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

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 189 posts

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

#91

Post by archagon »

superkuh wrote: post #56
mayniac wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No doubt. The people at notabug, mostly, are the most abrasive assholes that have been pushed out from other sites. They're not good people. You gotta be the change you want to see. I often post about technology and science there. But I'm simply not enough to make the frontpage always tolerable to people that can't ignore assholes. Sometimes there are strings of racist posts but that's still better than corporate cen…

I like this kind of decentralized social tech a lot. But, IMO, a social network built like this just won’t work if the default instance you see is a hive of scum and villainy. It tells you exactly which way the leadership leans, and I doubt many people want to participate in a community mired in far-right “politics”. For there to be any adoption, the front page of these kinds of services needs to be friendly and tightly moderated, à la Mastodon. No amount of being the change you want to see will help if the roots are rotten.

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

#92

Post by QuickToBan »

chronogram wrote: post #88
amelius wrote: post #50

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 Yes, but in a big company developers don't define the product, (product) designers do.

“Big company” developers: do you call yourself “Unit 3829” or “autonomous drone 283”? Because seeing comments like above so frequently, you’d think developers are sacred and never do wrong but have no free will or input.

> you’d think developers are sacred and never do wrong but have no free will or input.

Developers who express their free will strongly risk getting fired. It pays to keep their mouth shut and let the firm torpedo itself.

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

#93

Post by wott »

basch wrote: post #86
robin_reala wrote: post #21

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…

responsive sites and mobile apps have led to the mobilification of desktop sites. there is absolutely a branding/marketing/design trend pushing shiny over usability. ive noticed it in banks in the last 5 years, where they have replaced dense powerful beautiful text based interfaces with giant versions of their mobile apps. huge buttons, minimal screen density. https://m.signalvnoise.com/why-i-love-ugly-messy-interfac…

> in banks in the last 5 years, where they have replaced dense powerful beautiful text based interfaces with giant versions of their mobile apps. huge buttons, minimal screen density.

You forgot to mention that they load progressively and you never know when the page layout is done and stable, so when you think you click on something, your click ends up being received by a button/link which popped up in between, and there we go, launching a new page or performing an unwanted action, and then going back to the previous page (well, you've got to find the way to go back, because of course it may or may not obey the standard "previous page" command, or it may or may not be a one-page app with a specific way of going back [a cross, a link, a button, ...] placed in a specific place [upper right corner, upper left, bottom row, bottom left corner, bottom right, in a window, in the full page space, etc.]), and waiting for the original page to reload completely one more time...

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

#94

Post by amelius »

QuickToBan wrote: post #92
chronogram wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Big company” developers: do you call yourself “Unit 3829” or “autonomous drone 283”? Because seeing comments like above so frequently, you’d think developers are sacred and never do wrong but have no free will or input.

> you’d think developers are sacred and never do wrong but have no free will or input. Developers who express their free will strongly risk getting fired. It pays to keep their mouth shut and let the firm torpedo itself.

Why else do you think the industry favors young developers over seasoned ones?

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

#95

Post by majewsky »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #85
50656E6973 wrote: post #47

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.

This kind of clueless, smug cynicism is one of the worst parts of internet comments. It's why basically every comment section on Reddit is a vapid circlejerk.

Would you like HN to protect you from the truth?

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

#96

Post by dorchadas »

wazoox wrote: post #84
hrunt wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the first HN comment I have seen that actually describes what about the new design makes it unusable. Most that I have seen are "The new design is unusable! Everyone agrees with me! I use old.reddit.com and do not use the new design!" A few comments point out that nothing loads without errors, but that's not a design problem -- that's an implementation problem. With that said, I am throwing my hat into the "I…

I just checked, opened https://old.reddit.com/r/france : less than 2 seconds, the page is fully loaded. Tried https://www.reddit.com/r/france/ : more than 4 seconds before the page is loaded. Loading : https://old.reddit.com/r/france/comments/ccs5tx/emmanuel_mac... is about 2 seconds. Loading: https://www.reddit.com/r/france/comments/ccs5tx/emmanuel_mac... about 6 seconds. The new reddit looks therefore 2 to 3 times…

Not to mention, with RES on old reddit you can turn the Javascript for specific subs off. Not sure if that's even possible on New, which I hate. The JS is often just overcrowded and too much, so I'd prefer it off.

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

#97

Post by Data_Junkie »

hlandau wrote: 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.

The amount that the readability of the original Reddit design led to the popularity of Reddit seems to have been completely lost. There were aggregators before Reddit, and they lost out because of dumb design, and now Reddit seeks to follow in their footsteps. Absurd and foolish. No adults in the room.

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

#98

Post by segmondy »

I didn't think about it till now, but I went from checking reddit once a day before the design to never now. I don't go to reddit anymore, unless I see a link from another site. The only thing that did change was the new site. I had my own custom list of subreddits that I frequented and that's not even enough to get me to keep using it.

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

#99

Post by sizzle »

amelius wrote: post #50
robin_reala wrote: post #21

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…

> It’s not the designers’ fault, it’s developers seeing everything as a technology problem rather than a user needs problem Yes, but in a big company developers don't define the product, (product) designers do.

Correct, but developers are directly responsible for the performance and stability of the platform. I highly doubt the designers specified in their designs that the website should constantly display: "Sorry, we couldn't load posts for this page" as mentioned in the OP.

If we are talking about poor interaction design patterns and unintuitive conceptual models with no prior usability testing/UX research then designers/researchers deserve the blame (assuming devs didn't botch the implementation and create usability problems), but this isn't the issue at hand... platform stability is and that's the job of the developers who code it.

Post reply on HN