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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?

#51
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.

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

#54

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.

Then why provide old.reddit.com?

To temper the uproar

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

#55
I moderate one of the "default" subreddits so I have a rarer perspective than most. I can see the traffic of a subreddit that most users see daily.

There are almost 3 times more people using the redesign and the official reddit app together than the old site. However, engagement (number of page views per unique IP) is half or less of the old desktop or third party app.

So the new styles (cards, content focused) have more unique users overall, but those users engage less with the content.

There may be other reasons for this -- but to me it makes sense. The redesigns are harder to use and make reddit less addictive. You simply see a smaller volume of content and can't interact with it as well. But hey, it's a modern looking website I guess.

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

#56
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

old.reddit.com is okay, but it now requires the temp whitelisting of 2 or sometimes 3 javascript domains. Not just reddit.com like was required in the past. Given that, it's just easier to use the ceddit.com javascript interface to pull from the API and get the actual old reddit experience. But even worse than the redesign is the new corporate culture of censorship. I left after they banned r/gundeals. They're boilin…

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 censorship.

The people aren't the point. The technology is. It's a federated server system using the GUN distributed database. And posts can be transferred from instance to instance via p2p between browsers.

If you want to start a notabug server you can run it with an iron fist and censor all you want. But notabug, at heart, is about not censoring. Even for people who suck and say shitty things.

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

#57
post #7

I can't stand the new reddit. I always browse the site with https://old.reddit.com/ Just replace www with old.

Me too, but you must know that they will turn it off at some point.

Anyone know if they have public metrics on www vs old visitor traffic?

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

#58

I think the UI design isn't that bad; I actually like the large thumbnails in the new UI better because I like to view a lot of art. But it's the performance that makes it disgustingly horrible - I wonder if someone made a sane desktop UI replacement for Reddit.

They're are so many extensions that made old reddit far superior. Namely Reddit Enhancement Suit and Imagus (which is good for the large thumbnails you like)

It seems that Imagus is not maintained anymore... but at least Reddit Enhancement Suite gives you a button to view images inline. Thanks for the suggestion!

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

#59

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.

Then why provide old.reddit.com?

Because they know if they didn’t they would lose tons of users immediately. They’re betting that many of those users will slowly get used to the new site, or they can remove access to the old site in smaller groups instead of all at once. They also could be trying to work out bugs on the new site and the old one gives them a decent fallback for people. Also could be that some of the more obscure functionality of the site has not been ported to the new design, so they can link into the old one for those pages.

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

#60
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 disagree" camp. I do not find the new design unusable. It is not slow for me (American cable ISP, Firefox browser, uBlock Origin enabled, JavaScript enabled). My experience is just as fast as the old design. I have direct access to both the shared link and comments (the title now goes to the comments and the shared link is the orange link to the right of the title). I admit I did have to retrain my brain to the new design's conversation-focused design vs. remote-link-focused design, but that took all of a week. I do not have any slowness managing text formatting, but then, I do not comment a lot and I do not write long comments. I appreciate that the new design, on most subreddits, appears cleaner and the information, for me, is more clearly laid out. To me, the site appears "prettier." With the ad-blocker on, some of the sidebar ads get blocked. I do not know how that impacts my experience.

I have also not experienced any of the page loading errors that people have described. Not once, unless it was a known outage causing the Internet to collectively scream.

I am mostly a reader on reddit. I visit my subreddits twice a day, during what are probably peak usage times in North America.

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