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Ask HN: Is “new” Reddit completely unusable for anyone else?

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Re: Ask HN: Is “new” Reddit completely unusable for anyone else?

#161

Post by acoard »

regecks wrote: post #107
jedmeyers wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why aren’t you using old.reddit when you are signed in?

You can, but the problem with using old.reddit.com is that clicking on reddit.com links (e.g. from reddit comments) will take you back to the new design. With the opt-out, you get the old design no matter what.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...

Redirect extension to always get old.reddit.com. I've been using it for years without issue. It's one of the very few extensions I have that is enabled in Incognito mode.

But I still feel your pain whenever I'm on another computer without the extension and forget to type the old url.

Re: Ask HN: Is “new” Reddit completely unusable for anyone else?

#162

Post by acoard »

zzzcpan wrote: post #74
imustbeevil wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 al…

> A/B testing Despite popular belief, A/B testing doesn't actually work for usability testing. So successful A/B testing usually means bad usability practices.

Can you provide some evidence or reading on this? I understand A/B typically measures _conversions_, but couldn't you have quantifiable proxies for usability? For example, things like form abandonment and time-to-complete a task.

To be clear, I'm not contesting the value of usability tests involving watching actual users. Our UX team does this with every release and it's invaluable. But I would think data from A/B testing would only help inform our decisions.

Re: Ask HN: Is “new” Reddit completely unusable for anyone else?

#163

Post by acoard »

Accujack wrote: post #155
pjc50 wrote: post #37

Yes, but I eventually realised what it's optimised for: image posts. For some insane reason they're competing with Instagram and Reddit's co-evolved site Imgur, on which people read comments much less often. They also really, really want you to use the mobile app, which presumably means it does something privacy-violating.

>For some insane reason they're competing with Instagram and Reddit's management is driving the site as a business, which means doing things for the purpose of maximizing revenue according to the perception of what's "successful". Facebook is evil but successful at it, Instagram is (was) successful. The path they see to making money is to try to become the next XXXX, where XXXX is the "successful" social media site o…

>Once there's another option, Reddit is going to rather quickly become a ghost town.

One can hope, but if Reddit really is taking their lessons from FB then they'll buy up the nascent competition and strangle the market.

Re: Ask HN: Is “new” Reddit completely unusable for anyone else?

#164

Post by jccalhoun »

aitchnyu wrote: post #130
jccalhoun wrote: post #27

The thing I hate the most about the redesign is that now everything takes an extra click. On old reddit the subreddits were right there on the left. Now they are in a drop down menu. If I wanted to switch between new and top stories it used to be right there at the top. Now it is hidden behind a drop down menu.

I'm feeling gaslit into a world where PCs which can show everything on a single screen abuse whitespace, hide info and require lots of extra taps.

I have joked that maybe Reddit is a shill for Big Mouse because they are making us click so much we will wear out our mice and have to buy new ones more quickly.

Re: Ask HN: Is “new” Reddit completely unusable for anyone else?

#165

Post by MH15 »

Retroity wrote: post #104

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…

My 2018 Macbook Pro i5 can't handle it. I get the "this site is draining your battery" warning far to often. I can't watch Netflix and browse Reddit at the same time anymore

Re: Ask HN: Is “new” Reddit completely unusable for anyone else?

#168

Post by everdrive »

CamelCaseName wrote: post #62
pjc50 wrote: post #37

Yes, but I eventually realised what it's optimised for: image posts. For some insane reason they're competing with Instagram and Reddit's co-evolved site Imgur, on which people read comments much less often. They also really, really want you to use the mobile app, which presumably means it does something privacy-violating.

I think the push to mobile is to increase lock in and engagement, not to gather sensitive data. From my in person discussion with some of the admins, they seemed to genuinely care about privacy. With regard to the layout, the head of the redesign really emphasized that user choice was important, and that they will never deprecate old.reddit (in fact, they still have .compact from their very early days!). In a way, it…

I think website admins and operators live in a bit of a different world. They may earnestly care about privacy, but I'd bet they're defining privacy differently than users who are concerned about privacy. Further, engagement & lock-in is often bad for users, whether or not privacy is violated.

Re: Ask HN: Is “new” Reddit completely unusable for anyone else?

#169

Post by jumbopapa »

lasagnaphil wrote: post #58
jumbopapa wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're are so many extensions that made old reddit far superior. Namely Reddit Enhancement Suit and Imagus (which is good for the large thumbnails you like)

It seems that Imagus is not maintained anymore... but at least Reddit Enhancement Suite gives you a button to view images inline. Thanks for the suggestion!

I think Imagus is maintained still... Last update says 5 hours ago.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/imagus/

Re: Ask HN: Is “new” Reddit completely unusable for anyone else?

#170

Post by parliament32 »

old.reddit.com is the only way I browse reddit. That original simplistic design was the whole reason I started with Reddit in the first place -- the new design is just really bad, for many reasons. If they ever enforce the new design I'll probably end up staying away from the site alltogether.

Some stats, testing from pingdom's site analyzer:

old reddit homepage: 80 assets, 1.1mb

new reddit homepage: 283 assets, 5.1mb

That's a serious regression. I'm not interested in tiled youtube-style presentation -- information density was always the nice thing about Reddit, and it seems like they're moving away from objective.

If you're on Firefox use Old Reddit Redirect to auto-redirect all Reddit links to old: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...

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