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One has to choose between the old and the new interface. There's no way of contenting everybody with a link that makes you reach the one you prefer because such
by jraph 4y ago
One has to choose between the old and the new interface. There's no way of contenting everybody with a link that makes you reach the one you prefer because such a link does not exist or is not known. And it happens that most people here likely prefer the old or don't care.
So extensions are good for exactly this use case: you have a strong preference, you make your user agent be your agent and make it do what you want.
FWIW I prefer the look of the new interface (except the information density) but as someone who rarely reach a Reddit link, I still haven't understood how to efficiently navigate Reddit threads in it, with its "continue this thread" links all over the place I still haven't understood how they work. I'm lost on these pages. The old interface is easy to navigate (for everybody, even for people who prefer the new interface, the opposite isn't true), way more lightweight on resources usage, works well without JS and also looks like HN a lot more so one could argue that linking to the old interface from HN makes more sense.
(also, you are responding to a comment that changed a link using the old interface to another link using the old interface)
- zamadatix 4y agoAh I didn't realize both links were to the "old." prefix, thanks for the clarification. I disagree with this bit though: "There's no way of contenting everybody with a link that makes you reach the one you prefer because such a link does not exist". Non-prefixed links are precisely the ones that make you reach what the opener prefers, to provide them simply don't add a prefix. It's prefixed links which are the ones that break this functionality, they were meant to explicitly override the user preference setting not to act as the way to set it. If everyone shared unprefixed links (or HN stripped them in posts automatically) then the default behaviour of following the users preference kicks in be it set to old or new. If people want extensions to double down on overriding it or changing it without a Reddit account then by all means they can go for it but it's backwards to instead have the built in preference functionality but distribute the links in a way you need an extension for it to take effect.
- jraph 4y ago> Non-prefixed links are precisely the ones that make you reach what the opener prefers How so? Is this a feature for people who have a Reddit account?
- zamadatix 4y agoYeah, it's a user preference just like top bar color is here. That's why I say the default linking should be unprefixed and the extension should only be needed if you want to change it but don't want to do so via an account. But I was under the assumption the change was to old.-ify it. Had I known it was just to modify the URL I wouldn't have went and made this off-topic rabbithole :).
- jraph 4y agoActually, HN offering to give old, new or unprefixed links to reddit based on a preference here would be neat :-)
- dang 4y agoI'm not sure I've followed this discussion correctly but we do rewrite reddit.com submissions to old.reddit.com, to try to reduce off-topic flamewars about the 'new' interface. And yeah that sucks if you prefer the latter. Sorry.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]