The funniest part is plenty of 3rd party apps had been doing an amazing job already. All reedit had to do was acquire one of them on the cheap or steal design cues from the ones that were most popular.
Instead they created this monstrosity which till date lags behind many 3rd party apps in features and fluidity.
> old.reddit
RES is the only way to use reddit, and they can pry it from my cold dead hands.
> I started to think they purposely make the experience worse to push user to their mobile app.
It’s been awful for so long that this has to be the reason. The constant nags to use the app support this.
I don’t use reddit much these days but I noticed subreddits are now locked behind logins?! Since I long ago deleted my account I now switch to old.reddit.com to view. Desktop view on mobile but subreddits are “unlocked”.
>>but the vast majority of the userbase is on the mobile website or app.
proving that the world truly is insane, I use old reddit on mobile as well as new reddit is more or less unusable on a mobile browser they hard force you in to their terrible app. If I need a mobile app I use a 3rd party app as the offical app is TERRIBLE
When/if they kill old.reddit is the say I stop using reddit, I would say my usage is already down 80% since the launch of reddit, as I pretty much only use the technical subreddits for news now, staying away for all other area;s of reddit.
>They also decided to do presumably costly ui rollouts that a lot of their most veteran community members opt out of.
The original UI works well, and it's great they kept old.reddit. Everything since has been horrible, along with the dark patterns pushing their mobile client. It reminds me of all the craigslist UI redesign posts on hacker news many years ago that completely missed the point.
Reddit has definite value (really important as Google quality declines IMO), and I'd love if they could find a way to sustain without destroying the community... but I'm not optimistic.
> They have been hostile to old reddit for a long time - many new features don't work with it like polls, free awards, inline pics, avatar, and so on.
I didn't want or appreciate some of those features anyway. Old Reddit with RES pretty much feels feature-complete to me. In some sense it's also refreshing to use a popular social media UI that isn't going through constant redesigns and tweaks.
> Is it just accessibility and moderation tools or something else?
The information density and UX are terrible in new Reddit and the official app (in my opinion of course). I find them completely and utterly unusable. I just tried opening new Reddit and going to /r/all. I can see exactly 2 posts on my screen, compared to 14 on old Reddit. I tried clicking on something, it opens up in a narrow popover. Middle clicking to open it in a proper tab takes a lot longer than in old Reddit.
When it comes to the app, there are similar issues, it's just _so_ much slower than using RiF, the information density is abysmal, comment chains are painful for me to read and it uses _significantly_ more data than RiF. I'm guessing it preloads lots of assets in the background or something.
When they kill off 3rd party access, I will stop using it on my mobile. I already feel like I waste too much time on Reddit, ruining the experience will make it much easier to quit. If they ever kill old Reddit, then I guess I'll finally quit Reddit for good or make an extension that makes it look and work like the old version.
>Hacker News has like 1% of the number of users that Reddit has, and it's already better.
Exactly. I went on reddit for years until the redesign. Now I can’t stand that site. The reddit redesign is so astoundingly bad and nonfunctional it shocks me to this day.
>For the "front page of the internet" it sure looks like a bad Twitter clone.
The worst part is that they try to enforce it. Back when I used Reddit, I set old reddit as default in my settings, but Reddit would randomly switch me to the new interface in an attempt to wean me off the superior interface. Makes you wonder how profitable Reddit could be if they didn't spend so much money ruining their UI.
> Reddit’s redesign is so unusably sluggish that I don’t stay on it long enough to run into any other problems
I agree with everything you said, but allow me to reiterate this point. Reddit's redesign is the most hostile thing I've ever seen. It explicitly blocks me from reading the discussion. What's the point, then? It's absolutely unusable. If they ever remove old.reddit.com, I'm not following a Reddit link ever again.
> My Reddit usage has basically plummeted to 0 at this point because of their pushing me towards an app.
My phone can't even work all that well with apps like that or Chrome browser/WebView for that matter. I use Opera on my phone because they allow me to have 50-100 tabs open with no issues, but maybe that's only passable because I never do anything important like banking on the phone anyways.
So, whenever I'm coerced into installing an app for actually browsing content, reading comments, looking at media (vs something more one-off like ordering food/a ride), I just look the other way. Ergo, I never use Reddit on my phone without spoofing the user agent or whatever the "request desktop site" option in Opera does, but then the UI becomes unusable on a phone.
Sadly, cases like mine don't show up in any metrics, nor do people care about that use case, so it's likely that this will keep being done a lot.
> Anything telling me to install an app whose mobile experience is fine already is very fishy to me. I'm looking at you, Reddit.
So much this.
To add insult to injury, reddit intentionally degrades the site's experience in mobile devices with tons of dark patterns pushing users to their shady mobile app.
>Reddit seems like an example of a successful acquisition
For whom? For people who uses it since the beginning it isn’t even the same place anymore. It’s UX (and I’m not talking about the aesthetics of the new design, I don’t mind those) is legitimately the worst I’ve ever experienced and the quality of discussion has went down the drain. Even if you find a tightly controlled community dedicated to a topic you’re interested in it’s either one extreme to another or doesn’t last long.
That doesn’t even get into the constant rolling out for Facebook-tier features that no Reddit user ever wanted. I stopped using Reddit last month after ~12 years and I’ve since realized I was getting nothing but regurgitated memes and anger from a dozen people replying to my every comment who aren’t even addressing what I was saying just arguing for arguments sake.
It’s basically what Facebook groups were in 2016 at this point. I’m sure it’s a great acquisition for those who bought it, but for the old power users it’s anything but.
The funniest part is plenty of 3rd party apps had been doing an amazing job already. All reedit had to do was acquire one of them on the cheap or steal design cues from the ones that were most popular.
Instead they created this monstrosity which till date lags behind many 3rd party apps in features and fluidity.
> old.reddit
RES is the only way to use reddit, and they can pry it from my cold dead hands.
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