> 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.
>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.
>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.
> The day old.reddit goes away is the day I stop using reddit, period.
Me too! I'll be super happy about it, though. Will break my reddit addiction and principal time sink once and for all. The new design is just so visually disgusting to me I get a palpably negative reaction to it. So cartoony and spaced out, so much less information, even the concise views make everything look like it was obviously designed for mobile and to be like instagram. It's gross. The whole reason I read reddit is for the good discussion and comments. Part of the reason I like HN and craigslist is they're simple and not a visual overload.
>I know that Reddit admins read HN so please please do not kill off old.reddit.com. The redesign is absolute garbage.
People have ben telling them this for years. They know and do not give a shit or at the very least they are powerless to do anything. The redesign is so bad I'll stop using reddit completely if they ever kill the old domain. Its almost like they intentionally tried to make the least functional website possible.
> - The new Reddit layout is borderline unusable. They will lose the rest of the core users when they disable the old. subdomain
While I agree with you here, there is also a point that it might attract new and younger users with its more 'modern' look.
Personally I like sites like HN or the old style wikipedia for its information density and out of the way design. But that might just be the age talking here. People that grow up now that mostly scroll by touching the screen with their fingers have other requirements and ideas about good UI.
>Unfortunately the way things are going I can see them getting rid of old.reddit.com
Well, if they do I'm out. The new is, and always has been, a steaming pile. I mean, people can't even confidently reply to who they think they are and often reply to the OP instead of a comment (I see this every single day in multiple threads) and as a mod I absolutely hate the way new Reddit is set up on the mod side.
New Reddit is also just flat out hideous in appearance. One of the reasons I've paid for Reddit for years is so I could strip custom themes to keep a plain experience not unlike HN. New Reddit is like 'Hey guys!!!!!! We discovered pastels, omg omg omg do you want to see pictures because here are a bunch of pictures loaded rather large that you didn't ask to see, pictures, yay pictures, omg omg pictures!"
>I suspect that's the real purpose of the redesign
I mean at this point I don't think there's any doubt whatsoever. Is there even a plausible other explanation?
I only lurk on reddit but it's rather comical how bad it's become. And not just the interface, the content too, /r/all is basically Facebook with a slightly younger audience and you have to get deeper and deeper into niche subreddits to find worthwhile discussions.
>It boggles my mind that a redesign could be implemented so poorly on such a popular site.
The irony of this statement is that Reddit _really_ became popular when Digg, who was the top link sharing site at the time, rolled out a new clunky ad-friendly redesign that caused a mass exodus of users to Reddit.
> What I want is a decentralized Reddit not under the control of advertising needs
Isn't this basically what Disqus was trying to do? There were a lot of these. I think moderation ended up being a huge problem that none solved.
> Reddit redesign has been bad for quality content
I've had the opposite experience. I only started browsing reddit after advertisers forced them to purge the most toxic users/content from the site. I think it's reddit's right to do either -- purge or not purge -- but I'm not interested in the old reddit.
The redesign is bad, but I'm not really a power user, so it's not a deal-breaker for me. You can always just use old.reddit.com anyway, right?
> Since the redesign Reddit has been putting a huge amount of effort into keeping people on their platform.
On something, anyway. Whenever Reddit tricks me into opting into the redesign I'm disoriented by just how much of reddit I cannot access. Following comment chains is a chore, getting all comments to a post impossible, instead every page is a duplicate of the front page with random barely related posts getting shoved in my face I already didn't care about the last three times reddit wanted me to.
Is the only metric developers are judged by the number of (intentional or even just accidental) top-post clicks per user?
> 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.
It's not just the horrible redesign. Reddit changed for the worse in every way possible. The quality of content is pathetic. All you get is just political ads pretending to be reddit content and reposts. But the biggest disappointment is their change in ethos. Reddit used to support free speech, now they support censorship just like most publishers and media companies.
When digg screwed up, we had reddit to fall back on. Now that reddit screwed up, there is nothing else to fall back on.
> 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.
> I see reddit less as a website and more as a collection of communities.
I’d say that Reddit used to be like that, but that they’ve been actively undermining that, because that’s not what they want to be any more. New Reddit (2018, I think) showed that they really don’t care about that aspect.
New Reddit forces post lists to be massive space-wasting and thumbnailed stuff. On my laptop’s screen, it tends to fit about one and a half items per screen, and is clearly oriented around doom scrolling: consuming content. When you view a post, you can see about six comments at once, mostly only top-level ones with occasional second-level ones. Actually, it seems they might have improved it recently: last time I tried it, I think you couldn’t get it to display beyond third-level, and it would only expand one level at a time, whereas now it seems to expand more at once (though it’s still way too aggressive in its collapsing) and go up to fourth-level before going deeper takes you to a single comment thread view with hopelessly bad history management that makes anything but always opening in new tabs just about completely broken. Anyway, they’ve severely hobbled the threaded comments system, because they’re optimising for massive subreddits where comments average vapid. Basically, anti-community.
By contrast, Old Reddit fit about a dozen items per screen, and required action to see an item at anything but a tiny size (70×70 or so), because it cared more about the comments thread. And it tends to fit about a dozen comments on my screen, and you can actually view nested comment threads meaningfully, and it all just works way better. Because it cared more about community.
Communities depend on a much better commenting system than New Reddit wants to let you have. HN and Old Reddit are both way better.
I’m fairly involved in r/rust. If Old Reddit ever disappears, so does my remaining use of Reddit, because I don’t think you can maintain a decent community without it.
Reddit are forsaking their link discovery and community discussion roots, and becoming just mass social media and memes, and they’re making major technical decisions which enforce this, even for the subreddits that want things the way they used to be.
> Also, Protip: in case anyone still doesn’t know, go to old.reddit.com for the previous, better interface. Who knows how long it will be kept alive though.
I'm using an extension to automatically redirect to the old one. When the old site is gone, I will probably leave Reddit, the redesign is too unusable for me.
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 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.
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