It is touted to be better, but I don't see the appeal and it's slower. I also notice that old reddit randomly logs me out or "forgets" to use the classic design.
I want to congratulate you for being the only person in this thread to like the redesign. I'd go as far to say that you're brave for outing yourself like this
I’ve never seen a single site design repel me more quickly. I depend heavily on the simplicity and information-density of the old design (e.g. being able to pick from a dozen link titles that all fit on screen at once). I also depend on the pinch-to-zoom simplicity of focusing on exactly what I want, which only works well in the “normal” web pages of the old design. The new “design” breaks everything that made the old design convenient in these respects, and is almost impressively bad. It is so astoundingly different than what made Reddit work originally (i.e. its simplicity) that it quite honestly feels like someone tried their best to sabotage Reddit.
And all of this, I must say, is before I even mention the ridiculous spam-like additions they made. I think the new design finds no fewer than 3 places to shove something in my face like “USE APP / Better in app / HEY DID YOU KNOW WE HAVE AN APP!?!?!?”. Who is that for? Does anyone like this kind of crap? It virtually guarantees that I will never download the app.
Reddit’s days are numbered if it keeps this stuff up. I’m actually surprised that, historically, Digg died for much smaller redesign “sins”, and I think it was primarily because Reddit was an alternative. What’s the alternative?
If there was a cookie cutter reddit alternative and there was no content, would you use it? The network effects of reddit are a reasonably strong barrier of entry.
For a viable competitor to Reddit, you only need enough other users to fill a few pages worth of content, so the barrier of entry is much lower than if you wanted to outcompete something like Whatsapp. I mean, Hacker News has like 1% of the number of users that Reddit has, and it's already better.
>Hacker News has like 1% of the number of users that Reddit has, and it's already better.
Exactly. I went on reddit for years until the redesign. Now I can’t stand that site. The reddit redesign is so astoundingly bad and nonfunctional it shocks me to this day.
There's a simple browser extension to redirect to old.reddit.com. But I agree that if they ever remove that, I'll leave the site. The redesign is comically worse.
Yes, in fact there are several and I use them all.
The network effect has a positive influence on curation but an often profoundly negative effect on conversation. The smaller reddit spinoffs tend to have users that are more passionate about the topic at hand, don't "shit post" as much and the comment threads aren't plagued by low-effort puns. A casual observation of this might have you believe that the engagement is low, but a closer examination often reveals that the conversations are much more on-topic.
> I’m actually surprised that, historically, Digg died for much smaller redesign “sins”, and I think it was primarily because Reddit was an alternative.
if you use reddit mostly on mobile then there are many unofficial apps to use, and some people might not even notice the redesign.
The only thing that would make people like the new design would be coming out with a newest design. It’s the perpetual law of redesigns, which makes me believe a very vocal fraction of the internet lives in constant horror of the world around them changing.
Most designs aren't good enough to become huge sites like Reddit. Most redesigns aren't better than most designs. So if you take a very successful site and redesign it, more often than not it'll become worse.
Unless you really, really understand why your original design was so successful in the first place and you make sure you keep those things, but Reddit's just seems like generic web design of nowadays.
It's dog slow. It uses small popup instead of leading to a new page. And it has less density of information compared to the old design, even in compact mode.
It's like new Gmail versus old Gmail, everything got bigger anv you got less information per page as a result.
Nope, it's awful. I will likely stop using the site if they ever do away with the old design option. I just can't stand how slow the new one is in comparison. If they fixed the performance, I guess it would be tolerable to use. Not sure what they are doing that makes it feel so laggy to use.
I Reddit a lot, with the old design + RES, and the Reddit is Fun app. I have not liked the new design because it's harder to scroll past stories I don't care about, and I can't view full text posts without going to the comments page.
I prefer the old design, but the new one has a number of improvements and I think I could get used to it if it wasn't so unbearably laggy. I'm on a beefy MacBook pro and it's so slow it's frustrating, especially on Firefox.
Also I think it's a huge shame how much customization they've taken away from the subreddit styling. Completely custom CSS was way better, the new design seems to allow for some basic elements to be styled along with the banner. That is a major downgrade.
I hate the new design. Not because it's new, but because it took everything I liked about Reddit (i.e. easy to read, no flashy design, FAST) and threw it out the window for a slow error-prone POS SPA app. I also hate the fact that when I follow links to Reddit from anywhere, e.g. Twitter, Slack, I see the new design and have to manually change the domain to old.reddit.com, even though my account settings are set to always use the old design.
I also finally caved and downloaded their mobile app because I got tired of all of the nagging. I feel like they intentionally broke their mobile experience to push users to the app so they could increase ad revenue. I'm sad I caved, but I just couldn't take the BS experience any longer.
The third party reddit apps are a lot better. I prefer Reddit Is Fun on Android but I know there are several good options besides that on both mobile platforms.
Apollo, FTW. It has my vote. Grabbing content to quote is still a problem (it sits beneath the bottom bar, probably a negative padding issue), but otherwise I have no complaints.
For which its become pretty much the exclusive way I use reddit now. I can't remember the last time I opened reddit on anything other than my phone.
It's actually clean, and configurable enough that I can set the right information density for myself, and I dont get all the banners and ads bugging you to use reddit's official mobile app. Plus an actually consistent dark theme is a massive bonus.
Figured I'd leave my vote for Redreader here. It's open source, works offline (has a fully featured cached versions system) and I've used it for years. It also supports custom tabs too, so if you use a decent browser with add-on support (Firefox) you can get ad-blocking working for all articles you read within the app.
i.reddit.com (the old mobile site) doesn't have a single advertisement for the app, and still seems to work pretty well (although videos will redirect you back to the new site).
It's interesting to see a side-by-side comparison of a SPA designed with the best modern web development has to offer and a hardened and optimized over 10 years server-rendered site.
You can opt out of the redesign if you go to your profile. Also, if you use it in the browser on your desktop, reddit enhancement suite is the best add-on you can use. Works with (almost) any browser.
That feature is likely working 100%, as in, the redirects are probably an intentional feature meant to expose users to the redesign in hopes that they stay.
That theory fits with how obnoxious the reddit mobile webpage is in it's attempts to onboard you to the native mobile app.
It's terrible. I say that as someone who usually likes exploring redesigns and new software products.
It's clear what it's optimized for and the user or the user expereince is not it.
What's especially annoying is that the mobile website is unreadable since they use growth tactics at every step to try to funnel you into their native mobile app.
I can tell you already that 99.99% of Hacker News commenters are going to say they hate the new design. And it does suck! But we're not the population that Reddit redesigned for.
Given how much content gets pasted here from /r/programming and other tech subreddits, and how much passion there is behind HN's distaste for the redesign, I would bet that many, if not most, HN users are redditors.
We're the population designing and deploying these JS driven SPA things, so maybe someone should ask how Reddit could have done it right, and why we always seem to get it wrong?
The new design shows images from links on the page. It's faster for redditors to upvote an image on the page they find vaguely aggreeable than to click a link, wait for it load, decides if they like it, go back and upvote it.
This eventually leads to all the top voted threads to be vaguely agreeable images, crowding out everything else.
Their metics on the redesign isn’t “like it vs. dislike it” it’s “actively hates it vs. hates it but not enough to care”
But at least they didn’t digg it and kill the site outright, and instead just started to see how much nagging and annoyance they can pull their faithful user base through before they break.
I don't know about that. I didn't really start using Reddit until 3 years ago, and even though I loved the content I could not stand the old school design. I hated it so much that I ended up with multiple extensions and scripts overlayed on top of it to make it bearable for me.
Their new design is a vast improvement, but in my opinion they didn't go far enough and missed the mark on improving the backend capabilities. Why can't I easily apply arbitrary sort and filters to subreddit content? Why is the messaging system unreliable and lack basic organization capabilities?
They're obviously heading toward the moment when redesign will be the default interface without way to opt-out (which is already happening to some of the people who managed to trap themselves by this "dark mode" banner acc. to r/redesign comments) and I assume neither old domain will be working at some point and removal will be explained by some ridiculous statement that it's inefficient to keep 2 interfaces, users are happily adapted to use new style (having no other choice) or something similar.
I preferred the old one though the new one is slowly growing on me. I do like the way that posts seem to be in a popup that get closed rather than having to use the back button.
Is it just me or is the quality of Reddit posts on any mainstream sub going down? If feels like its going the way of Digg.
Reddit keeps on putting a banner at the bottom of its pages saying "Try the redesign! It has INFINITE SCROLLING!" and I am like, guys, that's the last thing I want, I like having those little moments where I have to explicitly decide if I want more of what you have or not, that makes it easier to stop and go do something useful.
Infinite scrolling is a pet peeve of mine. When it's on a PC (and not mobile), it's a little disconcerting to not have breaks in the content, and it completely breaks scroll bar behavior if I'm dragging down the scroll bar when the next chunk loads.
I've also found that it leads to the browser using more and more memory to the point that my computer starts swapping unless I close the tab every so often.
Pretty much stopped using reddit and found other things to do. Still go back of course but if they're gonna make my exp shitty for more money then I'll take my attention elsewhere. Plus it's helped me realize how shitty reddit has become anyway :/
164 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 212 ms ] threadI’ve never seen a single site design repel me more quickly. I depend heavily on the simplicity and information-density of the old design (e.g. being able to pick from a dozen link titles that all fit on screen at once). I also depend on the pinch-to-zoom simplicity of focusing on exactly what I want, which only works well in the “normal” web pages of the old design. The new “design” breaks everything that made the old design convenient in these respects, and is almost impressively bad. It is so astoundingly different than what made Reddit work originally (i.e. its simplicity) that it quite honestly feels like someone tried their best to sabotage Reddit.
And all of this, I must say, is before I even mention the ridiculous spam-like additions they made. I think the new design finds no fewer than 3 places to shove something in my face like “USE APP / Better in app / HEY DID YOU KNOW WE HAVE AN APP!?!?!?”. Who is that for? Does anyone like this kind of crap? It virtually guarantees that I will never download the app.
Reddit’s days are numbered if it keeps this stuff up. I’m actually surprised that, historically, Digg died for much smaller redesign “sins”, and I think it was primarily because Reddit was an alternative. What’s the alternative?
Exactly. I went on reddit for years until the redesign. Now I can’t stand that site. The reddit redesign is so astoundingly bad and nonfunctional it shocks me to this day.
The network effect has a positive influence on curation but an often profoundly negative effect on conversation. The smaller reddit spinoffs tend to have users that are more passionate about the topic at hand, don't "shit post" as much and the comment threads aren't plagued by low-effort puns. A casual observation of this might have you believe that the engagement is low, but a closer examination often reveals that the conversations are much more on-topic.
if you use reddit mostly on mobile then there are many unofficial apps to use, and some people might not even notice the redesign.
Unless you really, really understand why your original design was so successful in the first place and you make sure you keep those things, but Reddit's just seems like generic web design of nowadays.
it would have been a good April Fools prank to launch a "HN redesign" in the same style
Isn't it amazing that its possible to make this slow on a fast computer?
I don't see why Reddit shouldn't just publish its retention/cohort metrics. Of general interest to the community and certainly not a trade secret.
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reddit-enhancement...
Also I think it's a huge shame how much customization they've taken away from the subreddit styling. Completely custom CSS was way better, the new design seems to allow for some basic elements to be styled along with the banner. That is a major downgrade.
I also finally caved and downloaded their mobile app because I got tired of all of the nagging. I feel like they intentionally broke their mobile experience to push users to the app so they could increase ad revenue. I'm sad I caved, but I just couldn't take the BS experience any longer.
Makes me sick.
It's actually clean, and configurable enough that I can set the right information density for myself, and I dont get all the banners and ads bugging you to use reddit's official mobile app. Plus an actually consistent dark theme is a massive bonus.
https://github.com/QuantumBadger/RedReader/
Now, even if you're following links from elsewhere, you'll get the "old" experience. No need to go to "old.reddit.com" any more.
That theory fits with how obnoxious the reddit mobile webpage is in it's attempts to onboard you to the native mobile app.
It's clear what it's optimized for and the user or the user expereince is not it.
What's especially annoying is that the mobile website is unreadable since they use growth tactics at every step to try to funnel you into their native mobile app.
I pretty much still browse on old.reddit.com.
What is the population that Reddit was redesigned for and how does that redesign cater to them?
But at least they didn’t digg it and kill the site outright, and instead just started to see how much nagging and annoyance they can pull their faithful user base through before they break.
Their new design is a vast improvement, but in my opinion they didn't go far enough and missed the mark on improving the backend capabilities. Why can't I easily apply arbitrary sort and filters to subreddit content? Why is the messaging system unreliable and lack basic organization capabilities?
Is it just me or is the quality of Reddit posts on any mainstream sub going down? If feels like its going the way of Digg.
The fact that they've called it an `onboardingbar` is not exactly reassuring.