I think people have even go so far as to make browser extensions to automatically rewrite "reddit.com" to "old.reddit.com".
The redesign looks... well, I don't even know where to start, but it's pretty clear that users aren't the focus and they've sold out completely to corporate interests.
I'd actually be OK with some of this if they were forthright and honest about this shift in focus, but they're trying to say that the new design is 'better', etc. That's nonsense and lies.
EDIT: Oh, yeah, just remembered: IIRC the failure to link properly to 'old.reddit.com' on links that Reddit have full control over was registered as a 'bug' instead of an obvious way to drive traffic to the redesign.
EDIT#2: This is also what drove people to write browser extensions. The value of reddit has always been in the communities, not the design (or whatever).
On desktop I just use "Old Reddit Redirect" extension :)
But yup, I wholly agree with your point. The redesign feels like a mix of product managers trying to get promoted + boosting "engagement" numbers at the expense of all else.
Or perhaps we are the odd ones out - I'm sure there's been a huge growth in new users Reddit since the redesign and I doubt that new users are hankering for a different experience now that they're used to it.
The new design is godawful and unusable, especially without JavaScript. Switching to old.reddit.com is a breath of fresh air. The juxtaposition seems like an ideal case study in how bad modern web design is. I swear it's almost like web designers are trying to make things worse.
I mean, a sizable enough number of us continue to use old.reddit.com that it seems like they realize they can't force us onto the new design and are relegated to maintaining the old one for essentially forever... which to me says something incredible about just how badly their design failed.
There's a simple browser extension to redirect to old.reddit.com. But I agree that if they ever remove that, I'll leave the site. The redesign is comically worse.
Reddit seems destined to follow in Digg's footsteps. The negative feedback on the reddit redesign and the reddit app has been building for years, and they continue to push it. The motivation is puzzling. Are executives knowingly pushing the need for advertising at the expense of users? Do Product managers have too much free time?
For anyone else annoying by the reddit redesign, you can use the Redirector chrome extension to fix it w/the following...
redirect: https://www.reddit.com(.*)
to: https://old.reddit.com$1
Definitely, I hate the redesign and use old.reddit.com when I do visit, but what their ops team does on the backend to scale the site seems tangential to that.
It is the worst redesign I've ever seen on a major website like this for a number of reasons. It's needlessly heavy on resources, it's slow, it's difficult to navigate, it's filled to the brim with ads, it's uninspired and takes away all of the charm of the old design in favor of making Reddit look like a more generic social media, it doesn't work with the wayback machine, and that's just scratching the surface.
It's such a awful design. I've explicitly opted out of the new design on my account, and I use old.reddit.com whenever I'm not signed in.
Reddit's nagging has been very user-hostile for a while now, especially on mobile.
Dark patterns like the big red button saying "CONTINUE" that opens the App Store, instead of letting you continue on the website.
The "redesign" is a buggy waste of screen space which loads noticeably slower and also, I think, prevents subreddits from having rich sidebars or custom themes, hindering the original promise of serving unique sub-communities.
I always use "old.reddit.com" to force the "classic" site but it still keeps jumping back to the redesign in some places like certain user profiles.
This frontend assault combined with the deplorable meatspace behavior like the Reddit admin(s) secretly editing user comments [0], threatening better apps for "stealing" their icon [1], among other scumminess [2], I think it's nigh approaching its Digg Moment.
If reddit ever dropped the old.reddit option, that would be the last time I ever use the site. They must know the new (several years old now, I suppose) layout is awful. I can't understand the rational. Maybe it cost a fortune to build and it's sunk-cost fallacy thing.
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.
I'm an avid reddit user but I completely agree with you. The redesign is outright horrible to the point that if they stop allowing the old design (old.reddit.com) sometime in the future and force me on the new design I will most likely just stop using reddit.
I haven't been using old.reddit.com for years because I'm resistant to change. I've been using it because the new reddit design has sucked for as long as it's existed.
I use the "Old Reddit Redirect" Chrome extension to automatically switch to old.reddit.com. It's kind of unbelievable how much worse the new site layout is by almost any metric (usability, performance, etc.). https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...
12% of users are going out of their way to go to the old.reddit.com domain.
I myself use a chrome extension to take care of switching but I do wonder what this means giving how many millions of users prefer the old site design.
The redesign looks... well, I don't even know where to start, but it's pretty clear that users aren't the focus and they've sold out completely to corporate interests.
I'd actually be OK with some of this if they were forthright and honest about this shift in focus, but they're trying to say that the new design is 'better', etc. That's nonsense and lies.
EDIT: Oh, yeah, just remembered: IIRC the failure to link properly to 'old.reddit.com' on links that Reddit have full control over was registered as a 'bug' instead of an obvious way to drive traffic to the redesign.
EDIT#2: This is also what drove people to write browser extensions. The value of reddit has always been in the communities, not the design (or whatever).
reply