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How not to do UX (new Reddit.com)

22 points by Madmallard ↗ HN
(1) Click on "visit new Reddit" from old Reddit.

- It immediately brings you to a login page instead of Reddit.

(2) https://old.reddit.com/

- Go to old Reddit

- Have your page blocked out by a login dialog with a small link to close the window that does not save to a session variable so every time you load a new page on the old Reddit it pops up again.

(3) New Reddit looks like a Facebook feed and much less content shows on one screen than before. There is a ton of wasted space on screen for no reason. The sub-Reddit listing on the left is tied to your account, not the session or cookies, forcing you to login to get features.

Every single one of these visual design decisions is irritating to interact with and makes me want to close the site and never visit it again.

12 comments

[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 39.9 ms ] thread
notheguyouthink
Yup, I only browser `old.reddit.com` these days, and expect I'll be dropping Reddit all together once they eventually force me to view that new abomination. Maybe RES will offer a way to remove the ugly UI.. one can hope.

Perhaps this is what I needed to stop browsing that mind-trap of a site anyway.

[deleted]
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freehunter
The old mobile reddit had gotten pretty ridiculous too, if you go back a page you see "Sorry an error has occurred". Sometimes the error goes away just by waiting, which is stupid. Sometimes you have to refresh and it shoves you all the way back to the top of the page, which is equally stupid.

Reddit is such a simple site. I know scaling is hard but it's just a basic CRUD app. They're not doing anything hard other than scaling. So why is it constantly broken?

mcintyre1994
Reddit has always seemed to have error messages that go away when you refresh or wait some time, sometimes on page load and sometimes on actions like voting/commenting. I assume they're all just server load errors but they have some heuristic to not explicitly tell me their servers are overloaded every day.
wingerlang
> New Reddit looks like a Facebook feed and much less content shows on one screen than before. There is a ton of wasted space on screen for no reason.

New reddit provides 3 different modes for the content. The compact view shows 2 more posts than old reddit, and the 'classic' mode shows 2 less.

stevekemp
And annoyingly every link you click tries to open a new tab, or uses ajax to open things inline. It's really annoying to click links and see "Firefox has blocked a popup", etc.

Once the new look becomes mandatory I'll be moving to another site, even if I have to write it, host it, and populate it myself.

edyc
> It immediately brings you to a login page instead of Reddit.

I was so annoyed with this new login/signup wall that I ended up writing a Chrome Extension that removes just that. If anyone's interested, I'll share it here or look up "Reddit Login Remover" on the Chrome extension store.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reddit-login-remov...

CM30
And all of these changes didn't have to happen at all, since Reddit worked perfectly already. It wasn't fancy, but it worked, fit lots of information onto the screen and didn't annoy you with modal related crap.

Which makes me wonder... why even change it? Why do all large websites seem to change their designs at seemingly random? Is there a hatred of a website's design just staying the same for the foreseeable future? It's like this is done just to give their engineers something to do...

Ah well, I guess it at least works a bit better than YouTube, whose every design change seems to exist purely to break some piece of the UI that everyone depends on and to make things less usable than they were before.

Lan
Visual changes are an easy feather-in-the-cap for both front-end developers and for management. A design overhaul is immediately obvious to everyone. It's something you can show off. It's something you can add eye-candy to. Changes like that are more glamorous than performance improvements. People that are trying to justify their position love to attach their name to those types of things.
ManlyBread
i.reddit.com loads instantly, the regular version forces me to look at a pulsating logo every time I click a link, which takes 7-20 seconds on my device. What is it even doing during that time?
chatmasta
Reddit critics throw around the “remember digg” meme a lot, but I really think this time it may happen. The reddit exodus is coming, and Reddit has no lock-in mechanism other than the 1% of community members who post content.

Actually, same goes for Facebook, when is it going to have its MySpace moment?

In some ways it feels like we are on the verge of another one of these cycles, ala “web 2.0”

The tech industry is so young that we cannot predict which processes are cyclical. Perhaps there is some social/economic/psychological certainty that we do not understand, underpinning not only the growth and success of major tech companies, but also their inevitable failures.