The new desktop design is unusable.
BUT the mobile experience of reddit (to scroll mindlessly) is super polished.
Ask HN: Is “new” Reddit completely unusable for anyone else?
131–140 of 189 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is “new” Reddit completely unusable for anyone else?
#132Earlier 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…
The A/B testing would only be concerned with ad click through and time on site, by those metrics the redesign could be a success, I have no idea.
Re: Ask HN: Is “new” Reddit completely unusable for anyone else?
#133It's completely unusable, but it's barely usable and outright annoying.
From to time I forget to switch to old.reddit.com
Re: Ask HN: Is “new” Reddit completely unusable for anyone else?
#134Unless I missed someone, every single comment (including myself) agrees: the new site is just unusable. It’s awful. IMHO it’s been broken since they released it and so it makes me think that they won’t fix it so people will switch to the app (or that’s what they might be thinking). Like many others I use the old design and if they get rid of it then I’ll just skip Reddit entirely.
A peek outside the echo chamber: my roommates and girlfriend use Reddit. They don't have anything bad to say about the UI nor are aware HNers hate it. They didn't even know it changed, they just don't seem to care. I use old.reddit.com out of habit, but don't really care when I land on the new UI. I just use it. People blow it way out of proportion. I like some of its features, like how it's now a modal over the infi…
By the nature of the normal distribution there would be some people who would love new design. That's fine but it doesn't mean it is good.
Re: Ask HN: Is “new” Reddit completely unusable for anyone else?
#135Paradoxically the old reddit on mobile is way more usable than the new one. The other sin is AMP. Every time I visit reddit from Google, I need to go through additional steps, to be able to vote, comment etc.
Re: Ask HN: Is “new” Reddit completely unusable for anyone else?
#136It 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…
Not to mention half the time you load a page it fails to retrieve any data.
Re: Ask HN: Is “new” Reddit completely unusable for anyone else?
#137It 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…
I just append '.compact" to the URL. Unrelated, but I also use m.facebook.com and the non JS version of gmail.
Oh god, JS version of gmail is unusable on firefox.
Takes minutes(!) to load(multiple powerful machines - i7 3770k, i5 6th gen and i7 7700, tested on fresh OS installs of both Win10 and Ubuntu) - it fakes loaded status usually by displaying your last viewed page - which is very annoying as it has no loading bar nor a throbber.
It is horrible when you are waiting for 2FA code in email, or when resetting a password.
Re: Ask HN: Is “new” Reddit completely unusable for anyone else?
#138The 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…
I would rather say that it is a management problem.
Focus shifted from building userbase and sustaining business to milking ad revenue.
Re: Ask HN: Is “new” Reddit completely unusable for anyone else?
#139>It boggles my mind that a redesign could be implemented so poorly on such a popular site. The irony of this statement is that Reddit _really_ became popular when Digg, who was the top link sharing site at the time, rolled out a new clunky ad-friendly redesign that caused a mass exodus of users to Reddit.
...which makes me wonder if this could ever happen again today, given that all of our data is being pushed into tighter and tighter silos with less integration than ever before (I'll admit Reddit has been better in this regard with its API and abundance of 3rd party clients). It seems like a lot of social networks rely on the network effect more than their actual features, and in the worst case they can just e.g. imp…
The thing about the network effect is sometimes the network decides to leave. MySpace flowed all into Facebook just as digg flowed into Reddit. The companies have been spending lots and lots of money to build a moat but as they make money they do the things that makes other platforms seem more attractive.
Re: Ask HN: Is “new” Reddit completely unusable for anyone else?
#140Also, resource lists, wikis and a lot of other features are only available in the old design - and there isn’t even a mention of them when browsing the new one. Lots and lots of easily accessible and well referenced and summarized knowledge essentially invisible.