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I really wish the rest of the Reddit site wasn’t so buggy. The search sucks and is unintuitive. The mobile website forces you onto the app, but deep links don’t
by nirushiv 6y ago
I really wish the rest of the Reddit site wasn’t so buggy.
The search sucks and is unintuitive. The mobile website forces you onto the app, but deep links don’t work 90% of the time.
On both platforms, the site loads so slowly. If you try to delete a post or comment, the operation often fails with no error message. Sometimes you comment, there’s a long pause, then an error message and 2-3 copies of your comment show up. Pages break randomly on the back button. On mobile, login tends to break context - this is a feature even bootcamp projects have now.
I really don’t understand how it’s possible to be so bad after so many years and so much complaining. Conceptually, Reddit isn’t a very complex site. There is a core set of maybe 10 user flows, of which over half are broken on at least one platform.
I understand they’re trying to become hot for VC attention and are trying to monetize (are they profitable yet?)
I actually don’t mind ads on Reddit as they’re generally relevant and clearly marked (minus the shilling, which is an unsolved problem on many platforms). I just wish they’d make the core experience less obnoxious before trying to add these big features.
I didn’t mean to hijack the thread with this rant - it just hurts when the site for a community you really enjoy also sucks to use, and drains the joy out of it.
- ghostpepper 6y agoThe one that really baffles me is: 1) Navigate to a subreddit of interest 2) Start a search 3) The default behaviour is to search the entire site, not that subreddit There's a checkbox there to 'search only this subreddit' which is disabled by default. I am now wondering if there is some userscript I can inject to change the state of that checkbox by default. The fact that such lengths are even considered by your users should be a massive red flag.
- CivBase 6y ago> There's a checkbox there to 'search only this subreddit' which is disabled by default. I've always wondered why that checkbox is even there. Why are they even the same search box to begin with? If I go to a particular YouTube channel, there is a global search box at the top and a channel-specific search box a under the channel banner. That's a much more intuitive layout IMO.
- devb 6y agoI'm not 100% certain because I'm not a mod, but I believe the subreddit owner controls that behavior.
- InsaneOstrich 6y agoI always have the checkbox checked, but that could be the Reddit Enhancement Suite addon doing that for me
- syntheticnature 6y agoThere isn't even a checkbox on the new reddit UI as far as I can find; you have to do the search, then tell it you only want results from that subreddit.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- MrFantastic 6y agoI think that is set by mods. Some subreddits default to searching that subreddit.
- gwern 6y agoWhere is that set? I've been a mod on subreddits for a decade and I'm not aware of any such setting. I just checked 'subreddit settings' for one of my subreddits, and I see nothing about defaulting to subreddit-only search (which is a setting I'd definitely like to enable!).
- OGWhales 6y agoIf it is I couldn't find the setting for it (didn't look too long), but I did discover the site will remember (per subreddit) if you checked the box or not the last time you searched, so that's nice I guess.
- JMTQp8lwXL 6y agoThey are either lacking product management or squeezed the re-design into a period where not all the work could be reasonably be completed, yet that didn't stop them from trying. One other common broken flow is refreshing the webpage. Sometimes, you'll be presented with a logged-out experience (despite having proper cookies; a few more refreshes and I appear logged back in). It's some sort of organizational failure.
- teraflop 6y agoThe redesign is 3 years old at this point, so I don't think you can blame it on time pressure.
- bredren 6y agoI presumed it was because pushing people back to Reddit-wide serps led to some conversion goal. How else could something so stunningly opposite user intent persist this long? It is customer-hostile but something to get away with.
- JMTQp8lwXL 6y agoThey never fixed the bugs; they either didn't budget to do a post-beta bug bash or something's amiss with their quality leadership. No matter how you dice it, their engineering organization isn't in a healthy state. If it's not time, it's a lack of resourcing.
- charlesdaniels 6y agoPersonally, I have found that even old.reddit.com is pretty much unusable these days, to say nothing of the horrible new mobile site, which for some reason is also the desktop site. I have found Teddit[0] is much more usable, and much less privacy-invading. Of course Teddit does not allow posting or commenting though, so depending on your use case it might not be suitable. 0 - https://teddit.net/about https://teddit.net/about
- kgwxd 6y agoold.reddit.com is good if you're not logged in. But if you create an account and disable a ton of things like: allow subreddits to show me custom themes, show user flair, show link flair, allow my data to be used for research purposes, allow reddit to log my outbound clicks for personalization, let other users see my online status, Use new Reddit as my default experience, and everything under "set personalization preferences" And enable "compress the link display" which in turn disables thumbnails. It's basically just like HN.
- gbrown_ 6y agoSadly the outbound preferences will be going away too it seems. https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/lqtecn/update_to_user_preferences/ https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/lqtecn/update_to...
- kgwxd 6y agoI caught wind of that a few days ago. I wonder if it will effect rss feeds, which is usually how I open links. I might be willing to put up with just never clicking a link through the site, but if the rss feed hits their servers first, that'll be the end of Reddit for me.
- tarr11 6y agoMy favorite is when I try to play a video, it flashes and resizes several times before playing. And then sets any other video to autoplay as soon as I scroll to it.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- peteretep 6y agoAs someone who purchases ads on Reddit, I can also tell you that the ad purchasing experience is baffling terrible too.
- aboringusername 6y agoYou have i.reddit, m.reddit, old.reddit and regular reddit.com, that's 4 different UI's that they are maintaining, as well as iOS/Android applications. I really wish they'd go to hackernews, CTRL+U and look at the beauty of the code that awaits them. Works without JS flawlessly, fast, speedy, no cruft, no bullshit, just a simple fast loading page. I actually enjoy HN a lot more than reddit these days, the cruft is so discouraging.
- pavel_lishin 6y agoTwo counterpoints, though I'm using old.reddit.com: - I like reddit's javascript. I like being able to collapse comment threads. - HN doesn't have multiple niches and community. You get what you get for that day.
- viklove 6y agoold.reddit.com + RES is the pinnacle of the web forum experience They day they kill that (and third-party app support), I leave reddit for good.
- pavel_lishin 6y agoAgreed, RES has done more work to make Reddit usable than the reddit team has for the past few years. Granted, RES has a different charter and goals.
- forgetfulness 6y agoThey wouldn't have to maintain so many versions of their own website if they made one or perhaps two that left people content. Instead they have released three half baked successors to old.reddit.com, broken in different ways.