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

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

#151

Post by non-entity »

hrunt wrote: post #60
wazoox wrote: post #23

The new design is slow as mollasses. It's ugly. It doesn't provide direct access to both the shared link and comments. Managing text formatting is slow and painful. The only positive point is the Ctrl+enter shortcut to post comments. I always use old.reddit.com.

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 am not a fan of their redesign, but I don't use reddit in a browser enough anymore to complain, in fairness. I can, however describe how painfully unusable the app they harass you to install is.

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

#152

Post by non-entity »

Waterluvian wrote: post #53

I love that there's three locations eating up 1/3 of the screen telling me to use the mobile app instead.

The mobile app is worse than the redesign! Can't copy text via the OS interface, no sort of spell check whatsoever in the textboxes and constantly failing to load posts that the website does just fine.

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

#153

Post by laken »

Crinus wrote: post #141
CamelCaseName wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> casuals will be pushed to new.reddit, which may be a better fit for them. Why would new.reddit be a better fit for "casuals" when it is worse is pretty much every way?

Before the redesign, in my circles of non-tech friends, Reddit on desktop would scare them off. They thought it looked really old and ugly. The new design is really to capture those people.

That said, I hate new Reddit with a passion and still use the old design.

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

#154

Post by piva00 »

kranner wrote: post #31
kgwxd wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have an account, you can set your preferences to use the "old" design by default so you don't have to manually use old.reddit.com. Uncheck "Use the redesign as my default experience". If that option goes away, I'm done with reddit.

I’m sure an extension like Reddit Enhancement Suite will add the option if reddit stops supporting old.reddit.com.

I already set in my head that if Reddit ever leaves me without the option to use `old.reddit` I will create a Reddit visualiser for the web, maybe a desktop app if that breaks any kind of TOS but... I CAN'T use the redesign, it's slow, UX is horrible (not that the UX of old Reddit is any good but for a power user it's much better) and I refuse to use these shitty SPAs that just make the experience clunky.

Same way as LinkedIn, I barely use it to reply to recruiter messages, whenever possible I just prefer to reply it through an e-mail instead of suffering with their slow non-responsive UI.

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

#155

Post by Accujack »

pjc50 wrote: 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.

>For some insane reason they're competing with Instagram and

Reddit's management is driving the site as a business, which means doing things for the purpose of maximizing revenue according to the perception of what's "successful". Facebook is evil but successful at it, Instagram is (was) successful.

The path they see to making money is to try to become the next XXXX, where XXXX is the "successful" social media site of the month.

Reddit was originally driven by user need and the desire for functionality, and innovation and working with the user community helped it grow. Not so anymore.

Ultimately, someone/something has to pay for the resources such a site uses, and finding a working profit model that can keep businesses like Reddit functioning is not easy.

Reddit is a zombie at this point - there's no solid alternative to it, despite what some people seem to think, so there's nowhere for people to go. Once there's another option, Reddit is going to rather quickly become a ghost town.

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

#157

Post by winternett »

Retroity wrote: post #104

It 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…

if you think that's terrible, check out the mobile browser version... It's full of pop ups that remind you to download their app, and none of the v.reddit or giphycat links work :/

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

#158

Post by winternett »

tootie wrote: post #51
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.

I've been exclusively using https://i.reddit.com for years.

I've been using http://www.redditp.com for years, it's great for when you don't need to read the comments. If on mobile, you can simply swipe left or right :)

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

#160

Post by everdrive »

pjc50 wrote: 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.

>They also really, really want you to use the mobile app, which presumably means it does something privacy-violating.

This is great life advice, and true of almost any app.

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