Tell HN: Reddit does not allow comments post via old.reddit.com
Can Reddit go much worse than this... I can accept the pain of using new.reddit.com to login. But as soon as switch to old.reddit.com it shows that I am logged out? What are the product dev teams aiming for?
1. Reddit now forces you to use new.reddit.com to dismiss the cookie banner
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21780092
2. Since forcing people to mobile all the time to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24208958
3. To forcing create account to read threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21780092
227 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 237 ms ] threadSometimes Hanlon's razor is wrong and it's malice, not incompetence.
By contrast the official mobile app has become the overwhelming way that people consume the site's content.
Edit: added uniques
In the end running the old version probably doesn't cost Reddit much, nobody expects them to update or maintain it and so they have no reason to shut it down as long as it keeps working. It isn't worth the inevitable backlash.
I honestly think one of the biggest issues with axing old reddit is that old reddit users are disproportionately moderators (even though new reddit has unique mod tools). Reddit survives off of unpaid labour, it may be a bit wise to rock the apple cart too much.
Which is why they don't phase https://old.reddit.com out.
They know the contributors use the "old" reddit.
Also the reason why they don't publish those stats. Too ashamed.
For the vast majority reddit is just the 15 or so default subs ran by a tiny number of power mods regurgitating content. Has been for years now.
Since 72% of Reddit users are on mobile [1], the difference is smaller than your comment suggests.
1: https://backlinko.com/reddit-users#reddit-statistics
78% - official mobile app 14% - new reddit 6% - mobile web 2% - old reddit ??% - 3rd party mobile apps (not counted)
Uniques are basically the same way but skewed towards the desktop more than mobile.
because it's forced down people's throat. you can't read anything there except possibly for the default subs populated with shills and redditors. you get "unreviewed content, please install our botnet to proceed" popup as soon as you scroll down half a screen past the op
Everything about these nags is idiotic to the point of insulting the user's intelligence. The randomness, the timing, and the messages themselves.
What is the browser for then? Is a browser such as Chrome not enough for a fucking forum in 2022? This circlejerk is completely out of control.
If it's true that the majority of users are using the app, does that not suggest that it's effective?
https://www.reddit.com/.compact
Mine says "come to the app, it has more cats/dogs". Some "UX engineer" ab/testing usage patterns, maybe?
It annoys me to the point of sadness. Some of the greatest minds, the most capable programmers of our time spending their meager existance using their skills to make people "install our app". Disgusting.
Same. It's still awful though. It really is insulting. How is it that I could do this perfectly fine 10 years ago but _now_ I have to use an app?
1. Product Owner: "Users want to use [crappy feature]."
2. Make [crappy feature] the default, add pop-ups nudging people to use [crappy feature], constantly "forget" when users opt out of [crappy feature], limit other product benefits only to users of [crappy feature], do everything possible to sabotage users who deliberately avoid [crappy feature].
3. Product Owner: "Look, boss, the numbers from last month are in: 92% of users are using [crappy feature]. I was right!"
4. More investment into [crappy feature], since obviously users love it.
By virtue of them making it unpleasant to use the site on a mobile device other ways.
Of course “most people using Reddit on mobile do so via the app” masks the fact that a fair few, including myself, simply no longer use Reddit on mobile at all. Though I assume we are a small enough minority that they don't care about losing us in the push to force the rest towards the app.
Seriously, they are killing themselves for no reason. Whoever greenlighted the new web should be fired immediately, if not already.
I believe the problem is that there's a significant frontend/JS team (along with managers, etc) that needed something to do so a rewrite was planned. It probably started with good intentions (and the initial MVP/prototype probably was lightning-fast), but now once all the bloat is they ended up with a pile of shit, but bonuses have been paid, people have been hired/promoted and can brag about this new "achievement" on their resumes, so turning back while saving face is impossible.
This skews the numbers on how many people will bail once they drop support for the old layout. I'll definitely be part of that exodus and it will surely be bigger than 2%.
At this point I would consider moving a valuable community that I was invested in and considered worth saving to one of the reddit alternatives.
* https://old.reddit.com/prefs/
Yes, let's just phase it out, and drive away people who actually contribute to that forum by adding the comments and posts that are reason d'etre of reddit.
Go figure, you didn't include posts, comments, and karma breakdown in that analysis.
The information you provided may not serve as a basis for such conclusion.
I'd literally rather use Reddit though the terminal than their awful new site! I have no idea what their designers were thinking when they came up with it, it's such a faff to actually do anything with.
I have multis (maybe custom feeds now?) for the topics I actually want to see.
It's worked for me.
Felt like I was missing everything after I got off but then I realized I really wasn't lol.
You cannot browse some subreddits on mobile because it shows a message saying that you need to install the app to see its contents.
The title is incorrect/misleading. You can still post via old.reddit.com
I do sorta wish HN had reply notifications.
There is a 3rd party app for that, though I haven't tried it yet.
https://www.hnreplies.com/
The only problem with it is that it does not send you replies to your submissions, e.g. AskHN posts.
It kinda weird because for some reason in my mind Ycombinator was 5 year-ish older.
AAAAAND you lost literally 95% of every single person who might even consider using this. Stop trying to make "fediverse" happen. It's not going to happen. All you do is end up putting great developers into projects that will literally never, ever amount to anything due to an insistence on decentralization.
The federated alternative that I'm building[1], is trying to specifically keep some of the benefits of old reddit (and of HN, and of lobste.rs), most important of which being that it has no reliance on Javascript and that it has a minimal size footprint.
[1] https://littr.me (just a demo instance)
Right now I'm not seeing any of these problems that OP is talking about when using old.reddit either. I think I may have ublocked all the banners and popups at some point.
It's impressive how much engineering effort reddit is able to waste, that isn't cheap.
As for new users, it's likely a lot of people that reach Reddit from Google - their SEO seems to have gotten loads better in recent years. They also don't remember how simple oldreddit was, so they have no reference point.
https://baconreader.com/
P.S.
I suspect that one of the issues with Reddit is a large number of regular visitors who lurk. No account, no login, never post, never upvote... but spend hours a day on the site.
Serving them means that features for actual active contributors have low priority. I suspect that looking at the site and its features with that in mind may explain a lot.
They would be shooting themselves in the foot because the lurkers are looking for posts and comments. Prioritizing contributors would keep lurkers engaged longer, watching more ads.
Also, never underestimate the need of people to voice their opinions. Controversial topics will tempt lurkers to contribute.
There are some niche communities that are small enough to retain credibility though.
But yes, SEO spam has become really bad. And the the topic you looked at seems to be one of the worst.
Not true for the feed though. If you switch to the compact feed on the redesign you'll even see more posts than you'd see on default old.
But I do agree with the infinite scroll point, or at least the way they implemented it.
* Defaults to some stupid instagram wall-like view where every link takes half the page
* The whole thing is now centered in a tiny slice of the screen
* Threads open in some weird modal mode where accidentally clicking outside of the content takes you to the previous page
* Opening a direct link on a phone loads like 5 comments, then it continues with endless irrelevant content
* You can't open random subreddits that have been set as NSFW on the phone because "This community is 18+, please open it in the app"
Every time I had the displeasure of interacting with the new design there was some upsetting regression compared to old Reddit.
Which is changed with a single click in the top right of the feed and it never defaulted back for me. (At least not the last 2+ years.)
> The whole thing is now centered in a tiny slice of the screen
If you're talking about the feed, it's not. At least not in classic or compact mode. Besides that, depends on your screen / windows size of course.
> Threads open in some weird modal mode where accidentally clicking outside of the content takes you to the previous page
Guess that's a matter of taste? I like it, I know there are people who force similar behaviour on old with plugins, so... - The implementation is still wonky though and the overall still existing, at least at times, slowness of the redesign (/api) fucks with it.
Last two points are less of an UI more of an UX thing and Reddit pushing their app. Still sucks of course. For mobile I can only recommend using third party apps - better than the mobile view and the official app.
The new UI, by virtue of its very low information density and pushing or irrelevant crap definitely encourages quicker & shallower interactions.
All the forums that Reddit took over are making a comeback, this time with Discourse (probably Baader-Meinhoff, but I'm seeing it everywhere now).
Reddit had a good run, but as a place for real people to go to, its time is over.
Most are going Discourse or Vanilla, some are wanting more custom things these days. All are saying that their userbase (that previously migrated to Reddit) are all crying out for an off-Reddit solution.
Reddit did a Digg, which is endlessly hilarious.
IMO Reddit killed their vibe when they removed the distinction between post karma and comment karma, in the subs I visited it seemed to encourage the upvoting of very basic questions and observations that were easy to farm karma from by posting the same answers, comments and jokes every time. (I'm aware that some of the smaller and more actively moderated communities have escaped this, sadly it didn't cover the main ones I was interested in.)
I just don't like Discourse because it seems to have so many particularly colourful failure modes, like not ordering comments in a sane way, layout-breaking bugs if all 20GB of javascript doesn't download, and that bloody awful infinite scroll "hey instead of just clicking to go to the next page, why not wait a few minutes for an ajax request to time out and blank the page?"
New reddit also doesn't properly fetch your default subreddits. Something is screwed with their entire auth system.
Going to new reddit and refreshing and going back to old does work. Additionally, if logged in, just tick the "use old reddit experience" option in settings and you have old reddit, everywhere.
You're trying to tell me they released a feature without even testing the login flow? That's going beyond "oh this is a little accident" straight into almost unbelievable amounts of incompetence. At that point it is more charitable to attribute it to malice.
Have you seen the state of new reddit, of chat, of their video player, or literally any feature they've released in the past 4 years ?
The problem with assuming that this specific issue is targeted is that they also broke the system that they want people to move to.
Reddit definitely does want to push people to the new interface, and is very likely going to decrease support for the old interface and invest less effort into bugfixing/maintenance. However, just because something is true, that doesn't mean every single thing you see that reinforces that idea is also true.
There are lots of ways in an incompetent company to break a login flow late in testing, especially if they're pushing fixes in real-time or during testing. I don't know what Reddit's setup actually is, but it is unlikely to me that they would purposefully introduce auth bugs that broke both the old and new interface. I do believe that they are trying to get people off of the old interface and would be willing to resort to underhanded methods to do so. But I don't think it's likely that this specific bug was a deliberate effort to do that.
I've lost nothing. My time goes on things that are significantly more productive, like online gaming and polishing my nails. I'm only half joking.
I hope reddit's slow decline continues rather than hitting some sudden turning point, because the alternative is some new clone coming along and everyone migrates like happened with digg redesign. That would just perpetuate the situation for another decade or two, and that would be a shame.
edit: cookie banner dismissal does indeed not work, I guess I had it blocked and didn’t realize
Maybe OP was confused that Reddit blocks all comments on posts older than a certain amount...?
Not really sure what to make of this.
It seems OP's claims are disputable...
The easiest way to experience that is to access it through the European address and with old. URI as the first one.
So, yeah, seems to be a thing and one that I'm more than happy to leave behind. I have noticed a couple other of my hobby sites have recently put their forums behind login-walls. Which I have a problem with, because I think having these sites indexed by search engines promotes activity and interest in the hobby.
Oh well, is it too late to come up with a new Usenet standard and bring back newsgroups?
I rarely browse reddit on mobile, and on desktop normally go straight to the subreddits I'm interested in (and even that's decreasing).
There's probably some axiom that's relevant to this inevitable degradation of user experience on all social networking / UGC sites. If there isn't there should be.
they wanted the endless scroll, they've decided to write the whole thing from scratch while they're at it, and the end result is a steaming pile of shit
I don't think it made the site higher quality...
- on any post or comment click 'report'
- the popup that opens is an iframe with the new reddit
- dismiss the cookie banner from within that iframe
- close the report dialog
future visits to reddit will now have cookie policy accepted
> I can accept the pain of using new.reddit.com to login
Huh? Reddit never made me do that. The only thing that doesn't work on old reddit for me are those free medal unlocks, which I don't care about. Otherwise it's still 100% functional.
(Just ran into predictions for the first time recently - https://www.redditinc.com/blog/a-new-way-to-interact-on-redd... ).
https://f-droid.org/packages/org.quantumbadger.redreader/
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/me.ccrama.redditslide/
Do a google search and see a promising result on reddit.
Click the link, be asked if you want to view the page via the app, click no.
Go to the next link, say no to the app again.
Go to the next link, say no to the god damn app again.
Repeat.
Why can you just remember that i dont want your crappy app instead of asking me on every single page load?
I don't know why they are so annoying with this mobile app stuff as I would be a big supporter otherwise.
So I logged out and I see a login form on old (in a subreddit), but it doesn't seem to work.
Then I went to / on old and I am logged in. Going back to the subreddit shows me logged out.
I'd say this is broken somehow and if it's intentional then it's still very buggy.
You could also try https://ns.reddit.com