Even as a tech problem, the new UI puts less information on the screen and makes it harder to interact with. It's worse by every observable metric, and I can't imagine they have successful A/B testing, because every other site on the internet that does a redesign (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube) commits to it, and Reddit has allowed users to stay on old reddit for like a year now.
The weirdest thing is that successful alternative reddit UIs exist, so all they would have to do is incorporate the features people are using alternative UIs for. They did virtually the opposite of that. This is exactly what Digg did, and the solution for Digg wasn't "allow people to use old Digg", it was "Everyone left and went to reddit".
Old Reddit was awful and I always used alternative UIs for it.
New Reddit’s design was a great improvement if it weren't for the fact that its developers were and still are absolutely clueless. That paired with a user-hostile management made Reddit even worse.
But the redesign itself was not the issue, it was the implementation.
I'm still baffled about the UI "improvement." It's comically bad. It's so busy and I can't find anything I want.
I have never, ever seen a site anywhere near as big as Reddit with such a bad redesign. It seems they could have hired one UX guy and one graphic guy... I could probably pay some people on Fiverr $100 total to create a better design for the entirety of Reddit.
The old design was boring and out of date, but it was everything I needed so I was fine with it.
But I'm mainly a mobile user so I don't really care.
the new UI is so uncomfortable to use, I don't like how bloated websites are becoming, but usually I can cope with it. Reddit's is just bad. It's buggy, it's inconsistent, and its resource-intensive.
The new design fundamentally feels worse to use. It feels slower for sure. I don't mind the cleaner aesthetics, but the animations, layout, and general feel of using the site makes me feel like I'm one one of those blogs that has the "dickbars" and other UI elements that feel more annoying than useful. The mobile site is frustrating as well (but using apps gets around this easily).
I've gone back to using the old.reddit.com for now, but who knows how long that will remain
I tried to use the new Reddit UI and it is factually less useful than the old one.
Two things that bother the most in changed UI, having less information in one screen (be it having to scroll to get the same information as the old UI or just less info than the old one) and adding useless clicks.
The new UI is worse compared to the old one. I agree completely, no idea why this change is being pushed as it worsens experience a lot. Similar to Reddit mobile website.
The new UX on the site is unusable. I don't use anything except old.reddit.com and if they ever try to get rid of that, I'll surely stop visiting the site altogether. You have to wonder how long they'll continue to maintain two different web frontends for the site, though.
With their redesign and a few other choices, Reddit has gone from one of the most beautiful places on the web to the second most hostile UX that I put up with.
I don't want to "GET NEW REDDIT" as I'm urged to in the top left of every page because I don't want a card-based layout. The whole reason I and so many others left Digg for Reddit to begin with was for a highly skimmable, information-dense site!
Similarly, I don't want to install a mobile app. The page worked fine on mobile when I got my first iPod Touch a decade ago. Why do I have to see a huge USE APP button in the nav bar and then lose another 20% of the page at the bottom to a See Reddit In section at the bottom that's also urging me to install a native app?
Infinite scroll actually slows down my browsing experience too, since it no longer loads as many entries at a time and I have to keep waiting for pagination.
It's literally 10x slower on all devices that I have, shows less content (particularly, long comment threads), and 100 other reasons they I'd sure hope you understood as a UX designer.
It's 2021, I don't want to see a "Loading..." icon like I'm on dial-up in the 90s.
I find it impossible to believe that at all. The new Reddit UI is essentially just a reskin. The Digg "redesign" was an entirely new concept that radically changed the purpose of the site. The two aren't comparable at all.
A difference is that Digg didn't keep the old design around. With Reddit you can simply use old.reddit and forget about the redesign while being in the same communities you were already (no need to wait for the entire community to move). Considering that Reddit already has two mobile interfaces (i.reddit.com - which i personally prefer due to it being very fast - and m.reddit.com) and two desktop interfaces, i doubt they'll drop old.reddit at any point.
It is a form of backwards compatibility on a UX level.
Honestly boggles my mind how unusable and slow the redesign is. But I don't think it matters anymore, seems like most Reddit users just use the app these days which is equally bad design wise but runs ok at least.
Information density, load times, speed of navigation, UX simplicity, effort required client-side...
TBH I struggle to see how the new interface could be considered better in any respect worth considering. The only good feature is, I believe, showing images by default, which you can achieve trivially with Reddit Enhancement Suite and would have not required a complete re-engineering on a SPA model.
There might well be server-side improvements that make it worth to Reddit, but from a user perspective the new UI was a straight UX downgrade; without old.reddit.com they would probably have become another Digg.
Maybe we’re just not the target audience for reddit anymore. I’ve spoken to spoken to zoomers who use reddit and their response is that the “new UI” is all they’ve used and they like it because everything is embedded in the same page and scrolls like their twitter/facebook/instagram feed.
The weirdest thing is that successful alternative reddit UIs exist, so all they would have to do is incorporate the features people are using alternative UIs for. They did virtually the opposite of that. This is exactly what Digg did, and the solution for Digg wasn't "allow people to use old Digg", it was "Everyone left and went to reddit".
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