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Reddit is slowly killing the old interface? native image galleries are invisible

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Re: Reddit is slowly killing the old interface? native image galleries are invisible

#51

Post by fiblye »

tmpz22 wrote: post #28
someperson wrote: post #25

Very good opportunity for a Reddit alternative to come in and dominate. Getting rid of old Reddit would be Digg v4 all over again.

Not really. Reddit infrastructure and product development has been subsidized by hundreds of millions in VC funding for almost a decade. At this point they don't even need a good product to stay at the table. Meanwhile to compete you need moderation tools, highly performant and reliable caching infrastructure for media rich content, enough of an ad network the investors believe you can eventually build an ad network,…

>subsidized by hundreds of millions in VC funding for almost a decade

That hasn't stopped any company from total collapse before and it won't now. Other social media sites have people somewhat locked in since it's all about staying in contact with friends and following certain people. You need to push the entire crowd at once to have a good replacement, but those sites still die when they screw up enough. Reddit's a place where people mostly read comments, see some funny pictures or news, and then go about their day. There's a lot less keeping people from dropping it and moving on.

Re: Reddit is slowly killing the old interface? native image galleries are invisible

#53

Post by buzzerbetrayed »

zests wrote: post #36

I dislike all things "new web". The websites feel like layers upon layers of Javascript, fancy designs that feel like they are responsible for the decreased responsiveness. Styles delegated to the same CSS frameworks that everyone else uses. The rounded corners. Give me plain HTML, minimal CSS, and a template engine any day of the week.

I want to agree, but don't. Javascript is nice. Leave a comment on HN, then push back to go out to the home page. Wait, you're back at your comment.

This flow is obviously not ideal, and would be prevented with a little Javascript.

Re: Reddit is slowly killing the old interface? native image galleries are invisible

#54

Post by novia »

klodolph wrote: post #41
nO0b wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ask Digg how well that worked out...

Digg was flooded with College Humor posts and XKCD comics before the redesign. For some reason, people think the redesign was the reason why people left.

Genuine question: What's wrong with XKCD comics?

Re: Reddit is slowly killing the old interface? native image galleries are invisible

#55

Post by marcinzm »

someperson wrote: post #25

Very good opportunity for a Reddit alternative to come in and dominate. Getting rid of old Reddit would be Digg v4 all over again.

Reddit does this because they have failed to find a monetization strategy good enough to cover the investment in the business. Any competitor without some new approach will have the same issue.

Re: Reddit is slowly killing the old interface? native image galleries are invisible

#56

Post by Pxtl »

buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #53
zests wrote: post #36

I dislike all things "new web". The websites feel like layers upon layers of Javascript, fancy designs that feel like they are responsible for the decreased responsiveness. Styles delegated to the same CSS frameworks that everyone else uses. The rounded corners. Give me plain HTML, minimal CSS, and a template engine any day of the week.

I want to agree, but don't. Javascript is nice. Leave a comment on HN, then push back to go out to the home page. Wait, you're back at your comment. This flow is obviously not ideal, and would be prevented with a little Javascript.

Also, it would be basically impossible to host comment threads on video content if the video reset every time you submitted a comment. By comparison, Twitter's video experience is still awful in that you can't multitask and join the conversation on a video tweet.

Re: Reddit is slowly killing the old interface? native image galleries are invisible

#57

Post by unclekev »

mynameishere wrote: post #40
tmpz22 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Reddit infrastructure and product development has been subsidized by hundreds of millions in VC funding for almost a decade. At this point they don't even need a good product to stay at the table. Meanwhile to compete you need moderation tools, highly performant and reliable caching infrastructure for media rich content, enough of an ad network the investors believe you can eventually build an ad network,…

I've been on reddit for 14 years (14 years club!) and I can honestly say in that time it hasn't changed in any fundamental way. (It has however changed for the worse in many small ways.) I'm sure they put a lot of effort into serving their own images and video and placing ads in just the right place for maximal accidental clickage but why would the user care?

14 year club here as well.

I'd argue that the following are fundamental changes that have impacted the community in a big way:

- Selling 10% of the business to Tencent/Chinese investors

- Firing their community managers in 2015 and not replacing them

- When I first joined Reddit it was more technology focused, now it's all pop culture and memes. Although Tech subs are still plentiful so it can still be that site. (With some effort)

- Banning any Sub-Reddit's that go against whatever the admins mood is on a particular day, or content that no longer fits with their "We have shareholders and need to keep them happy" mantra. Reddit is absolutely not a place for free speech/uncensored discussions these days. Because of both toxic mods and horrible admins.

- Huge increase of censorship across the site in Sub-Reddit's, Posts and Comments

- Users care about the video stuff because Reddit's video hosting is fundamentally broken and hardly works, but they would rather keep it broken because it makes it harder to download videos (DASH)

- The whole new design is anti-user, the site is just masses of white space, super slow, JS heavy and pretty much unusable outside a third party mobile client. The day old.reddit.com gets shut down will be a sad day.

None of this stuff was a problem 14 years ago

Although some of the above comes with the toxicity that tends to come with huge community growth.

You can argue the above isn't significant, but as someone who's been on the site for 14 years, it sure ain't the same place I signed up for all those years ago.

Re: Reddit is slowly killing the old interface? native image galleries are invisible

#58

Post by Lammy »

arp242 wrote: post #35
Lammy wrote: post #16

It would be called "classic" instead of "old" if it wasn't something they actively wanted to kill.

It was mentioned somewhere it's not going to be killed anytime soon, similar to how i.reddit.com is still working. But it also won't get updates so you may get a "degraded" experience. A good example of this is GitHub-style ``` ... ``` codeblocks, which don't work on old.reddit.com, but do in the new UI.

Yeah, that's how I imagine it will play out. Eventually there will be so many of those things that don't work on the old site that they will "have to" kill it for our sake :)

Re: Reddit is slowly killing the old interface? native image galleries are invisible

#59

Post by meowster »

throwawaysea wrote: post #44

Between Reddit’s heavy-handed censorship, rampant site wide political biases, their terrible new UI, the dark patterns forcing users to the app, unexplained bans of subreddits, overzealous mods, and deletion of discussions of Reddit alternatives ( https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/hib1oj/... ), it is time for them to go the way of the dodo. Here’s a list of alternatives: https://www.reddit.com/r/Re…

I click on the top alternative, Parler, and the root page redirects to some advertising page about the site.

Whereas if I go to the root page of reddit, I get content.

I think that's a huge turn off for alot of people.

Show interesting content, and let the product speak for itself.

If you go to Hacker News, you see content, you don't see a page explaining why Hacker News is great.

I just closed the Parler website rather than figure out what hoops I have to jump through to see content and what it's like.

Re: Reddit is slowly killing the old interface? native image galleries are invisible

#60

Post by ysavir »

Pxtl wrote: post #56
buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to agree, but don't. Javascript is nice. Leave a comment on HN, then push back to go out to the home page. Wait, you're back at your comment. This flow is obviously not ideal, and would be prevented with a little Javascript.

Also, it would be basically impossible to host comment threads on video content if the video reset every time you submitted a comment. By comparison, Twitter's video experience is still awful in that you can't multitask and join the conversation on a video tweet.

Thankfully, it's not en either/or situation.

The principle that site designers need to start abiding by is to not reinvent the browser--there's no need to use JS for routing or single page apps. The browser does that fantastically already. All that's needed of JS is to add asynchronicity to pages that need to update state without interrupting a running service.

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