8 ms·

I mean, a sizable enough number of us continue to use old.reddit.com that it seems like they realize they can't force us onto the new design and are relegated t

by saurik 6y ago

I mean, a sizable enough number of us continue to use old.reddit.com that it seems like they realize they can't force us onto the new design and are relegated to maintaining the old one for essentially forever... which to me says something incredible about just how badly their design failed.

notyourwork 6y ago
> forever I suspect a Reddit PM is watching a usage of old.reddit.com metric and waiting for it to hit a certain threshold before canning it. Perhaps the migration has taken longer than they planned but I have no doubt in time old.reddit.com will be retired.
- pletsch 6y ago
  I expect features to just stop working on old.reddit as we get further away from the redesign, whether it be updates internally or full new features. This will continue until it gets unusable and then they'll kill it because 'nobody uses it!'
  - lapetitejort 6y ago
    I noticed polls don't work on old reddit. Then don't even show in the feed. If you visit the poll directly it expands as some sort of embedded new reddit.
  - teraflop 6y ago
    They've already started taking small steps in this direction. For example, about a year and a half ago they added the option for subreddit moderators to "lock" an individual comment to prevent others from replying to it (previously it was only possible to lock entire threads). They deliberately avoided exposing this functionality through the old Reddit UI. https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/brgr8i/moderators_you_may_now_lock_individual_comments/ https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/brgr8i/moderators_...
  - AndrewKemendo 6y ago
    On mobile they already limit how many comments you can view and force you to sign in otherwise.
    - KMnO4 6y ago
      Signing in doesn’t remove the limit. They want you to download their app.
  - dorkinspace 6y ago
    With the recent new features they have been adding, I would consider old.reddit not supporting them as a feature rather than a bug. As others have said, none of the new features they have added have been desirable.
- JxLS-cpgbe0 6y ago
  _
  - ximeng 6y ago
    https://i.reddit.com https://i.reddit.com still lives
- politelemon 6y ago
  I think you're right. Part of the clue is in the name 'old' which in the IT world is often associated with something you'd want to remove, tech debt, baggage, staleness. What they'll be looking for is the right messaging to force a migration to new. In a similar vein, there is Adobe Lightroom Classic. There are still people who aren't giving in to Adobe's predatory subscription model, but at some point the "Classic" will be deprecated in favor of "Cloud"
  - notyourwork 6y ago
    Exactly, when the cost outweighs the revenue benefits for the deprecated solution it is easy to justify killing it.
- everdrive 6y ago
  Indeed, and at which point, I stop using reddit. Perhaps as a search extension (ie, "site:reddit.com topic") every so often.
- somehnguy 6y ago
  The day reddit drops old.reddit.com is the last day I ever visit. The redesign is that horrible for anything but mindless scrolling watching clip videos.
  - awakeasleep 6y ago
    Reddit's video player more or less does not work
    - lmpostor 6y ago
      It works as a content rip-off machines, which is exactly what it was designed for... but yeah in a vacuum it blows
    - erikpukinskis 6y ago
      Every now and then a play a video on Reddit to see if it works yet, and the answer is always no. Sometimes the first second or two plays though.
    - jeremy_k 6y ago
      It works, but the video restarts at least once, sometimes two or three times, before it finally plays correctly. Its very annoying
    - dhritzkiv 6y ago
      It makes me wonder what's going on at a technical level, that it's still broken after all this time. I would have figured that a dependable native video player is a solved problem.
  - bonestamp2 6y ago
    > The redesign is that horrible for anything but mindless scrolling watching clip videos. That's not entirely true... the redesign has some moderation and content submission improvements. But, if you don't mod or submit content then you might not notice those improvements. That said, like digg, the redesign is also missing a lot of features that old.reddit has. So, if they don't want to digg v4 themselves (which is what made Reddit popular to begin with) then they have to at least keep old.reddit around until there is feature parity. They will definitely shed a lot of users when they drop old.reddit but anyone who uses particular subreddits for their hobbies and interests may bite the bullet and get used to the redesign if they like the community enough. Hopefully Reddit Enhancement Suite makes a lot of improvements when that happens because RES makes reddit so much better.
- saurik 6y ago
  I 100% understood that, which was in fact the background of my thesis: it looks like they are going to be forced ("relegated", even) to maintain old.reddit.com forever because, explicitly, so many people aren't upgrading and the new design isn't succeeding in motivating these people to upgrade (even years later!). I mean, someone else on this thread noted that the new design seems to only have twice as many page views as the new design?! LOL
  - notyourwork 6y ago
    They aren't forced to do anything, if a small enough minority of users goto old.reddit.com they will willingly deprecate it due to the cost reduction. Sometimes a small hit is beneficial even if it harms your customers because of the reduced operational cost. Simplifiers allow you to do a lot of things faster.
breitling 6y ago
Recently learned about Teddit.net on HN. That's now my go-to... Better than old.Reddit.com However, teddit is limited to browsing. Can't reply / comment on it
- erichurkman 6y ago
  > However, teddit is limited to browsing. Can't reply / comment on it Maybe a feature, not a limitation.
  - somehnguy 6y ago
    It's definitely a limitation. I subscribe and participate in a number of smaller/niche/hobby related subreddits. Not being able to participate makes it completely useless for people like me. There are great places and discussions on reddit once you filter out all the popular subs.
    - SkyPuncher 6y ago
      I agree. I visit Reddit and HN to engage with other people. If I just wanted to read, I'd directly subscribe to a select set of blogs.
mskslal 6y ago
The redesign was a massive success. The goal was to turn reddit into a typical social media property, and it worked. Real conversation was pushed aside into niche subreddits, and was replaced by typical social media filler crap, like r/funny and pics and wholesomememes, etc. It was bad before, but I just feel like the redesign made it 100x worse. Try opening the reddit homepage, new design, no account, and tell me with a straight face that that is a place where serious, well-thought discussion happens. The content on the front page is exactly what I would expect to see on my Facebook timeline or on the Instagram explore page, which I see now was Reddit's goal from the start.
- snarfy 6y ago
  It would be interesting to sort the highest rated comments and group them based on if they originated from old reddit or new. I suspect all of the high quality content comes from old.reddit.com.
- bobthepanda 6y ago
  This has always been a thing; way before all of this, default subs had the same effect, to the point where subs that were getting big would actively jockey to not become default and get ruined by popularity.
- madeofpalk 6y ago
  > Try opening the reddit homepage, new design, no account, and tell me with a straight face that that is a place where serious, well-thought discussion happens. This has nothing to do with the new design. If Reddit was ever a place for “serious, well thought discussion”, it hasn’t been that way for the past 10 years.
  - intotheabyss 6y ago
    It really depends on the subreddits. The smaller and more engaged the community, the better the discussions. As subreddits scale in size, the discussions get proportionally worse.
  - rchaud 6y ago
jackson1442 6y ago
I think the redesign worked exactly as well as it was supposed to. Looking at this graph for a subreddit with approx. 4 million subscribers, the unique pageviews are quite high on the redesign. The official mobile app, however, blows them both out of the water. https://i.imgur.com/o80v09J.png https://i.imgur.com/o80v09J.png
- wongarsu 6y ago
  Given how much they were pushing to convert everyone to the new design, and how undiscoverable the old design is to new users, I'm very surprised that the new design has only twice the unique pageviews of the old design.
chanmad29 6y ago
Am I missing something here? old reddit on iphone is just unusable- need to pinch zoom for everything. I so much prefer the new one at least on mobile.

by saurik 6y ago

notyourwork 6y ago

> forever I suspect a Reddit PM is watching a usage of old.reddit.com metric and waiting for it to hit a certain threshold before canning it. Perhaps the migration has taken longer than they planned but I have no doubt in time old.reddit.com will be retired.

pletsch 6y ago
I expect features to just stop working on old.reddit as we get further away from the redesign, whether it be updates internally or full new features. This will continue until it gets unusable and then they'll kill it because 'nobody uses it!'
- lapetitejort 6y ago
  I noticed polls don't work on old reddit. Then don't even show in the feed. If you visit the poll directly it expands as some sort of embedded new reddit.
- teraflop 6y ago
  They've already started taking small steps in this direction. For example, about a year and a half ago they added the option for subreddit moderators to "lock" an individual comment to prevent others from replying to it (previously it was only possible to lock entire threads). They deliberately avoided exposing this functionality through the old Reddit UI. https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/brgr8i/moderators_you_may_now_lock_individual_comments/ https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/brgr8i/moderators_...
- AndrewKemendo 6y ago
  On mobile they already limit how many comments you can view and force you to sign in otherwise.
  - KMnO4 6y ago
    Signing in doesn’t remove the limit. They want you to download their app.
- dorkinspace 6y ago
  With the recent new features they have been adding, I would consider old.reddit not supporting them as a feature rather than a bug. As others have said, none of the new features they have added have been desirable.
JxLS-cpgbe0 6y ago
_
- ximeng 6y ago
  https://i.reddit.com https://i.reddit.com still lives
politelemon 6y ago
I think you're right. Part of the clue is in the name 'old' which in the IT world is often associated with something you'd want to remove, tech debt, baggage, staleness. What they'll be looking for is the right messaging to force a migration to new. In a similar vein, there is Adobe Lightroom Classic. There are still people who aren't giving in to Adobe's predatory subscription model, but at some point the "Classic" will be deprecated in favor of "Cloud"
- notyourwork 6y ago
  Exactly, when the cost outweighs the revenue benefits for the deprecated solution it is easy to justify killing it.
everdrive 6y ago
Indeed, and at which point, I stop using reddit. Perhaps as a search extension (ie, "site:reddit.com topic") every so often.
somehnguy 6y ago
The day reddit drops old.reddit.com is the last day I ever visit. The redesign is that horrible for anything but mindless scrolling watching clip videos.
- awakeasleep 6y ago
  Reddit's video player more or less does not work
  - lmpostor 6y ago
    It works as a content rip-off machines, which is exactly what it was designed for... but yeah in a vacuum it blows
  - erikpukinskis 6y ago
    Every now and then a play a video on Reddit to see if it works yet, and the answer is always no. Sometimes the first second or two plays though.
  - jeremy_k 6y ago
    It works, but the video restarts at least once, sometimes two or three times, before it finally plays correctly. Its very annoying
  - dhritzkiv 6y ago
    It makes me wonder what's going on at a technical level, that it's still broken after all this time. I would have figured that a dependable native video player is a solved problem.
- bonestamp2 6y ago
  > The redesign is that horrible for anything but mindless scrolling watching clip videos. That's not entirely true... the redesign has some moderation and content submission improvements. But, if you don't mod or submit content then you might not notice those improvements. That said, like digg, the redesign is also missing a lot of features that old.reddit has. So, if they don't want to digg v4 themselves (which is what made Reddit popular to begin with) then they have to at least keep old.reddit around until there is feature parity. They will definitely shed a lot of users when they drop old.reddit but anyone who uses particular subreddits for their hobbies and interests may bite the bullet and get used to the redesign if they like the community enough. Hopefully Reddit Enhancement Suite makes a lot of improvements when that happens because RES makes reddit so much better.
saurik 6y ago
I 100% understood that, which was in fact the background of my thesis: it looks like they are going to be forced ("relegated", even) to maintain old.reddit.com forever because, explicitly, so many people aren't upgrading and the new design isn't succeeding in motivating these people to upgrade (even years later!). I mean, someone else on this thread noted that the new design seems to only have twice as many page views as the new design?! LOL
- notyourwork 6y ago
  They aren't forced to do anything, if a small enough minority of users goto old.reddit.com they will willingly deprecate it due to the cost reduction. Sometimes a small hit is beneficial even if it harms your customers because of the reduced operational cost. Simplifiers allow you to do a lot of things faster.

breitling 6y ago

Recently learned about Teddit.net on HN. That's now my go-to... Better than old.Reddit.com However, teddit is limited to browsing. Can't reply / comment on it

erichurkman 6y ago
> However, teddit is limited to browsing. Can't reply / comment on it Maybe a feature, not a limitation.
- somehnguy 6y ago
  It's definitely a limitation. I subscribe and participate in a number of smaller/niche/hobby related subreddits. Not being able to participate makes it completely useless for people like me. There are great places and discussions on reddit once you filter out all the popular subs.
  - SkyPuncher 6y ago
    I agree. I visit Reddit and HN to engage with other people. If I just wanted to read, I'd directly subscribe to a select set of blogs.

mskslal 6y ago

The redesign was a massive success. The goal was to turn reddit into a typical social media property, and it worked. Real conversation was pushed aside into niche subreddits, and was replaced by typical social media filler crap, like r/funny and pics and wholesomememes, etc. It was bad before, but I just feel like the redesign made it 100x worse. Try opening the reddit homepage, new design, no account, and tell me with a straight face that that is a place where serious, well-thought discussion happens. The content on the front page is exactly what I would expect to see on my Facebook timeline or on the Instagram explore page, which I see now was Reddit's goal from the start.

snarfy 6y ago
It would be interesting to sort the highest rated comments and group them based on if they originated from old reddit or new. I suspect all of the high quality content comes from old.reddit.com.
bobthepanda 6y ago
This has always been a thing; way before all of this, default subs had the same effect, to the point where subs that were getting big would actively jockey to not become default and get ruined by popularity.
madeofpalk 6y ago
> Try opening the reddit homepage, new design, no account, and tell me with a straight face that that is a place where serious, well-thought discussion happens. This has nothing to do with the new design. If Reddit was ever a place for “serious, well thought discussion”, it hasn’t been that way for the past 10 years.
- intotheabyss 6y ago
  It really depends on the subreddits. The smaller and more engaged the community, the better the discussions. As subreddits scale in size, the discussions get proportionally worse.
- rchaud 6y ago

jackson1442 6y ago

I think the redesign worked exactly as well as it was supposed to. Looking at this graph for a subreddit with approx. 4 million subscribers, the unique pageviews are quite high on the redesign. The official mobile app, however, blows them both out of the water. https://i.imgur.com/o80v09J.png https://i.imgur.com/o80v09J.png

wongarsu 6y ago
Given how much they were pushing to convert everyone to the new design, and how undiscoverable the old design is to new users, I'm very surprised that the new design has only twice the unique pageviews of the old design.

chanmad29 6y ago

Am I missing something here? old reddit on iphone is just unusable- need to pinch zoom for everything. I so much prefer the new one at least on mobile.