Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

61–70 of 189 posts

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

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I swear it's almost like web designers are trying to make things worse. They are, because the business wants you to download the app.

Then why provide old.reddit.com?

If I had to guess, they're keenly aware of the demise of digg and don't want to follow in their footsteps. They're probably tracking what percentage of their users are still using the old design.

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

#62
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 makes sense. "Hardcore" users will use RES / old.reddit, while casuals will be pushed to new.reddit, which may be a better fit for them.

My takeaway from talking to them was that, even if I don't believe in their product vision (I hate the app and redesign passionately), I do believe in their team to do the right thing. I hope my trust is well placed.

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

#63
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me too, but you must know that they will turn it off at some point.

Anyone know if they have public metrics on www vs old visitor traffic?

I'm not sure about public data, but here is what I'm seeing from one of my larger subreddits: https://i.imgur.com/YPUvYiu.png

Looks like new is gaining on old.

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

#64
post #14

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.

It’s not the designers’ fault, it’s developers seeing everything as a technology problem rather than a user needs problem (and I’m speaking as a developer). The best solution for any given problem is usually the simplest, at least until you find that you specifically need extra complexity to solve a user need. Unfortunately modern client-side development is fixed in a mindset of developer efficiency above all, which…

does “simplest” here mean simplest for the user to use, or simplest for the dev to build? these are sometimes completely opposed to one another.

an example: filtering a large table of data on multiple fields in an otherwise fully-server-rendered project. doing it server-side is likely mostly sql queries using existing stack and re-rendering the page after some “submit” click.

doing it client side means the data can react immediately to selections and never require a full page refresh (which might be costly, depending on the rest of the page). the dev downside is that this might require an enormous amount of new stack and complexity.

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

#65
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

old.reddit.com is okay, but it now requires the temp whitelisting of 2 or sometimes 3 javascript domains. Not just reddit.com like was required in the past. Given that, it's just easier to use the ceddit.com javascript interface to pull from the API and get the actual old reddit experience. But even worse than the redesign is the new corporate culture of censorship. I left after they banned r/gundeals. They're boilin…

I hadn't seen notabug before. Visited the site and this was the current top post (censored by me): "Should I complain about a nXXXXr cashier braying like a donkey?" That's not a great first impression... As a side note, anyone know how to do multiple asterisks on HN? Backslash doesn't seem to work as an escape character.

Voting is PoW-based on notabug, so users can upvote themselves multiple times (spending their CPU time). It also means top posts are not really most popular posts, just that the OP was stubborn enough to upvote himself into positive score when downvoted a couple of times.

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

#68
post #14

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 swear it's almost like web designers are trying to make things worse. They are, because the business wants you to download the app.

Why would they expect me to download an app on my laptop?

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

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not the designers’ fault, it’s developers seeing everything as a technology problem rather than a user needs problem (and I’m speaking as a developer). The best solution for any given problem is usually the simplest, at least until you find that you specifically need extra complexity to solve a user need. Unfortunately modern client-side development is fixed in a mindset of developer efficiency above all, which…

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…

This time, though, Reddit doesn't have a suitable competitor and they know it. Power users will whine, but they don't have anywhere else to run.

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

#70
post #14

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.

Thanks for the old.reddit.com mention. That made my life just plain better.
Post reply on HN