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Reddit's redesign increases power usage of user's devices

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Re: Reddit's redesign increases power usage of user's devices

#51

Post by jacobparker »

Shameless plug:

Here's a minimal UI for browsing r/politics/rising specifically:

* https://www.f6oclock.com

* https://www.f6oclock.com/#ninja if you want something more discrete

It updates live and throttles way back when the page doesn't have focus.) The default links go through https://outline.com which is a reader-mode like service (sadly it requires JS - I've got a prototype of a non-JS/server-side rendered version here: https://www.f6oclock.com/readability-demo/test.out.html )

(viewing the stories from r/politics is a guilty pleasure of mine that I'm a little bit ashamed of.)

---

The reddit feed-reading APIs are very easy to use. Just add .json in front of a URL and make sure to send a User-Agent. You can whip up bespoke UIs to suit your particular needs--e.g. I have some things that I send through IRC.

Re: Reddit's redesign increases power usage of user's devices

#52

Post by [deleted] »

firebacon wrote: post #38
gpm wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, he just dropped the per month part. 68 GJ / month, is 68 * 1 billion watts / 30 * 24 * 60 * 60 seconds, is 26 kw

EDIT: Doh! It appears I missed what blutfink was trying to say and that their changing of quantities from energy to power was intentional. Sorry for the confusion.

[deleted]

Re: Reddit's redesign increases power usage of user's devices

#53

Post by jimrandomh »

lucb1e wrote: post #46
yongjik wrote: post #28

My favorite comment from TFA: > None of your math makes sense. All your measurements have only the consumption at one exact instant, not over time, the total energy used is the integral of the energy flow over time. You'd need to measure the consumption over time, or total discharge of the battery, to actually have the energy used to load a page (in J, not W, you can't measure the energy required to load a page in W)…

Everyone's dodging the point of the post (versus the exact numbers and terminology). As I said on reddit as well: > The issue is that the redesign uses more power across millions of devices, and that has an impact. > I might have gotten the exact number wrong, but the exact number doesn't matter that much. It's about it being a significant difference.

Simply put, you don't have the expertise required to measure this. It's not just that you didn't get the exact number, it's that you haven't got a usable measurement at all. For all we know from your tests, the new site uses less power than the old one.

Re: Reddit's redesign increases power usage of user's devices

#54

Post by nilkn »

darkstar999 wrote: post #47
nilkn wrote: post #42

Between... * feeling completely overrun with sensationalized politics; * the new design feeling sluggish and painful even on my maxed out late-2016 MBP; * the general community feeling more hostile and downvote-heavy than ever before; * and the content being increasingly image-, video-, and meme-focused... reddit has really lost a lot of its magic and appeal to me. I do still use it, but I find it almost intolerable…

Most of your criticisms are solved by unsubscribing from those bad subreddits like politics, funny, and all the picture/meme ones.

I don't disagree -- I wrote as much in my own post. The site is okay once I've unsubscribed from virtually everything it throws at you by default and instead subscribed to a heavily curated selection of subreddits that I found over the years.

Even then, though, subreddits that used to be great have often degraded significantly -- in many cases simply by getting too big. Perhaps that's the primary difficulty. Even some "niche" subreddits often now have 100k+ users. The site is just so much bigger and more active than it was when I first started using it that it's very difficult to capture what it used to feel like, even with extensive subreddit curation and filtering.

Re: Reddit's redesign increases power usage of user's devices

#55

Post by majos »

nostrademons wrote: post #15
smaili wrote: post #8

Given the old site was built off of older libraries/frameworks and the newer site is presumably built using more modern ones, wouldn't this be an indicator of latest tools being heavier and/or more bloated?

The old site also did mostly server-side rendering while the new site is largely client-side rendering of structured data. One of those isn't necessarily heavier-weight than the other, but it does shift the energy usage from the company's data-center to the user's computer or mobile device. Server-side rendering also opens up more opportunities for cross-user caching, which AIUI Reddit used extensively.

Is shifting costs from servers to clients such a massive savings that it could outweigh annoyed users? I genuinely have no feel for the relevant amounts here.

Re: Reddit's redesign increases power usage of user's devices

#56

Post by mannykannot »

firebacon wrote: post #38
gpm wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, he just dropped the per month part. 68 GJ / month, is 68 * 1 billion watts / 30 * 24 * 60 * 60 seconds, is 26 kw

EDIT: Doh! It appears I missed what blutfink was trying to say and that their changing of quantities from energy to power was intentional. Sorry for the confusion.

Whenever you have an energy use figure over a specific period, it is perfectly legitimate to calculate the average power, just as if it took you 30 min to reach your grandmother's house, which is 60 miles away, then you averaged 120 mph. In this case, an average power is an appropriate measure, as we do not know how long this page will be in service.

Re: Reddit's redesign increases power usage of user's devices

#57

Post by [deleted] »

mannykannot wrote: post #56
firebacon wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EDIT: Doh! It appears I missed what blutfink was trying to say and that their changing of quantities from energy to power was intentional. Sorry for the confusion.

Whenever you have an energy use figure over a specific period, it is perfectly legitimate to calculate the average power, just as if it took you 30 min to reach your grandmother's house, which is 60 miles away, then you averaged 120 mph. In this case, an average power is an appropriate measure, as we do not know how long this page will be in service.

[deleted]

Re: Reddit's redesign increases power usage of user's devices

#58

Post by meesterdude »

frfl wrote: post #22

Anyone from reddit's dev team reading this? Or youtube's dev team, because my question applies to both. The previous design was great. The new version of both sites is slow, sluggish and provides me with no benefit. Why was the change implemented? The previous design wasn't broken! How's the user feedback? A/B testing really indicated to you this was a good choice?! If you have any insight -- I'm sure this was a deci…

> Why was the change implemented?

There's no easy back peddling from a year of development. It may be crap, but they put so much time & effort into it they can't turn back now - even if a lot of users hate it. They're also working more on becoming an Advertising platform, and this redesign allows for more flexibility there, like linkedin's auto-play videos when scrolling into view.

Re: Reddit's redesign increases power usage of user's devices

#59

Post by graeme »

cool_shit wrote: post #43

I deleted my Reddit account which kept the old design on it. Now when I occasionally browse Reddit as a non-user, it looks like an awful implementation of material design with tons of wasted space. For example, I see about 1.5 cards per page on my 13" laptop. Who designed this? It is horrid and nearly unusable. Not that I'll be using Reddit that much anymore, but it's like they deprecated the desktop version for mobi…

Interesting. New users can't access the old design at all?

Re: Reddit's redesign increases power usage of user's devices

#60

Post by meesterdude »

rland wrote: post #14

I do not understand what extra functionality is gained by making the site so much slower. I go on Reddit primarily for text content. Threaded comments and HTML tags. WHY does it NEED to be so SLOW? For this degree of sluggishness, it feels like you could build a site that fulfills all of reddit's functionality—and have a crypto miner running in the background.

It's not about the users. The users have become the product - their new user base is advertisers.
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