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Ask HN: Do you like/use Reddit's redesign?

101 points by return0 8y ago

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.

robertcope 8y ago
The old design was better, IMHO.
maccam94 8y ago
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.
gargarplex 8y ago
I dislike it and I don't use it. I also use Reddit Enhancement Suite [1] to improve my experience. 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-suite/kbmfpngjjgdllneeigpgjifpgocmfgmb?hl=en-US https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reddit-enhancement...
orangep 8y ago
i personally like it, it's cleaner and there's more whitespace that helps with readability.
- charlesbradshaw 8y ago
  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
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- return0 8y ago
  well, congratulations on your courage, but i actually find it less readable, because titles do not stand out from everything else on the page
sarcasmatwork 8y ago
Do not like it. old.reddit.com
andrei_says_ 8y ago
No+no. Https://old.reddit.com
makecheck 8y ago
Not at ALL. 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?
- tiredyam 8y ago
  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.
  - j0057 8y ago
    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.
    - dondawest 8y ago
      >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.
matt4077 8y ago
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.
- ezekg 8y ago
  Except Reddit's new design definitively sucks and it practically forces their app down your throat on mobile to increase their ad revenue.
- Scarblac 8y ago
  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.
eclipseo76 8y ago
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.
WallWextra 8y ago
I would like it quite a lot if it worked properly, but there are some pretty brutal bugs. I have some amount of faith that they'll be fixed, though.
remyp 8y ago
No. Scrolling down the page should not make my 2018 i7 MacBook Pro spin up its fans.
Jack000 8y ago
the new design reminds me of digg's old design. it would have been a good April Fools prank to launch a "HN redesign" in the same style
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
x3sphere 8y ago
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.
- michaelmrose 8y ago
  Reddit is mostly 0 or 1 pictures followed by chunks of text with minimal controls/links. Isn't it amazing that its possible to make this slow on a fast computer?
AdamGibbins 8y ago
No, its buggy and the moderation tools are in-superior especially when you factor in the incomplete RES support.
mostlysimilar 8y ago
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.
ezekg 8y ago
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. Makes me sick.
- krisgee 8y ago
  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.
  - joezydeco 8y ago
    Apollo on iOS is fast and easy. Would recommend to anyone.
    - rekabis 8y ago
      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.
  - eden_hazard 8y ago
    Reddit is fun on Android is so much better than official reddit one.
    - genocidicbunny 8y ago
      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.
askafriend 8y ago
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 pretty much still browse on old.reddit.com.
exolymph 8y ago
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.
- collyw 8y ago
  Its pretty much like any major redesign of Facebooks page back 10 years ago.
- return0 8y ago
  i do think that we re not far from the average redditor.
  - krapp 8y ago
    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.
    - exolymph 8y ago
      Those are a weird minority of subreddits. Look at the front page for a taste of how Reddit is experienced on average.
  - pndy 8y ago
    Still bit away I'd say tho, reddit commenting style leaks out in some topics
- krapp 8y ago
  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?
- Crinus 7y ago
  > we're not the population that Reddit redesigned for. What is the population that Reddit was redesigned for and how does that redesign cater to them?
khrbrt 8y ago
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.
hjk05 8y ago
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.
- darpa_escapee 8y ago
  Metrics are "will this push more users to use the mobile app/give us more ad impressions vs ???"
- dual_basis 8y ago
  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?
- pndy 8y ago
  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.
bg4 8y ago
I wonder if Reddit will one day trigger a Digg-like death for themselves?
collyw 8y ago
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.
egypturnash 8y ago
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.
- dehrmann 8y ago
  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.
  - u801e 8y ago
    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.
- contravariant 8y ago
  I'm currently using uBlock origin to get rid of the banners. The fact that they've called it an `onboardingbar` is not exactly reassuring.
thatoneuser 8y ago
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 :/
gcb0 8y ago
captcha. captcha everywhere.
mezzode 8y ago
Generally yes, although I definitely wish the initial load was speedier the better looks and "flow" are worth it imo. I usually browse Reddit using Relay and look at my saved posts on desktop, which has benefited a lot from the redesign since I can just do stuff in a single tab instead of middle-clicking a bunch of posts.
darpa_escapee 8y ago
No. It's buggy, slow and looks terrible on a desktop/laptop. Not only does it look awful via mobile, it is practically unusable on a phone. If they cared about usability or user experience, they wouldn't have 3 different reminders to use the Reddit app or redesign each time you visit the site, each interrupting flow or completely blocking the visible page itself. Certainly the web app wouldn't "forget" that you opted out of the redesign or log you out if they cared about user experience. It's very clear that the redesign was an effort to more efficiently push ads to users and drive their valuation up.
hieloz 8y ago
I still like to browse reddit.com/.compact on mobile.
pard68 8y ago
Sidebars are totally gone. There are subs I _only visit_ for the information in their sidebar and wiki, both of which are gone, as far as I can tell, in the redesign. Also, I use reddit the most in bed, on my phone. It is a great aggregation service for news and interesting articles, but they have intentionally slowed down their website and regularly make it worse and more annoying in an effort to force users to use their app. I am sure that the app is fine, but I like the browser because I want to be able to open links in new tabs and then have those tabs available on my desktop the next day for further reading.
- mikewhy 8y ago
  Both the sidebar an wiki are available in the redesign.
crypticlizard 8y ago
I hate it. So many reasons why. Redirect to mobile app along with nerfed mobile website is God awful. Broken browser behavior when clicking links is obnoxious. I'd go on but this thread covered everything else.
sorryforthethro 8y ago
I imagine it's a huge success metrics-wise. The infinite scroll and bright pictures, even the sizing of the preview boxes as 2/3s screen height, it's perfectly tuned to maximize user engagement time. And since they put extra effort into maintaining the old design, they seem to have lost few users if any. Few companies have pulled off a successful transition like this.
droptablemain 8y ago
I don't mind the new look, but the build itself is terribly slow and feels bloated.
wodenokoto 8y ago
It is great for looking at gifs and funny pictures. Not so good for intelligent discussions, but I feel like those disappeared a long time ago.
- jefurii 8y ago
  If you only ever look at the home page as a non-logged-in user, or if you don't subscribe to subreddits I can see why you'd think that. There are awesome groups on a whole range of topics. Subscribe to some of those and suddenly Reddit is an aggregator of the best of the web. It rewarda careful choices.
dewey 8y ago
On every redesign on every website ever there will be a huge outcry of people who hate the new design. The Reddit one is barely usable for me though, I’m not sure if it’s the JS heavy front end buts it’s really laggy and hard to use on a 2015 MBP with Safari so I just switched to Apollo app as the only way to use it. The desktop site got unusable for me.
millstone 8y ago
On my screen the redesign goes from 17 links to 3.
pndy 8y ago
No. Neither do I like being harassed by various banners to switch to redesign (recently sliding banners for "amazing" dark mode and infinite scrolling) or even finding it was loaded by force randomly during browsing random content and that seems to be happening way too often to count it as "accident". I get the idea behind this: they set themselves a goal of luring in new people by making UI more attractive to the audience who's familiar with social network interfaces and such way of providing content (the default card is just same as twitter, facebook and instagram feed view). Still, they should still respect users who want to stay on faster-loading old interface and provide it as an option in preferences (old domain is just half-assed way to do it), not assuming that everyone will be enjoying this new UI.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
u801e 8y ago
I don't, mainly because of the slower load times, the fact that they mix in sponsored links in the current version (but not the old version), and that it's unusable in my smart phone's browser. I've gotten into the habit of using old.reddit.com whenever I view it.
CM30 8y ago
No, and I always go to old.reddit.com to avoid it. It's set as my default style when logged in, and I'm happy to use an extension to redirect to the old site on Firefox too. As for why? Well the new one is slower, fits less information on the page, keeps trying to force me to use their mobile app, etc. It just keeps getting in the way with no real benefits provided in return.
floatboth 8y ago
Yes. It's nice. I love how collapsing comment threads is now done with a big solid bar on the left instead of a tiny '[-]' link that you have to scroll up to find.
everdrive 8y ago
I hate it, it's infinitely worse. Here are a few issues: - It's much slower/bulkier. I don't want a modern machine just render webpages. - Infinite scrolling designs are good for addiction, but not actually good for reading. If I have to reload the page, my spot is gone. - Much less content actually fits on a page, and I suspect this is done to encourage scrolling, similar to facebook's strategy. Increase addiction, tracking, and ad impressions through engagement. - There seem to be a lot more emojis and post flair. - There seem to be A lot more promoted posts There's probably other stuff I haven't noticed. Between the redesign, the enhanced user tracking, their desire to go public, and tencent's investment, it's pretty clear that it's getting to be time to abandon reddit completely.
- thisismyaccoun7 8y ago
  You're first point is my biggest pet peeve. I get the "Something went wrong. Press here to return home" error all the time when my connection is mediocre or like if my phone is about to drop wifi for data. For a site comprised of basically just text and images, they figured out very well how to complicate serving the data to the point of unusability.
benbristow 8y ago
I do prefer it. It looks much nicer, the old design was very dated, let's be honest. Don't need to use a third-party extension (Reddit Enhancement Suite) to make it usable anymore. It does seem quite buggy in places though. Especially in regards to login flow & 2 factor authentication. Seems to get stuck and gets in limbo where it acts like it's logged in but it isn't. However, I do hate the mobile 'experience', it's borderline unusable with all the banners and attempts to get you to install their app. If the links would take me to my third-party reader like BaconReader (iOS) then it'd be more tolerable but it only works with the official Reddit app.
- htfy96 8y ago
  Exactly. New design makes it much easier to be used by non-advanced users like your mom or nephew. They are often ignored in the context of HN discussions and seldom voice for themselves, but they did consist a large portion of user base.
  - michaelmrose 8y ago
    Please explain why the new design is easier.
    - htfy96 8y ago
      There are much fewer visual elements after the redesign. Take the post view as an example. The new design removes my subreddits, sub description & recent viewed posts and tries to hide all other elements like share links / absolute last replied date from the page. Same as the reason for the success of iPad, People like my mom feel petrified for a UI with many choices. In the new design if you look at the screen from meters away, you can easily identify the reply box & reply button as the only prominent visual element.
- julianlam 8y ago
  Do you use Firefox on your mobile device? In the address bar, FF will show a "open in app" button. It looks like the Android robot.
jefurii 8y ago
I love the old Reddit design. It's a sea of mostly text with a few flair images but it really works. For me it's always been really readable and a joy to use. If they take it away I'll probably just stop using the site.
fukbezos 8y ago
No and the Reddit community is a shadow of what it once was. I enjoy HN because there are less racists and 14 year olds. No politics either
mrmondo 8y ago
No, it’s absolutely terrible. Overly JavaScript heavy, slow as anything, laggy UI elements, bad use of screen realestate and it seems to be generally bloated.
SN76477 8y ago
Can’t stand the redesign. It feels like a group of fresh ux grads built it. Trendy and cool, with the latest js crap but with Zero functionality or friendliness.
kenrose 8y ago
For most people who don’t like the new design, there is still https://old.reddit.com https://old.reddit.com
- Noumenon72 8y ago
  This is how I can tell the design's actually bad -- that when I get on the new design by mistake, I'm not like "meh, links are still here", I'm like "whoops, have to go to the old one!"
moogly 8y ago
It looks like a fake/scam site, somehow. You know one of those who scrape other sites, steal the content and put their own ads on top.
- jtriangle 7y ago
  I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, but I think you've really hit the nail on the head.
TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
No. The old design is ugly, but it works. The new design is prettier in a messy way, but I much prefer the original UI.
juststeve 8y ago
it is absolutely worse.
david-s 8y ago
No. Largely the dark pattern mobile "get the app" hassling. But also the sheer load time on desktop. And to a lesser extent the breaking of the "a bunch of mostly-static links with associated commentary" model. Using the site is quite unpleasant now. And it's enough unpleasantness to keep me from going back to checking it regularly. I hope they keep it.
- prolikewhoa 8y ago
  I think you can disable the "get the app" in your Reddit settings panel. How persistent that is, not sure.
aosaigh 8y ago
Interesting, I just closed Reddit while complaining in my head about how poor the experience is: - You can't seem to persist the "old reddit" design any more. It keeps switching you back to the new design - It's just much slower to load content. The old site was fairly snappy - Comment are CONSTANTLY failing to load in most of the threads I open - The autoscroll is also regularly failing to load new items - Using the mobile site, I'm nagged by numerous attempts to get me to install the native app
- Ne02ptzero 8y ago
  Just so you know, there's this[1] firefox addon that always force the redirection to old.reddit.com. I imagine there's a similar thing for chrome. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-redirect/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...
  - Twirrim 8y ago
    You don't even have to do that. On reddit, go to your preferences. Down under beta test you'll find "Use the redesign as my default experience" Disable it.
    - pubby 8y ago
      The problem is that reddit randomly ignores this and switches back to the redesign on a whim.
      - Twirrim 8y ago
        Interesting. It has never failed for me since turning it on soon after the redesign landed.
myself248 8y ago
Apparently my "That's enough Reddit, time to go do something productive" check only happens when I reach the bottom of the page and have to click for another page. Endless Scroll basically destroyed my productivity for a week until I figured that out. I switched to Old Reddit and my life is back in balance. Just one of those subtle little things nobody would've anticipated, I guess.
- wool_gather 8y ago
  On the contrary: this was very likely a key point in the decision process for the new design.
karangoeluw 8y ago
old.reddit.com all the time
prolikewhoa 8y ago
No, not in the slightest. Seems solely designed to push more banner advertisements instead of providing content. Even on Desktop you're unable to see 1 or more posts at a time if there's an image post open.
villgax 8y ago
History is broken, search is broken
joshmn 8y ago
No.
L_226 8y ago
I saw Anand Mariappan (snr. dir. eng. at Reddit) speak at the Landing Festival Berlin last week. I was amused to note that both he and the organisers of the conference touted his management of the redesign as a highlight of his career. I do not use Reddit often, but I detest the new design.
dreamcompiler 8y ago
All growth-minded websites eventually decide to go to war with their users. This usually happens right before they die.
truth_be_told 8y ago
Absolute worst unnecessary redesign! Reddit's charm was its simplicity and information density on a single screen. The new redesign has completely gutted it and made everything worse. I ONLY use https://old.reddit.com/ https://old.reddit.com/ to access the site now.
- alanz1223 8y ago
  Reddit has gone through many changes both in the product and the organization.. I feel like its initial purpose/mission has been lost in the way that it was intended as an open space to share things. I do absolutely hate the redesign and hate having to type the URL out.. the redesign is more tedious and eats up data like mad
  - michaelmrose 8y ago
    You can set a preference in your user settings to prefer the old design and automatically get that on any reddit link you click.
    - tuananh 8y ago
      it still randomly switch to new design once in a while. a refresh fixes it.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- collyw 8y ago
  The commenters have been getting worse as Reddit has grown completely independent of the new design.
- ggregoire 8y ago
  There is an option in the settings to display the old version on https://reddit.com https://reddit.com
aaomidi 8y ago
I dislike the redesign very much. I've made a very simple open source extension to automatically redirect all reddit.com and www.reddit.com links to old.reddit.com. - https://github.com/aaomidi/reddit-fixer https://github.com/aaomidi/reddit-fixer - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reddit-fixer/boahhdcjflkiibelindjjjfpnffcjdag https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reddit-fixer/boahh... - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/reddit-redirector/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/reddit-redire...
- jtriangle 7y ago
  Thanks fam. This is even lighter than what I was using previously.
  - aaomidi 7y ago
    Thanks <3
jplata 8y ago
Shameless plug, since I didn't get much feedback when shared previously [0]...if anyone wants to check out another alternative to browsing reddit: https://lurrker.com https://lurrker.com [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18910818 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18910818
millzlane 8y ago
>I also notice that old reddit randomly logs me out or "forgets" to use the classic design. This was happening to me too. I've switched to a add on to FF that forces everything reddit to old.reddit.com I feel like the redesign wasn't for "Us". It was for those people used to a Facebook like feed. People that enjoy or easily digest pictures and videos more than they do words. I have a friend that uses RES to view all images on the page. And basically scrolls past any threads that would have a text title. Doesn't even read the title unless an image catches his eye. And never EVER reads the comments. I feel like the redesign was for people like that.
- jtriangle 7y ago
  Which unfortunately, is the sort of person who's going to accidentally click on an ad, which is probably an intentional move on their end.
NamTaf 8y ago
I dislike it, but I reluctantly use it because its very numerous and significant drawbacks are maybe offset by the fact that it offers night mode. If there was a night mode setting in the old version, I'd use that in a heartbeat.
- michaelmrose 8y ago
  Did you know user scripts can give you a night mode?
  - NamTaf 7y ago
    I did wonder if an add-on or something could do this, but hadn't got to looking into it. Knowing there's an easy solution means I will now. Thank you!
throwaway66666 8y ago
"Mike from Triplebyte here" is the new "Here in my garage with my new lamborghini". (referring to the way-too-common reddit ads with the goofy looking guy, and to Tai Lopez's cringey "here in my garage" self-help-success videos)
ddingus 8y ago
Hate it. I avoid it constantly. The old design isn't very sexy, but it's super efficient easy to read information dense. They haven't improved on that.
lifehacked 8y ago
Hate it, old.reddit.com stays in my address bar
Bayart 8y ago
No, it's unreadable and I despise it. And trying to force me to use it makes it worse.
strzibny 8y ago
No and no.
tuberelay 8y ago
When I finally get tired of being nagged to install the app and concede, I find the app is exactly like the mobile website, except all my normal browser functions like select/copy, copy image link, find are all non-intuitive or don't exist. Its just so pointless and stupid. Are these guys doing any UX testing?
- jtriangle 7y ago
  Sure, they're testing the new UX's ability to increase their ad impressions. I'm sure that's going swimmingly.
jmkni 8y ago
Reddit’s redesign is ok, and I can use it when I have to, but it’s worse in every way than the old version.
grwthckrmstr 8y ago
Hey, I'm a long time Reddit user. I really enjoy the new interface. Loving the app as well, which got much better over the past year or so. (quickly hides before old Reddit fans come at me swinging)
digikazi 8y ago
I don't normally comment, but as a (formerly) heavy Reddit user I feel compelled to chime in: I absolutely loathe the new redesign. Infinite scrolling: ye Gods, why? It makes my fairly beefy laptop grind to a halt. Plenty of very eloquent posters before me have stated in great detail just why they hate it, so I won't bore everybody by repeating everything. I used to love the very simplicity of old Reddit; by making it more Facebook-like, they infantilised a great site, and the moment they take away the ability to visit "old Reddit" my usage will drop right down. But I suppose this infantilisation is just right for the social media generation. Sigh. Some commenters have mentioned the great Digg redesign fiasco; here's a link from August 2010 that talks about it. The internet was a very different place in 2010. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/pda/2010/aug/31/digg-redesign-revolt https://www.theguardian.com/technology/pda/2010/aug/31/digg-...
- jtriangle 7y ago
  When, not if, they take away the old site, I'm done with reddit for good. I have plenty of alternatives at this point and I imagine that I'm not the only one who's jumping ship at that point.
- Crinus 7y ago
  > by making it more Facebook-like, they infantilised a great site And Facebook itself used to have a very simple and lightweight layout.
b3b0p 8y ago
No. Reminds me of Netflix. Both have gotten substantially worse. To the point of me not even visiting or cancelling my subscription in the case of Netflix. Is anyone or any company actually improving their website? What is the cause of this? Any one have insight? I have a theory or thought, but I'm interested if anyone has some real insight or reason? Edit: The constant use our app banner and nag is the worse.
DuskStar 8y ago
Nope, dark mode+RES remains my one true love. If your redesign reduces info density, increases load times and breaks compatibility with the most popular user mod to your site... Perhaps you should rethink things.
musicale 8y ago
Is that a trick question?
mftrhu 8y ago
I do not use the redesign. I especially despise this behavior of "forgetting" the login and redirecting users to the redesign, and I use a simple userscript to keep everything on old.reddit. It's much heavier on my machine, for one thing, and I hate the new user pages - not the bio/avatar, or the fact that you can post there, but just how the messages are displayed. It's noisy. The context provided is not worth the space it takes on the screen, and AFAICT comments from deleted thread only appear on the old overview.
alt_f4 8y ago
I don't know anyone who does.
finnthehuman 8y ago
I understand that reddit wants to be the place where bored teens scroll through memes, gifs, news and screenshots from twitter, facebook and 4chan. But I want nothing to do with any of that. I go for the interesting conversations in 3 tiny subreddits filled with thoughts I don't get to read anywhere else. Of course I hate the redesign. When I want to browse twitter, I'll just open twitter.
Spooky23 8y ago
It’s amazingly bad. It’s bad for text, media, commenting, following users, etc. Other than sort of looking like GMail, I cannot imagine what drove the folks behind it. It’s almost Reddit and Tumblr are in a race to product the worst 2000s era social website ever.
wingerlang 8y ago
I MUCH prefer it. I've been using reddit daily for just under a decade.
tluyben2 8y ago
Hate it. I use the old. The new one is very slow here and pops up errors that it cannot load posts and then it they appear anyway etc. It's dynamic loading taken way too far. Just give me static pages preloaded please and, if you must, update things dynamically, but that's not really a must anyway.
norin 8y ago
I will be using the older version until they can it. the old Reddit is still very easy to use, very responsive and is very fast.
majortennis 7y ago
no
AKhoo 7y ago
I used to absolutely hate it, to the extent where I would actually take the time and effort to switch to old.reddit.com whenever I got served the new redesign. BUT after a few months of having the new design being pushed in my face, and forced to engage with it, I've kind of mellowed out. Infinite scroll is annoying, otherwise I find the look and feel is reasonably pleasant, and a little more "2019". It does feel like a pretty unnecessary redesign though. Does anyone know if Reddit has published any stats showing what the redesign accomplished? I'd be curious to know.
locklock 7y ago
Kind of, but not for the reasons they want me to like it. The redesign itself is terrible in almost every way, but in being so terrible it really drives a point home I've been thinking about for a while: the "best practices" of modern SPA design and implementation can really lead to drastically reduced functionality. It might look slightly easier on the eyes (debatable) but other than that, actually using the redesign is worse in almost every way. It's slower than the previous version and there's way less information on a page, yet this is the app you'd get if you followed all the "common wisdom" about building a web front end in 2019. Compare this to something like craigslist, or pinboard, or HN, which are all theoretically "ugly" but all very fast and very easy to use. Content notwithstanding the user experience on craigslist is infinitely better than the one on new Reddit. So yes, I like the redesign, but only in the sense that is has highlighted all of the bad parts of modern web design to me in a very concrete way.
happppy 7y ago
Kinda and I usually use reddit on mobile app because reddit website on mobile is terrible and on pc its not appealing enough. So I use mobile app. Mobile app also sucks a bit.
Nasreddin_Hodja 7y ago
Only one thing I don't like is infinite scrolling.
geddy 7y ago
I quit Reddit for a lot of reasons, but the redesign was the final nail in the coffin for me. Feels like No Country for Old Men over there. I felt like all I was doing was watching loading spinners for the content to come in. Lots of last-minute DOM element readjustments that felt super broken and I never quite knew how to use anything. Add to that, links were replaced with icons in a lot of places so I never could find what I was looking for. Blessing in disguise, really. I started using HackerNews and I love the community here.
theklub 7y ago
No, I use old.reddit or nothing at all.
pier25 7y ago
NO It's a disaster. It is slower has worse UX than the old Reddit. Whoever thought making a SPA with React was a good idea was wrong. Reddit is a terrible use case for a SPA. Design wise it's not terrible, but the chosen fonts have less readability than the previous fonts (I believe good old Verdana). I will keep using old Reddit with RES for as long as I can.

101 points by return0 8y ago

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.

robertcope 8y ago

The old design was better, IMHO.

maccam94 8y ago

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.

gargarplex 8y ago

I dislike it and I don't use it. I also use Reddit Enhancement Suite [1] to improve my experience. 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-suite/kbmfpngjjgdllneeigpgjifpgocmfgmb?hl=en-US https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reddit-enhancement...

orangep 8y ago

i personally like it, it's cleaner and there's more whitespace that helps with readability.

charlesbradshaw 8y ago
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
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
return0 8y ago
well, congratulations on your courage, but i actually find it less readable, because titles do not stand out from everything else on the page

sarcasmatwork 8y ago

Do not like it. old.reddit.com

andrei_says_ 8y ago

No+no. Https://old.reddit.com

makecheck 8y ago

Not at ALL. 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?

tiredyam 8y ago
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.
- j0057 8y ago
  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.
  - dondawest 8y ago
    >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.

matt4077 8y ago

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.

ezekg 8y ago
Except Reddit's new design definitively sucks and it practically forces their app down your throat on mobile to increase their ad revenue.
Scarblac 8y ago
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.

eclipseo76 8y ago

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.

WallWextra 8y ago

I would like it quite a lot if it worked properly, but there are some pretty brutal bugs. I have some amount of faith that they'll be fixed, though.

remyp 8y ago

No. Scrolling down the page should not make my 2018 i7 MacBook Pro spin up its fans.

Jack000 8y ago

the new design reminds me of digg's old design. it would have been a good April Fools prank to launch a "HN redesign" in the same style

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

x3sphere 8y ago

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.

michaelmrose 8y ago
Reddit is mostly 0 or 1 pictures followed by chunks of text with minimal controls/links. Isn't it amazing that its possible to make this slow on a fast computer?

AdamGibbins 8y ago

No, its buggy and the moderation tools are in-superior especially when you factor in the incomplete RES support.

mostlysimilar 8y ago

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.

ezekg 8y ago

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. Makes me sick.

krisgee 8y ago
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.
- joezydeco 8y ago
  Apollo on iOS is fast and easy. Would recommend to anyone.
  - rekabis 8y ago
    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.
- eden_hazard 8y ago
  Reddit is fun on Android is so much better than official reddit one.
  - genocidicbunny 8y ago
    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.

askafriend 8y ago

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 pretty much still browse on old.reddit.com.

exolymph 8y ago

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.

collyw 8y ago
Its pretty much like any major redesign of Facebooks page back 10 years ago.
return0 8y ago
i do think that we re not far from the average redditor.
- krapp 8y ago
  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.
  - exolymph 8y ago
    Those are a weird minority of subreddits. Look at the front page for a taste of how Reddit is experienced on average.
- pndy 8y ago
  Still bit away I'd say tho, reddit commenting style leaks out in some topics
krapp 8y ago
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?
Crinus 7y ago
> we're not the population that Reddit redesigned for. What is the population that Reddit was redesigned for and how does that redesign cater to them?

khrbrt 8y ago

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.

hjk05 8y ago

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.

darpa_escapee 8y ago
Metrics are "will this push more users to use the mobile app/give us more ad impressions vs ???"
dual_basis 8y ago
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?
pndy 8y ago
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.

bg4 8y ago

I wonder if Reddit will one day trigger a Digg-like death for themselves?

collyw 8y ago

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.

egypturnash 8y ago

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.

dehrmann 8y ago
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.
- u801e 8y ago
  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.
contravariant 8y ago
I'm currently using uBlock origin to get rid of the banners. The fact that they've called it an `onboardingbar` is not exactly reassuring.

thatoneuser 8y ago

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 :/

gcb0 8y ago

captcha. captcha everywhere.

mezzode 8y ago

Generally yes, although I definitely wish the initial load was speedier the better looks and "flow" are worth it imo. I usually browse Reddit using Relay and look at my saved posts on desktop, which has benefited a lot from the redesign since I can just do stuff in a single tab instead of middle-clicking a bunch of posts.

darpa_escapee 8y ago

No. It's buggy, slow and looks terrible on a desktop/laptop. Not only does it look awful via mobile, it is practically unusable on a phone. If they cared about usability or user experience, they wouldn't have 3 different reminders to use the Reddit app or redesign each time you visit the site, each interrupting flow or completely blocking the visible page itself. Certainly the web app wouldn't "forget" that you opted out of the redesign or log you out if they cared about user experience. It's very clear that the redesign was an effort to more efficiently push ads to users and drive their valuation up.

hieloz 8y ago

I still like to browse reddit.com/.compact on mobile.

pard68 8y ago

Sidebars are totally gone. There are subs I _only visit_ for the information in their sidebar and wiki, both of which are gone, as far as I can tell, in the redesign. Also, I use reddit the most in bed, on my phone. It is a great aggregation service for news and interesting articles, but they have intentionally slowed down their website and regularly make it worse and more annoying in an effort to force users to use their app. I am sure that the app is fine, but I like the browser because I want to be able to open links in new tabs and then have those tabs available on my desktop the next day for further reading.

mikewhy 8y ago
Both the sidebar an wiki are available in the redesign.

crypticlizard 8y ago

I hate it. So many reasons why. Redirect to mobile app along with nerfed mobile website is God awful. Broken browser behavior when clicking links is obnoxious. I'd go on but this thread covered everything else.

sorryforthethro 8y ago

I imagine it's a huge success metrics-wise. The infinite scroll and bright pictures, even the sizing of the preview boxes as 2/3s screen height, it's perfectly tuned to maximize user engagement time. And since they put extra effort into maintaining the old design, they seem to have lost few users if any. Few companies have pulled off a successful transition like this.

droptablemain 8y ago

I don't mind the new look, but the build itself is terribly slow and feels bloated.

wodenokoto 8y ago

It is great for looking at gifs and funny pictures. Not so good for intelligent discussions, but I feel like those disappeared a long time ago.

jefurii 8y ago
If you only ever look at the home page as a non-logged-in user, or if you don't subscribe to subreddits I can see why you'd think that. There are awesome groups on a whole range of topics. Subscribe to some of those and suddenly Reddit is an aggregator of the best of the web. It rewarda careful choices.

dewey 8y ago

On every redesign on every website ever there will be a huge outcry of people who hate the new design. The Reddit one is barely usable for me though, I’m not sure if it’s the JS heavy front end buts it’s really laggy and hard to use on a 2015 MBP with Safari so I just switched to Apollo app as the only way to use it. The desktop site got unusable for me.

millstone 8y ago

On my screen the redesign goes from 17 links to 3.

pndy 8y ago

No. Neither do I like being harassed by various banners to switch to redesign (recently sliding banners for "amazing" dark mode and infinite scrolling) or even finding it was loaded by force randomly during browsing random content and that seems to be happening way too often to count it as "accident". I get the idea behind this: they set themselves a goal of luring in new people by making UI more attractive to the audience who's familiar with social network interfaces and such way of providing content (the default card is just same as twitter, facebook and instagram feed view). Still, they should still respect users who want to stay on faster-loading old interface and provide it as an option in preferences (old domain is just half-assed way to do it), not assuming that everyone will be enjoying this new UI.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

u801e 8y ago

I don't, mainly because of the slower load times, the fact that they mix in sponsored links in the current version (but not the old version), and that it's unusable in my smart phone's browser. I've gotten into the habit of using old.reddit.com whenever I view it.

CM30 8y ago

No, and I always go to old.reddit.com to avoid it. It's set as my default style when logged in, and I'm happy to use an extension to redirect to the old site on Firefox too. As for why? Well the new one is slower, fits less information on the page, keeps trying to force me to use their mobile app, etc. It just keeps getting in the way with no real benefits provided in return.

floatboth 8y ago

Yes. It's nice. I love how collapsing comment threads is now done with a big solid bar on the left instead of a tiny '[-]' link that you have to scroll up to find.

everdrive 8y ago

I hate it, it's infinitely worse. Here are a few issues: - It's much slower/bulkier. I don't want a modern machine just render webpages. - Infinite scrolling designs are good for addiction, but not actually good for reading. If I have to reload the page, my spot is gone. - Much less content actually fits on a page, and I suspect this is done to encourage scrolling, similar to facebook's strategy. Increase addiction, tracking, and ad impressions through engagement. - There seem to be a lot more emojis and post flair. - There seem to be A lot more promoted posts There's probably other stuff I haven't noticed. Between the redesign, the enhanced user tracking, their desire to go public, and tencent's investment, it's pretty clear that it's getting to be time to abandon reddit completely.

thisismyaccoun7 8y ago
You're first point is my biggest pet peeve. I get the "Something went wrong. Press here to return home" error all the time when my connection is mediocre or like if my phone is about to drop wifi for data. For a site comprised of basically just text and images, they figured out very well how to complicate serving the data to the point of unusability.

benbristow 8y ago

I do prefer it. It looks much nicer, the old design was very dated, let's be honest. Don't need to use a third-party extension (Reddit Enhancement Suite) to make it usable anymore. It does seem quite buggy in places though. Especially in regards to login flow & 2 factor authentication. Seems to get stuck and gets in limbo where it acts like it's logged in but it isn't. However, I do hate the mobile 'experience', it's borderline unusable with all the banners and attempts to get you to install their app. If the links would take me to my third-party reader like BaconReader (iOS) then it'd be more tolerable but it only works with the official Reddit app.

htfy96 8y ago
Exactly. New design makes it much easier to be used by non-advanced users like your mom or nephew. They are often ignored in the context of HN discussions and seldom voice for themselves, but they did consist a large portion of user base.
- michaelmrose 8y ago
  Please explain why the new design is easier.
  - htfy96 8y ago
    There are much fewer visual elements after the redesign. Take the post view as an example. The new design removes my subreddits, sub description & recent viewed posts and tries to hide all other elements like share links / absolute last replied date from the page. Same as the reason for the success of iPad, People like my mom feel petrified for a UI with many choices. In the new design if you look at the screen from meters away, you can easily identify the reply box & reply button as the only prominent visual element.
julianlam 8y ago
Do you use Firefox on your mobile device? In the address bar, FF will show a "open in app" button. It looks like the Android robot.

jefurii 8y ago

I love the old Reddit design. It's a sea of mostly text with a few flair images but it really works. For me it's always been really readable and a joy to use. If they take it away I'll probably just stop using the site.

fukbezos 8y ago

No and the Reddit community is a shadow of what it once was. I enjoy HN because there are less racists and 14 year olds. No politics either

mrmondo 8y ago

No, it’s absolutely terrible. Overly JavaScript heavy, slow as anything, laggy UI elements, bad use of screen realestate and it seems to be generally bloated.

SN76477 8y ago

Can’t stand the redesign. It feels like a group of fresh ux grads built it. Trendy and cool, with the latest js crap but with Zero functionality or friendliness.

kenrose 8y ago

For most people who don’t like the new design, there is still https://old.reddit.com https://old.reddit.com

Noumenon72 8y ago
This is how I can tell the design's actually bad -- that when I get on the new design by mistake, I'm not like "meh, links are still here", I'm like "whoops, have to go to the old one!"

moogly 8y ago

It looks like a fake/scam site, somehow. You know one of those who scrape other sites, steal the content and put their own ads on top.

jtriangle 7y ago
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, but I think you've really hit the nail on the head.

TheOtherHobbes 8y ago

No. The old design is ugly, but it works. The new design is prettier in a messy way, but I much prefer the original UI.

juststeve 8y ago

it is absolutely worse.

david-s 8y ago

No. Largely the dark pattern mobile "get the app" hassling. But also the sheer load time on desktop. And to a lesser extent the breaking of the "a bunch of mostly-static links with associated commentary" model. Using the site is quite unpleasant now. And it's enough unpleasantness to keep me from going back to checking it regularly. I hope they keep it.

prolikewhoa 8y ago
I think you can disable the "get the app" in your Reddit settings panel. How persistent that is, not sure.

aosaigh 8y ago

Interesting, I just closed Reddit while complaining in my head about how poor the experience is: - You can't seem to persist the "old reddit" design any more. It keeps switching you back to the new design - It's just much slower to load content. The old site was fairly snappy - Comment are CONSTANTLY failing to load in most of the threads I open - The autoscroll is also regularly failing to load new items - Using the mobile site, I'm nagged by numerous attempts to get me to install the native app

Ne02ptzero 8y ago
Just so you know, there's this[1] firefox addon that always force the redirection to old.reddit.com. I imagine there's a similar thing for chrome. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-redirect/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...
- Twirrim 8y ago
  You don't even have to do that. On reddit, go to your preferences. Down under beta test you'll find "Use the redesign as my default experience" Disable it.
  - pubby 8y ago
    The problem is that reddit randomly ignores this and switches back to the redesign on a whim.
    - Twirrim 8y ago
      Interesting. It has never failed for me since turning it on soon after the redesign landed.

myself248 8y ago

Apparently my "That's enough Reddit, time to go do something productive" check only happens when I reach the bottom of the page and have to click for another page. Endless Scroll basically destroyed my productivity for a week until I figured that out. I switched to Old Reddit and my life is back in balance. Just one of those subtle little things nobody would've anticipated, I guess.

wool_gather 8y ago
On the contrary: this was very likely a key point in the decision process for the new design.

karangoeluw 8y ago

old.reddit.com all the time

prolikewhoa 8y ago

No, not in the slightest. Seems solely designed to push more banner advertisements instead of providing content. Even on Desktop you're unable to see 1 or more posts at a time if there's an image post open.

villgax 8y ago

History is broken, search is broken

joshmn 8y ago

No.

L_226 8y ago

I saw Anand Mariappan (snr. dir. eng. at Reddit) speak at the Landing Festival Berlin last week. I was amused to note that both he and the organisers of the conference touted his management of the redesign as a highlight of his career. I do not use Reddit often, but I detest the new design.

dreamcompiler 8y ago

All growth-minded websites eventually decide to go to war with their users. This usually happens right before they die.

truth_be_told 8y ago

Absolute worst unnecessary redesign! Reddit's charm was its simplicity and information density on a single screen. The new redesign has completely gutted it and made everything worse. I ONLY use https://old.reddit.com/ https://old.reddit.com/ to access the site now.

alanz1223 8y ago
Reddit has gone through many changes both in the product and the organization.. I feel like its initial purpose/mission has been lost in the way that it was intended as an open space to share things. I do absolutely hate the redesign and hate having to type the URL out.. the redesign is more tedious and eats up data like mad
- michaelmrose 8y ago
  You can set a preference in your user settings to prefer the old design and automatically get that on any reddit link you click.
  - tuananh 8y ago
    it still randomly switch to new design once in a while. a refresh fixes it.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
collyw 8y ago
The commenters have been getting worse as Reddit has grown completely independent of the new design.
ggregoire 8y ago
There is an option in the settings to display the old version on https://reddit.com https://reddit.com

aaomidi 8y ago

I dislike the redesign very much. I've made a very simple open source extension to automatically redirect all reddit.com and www.reddit.com links to old.reddit.com. - https://github.com/aaomidi/reddit-fixer https://github.com/aaomidi/reddit-fixer - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reddit-fixer/boahhdcjflkiibelindjjjfpnffcjdag https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reddit-fixer/boahh... - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/reddit-redirector/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/reddit-redire...

jtriangle 7y ago
Thanks fam. This is even lighter than what I was using previously.
- aaomidi 7y ago
  Thanks <3

jplata 8y ago

Shameless plug, since I didn't get much feedback when shared previously [0]...if anyone wants to check out another alternative to browsing reddit: https://lurrker.com https://lurrker.com [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18910818 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18910818

millzlane 8y ago

>I also notice that old reddit randomly logs me out or "forgets" to use the classic design. This was happening to me too. I've switched to a add on to FF that forces everything reddit to old.reddit.com I feel like the redesign wasn't for "Us". It was for those people used to a Facebook like feed. People that enjoy or easily digest pictures and videos more than they do words. I have a friend that uses RES to view all images on the page. And basically scrolls past any threads that would have a text title. Doesn't even read the title unless an image catches his eye. And never EVER reads the comments. I feel like the redesign was for people like that.

jtriangle 7y ago
Which unfortunately, is the sort of person who's going to accidentally click on an ad, which is probably an intentional move on their end.

NamTaf 8y ago

I dislike it, but I reluctantly use it because its very numerous and significant drawbacks are maybe offset by the fact that it offers night mode. If there was a night mode setting in the old version, I'd use that in a heartbeat.

michaelmrose 8y ago
Did you know user scripts can give you a night mode?
- NamTaf 7y ago
  I did wonder if an add-on or something could do this, but hadn't got to looking into it. Knowing there's an easy solution means I will now. Thank you!

throwaway66666 8y ago

"Mike from Triplebyte here" is the new "Here in my garage with my new lamborghini". (referring to the way-too-common reddit ads with the goofy looking guy, and to Tai Lopez's cringey "here in my garage" self-help-success videos)

ddingus 8y ago

Hate it. I avoid it constantly. The old design isn't very sexy, but it's super efficient easy to read information dense. They haven't improved on that.

lifehacked 8y ago

Hate it, old.reddit.com stays in my address bar

Bayart 8y ago

No, it's unreadable and I despise it. And trying to force me to use it makes it worse.

strzibny 8y ago

No and no.

tuberelay 8y ago

When I finally get tired of being nagged to install the app and concede, I find the app is exactly like the mobile website, except all my normal browser functions like select/copy, copy image link, find are all non-intuitive or don't exist. Its just so pointless and stupid. Are these guys doing any UX testing?

jtriangle 7y ago
Sure, they're testing the new UX's ability to increase their ad impressions. I'm sure that's going swimmingly.

jmkni 8y ago

Reddit’s redesign is ok, and I can use it when I have to, but it’s worse in every way than the old version.

grwthckrmstr 8y ago

Hey, I'm a long time Reddit user. I really enjoy the new interface. Loving the app as well, which got much better over the past year or so. (quickly hides before old Reddit fans come at me swinging)

digikazi 8y ago

I don't normally comment, but as a (formerly) heavy Reddit user I feel compelled to chime in: I absolutely loathe the new redesign. Infinite scrolling: ye Gods, why? It makes my fairly beefy laptop grind to a halt. Plenty of very eloquent posters before me have stated in great detail just why they hate it, so I won't bore everybody by repeating everything. I used to love the very simplicity of old Reddit; by making it more Facebook-like, they infantilised a great site, and the moment they take away the ability to visit "old Reddit" my usage will drop right down. But I suppose this infantilisation is just right for the social media generation. Sigh. Some commenters have mentioned the great Digg redesign fiasco; here's a link from August 2010 that talks about it. The internet was a very different place in 2010. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/pda/2010/aug/31/digg-redesign-revolt https://www.theguardian.com/technology/pda/2010/aug/31/digg-...

jtriangle 7y ago
When, not if, they take away the old site, I'm done with reddit for good. I have plenty of alternatives at this point and I imagine that I'm not the only one who's jumping ship at that point.
Crinus 7y ago
> by making it more Facebook-like, they infantilised a great site And Facebook itself used to have a very simple and lightweight layout.

b3b0p 8y ago

No. Reminds me of Netflix. Both have gotten substantially worse. To the point of me not even visiting or cancelling my subscription in the case of Netflix. Is anyone or any company actually improving their website? What is the cause of this? Any one have insight? I have a theory or thought, but I'm interested if anyone has some real insight or reason? Edit: The constant use our app banner and nag is the worse.

DuskStar 8y ago

Nope, dark mode+RES remains my one true love. If your redesign reduces info density, increases load times and breaks compatibility with the most popular user mod to your site... Perhaps you should rethink things.

musicale 8y ago

Is that a trick question?

mftrhu 8y ago

I do not use the redesign. I especially despise this behavior of "forgetting" the login and redirecting users to the redesign, and I use a simple userscript to keep everything on old.reddit. It's much heavier on my machine, for one thing, and I hate the new user pages - not the bio/avatar, or the fact that you can post there, but just how the messages are displayed. It's noisy. The context provided is not worth the space it takes on the screen, and AFAICT comments from deleted thread only appear on the old overview.

alt_f4 8y ago

I don't know anyone who does.

finnthehuman 8y ago

I understand that reddit wants to be the place where bored teens scroll through memes, gifs, news and screenshots from twitter, facebook and 4chan. But I want nothing to do with any of that. I go for the interesting conversations in 3 tiny subreddits filled with thoughts I don't get to read anywhere else. Of course I hate the redesign. When I want to browse twitter, I'll just open twitter.

Spooky23 8y ago

It’s amazingly bad. It’s bad for text, media, commenting, following users, etc. Other than sort of looking like GMail, I cannot imagine what drove the folks behind it. It’s almost Reddit and Tumblr are in a race to product the worst 2000s era social website ever.

wingerlang 8y ago

I MUCH prefer it. I've been using reddit daily for just under a decade.

tluyben2 8y ago

Hate it. I use the old. The new one is very slow here and pops up errors that it cannot load posts and then it they appear anyway etc. It's dynamic loading taken way too far. Just give me static pages preloaded please and, if you must, update things dynamically, but that's not really a must anyway.

norin 8y ago

I will be using the older version until they can it. the old Reddit is still very easy to use, very responsive and is very fast.

majortennis 7y ago

AKhoo 7y ago

I used to absolutely hate it, to the extent where I would actually take the time and effort to switch to old.reddit.com whenever I got served the new redesign. BUT after a few months of having the new design being pushed in my face, and forced to engage with it, I've kind of mellowed out. Infinite scroll is annoying, otherwise I find the look and feel is reasonably pleasant, and a little more "2019". It does feel like a pretty unnecessary redesign though. Does anyone know if Reddit has published any stats showing what the redesign accomplished? I'd be curious to know.

locklock 7y ago

Kind of, but not for the reasons they want me to like it. The redesign itself is terrible in almost every way, but in being so terrible it really drives a point home I've been thinking about for a while: the "best practices" of modern SPA design and implementation can really lead to drastically reduced functionality. It might look slightly easier on the eyes (debatable) but other than that, actually using the redesign is worse in almost every way. It's slower than the previous version and there's way less information on a page, yet this is the app you'd get if you followed all the "common wisdom" about building a web front end in 2019. Compare this to something like craigslist, or pinboard, or HN, which are all theoretically "ugly" but all very fast and very easy to use. Content notwithstanding the user experience on craigslist is infinitely better than the one on new Reddit. So yes, I like the redesign, but only in the sense that is has highlighted all of the bad parts of modern web design to me in a very concrete way.

happppy 7y ago

Kinda and I usually use reddit on mobile app because reddit website on mobile is terrible and on pc its not appealing enough. So I use mobile app. Mobile app also sucks a bit.

Nasreddin_Hodja 7y ago

Only one thing I don't like is infinite scrolling.

geddy 7y ago

I quit Reddit for a lot of reasons, but the redesign was the final nail in the coffin for me. Feels like No Country for Old Men over there. I felt like all I was doing was watching loading spinners for the content to come in. Lots of last-minute DOM element readjustments that felt super broken and I never quite knew how to use anything. Add to that, links were replaced with icons in a lot of places so I never could find what I was looking for. Blessing in disguise, really. I started using HackerNews and I love the community here.

theklub 7y ago

No, I use old.reddit or nothing at all.

pier25 7y ago

NO It's a disaster. It is slower has worse UX than the old Reddit. Whoever thought making a SPA with React was a good idea was wrong. Reddit is a terrible use case for a SPA. Design wise it's not terrible, but the chosen fonts have less readability than the previous fonts (I believe good old Verdana). I will keep using old Reddit with RES for as long as I can.