Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 192 posts

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

#101

Post by tgb »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #71
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…

I have definitely noticed that YouTube is one of the few sites that causes my desktop to struggle when loading the page. Gmail is oddly heavy in this regard too. I worry that google might not be paying enough attention to load times or resource utilization.

So this is veering off-topic: I remember but cannot for the life of me find a blog post from Google about either the number of bytes in their front page or the number of words on the front page. Apparently there was some guy who would email them just a number "23" or whatever it was that gave the number of bytes/words on google.com every time they updated it. After being puzzled by these emails for a while they figured out what he was hinting at when he sent one that was like "58, getting a bit heavy aren't we?". And that was a lesson about keeping front pages simple - something that was and largely still is unique about Google.

Ironic.

But why can't I find this blog post? I just spent much longer than I ought to have searching for it and can't find a trace of it. You have to wade through a lot of SEO stuff that comes up with the search results, but restricting to older content helps (I think this happened at latest 2010 probably several years before that). The old google blog I think was google.blogspot.com or googleblog.blogspot.com but you need to search it on the wayback machine and I can't see a way to do that except by hand.

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

#103

Post by sorenjan »

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…

I don't understand why modern websites need to be these javascript heavy single page apps. New Youtube is super slow, and if you scroll down to the comments under a video and then go back to your subscriptions you end up scrolled down and see old videos.

New Reddit is awful, the only reason I can see for them to make it is busy work for all the new developers they hired after getting a large investment. Again, there's absolutely no need for a single page app, the whole point of browsing Reddit is to load seperate documents, something the web has been able to do since its inception. And that's not even mentioning the actual design, which is like every new design with less contrast and more wasted space on my desktop monitor.

Unfortunately there's no going back, the sunk cost is to high and they think they really are making things better the new way. The linked post make some errors in the calculations, but I would be surprised if the overall point is wrong.

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

#104

Post by flukus »

sitkack wrote: post #88
vokep wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of that justifies it. They wasted their time, so now everyone has to pay? I don't think so. If the old design wasn't easy to go back to, I'd only view reddit through API based things (app) at this point.

If they need the eyeballs focused on forced content, expect the API to die soon.

This will be the day I delete my reddit account. Most of my redditing is done on my phone and the API is the only thing making that usable at all.

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

#105

Post by ddingus »

I hate it.

And I also hate to say that a little bit of spit and polish on old-school Reddit, probably would have done a lot more good, been a lot more lean, and more useful.

I would trade all this crap for a little bit better markup language for a few more options in posts and comments.

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

#106

Post by stcredzero »

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…

The new version of both sites is slow, sluggish and provides me with no benefit.

It's about par for the course when a new dev group and/or manager comes in and wants to make their mark. I generally find this sort of thing facepalm-inspiring-not-so-smart. For one thing, there are so many examples out there of how this can go wrong. (see sorenjan's cousin comment) For a mature long-running production system, the right thing to do is to bias for continuity and incremental change. This isn't to say that redesign and progress are forbidden. There are usually benefits to be had. I've been a part of teams that have implemented radical changes to underlying frameworks. (Re-hosting from an object database to Oracle, for example.) My experience is that there is almost always a way to do this incrementally, but that ego and limited imaginations get in the way of doing the right thing.

When you're out to re-architect or re-host a long standing production system, there are two things you should absolutely do, absolutely:

1) Avoid disrupting the current users

2) Preserve the hard won domain, operational, and optimization knowledge of the previous development team

The goodwill of the users and the good reputation of your company/app were won with great effort and expense. They are extremely valuable. Degrade those at your peril! Likewise, the hard won domain, operational, and optimization knowledge of the previous development team were won with great effort and expense and are extremely valuable. Degrade/disregard those at your peril!

I think I would like to ask new managers who are going to "make their mark" by re-implementing something if they can absolutely guarantee 1) and if they can quantify 2) and back themselves up empirically. Then, when the project is done, ask how good they were at answering those questions.

Just the 2 cents of a hoary old veteran.

(A couple of hints, for those wondering how: Automated test suites and syntactic code rewriting are your friend!)

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

#107

Post by AckSyn »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #71
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…

I have definitely noticed that YouTube is one of the few sites that causes my desktop to struggle when loading the page. Gmail is oddly heavy in this regard too. I worry that google might not be paying enough attention to load times or resource utilization.

I've taken to only playing youtube videos in VLC or outright downloading them with youtube-dl

Their web interface went to crap with the redesign in the worst way.

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

#108

Post by Casseres »

dredmorbius wrote: post #97
pxlt wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This Chrome extension does it for you: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...

Not on Android ...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...

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

#110

Post by stcredzero »

huac wrote: post #91
deathanatos wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The new design hasn't worked . In particular, when browsing a subreddit, the first page or so of posts will load, but that's it. The "Next" button that used to take you to the next page is gone, which rather limits what you can view. I think its supposed to be infinite scrolling, but that simply hasn't worked, if that's what is supposed to happen. Make it work. Make it fast (or pretty). That order.

that's your adblocker preventing the infinite scroll from loading more items

Are you on the team? Was there a clamoring from the users for infinite scroll? Was there a study of how it would effect the typical user?
Post reply on HN