5 ms·

The "new" web UI is so bad that I barely if ever use reddit on desktop. 99.5% of my usage is through the iOS client Apollo, which is leagues better than not onl

The "new" web UI is so bad that I barely if ever use reddit on desktop. 99.5% of my usage is through the iOS client Apollo, which is leagues better than not only the official web client but also the official mobile client. Both Reddit and Twitter are great examples of bafflingly bad first-party UIs, and it's comical because these vastly better third party clients are often solo side projects. How on earth are solo indie devs outperforming entire well-paid teams?!

Aardwolf 4y ago
I use the old reddit redirect plugin in firefox. If they ever take away old.reddit, that'll be very sad, since reddit will be practically unreadable then for me (due to the large and too image/video-focused new layout), and it still is some of the best sources of actual non-blogspam human generated content
- 93po 4y ago
  I will entirely stop using reddit if they take away old. I already refuse to visit it on my phone because of their annoying popups to download their app literally every single time you load a page.
  - CyanBird 4y ago
    I use rif, which used to be called reddit is fun an android third party app. For some legal reason more likely than not they changed the name to "rif is fun" so technically it is named "reddit is fun is fun"... But yeah, it works very well, I have used it for many many years, and in the same vein if someone has got high recommendations to hn apps I am all ears, I have used materialistic for couple years but it has fallen short on more than a couple things and seems to not be updated anymore
    - txtsd 4y ago
      These are called recursive acronyms. GNU (GNU's not Unix) is the most popular example, at least for us Linux folk.
hbosch 4y ago
>How on earth are solo indie devs outperforming entire well-paid teams?! Easy, no PMs!
- peter422 4y ago
  One is optimizing for ad revenue and the other is not.
  - arp242 4y ago
    It's not that; or not only that. For a while scrolling on my laptop happened at ~2 FPS. Granted, my laptop is not very fast, but plenty of fast enough for compiling stuff and even some 3D games and it was slower than any other website I've ever used by a considerable margin. I can't be bothered to check what the performance is like now, but for a long time the entire thing was slow, janky, and objectively just didn't work well.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    They could implement all the ads and user-hostility into Old Reddit just find and it would still be fast. In fact, I bet that Old Reddit with ads and trackers will still be faster than the New one without any of that.
dmix 4y ago
There's chrome/FF plugins that rewrite every url you're linked to old.reddit.com which is better than the builtin user setting. I'm a frontend dev who should like the type of JS stuff Reddit tried to do last time around but it was a UX failure. HN is still the ideal UX model for Reddit style sites (besides comment formatting + images/video submissions + long comment threads + native search integration). and anything that adds to that via JS/async should start from there and improve it by loading it faster. Like a lot of redesigns its 2 steps forward in one direction and 2 step back as a whole. Things like speed of opening threads and video thumbnails etc were a big improvement but they weren't better than the 5yr old RES extension on top of the much simpler base of old Reddit. The previews beta Reddit that came out a few months ago had a way better search UI and nice redesign but also made the comment UX way worse requiring hitting "load more" 10x more often favouring non threaded comment threads (scrolling > interaction) which is not how Reddit works IRL.
dustingetz 4y ago
scroll views increase impression metrics
robotburrito 4y ago
The real teams are not trying to make the best experience. They are actively trying to not do so for the sake of advertising probably. But that is just a guess.
- ParetoOptimal 4y ago
  > The real teams are not trying to make the best experience. They are trying to exist somewhere between not getting fired and getting promoted, occasionally something more if it doesn't conflict with those goals.
userbinator 4y ago
How on earth are solo indie devs outperforming entire well-paid teams?! As the classic saying goes, "well, there's your problem!" Work expands to fill the available capacity, regardless of whether it's beneficial to others besides the ones doing it, because those who are being paid will always try to justify their existence. The "solo indie dev" is, just by virtue of being limited in capacity, not going to add complexity where it isn't absolutely necessary, nor spend countless amounts of time on redesigning something that already works well. Over the years I've rewritten a lot of internal sites (after the relatively large teams responsible for their maintenance were cut) and turned them from huge monstrosities that would definitely require a large dedicated team to maintain into small, fast, simple ones which could almost be treated as a side-job.
- red-iron-pine 4y ago
  Those teams are optimizing for things that the business wants, not what the users or the devs want.
pwinnski 4y ago
> How on earth are solo indie devs outperforming entire well-paid teams?! They have different goals. The solo indie devs are performing horribly on the metrics the internal dev team is judged by, and vice-versa.
ttepasse 4y ago
Some weeks ago someone here linked to https://sh.reddit.com https://sh.reddit.com That seems to be a new new web reddit, build on web components via lit and it seems rather performant in contrast to whatever stuff reddit is using now. I’m no convinced about the UI choices, but at least they seem to recognized that the "new reddit" wasn’t the best. Hope dies last. (In my dreams there would be a real Apollo for Mac OS. Real as in AppKit, not UIKit/Catalyst. Won’t ever happen, of course. As productive Selig is with Apollo for iOS, there are limits.)
- jmisavage 4y ago
  Oh that actually seems fast and doesn’t crash my browser
Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
> How on earth are solo indie devs outperforming entire well-paid teams?! Because the UI for the first party apps have to be approved by MBA types who have different goals than 'make it good for users'.
PurpleRamen 4y ago
> How on earth are solo indie devs outperforming entire well-paid teams?! They don't outperform them, they have a different goal. The indie devs develop for the user. The company develops for the money, meaning more revenue, and whatever metrics for success they have.
schwartzworld 4y ago
You can gather much more data (the principal source of income for twitter and reddit) in a mobile app than a web one. The deliberately turfed their web offering to drive traffic towards official apps.

Aardwolf 4y ago

I use the old reddit redirect plugin in firefox. If they ever take away old.reddit, that'll be very sad, since reddit will be practically unreadable then for me (due to the large and too image/video-focused new layout), and it still is some of the best sources of actual non-blogspam human generated content

93po 4y ago
I will entirely stop using reddit if they take away old. I already refuse to visit it on my phone because of their annoying popups to download their app literally every single time you load a page.
- CyanBird 4y ago
  I use rif, which used to be called reddit is fun an android third party app. For some legal reason more likely than not they changed the name to "rif is fun" so technically it is named "reddit is fun is fun"... But yeah, it works very well, I have used it for many many years, and in the same vein if someone has got high recommendations to hn apps I am all ears, I have used materialistic for couple years but it has fallen short on more than a couple things and seems to not be updated anymore
  - txtsd 4y ago
    These are called recursive acronyms. GNU (GNU's not Unix) is the most popular example, at least for us Linux folk.

hbosch 4y ago

>How on earth are solo indie devs outperforming entire well-paid teams?! Easy, no PMs!

peter422 4y ago
One is optimizing for ad revenue and the other is not.
- arp242 4y ago
  It's not that; or not only that. For a while scrolling on my laptop happened at ~2 FPS. Granted, my laptop is not very fast, but plenty of fast enough for compiling stuff and even some 3D games and it was slower than any other website I've ever used by a considerable margin. I can't be bothered to check what the performance is like now, but for a long time the entire thing was slow, janky, and objectively just didn't work well.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  They could implement all the ads and user-hostility into Old Reddit just find and it would still be fast. In fact, I bet that Old Reddit with ads and trackers will still be faster than the New one without any of that.

dmix 4y ago

There's chrome/FF plugins that rewrite every url you're linked to old.reddit.com which is better than the builtin user setting. I'm a frontend dev who should like the type of JS stuff Reddit tried to do last time around but it was a UX failure. HN is still the ideal UX model for Reddit style sites (besides comment formatting + images/video submissions + long comment threads + native search integration). and anything that adds to that via JS/async should start from there and improve it by loading it faster. Like a lot of redesigns its 2 steps forward in one direction and 2 step back as a whole. Things like speed of opening threads and video thumbnails etc were a big improvement but they weren't better than the 5yr old RES extension on top of the much simpler base of old Reddit. The previews beta Reddit that came out a few months ago had a way better search UI and nice redesign but also made the comment UX way worse requiring hitting "load more" 10x more often favouring non threaded comment threads (scrolling > interaction) which is not how Reddit works IRL.

dustingetz 4y ago

scroll views increase impression metrics

robotburrito 4y ago

The real teams are not trying to make the best experience. They are actively trying to not do so for the sake of advertising probably. But that is just a guess.

ParetoOptimal 4y ago
> The real teams are not trying to make the best experience. They are trying to exist somewhere between not getting fired and getting promoted, occasionally something more if it doesn't conflict with those goals.

userbinator 4y ago

How on earth are solo indie devs outperforming entire well-paid teams?! As the classic saying goes, "well, there's your problem!" Work expands to fill the available capacity, regardless of whether it's beneficial to others besides the ones doing it, because those who are being paid will always try to justify their existence. The "solo indie dev" is, just by virtue of being limited in capacity, not going to add complexity where it isn't absolutely necessary, nor spend countless amounts of time on redesigning something that already works well. Over the years I've rewritten a lot of internal sites (after the relatively large teams responsible for their maintenance were cut) and turned them from huge monstrosities that would definitely require a large dedicated team to maintain into small, fast, simple ones which could almost be treated as a side-job.

red-iron-pine 4y ago
Those teams are optimizing for things that the business wants, not what the users or the devs want.

pwinnski 4y ago

> How on earth are solo indie devs outperforming entire well-paid teams?! They have different goals. The solo indie devs are performing horribly on the metrics the internal dev team is judged by, and vice-versa.

ttepasse 4y ago

Some weeks ago someone here linked to https://sh.reddit.com https://sh.reddit.com That seems to be a new new web reddit, build on web components via lit and it seems rather performant in contrast to whatever stuff reddit is using now. I’m no convinced about the UI choices, but at least they seem to recognized that the "new reddit" wasn’t the best. Hope dies last. (In my dreams there would be a real Apollo for Mac OS. Real as in AppKit, not UIKit/Catalyst. Won’t ever happen, of course. As productive Selig is with Apollo for iOS, there are limits.)

jmisavage 4y ago
Oh that actually seems fast and doesn’t crash my browser

Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago

> How on earth are solo indie devs outperforming entire well-paid teams?! Because the UI for the first party apps have to be approved by MBA types who have different goals than 'make it good for users'.

PurpleRamen 4y ago

> How on earth are solo indie devs outperforming entire well-paid teams?! They don't outperform them, they have a different goal. The indie devs develop for the user. The company develops for the money, meaning more revenue, and whatever metrics for success they have.

schwartzworld 4y ago

You can gather much more data (the principal source of income for twitter and reddit) in a mobile app than a web one. The deliberately turfed their web offering to drive traffic towards official apps.