I think old.reddit.com's interface is more user-friendly than HN's. Why should I leave the page to write a comment? Avoiding JS just for the sake of avoiding is just blind fanaticism under the pretense of being faster and more lightweight.
(The new reddit redesign is a resource hogging abomination riddled with needless SPA bullshit, but the old reddit design was pretty clean and minimal and yet an SPA.)
I was on reddit before they tried updating their designs, the only reason I'm still there is because they still have the old.reddit.com frontend available. I even use it on mobile where it's not exactly practical. It's not because I have some sort of aversion to change, well, I guess I'm really uninterested in downloading apps considering I didn't even bother to try things like Apolle to see what the fuzz was about, but their various attempts at redesigns have been so bad that I would rather use old.reddit.com than them on mobile, even though it's impractical.
On a computer I see no benefits from any of the redesigns compared to old.reddit.com. I work a lot with Typescript and also React myself, and I love the language, so it's not because I dislike that sort of thing, but I think a list of links with comments just works better without being put into a virtual DOM or even just JS. HN is the perfect example of that, there has been a lot of hobby JS frontends from people, but they all work worse than the real deal and somewhat hilariously they work better than reddit's professional attempts. Now I get why reddit wants to move away from the page-reload. They want a lot of the SoMe interactivity, like their silly chat and so on, but I'm not sure who would ever want a Facebook with total strangers instead of people you actually talk with. I sure don't.
There's chrome/FF plugins that rewrite every url you're linked to old.reddit.com which is better than the builtin user setting. I'm a frontend dev who should like the type of JS stuff Reddit tried to do last time around but it was a UX failure.
HN is still the ideal UX model for Reddit style sites (besides comment formatting + images/video submissions + long comment threads + native search integration). and anything that adds to that via JS/async should start from there and improve it by loading it faster. Like a lot of redesigns its 2 steps forward in one direction and 2 step back as a whole.
Things like speed of opening threads and video thumbnails etc were a big improvement but they weren't better than the 5yr old RES extension on top of the much simpler base of old Reddit.
The previews beta Reddit that came out a few months ago had a way better search UI and nice redesign but also made the comment UX way worse requiring hitting "load more" 10x more often favouring non threaded comment threads (scrolling > interaction) which is not how Reddit works IRL.
You have i.reddit, m.reddit, old.reddit and regular reddit.com, that's 4 different UI's that they are maintaining, as well as iOS/Android applications.
I really wish they'd go to hackernews, CTRL+U and look at the beauty of the code that awaits them.
Works without JS flawlessly, fast, speedy, no cruft, no bullshit, just a simple fast loading page.
I actually enjoy HN a lot more than reddit these days, the cruft is so discouraging.
Mainly the interaction (though the graphical design itself definitely isn't what you'd call modern). No notifications or gui animations, no thumbnails or header images, being as hard to navigate as possible, scroll position gets reset all the time, can't even reply to a comment while looking at the rest of the thread because everything is its own separate page, nothing has outlines so text has no clear separation, etc. In a nutshell it feels like a site made in the 90s entirely with HTML forms without a line of javascript.
I mean I do absolutely hate the new reddit redesign and almost exclusively use old.reddit, but the functionality there is still on another level when compared to HN.
I really respect this philosophy. I know the HN crowd hates when Reddit is brought up, but its redesign is a great example here. I find the old interface's technical simplicity serves me far better since it loads fast and can be extended with RES. Similarly, I love that HN still looks like a site from 2007, it functions beautifully
The new design is slow as mollasses. It's ugly. It doesn't provide direct access to both the shared link and comments. Managing text formatting is slow and painful. The only positive point is the Ctrl+enter shortcut to post comments. I always use old.reddit.com.
Yeah it's crazy how bad user-hostile reddit.com has become. Fortunately old.reddit.com is still available, but for how long? If only Javascript did not exist, it would be impossible for UX people to come up with something that bad.
Heh. Clearly, Reddit only survived their redesign because they kept the old one around too. All the cranky nerds have still never accepted the new one what, 8 years later?
Tbh I find new Reddit far more usable than old, but perhaps if I had a slow computer or didn’t run JS or something, I could disagree?
There is a considerable cultural overlap between "people who think no-JS, fast and responsive software is cool" and "people who think the design of Reddit or Discourse is really awful". (Man, especially Reddit, I swear the day they retire old.reddit.com will be the day I stop using it). They probably are investing a little bit into design, just not the one you like.
I'm still using old.reddit.com instead of the modern rework because the old version is fully compatible with Vim browser plugins while the new one has all kinds of issues with keyboard-focused usage.
This is a frequent symptom on websites that consist of more JS than HTML: they often won't even let you scroll the page without a mouse, let alone have UI that's visible to plugins(I never tried it, but I'd bet these same sites would also appear basically empty to screen readers etc.).
The new reddit site on desktop is actually really nice. Once I understood that it is optimized around content consumption I realized how it is an improvement for certain use cases. Previously opening comments opened either a new tab, or navigated away from the current page, which meant when hitting back the user lost their place in the flow of the front page. The new UI fixes that.
Mobile sucks, I use RIF instead, or old.reddit.com if I am roaming internationally and want to read some text only subreddits.
> That's the thing though, with static sites where JQuery is used only on updates to your data, the initial rendering is fast. Browsers are really good at rendering static content, whereas predicting what JS is going to do is really hard..
Depends how static the content is. For a blog post? Sure, the content should be delivered statically and the comments loaded dynamically. Let's ignore how many implementations of that are absolutely horrible (disqus) and presume someone at least tries to do it correctly.
But we're all forgetting how slow server side rendering was. 10 years ago, before SPAs, sites took forever to load not because of slow connections (I had a 20mbps connection back in 1999, by 2010 I was up to maybe 40, not much has changed in the last 10 years) but because server side was slow.
If anything more content (ads, trackers..) is being delivered now in the same amount of time.
sh.reddit seems to be build ful on web components with lit, different than HTMX. Looking into the web inspector is certainly depressing if your tastes come from the era of “semantic” HTML and progressive enhancement.
But well. The real sin of new.reddit wasn’t really the technical underpinnings, but the UI design. Here it seems even worse in parts: permanently clicking just to read the comments.
My motivation is to interact with the content of the website. Form is good only while it improves function. For example, simple css improves my ability to read a website over the default rendering of .txt (often seen in websites about K). However, the new reddit design isn't worth it for me because the improved form decreases the function. With lazy loading, controls that are more difficult to interact with, higher footprint, higher idle cost, etc., it's a less pleasant reading experience.
Beyond the experience of a loaded site, its ability to emphasize the text and to not interfere with the current visual field / search (badly implemented lazy loading for example), size alone impacts experience on bad internet connections. I use HN as a test website to see if the internet works over something like msn because it is so lightweight. I measured around 8KB transferred after caching on the home page. (>3000KB from MSN with an idle transfer of 7KB every couple of seconds.)
> People complain about reddit a lot, but even on mobile, the reddit website is fast. It may be janky at times, but navigating between comments on stories is under a second, loading more comments is, well, not fast, but quick.
Reddit is an example that clearly shows that the user experience of "old-style" code where interactions are primarily with the server beats out SPA.
old.reddit.com is clearly superior in pretty much every way save some pretty old CSS styling (which could easily be fixed without changing the underlying technology). The rewrite still feels buggy and slow, and the added interactivity doesn't really make a meaningful difference.
The old reddit user interface was/is remarkably good. Threaded, collapsible discussions with markdown for comments in a non-distracting (i.e. sparse) layout.
(The new reddit redesign is a resource hogging abomination riddled with needless SPA bullshit, but the old reddit design was pretty clean and minimal and yet an SPA.)
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