only way to look at some (surprisingly tame, 100% SFW content) too. gotta be old.reddit.com.
honestly the zooming isn't too bad and doesn't have to be done much. a well done mobile app would be preferable but it's perfectly fine for 10 minutes of casual browsing.
I love that reddit now wants you to log in to view 18+ subreddits, and that the work-around is to replace "www" with "old" in the URL, asserting that you are indeed old enough.
I was under the impression that most high value content producers and moderation tools that make the bigger subs usable rely on old. They know they'll drive away all the power users if it goes.
Interestingly, Steve Huffman has gone on record at least 5 years ago stating that he will continue use to ensure i.reddit.com is supported. I think he said it in an AMA shortly after he became CEO. I figure as long as he is still at the helm it will continue on.
Thanks for linking! Based on your comment it feels like I interpreted the original wrong. The person in your comment is not Steve, but their comment is basically equally valuable! So in practice what I said is still true, it’s just that whoever delivered the comment is not Steve
Huffman is not exactly known to stick by his words if it hurts his bottom line... Remember when he and Ohanian advertised Reddit as a "bastion of free speech" back ten years ago when it brought them new users, and then he did a 180 on that when it was convenient to raise advertising revenues in 2015?
They reverse engineered the Reddit API used by the official web client. It's not the same as the public API. Shutting down this API would break the website.
As soon as they remove old.reddit.com that's a wrap for Reddit for me. That's the last thing to do before it goes the way of Digg way back when. Related where is Kevin Rose these days?
I think some of the higher ups must realize that all of the content in the site that isn't TikTok-esque drivel is coming through old.reddit, or they would've cut it off long ago
I've drawn the same line, their new UI is just absolute trash. I can't tell if it's done on purpose or if they're just that bad at creating web interfaces.
It's 100% on purpose. One person can make a much better interface, as various alt clients have shown. Log in to show your age? How dare you browse without giving us data?
It must be on purpose. What really drives this home for me is the aggressive folding of comment threads, sometimes requiring 3-4 clicks/navigations to be able to read all <10 comments on a post.
The "new" web UI is so bad that I barely if ever use reddit on desktop. 99.5% of my usage is through the iOS client Apollo, which is leagues better than not only the official web client but also the official mobile client.
Both Reddit and Twitter are great examples of bafflingly bad first-party UIs, and it's comical because these vastly better third party clients are often solo side projects. How on earth are solo indie devs outperforming entire well-paid teams?!
I use the old reddit redirect plugin in firefox. If they ever take away old.reddit, that'll be very sad, since reddit will be practically unreadable then for me (due to the large and too image/video-focused new layout), and it still is some of the best sources of actual non-blogspam human generated content
I will entirely stop using reddit if they take away old. I already refuse to visit it on my phone because of their annoying popups to download their app literally every single time you load a page.
I use rif, which used to be called reddit is fun an android third party app. For some legal reason more likely than not they changed the name to "rif is fun" so technically it is named "reddit is fun is fun"...
But yeah, it works very well, I have used it for many many years, and in the same vein if someone has got high recommendations to hn apps I am all ears, I have used materialistic for couple years but it has fallen short on more than a couple things and seems to not be updated anymore
It's not that; or not only that. For a while scrolling on my laptop happened at ~2 FPS. Granted, my laptop is not very fast, but plenty of fast enough for compiling stuff and even some 3D games and it was slower than any other website I've ever used by a considerable margin. I can't be bothered to check what the performance is like now, but for a long time the entire thing was slow, janky, and objectively just didn't work well.
They could implement all the ads and user-hostility into Old Reddit just find and it would still be fast. In fact, I bet that Old Reddit with ads and trackers will still be faster than the New one without any of that.
There's chrome/FF plugins that rewrite every url you're linked to old.reddit.com which is better than the builtin user setting. I'm a frontend dev who should like the type of JS stuff Reddit tried to do last time around but it was a UX failure.
HN is still the ideal UX model for Reddit style sites (besides comment formatting + images/video submissions + long comment threads + native search integration). and anything that adds to that via JS/async should start from there and improve it by loading it faster. Like a lot of redesigns its 2 steps forward in one direction and 2 step back as a whole.
Things like speed of opening threads and video thumbnails etc were a big improvement but they weren't better than the 5yr old RES extension on top of the much simpler base of old Reddit.
The previews beta Reddit that came out a few months ago had a way better search UI and nice redesign but also made the comment UX way worse requiring hitting "load more" 10x more often favouring non threaded comment threads (scrolling > interaction) which is not how Reddit works IRL.
The real teams are not trying to make the best experience. They are actively trying to not do so for the sake of advertising probably. But that is just a guess.
> The real teams are not trying to make the best experience.
They are trying to exist somewhere between not getting fired and getting promoted, occasionally something more if it doesn't conflict with those goals.
How on earth are solo indie devs outperforming entire well-paid teams?!
As the classic saying goes, "well, there's your problem!"
Work expands to fill the available capacity, regardless of whether it's beneficial to others besides the ones doing it, because those who are being paid will always try to justify their existence.
The "solo indie dev" is, just by virtue of being limited in capacity, not going to add complexity where it isn't absolutely necessary, nor spend countless amounts of time on redesigning something that already works well.
Over the years I've rewritten a lot of internal sites (after the relatively large teams responsible for their maintenance were cut) and turned them from huge monstrosities that would definitely require a large dedicated team to maintain into small, fast, simple ones which could almost be treated as a side-job.
That seems to be a new new web reddit, build on web components via lit and it seems rather performant in contrast to whatever stuff reddit is using now. I’m no convinced about the UI choices, but at least they seem to recognized that the "new reddit" wasn’t the best. Hope dies last.
(In my dreams there would be a real Apollo for Mac OS. Real as in AppKit, not UIKit/Catalyst. Won’t ever happen, of course. As productive Selig is with Apollo for iOS, there are limits.)
> How on earth are solo indie devs outperforming entire well-paid teams?!
They don't outperform them, they have a different goal. The indie devs develop for the user. The company develops for the money, meaning more revenue, and whatever metrics for success they have.
You can gather much more data (the principal source of income for twitter and reddit) in a mobile app than a web one. The deliberately turfed their web offering to drive traffic towards official apps.
The design yes, but I love so many of the subs like woodworking, gardening, baking, boardgames, etc. I’d hate to have to go to separate sites for all my interests.
I'll rephrase: I hate the reddit default subs and the "reddit culture" in general. I am a frequent reader of some absolute treasures of a sub, like /r/askhistorians or /r/boardgames
I don't go on there much these days anyways... but if they remove "old.reddit" I just can't justify going on there at all.
More space is generally a good rule of thumb for UI/UX but when the "value" of the site/app is being able to grok through text fast, a "mobile-like" UI is awful.
To whoever from Reddit corporate that is reading this - you’ve done something bad and unnecessary. The new “mobile optimized” UI is slow and buggy. The net result is that I’ll use Reddit less instead of clicking on more ads on your new site.
86 comments
[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 174 ms ] threadAlthough there were issues with invisible edit button
honestly the zooming isn't too bad and doesn't have to be done much. a well done mobile app would be preferable but it's perfectly fine for 10 minutes of casual browsing.
https://old.reddit.com/r/news.compact
Yeah, it still works here.
https://old.reddit.com/r/beta/comments/8lv96l/feedback_pleas...
Curious, how do they get away with CORS?
3-4 times the ad impressions and 3-4 times the profit!
Both Reddit and Twitter are great examples of bafflingly bad first-party UIs, and it's comical because these vastly better third party clients are often solo side projects. How on earth are solo indie devs outperforming entire well-paid teams?!
But yeah, it works very well, I have used it for many many years, and in the same vein if someone has got high recommendations to hn apps I am all ears, I have used materialistic for couple years but it has fallen short on more than a couple things and seems to not be updated anymore
Easy, no PMs!
HN is still the ideal UX model for Reddit style sites (besides comment formatting + images/video submissions + long comment threads + native search integration). and anything that adds to that via JS/async should start from there and improve it by loading it faster. Like a lot of redesigns its 2 steps forward in one direction and 2 step back as a whole.
Things like speed of opening threads and video thumbnails etc were a big improvement but they weren't better than the 5yr old RES extension on top of the much simpler base of old Reddit.
The previews beta Reddit that came out a few months ago had a way better search UI and nice redesign but also made the comment UX way worse requiring hitting "load more" 10x more often favouring non threaded comment threads (scrolling > interaction) which is not how Reddit works IRL.
They are trying to exist somewhere between not getting fired and getting promoted, occasionally something more if it doesn't conflict with those goals.
As the classic saying goes, "well, there's your problem!"
Work expands to fill the available capacity, regardless of whether it's beneficial to others besides the ones doing it, because those who are being paid will always try to justify their existence.
The "solo indie dev" is, just by virtue of being limited in capacity, not going to add complexity where it isn't absolutely necessary, nor spend countless amounts of time on redesigning something that already works well.
Over the years I've rewritten a lot of internal sites (after the relatively large teams responsible for their maintenance were cut) and turned them from huge monstrosities that would definitely require a large dedicated team to maintain into small, fast, simple ones which could almost be treated as a side-job.
They have different goals. The solo indie devs are performing horribly on the metrics the internal dev team is judged by, and vice-versa.
That seems to be a new new web reddit, build on web components via lit and it seems rather performant in contrast to whatever stuff reddit is using now. I’m no convinced about the UI choices, but at least they seem to recognized that the "new reddit" wasn’t the best. Hope dies last.
(In my dreams there would be a real Apollo for Mac OS. Real as in AppKit, not UIKit/Catalyst. Won’t ever happen, of course. As productive Selig is with Apollo for iOS, there are limits.)
Because the UI for the first party apps have to be approved by MBA types who have different goals than 'make it good for users'.
They don't outperform them, they have a different goal. The indie devs develop for the user. The company develops for the money, meaning more revenue, and whatever metrics for success they have.
Finally my cue to quit my reddit addiction? God I hate that website.
I really can't believe their site was so bad, and yet it was.
More space is generally a good rule of thumb for UI/UX but when the "value" of the site/app is being able to grok through text fast, a "mobile-like" UI is awful.
[1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/ml.docilealligator.infinityf...
Then you can visit https://i.reddit.com/ just fine.
With non-logged-in session, you will be redirect to https://www.reddit.com/?rdt=55049