just erroring out from too much memory now. I'll fix it in a bit
