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Ask HN: Why Reddit's New Website Is So Slow?
I don't think I've ever seen such a bloated and sluggish website. I'm baffled by the fact that nothing gets any faster as time goes by. The website is being sluggish from early days of beta to this day! How is this ok for a site as popular as Reddit?
The app is not much better to be honest. Sure it works, but it doesn't feel optimized at all either.
- HIP_HOP 6y agosimply switch to old reddit
- lewisj489 6y agoold.reddit.com
- portmanteaufu 6y agoFor the uninitiated, you can do by changing the URL you're visiting from reddit.com to old.reddit.com. If you have an account, you can also set this as a preference.
- jonatron 6y agoThe preference automatically changes back, because they hate their users.
- jonathanliu 6y agoProbably because new reddit is much more ad revenue-friendly. I've managed to make the preference stick somehow.
- save_ferris 6y ago> because they hate their users I see stuff like this a lot and it bugs me. Reddit doesn't hate their users, there's simply a financial incentive to convert them over to the new site, either because it's easier to serve ads, or they need to justify to management that millions of dollars of work was worth it. I'd be willing to bet most unpopular UX/redesign decisions can be traced back to some financial incentive.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- loudmax 6y agoThey don't hate their users, but they love their customers. Their users are not their customers.
- fullstop 6y agoThere are browser extensions to do this automatically as well.
- kangnkodos 6y agoI only regret that I have but one upvote to give to this answer. Use old.reddit.com
- dceddia 6y agoI've been using this Old Reddit Redirect extension for Chrome that does what it says on the tin. Works great for this. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirect/dneaehbmnbhcippjikoajpoabadpodje https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...
- swinglock 6y agohttps://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-redirect/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...
- blakesterz 6y agoThis was asked about 8 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21738571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21738571 "The site lacks basic optimizations like virtual scrolling to keep the browser from crashing after a few pages of content. There are also entire npm packages being pulled in instead of any tree-shaking, or browser-specific polyfills."
- mschuster91 6y ago> The site lacks basic optimizations like virtual scrolling to keep the browser from crashing after a few pages of content. I fucking hate virtual scrolling. Twitter is particularly bad at this - it breaks search. Twitter's built in search isn't the strongest, so I previously just went with some generic hashtag I knew I used and then used ctrl+f to find the Tweet from my archive. With the "redesign" this use case is totally shot. For Reddit, I can go to "Saved posts", load as far as I reasonably need, ctrl+f and find what I need.
- est31 6y ago> I fucking hate virtual scrolling. Twitter is particularly bad at this - it breaks search. Not just twitter! Discourse has this "feature" too, breaking search as well. They "helpfully" provide overrides to the built-in search function, but it's a) restricted and b) not what I want. It's not what I want because it does NOT search inside the topic only but inside the whole website. It's restricted because I can't search for some word/phrase within a post. My browser also allows me to highlight searched phrases, but that requires the browser search to be triggered in the first place. For a while you could circumvent it by pressing / which on Firefox triggers search, but guess what, Discourse "helpfully" redirected it to their broken search as well. It's a disturbing trend that Discourse is being deployed so widely, replacing older, better working, alternatives.
- ubercow13 6y agoYeah, it seems kind of crazy that a modern browser can't be trusted to just render a few pages of text in boxes without such techniques
- orangepanda 6y agoSame question asked 10 years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/c821s/why_is_reddit_so_slow_seriously/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/c821s/why_is_red...
- golergka 6y agoIt seems that 10 years ago the problem was on the server side, and now it's sluggish javascript on the new redesigned client side.
- save_ferris 6y agoI was also really surprised at how much slower the new site performed when it dropped 2 years ago or whenever it was. I'm sure using react caused some of the performance hit, but I also suspect the flexibility of advertising on the new platform also caused some of the issues. Either way, I still access reddit via old.reddit.com and it's snappy as ever.
- tyingq 6y agoMaybe the weird incentives that web stats create? If you have a property like Reddit, people will fight through a bad experience to keep reading their stuff. So sluggish turns into "improved session duration" and shitty nav turns into "more pageviews / engagement". Deceptive content looking ads turn into "higher conversion".
- barbegal 6y agoIf you want the blazing fast site which is optimized for mobile add ".compact" onto any Reddit link such as https://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews/.compact https://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews/.compact
- wcchandler 6y agoYou can also use the subdomain i instead of adding .compact http://i.reddit.com/r/hackernews http://i.reddit.com/r/hackernews
- TravHatesMe 6y agoEven the basics of the redesign have issues. To the point that I would honestly quit reddit if they didn't have old.reddit. Simple things like, not showing me the entire thread and forcing me to like "View Entire Discussion" and then sometimes that will jump to a totally different vertical position in the webpage resulting in confusion, frustration, and anger. Unbelievable that things could be this horrid. How can it be so difficult to consume content when the website's sole purpose is to consume content? Although I do wonder how new users view the new design. Is it as bad as I made it out to be? I'd be curious to hear their thoughts. Am I simply an old, raggety, grumpy user shaking their fist at the clouds?
- 1337biz 6y agoJust switch back to the old design in your setting. But it is probably also time to look for something new - I am on that journey too. I was once a super heavy Reddit user but the environment has become so toxic and twitter. It followed a destiny similar to many conventional news sites. Even generic subs like 'news' or 'today I have learned' are infeced by personal agendas of a few monds. Once a month I still check a few niche communities with mostly work based discussions. For the rest it has become completely unusable. I think astroturfing and political 'outreach-campaigns' have killed that site for me.
- awinder 6y agoJust to save a lot of time and cut through a lot of BS, apparently organizational rot. If you’re on iOS give Apollo a try (I’m sure there’s an equally good android app), it’s completely possible to build a fantastic Reddit app with the existing apis (most of the downsides come into play from user-hostile API administration). The team sizes and funding have to pale in comparison, and on occasion I wonder why this isn’t seen internally at Reddit as a mortal biz threat and dire signal to clean up the act. And then I remember — organizational rot.
- SwiftyBug 6y agoApollo is amazing. It's the best experience I've ever had in an iOS app. The navigation is fluid and the app is very responsive. I never cease to be impressed by Apollo.
- drivingmenuts 6y agoI have an app already. It’s called a browser. Requiring a specialized app just to get performance that should already exist is the epitome of what’s wrong with the mobile experience. If Reddit had been envisioned from the begging as requiring a special app for access, I would feel differently, but it’s a damn website that should be cleanly and effectively accessed through a browser.
- 29083011397778 6y agoFor your own sake, I hope you're using Firefox with the mobile reddit redirect extension [1] - with that, your browser works very well for text sub-reddits. [1] Should always take you to i.reddit.com
- me_me_me 6y agoI use Reddit is Fun on android. Never had problems I am using paid version so not sure about quality of free version.
- pg_bot 6y agoIt's been two years and the site redesign is still slow, buggy and ugly. Continue this thread links don't work on comments. The inline video player UX is inconsistent, and placement on the page is bizarre. I use old.reddit.com but even that is broken. All self referential links redirect you the newer broken version of reddit, so you find yourself switching between new and old interfaces all the time. I have so many questions for their engineering department.
- agumonkey 6y agoI have mostly one: what did youtube do to you that you can't auto suggest video titles anymore .ç.
- bestouff 6y agoWell, launch your preferred browser, open the devtools (F12 in Firefox), make a request on the homepage of Reddit and HN and look at the result in the "debugger". - For HN you only have an optimized HTML page as well a short javascript download. - For Reddit you have a truckload of files which then dynamically load content piece by piece, and also loads ad content from elsewhere (c.amazon-adsystem.com in my case). Reddit's full content is bigger than HN's, but that isn't really a problem. The real problem is that everything is loaded by tiny chuncks, which adds loads of latencies for a total of a few seconds to load the page. If everything was in one big file it would be (and feel) way faster.
- abhayhegde 6y agoThe website is unbearably slow, mostly because of reasons already mentioned. Also, the server frequently fails loading and after 3-4 seconds of waiting, it says Reddit cannot be reached at the moment. If you have Android, try Relay for Reddit.
- seddin 6y agoI'm glad we still have access to https://old.reddit.com/ https://old.reddit.com/
- dvfjsdhgfv 6y agoI wonder when they cut us off.
- replyifuagree 6y agoThe reddit team did a classic overrreach rewrite project with a due date. The usual things skipped in projects like that are usability concerns and performance fixes. I'm sure there was a celebration when the project was "completed", however the user feedback to date indicates the celebration was not warranted.