6 ms·

While I agree that new reddit is awful, I still much prefer old reddit to this. Also what's up with this new trend of having the main content width-restricted,

While I agree that new reddit is awful, I still much prefer old reddit to this. Also what's up with this new trend of having the main content width-restricted, but not the header [0]? The new GitHub UI that went live this week has the exact same problem on wide screens. What kind of UX designer ever approved such a mess and why do so many sites do this? The main UI itself, again very width restricted, but also has strange paddings [1] which limit severely the area for the title (which is the most important UI element). Doesn't really make sense to me. The vertical centering is a bit of a mess, and the size of icons is also either way too big or way too small [2]. [0] https://i.imgur.com/gZEWEdJ.png https://i.imgur.com/gZEWEdJ.png [1] https://i.imgur.com/nayP548.png https://i.imgur.com/nayP548.png [2] https://i.imgur.com/XZPToxy.png https://i.imgur.com/XZPToxy.png EDIT: Huh, I hadn't used new reddit in a long time, I actually took a look now and it seems like it has improved significantly. I actually don't hate it as much, it looks much closer to old reddit now, with full width content and much less padding [3] [3] https://i.imgur.com/c1QBucR.png https://i.imgur.com/c1QBucR.png

buzzert 6y ago
Agreed. At least old Reddit didn’t require JS to load anything a didn’t show spinners every time you clicked on something.
- IggleSniggle 6y ago
  "New" reddit (not that new anymore) still _frequently_ just gets stuck on the spinners. Also with some frequency, when navigating to a page I've been to before, it will load everything from cache nicely, and then REPLACE THE CACHE WITH SPINNERS THAT NEVER LOAD THE CONTENT. Sometimes it will do this with a page I've never visited before, ie it will load the page and then replace it with the spinners and never load. Worst of both worlds. Grinds my gears. The _old_ reddit always just worked. I never had to reload the page multiple times, sometimes giving up entirely. Obviously I'm still using the site or I wouldn't be complaining, but like, what exactly was wrong with old reddit again?
  - ehsankia 6y ago
    I just tried it for 30s, and on my first try opening a comment section, it just failed and gave me an error, then I had to press retry to get it to load. I get reddit failures maybe once a month normally, so I'm either super unlucky or new is very broken.
  - danjac 6y ago
    I'd be interested to know what the rationale for the new design was. Some kind of dark patterns? Make people so disgusted with the web version they just download the native app, which provides better monitoring and "stickiness"? I mean, is anyone at Reddit actually proud of the redesign?
    - IggleSniggle 6y ago
      I assume a little of column A, little column B. Web devs who wanted a greenfield project and a PM willing to be convinced, because 1) old reddit still exists to fall back on and 2) in retrospect outcomes pushing users to mobile seemed to be good for monitoring and stickiness. I blame typical tech dysfunctions and the interests of users not align with short term stakeholder interests.
TulliusCicero 6y ago
> Also what's up with this new trend of having the main content width-restricted, but not the header [0]? For extremely wide screens it obviously looks awkward, but the idea seems sound in principle. IIRC, the reason you'd want to restrict width of content is that it's hard for your eyes to track back all the way left, to the start of the content, when you need to go down a line. But the header is just a single line, so it doesn't have this problem. In the case of very wide screens they should probably restrict the header width too, just not quite as much.
- ehsankia 6y ago
  But often these sites start doing the right thing and then restrict it, tkaing a step backward. Before: https://i.imgur.com/sgODcLW.png https://i.imgur.com/sgODcLW.png After: https://i.imgur.com/8j7P1YE.png https://i.imgur.com/8j7P1YE.png The latter is objectively worse. I understand that > 1080p monitors are a small fraction of your user base, but that's still not reason to not test your UI on larger resolutions, for a site as big (and prominently used by devs with large screens) as GitHub. My eye still has to jump back and forth long distances if I want to fork the repo for example.
  - TulliusCicero 6y ago
    Agreed, the UI in the after picture is awful. I really doubt it's intentional there, unfortunate that there's an oversight like that.
  - rsynnott 6y ago
    Do that many people use maximised windows on 16:9 or greater screens? Maybe it’s just because all my early experience was on 4:3, but I’d never maximise a browser window on a modern screen. I’d agree this is bad design, but I’d be somewhat surprised if it’s a big practical problem for most people.
    - TheDong 6y ago
      There are many many people who keep a single window maximized at all times and alt-tab between windows. It's the most basic form of window management, and it works pretty well. It's especially helpful if you want to be able to focus on one thing at a time only, and not have multiple different windows with disparate screen noise visible at once. I often operate in that mode, using a tiling window manager to have a single maximized window on my primary monitor, and optionally a tile of auxiliary windows on my secondary monitor.
boring_twenties 6y ago
Wow, you're right. It did improve quite a bit. Not in an "OMG I'm switching right now" kind of way, but definitely in a "maybe I'll play around with this and see if I can configure it to my liking." Never would have happened if someone hadn't made a post like this, so thanks! edit: Aaaand instant regret, wow. Are you guys seeing this "Top Broadcast Right Now" shit? The best part for me is not just the ~1000px high random garbage video that takes up my whole screen, but before the video itself loads I actually get a ~1000px "white noise" animation, except it isn't just white but brightly colored, too. I had a brief urge to heat up my soldering iron and stick it in my eye.
- ehsankia 6y ago
  Hah, yeah I played with it more myself too and instantly found still many issues. The biggest one for me was the comment section is still using the short width format, which is a no go for me.
- jedberg 6y ago
  I just did the same thing. I lasted one minute on the new interface.
- def8cefe 6y ago
  https://www.coldheat.com/ https://www.coldheat.com/ One of the few infomercial products that are actually good.
  - boring_twenties 6y ago
    Looks cool, thanks!
hanniabu 6y ago
> Huh, I hadn't used new reddit in a long time, I actually took a look now and it seems like it has improved significantly. The UI itself isn't horrible, it's the UX. It's incredibly bulky and slow, and some user links have been hidden while others completely removed.
- monsieurbanana 6y ago
  I can't wait until reddit removes old.reddit altogether. I will have so much more free time.
  - nvr219 6y ago
    I pretty much only use Apollo to read reddit so unfortunately I will not be freed from the shackles quite so easily :-/
- feanaro 6y ago
  Not even the "feature" which hides most comments in a post and makes you click on a button to load a bit more of them? And to make it even better, even when you open a post, it still renders other posts directly beneath the comments of the current one so it's easier to miss where the comments end!
- 9HZZRfNlpR 6y ago
  New reddit must be the slowest website out there, on mobile where I'm not logged in it takes ages to load. Then ages to kill all sort of pop ups that force me to use their app. I believe they don't care about UX and speed of the site, it's all about the app. They measure app downloads, not the experience on the site.
  - alpaca128 6y ago
    I still am in awe regularly at how damn sluggish the site is. Even with an ad blocker it is at least an order of magnitude slower than every other website I've seen.
  - hanniabu 6y ago
chamara1999 6y ago
I found this Surveys site, just completed few surveys, got paid $500 today https://sites.google.com/view/swagbucks-surveys/home https://sites.google.com/view/swagbucks-surveys/home
kixiQu 6y ago
"what kind of UX designer approved...." If you want to say that about GitHub, fair, but what an incredibly out-of-place sentiment for a FOSS project
treebornfrog 6y ago
On mobile, Baconreader app solves all my problems. On desktop, adding old. as a sub domain takes you back to legacy reddit.
- thuruv 6y ago
  takes you back to web and them gets annoyed with open Reddit app feature. Yet baconreader is awesome, yet I find 8t difficult with Search like the native one.
- zem 6y ago
  old.* works well for me on mobile too, with the one exception that links opened from modmail open in the bad ui
read_if_gay_ 6y ago
Regarding content width, shorter lines are far easier to read, so there is some justification for the ridiculous amounts of padding on your widescreen. 2500 pixels wide lines are very hard to follow.
- vladvasiliu 6y ago
  I think OP doesn't take issue with the content being narrow, but with the headers being wide while the content is narrow. The whole looks quite unbalanced and jarring (at least on the new Github).
neya 6y ago
> What kind of UX designer ever approved such a mess and why do so many sites do this? UX design used to be about good usability. Now it's all about shoving the latest hipster trends from Dribbble and Behance that look all "Shiny" and gives the CxOs orgasms. One more odd thing that I found - maybe this is anecdotal - Developers who design interfaces based on OTS frameworks (Eg. Bootstrap) have a much better sense of UX than dedicated UX designers.
clappski 6y ago
I had to go into my user settings and change the feed display to compact instead of (what I presume is the default of) card, which is the nasty timeline-like display.
mariusor 6y ago
Well, I'm glad to report that I'm working on a federated link aggregator project that tries to keep the good parts of old reddit. A test instance can be found at https://littr.me https://littr.me

buzzert 6y ago

Agreed. At least old Reddit didn’t require JS to load anything a didn’t show spinners every time you clicked on something.

IggleSniggle 6y ago
"New" reddit (not that new anymore) still _frequently_ just gets stuck on the spinners. Also with some frequency, when navigating to a page I've been to before, it will load everything from cache nicely, and then REPLACE THE CACHE WITH SPINNERS THAT NEVER LOAD THE CONTENT. Sometimes it will do this with a page I've never visited before, ie it will load the page and then replace it with the spinners and never load. Worst of both worlds. Grinds my gears. The _old_ reddit always just worked. I never had to reload the page multiple times, sometimes giving up entirely. Obviously I'm still using the site or I wouldn't be complaining, but like, what exactly was wrong with old reddit again?
- ehsankia 6y ago
  I just tried it for 30s, and on my first try opening a comment section, it just failed and gave me an error, then I had to press retry to get it to load. I get reddit failures maybe once a month normally, so I'm either super unlucky or new is very broken.
- danjac 6y ago
  I'd be interested to know what the rationale for the new design was. Some kind of dark patterns? Make people so disgusted with the web version they just download the native app, which provides better monitoring and "stickiness"? I mean, is anyone at Reddit actually proud of the redesign?
  - IggleSniggle 6y ago
    I assume a little of column A, little column B. Web devs who wanted a greenfield project and a PM willing to be convinced, because 1) old reddit still exists to fall back on and 2) in retrospect outcomes pushing users to mobile seemed to be good for monitoring and stickiness. I blame typical tech dysfunctions and the interests of users not align with short term stakeholder interests.

TulliusCicero 6y ago

> Also what's up with this new trend of having the main content width-restricted, but not the header [0]? For extremely wide screens it obviously looks awkward, but the idea seems sound in principle. IIRC, the reason you'd want to restrict width of content is that it's hard for your eyes to track back all the way left, to the start of the content, when you need to go down a line. But the header is just a single line, so it doesn't have this problem. In the case of very wide screens they should probably restrict the header width too, just not quite as much.

ehsankia 6y ago
But often these sites start doing the right thing and then restrict it, tkaing a step backward. Before: https://i.imgur.com/sgODcLW.png https://i.imgur.com/sgODcLW.png After: https://i.imgur.com/8j7P1YE.png https://i.imgur.com/8j7P1YE.png The latter is objectively worse. I understand that > 1080p monitors are a small fraction of your user base, but that's still not reason to not test your UI on larger resolutions, for a site as big (and prominently used by devs with large screens) as GitHub. My eye still has to jump back and forth long distances if I want to fork the repo for example.
- TulliusCicero 6y ago
  Agreed, the UI in the after picture is awful. I really doubt it's intentional there, unfortunate that there's an oversight like that.
- rsynnott 6y ago
  Do that many people use maximised windows on 16:9 or greater screens? Maybe it’s just because all my early experience was on 4:3, but I’d never maximise a browser window on a modern screen. I’d agree this is bad design, but I’d be somewhat surprised if it’s a big practical problem for most people.
  - TheDong 6y ago
    There are many many people who keep a single window maximized at all times and alt-tab between windows. It's the most basic form of window management, and it works pretty well. It's especially helpful if you want to be able to focus on one thing at a time only, and not have multiple different windows with disparate screen noise visible at once. I often operate in that mode, using a tiling window manager to have a single maximized window on my primary monitor, and optionally a tile of auxiliary windows on my secondary monitor.

boring_twenties 6y ago

Wow, you're right. It did improve quite a bit. Not in an "OMG I'm switching right now" kind of way, but definitely in a "maybe I'll play around with this and see if I can configure it to my liking." Never would have happened if someone hadn't made a post like this, so thanks! edit: Aaaand instant regret, wow. Are you guys seeing this "Top Broadcast Right Now" shit? The best part for me is not just the ~1000px high random garbage video that takes up my whole screen, but before the video itself loads I actually get a ~1000px "white noise" animation, except it isn't just white but brightly colored, too. I had a brief urge to heat up my soldering iron and stick it in my eye.

ehsankia 6y ago
Hah, yeah I played with it more myself too and instantly found still many issues. The biggest one for me was the comment section is still using the short width format, which is a no go for me.
jedberg 6y ago
I just did the same thing. I lasted one minute on the new interface.
def8cefe 6y ago
https://www.coldheat.com/ https://www.coldheat.com/ One of the few infomercial products that are actually good.
- boring_twenties 6y ago
  Looks cool, thanks!

hanniabu 6y ago

> Huh, I hadn't used new reddit in a long time, I actually took a look now and it seems like it has improved significantly. The UI itself isn't horrible, it's the UX. It's incredibly bulky and slow, and some user links have been hidden while others completely removed.

monsieurbanana 6y ago
I can't wait until reddit removes old.reddit altogether. I will have so much more free time.
- nvr219 6y ago
  I pretty much only use Apollo to read reddit so unfortunately I will not be freed from the shackles quite so easily :-/
feanaro 6y ago
Not even the "feature" which hides most comments in a post and makes you click on a button to load a bit more of them? And to make it even better, even when you open a post, it still renders other posts directly beneath the comments of the current one so it's easier to miss where the comments end!
9HZZRfNlpR 6y ago
New reddit must be the slowest website out there, on mobile where I'm not logged in it takes ages to load. Then ages to kill all sort of pop ups that force me to use their app. I believe they don't care about UX and speed of the site, it's all about the app. They measure app downloads, not the experience on the site.
- alpaca128 6y ago
  I still am in awe regularly at how damn sluggish the site is. Even with an ad blocker it is at least an order of magnitude slower than every other website I've seen.
- hanniabu 6y ago

chamara1999 6y ago

I found this Surveys site, just completed few surveys, got paid $500 today https://sites.google.com/view/swagbucks-surveys/home https://sites.google.com/view/swagbucks-surveys/home

kixiQu 6y ago

"what kind of UX designer approved...." If you want to say that about GitHub, fair, but what an incredibly out-of-place sentiment for a FOSS project

treebornfrog 6y ago

On mobile, Baconreader app solves all my problems. On desktop, adding old. as a sub domain takes you back to legacy reddit.

thuruv 6y ago
takes you back to web and them gets annoyed with open Reddit app feature. Yet baconreader is awesome, yet I find 8t difficult with Search like the native one.
zem 6y ago
old.* works well for me on mobile too, with the one exception that links opened from modmail open in the bad ui

read_if_gay_ 6y ago

Regarding content width, shorter lines are far easier to read, so there is some justification for the ridiculous amounts of padding on your widescreen. 2500 pixels wide lines are very hard to follow.

vladvasiliu 6y ago
I think OP doesn't take issue with the content being narrow, but with the headers being wide while the content is narrow. The whole looks quite unbalanced and jarring (at least on the new Github).

neya 6y ago

> What kind of UX designer ever approved such a mess and why do so many sites do this? UX design used to be about good usability. Now it's all about shoving the latest hipster trends from Dribbble and Behance that look all "Shiny" and gives the CxOs orgasms. One more odd thing that I found - maybe this is anecdotal - Developers who design interfaces based on OTS frameworks (Eg. Bootstrap) have a much better sense of UX than dedicated UX designers.

clappski 6y ago

I had to go into my user settings and change the feed display to compact instead of (what I presume is the default of) card, which is the nasty timeline-like display.

mariusor 6y ago

Well, I'm glad to report that I'm working on a federated link aggregator project that tries to keep the good parts of old reddit. A test instance can be found at https://littr.me https://littr.me