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I ask myself on a weekly basis when old.reddit.com will disappear. And there is nothing more cruel than the new Reddit, UI-wise. Even Twitter's "threading" of c

I ask myself on a weekly basis when old.reddit.com will disappear. And there is nothing more cruel than the new Reddit, UI-wise. Even Twitter's "threading" of conversations appears to make more sense, even though I have still not figured out how it works.

twostorytower 4y ago
I know some people at Reddit and sadly it's definitely going to happen.
- snvzz 4y ago
  I have mentally prepared myself to say goodbye to Reddit once it happens. Complete with deleting my account for closure. This is what I recommend. It's pretty much facebook, pure dark UX at that point.
- bmarquez 4y ago
  I hope the Fediverse replacement for Reddit, Lemmy, will pick up in popularity before old.reddit dies. It makes a lot of sense since each "subreddit" could be its own server.
  - uthinter 4y ago
    Are servers hosted on fediverse open to being indexed by search engines otherwise I doubt it can replace reddit. Reddit did discussion threads , subs, and searchable results from search engines really well. It was a really great version of "forums" . I am not sure fediverse or Discord can do such things.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 4y ago
    I don't think Fediverse solves the problems that we see in Reddit (or Twitter, or any of the others). Instead of admin meddling from a single group of closely-affiliated admins (they all work for the same company), you just get meddling from many small groups of admins, none of those groups affiliated with each other except via ActivityPub. They can't shut down conversations they dislike entirely, but they can sever you from the Fediverse thoroughly enough that they might as well. And they can do it early enough that no one ever knew you were there in the first place. Even the Reddit admins didn't do that... I don't know if it was apathy and indifference, or just that they couldn't pay enough attention back in the early 2010s, but they didn't. And that likely allowed Reddit to grow so large, it could be the forum for everybody, about everything. Fediverse and Lemmy just ends up being those old phpbb forums, that won't talk to or link to each other unless everything is excessively sanitized and drips with insincere civility. Lemmy doesn't even have an Elon Musk to piss everyone off of Reddit and drive them to search for an alternative.
- up_your_ass 4y ago
  Have they given any hints as to when?
- paulpauper 4y ago
  maybe plugins can restore the old look and functionality?
- noir_lord 4y ago
  Used Reddit for 14 years as a registered member and longer since before I signed up. The day old.reddit.com stops working is the day I stop using reddit completely, I detest their new UI so much that it’s essentially unusable for me.
  - hayst4ck 4y ago
    I agree completely. I've used Reddit since at least 2008. I quit Facebook over what they did to WhatsApp and will never use another Meta product. Reddit is getting dangerously close. It's very clear there is not an adult at reddit who can tell the people in power NO.
    - croutonwagon 4y ago
      Same. My account is some 16y 10m old. I use Reddit less and less YoY and even day to day. But the day old goes I’m out. Frankly I only use it for fairly niche subreddits and even then it’s more like 10 minutes a day. I’m also not a core demographic at this point anymore.
  - Firmwarrior 4y ago
    yeah, it's pretty wild how bad it is I ended up having to pay $2 for a Safari iOS extension to auto-redirect reddit links to old.reddit just so I could actually read the site when I got there via web searches. There's no usability whatsoever I just painstakingly pinch and pan around old.reddit rather than try to wrestle with their dog-awful app or redesign semi-related: I've been trying to get the WallStreetBets mods to just make their own version of Reddit instead of putting up with the admins' constant bullshit.. they're basically singlehandedly funding that whole shitshow and get nothing out of it but scam ads, users randomly banned for saying a no-no word, etc
  - sufficer 4y ago
    It has seen 0 improvement since it was released lmao. Like wait 8 years ago?
  - primax 4y ago
    100% agreed, it is absolutely awful. They learned nothing from the Digg apocalypse.
- hayst4ck 4y ago
  That is the day I will quit reddit and never look back. 6 months ago I rarely used old.reddit.com, but now I run into more and more dark patterns all the time. They tried to TikTok my feed and it was an awful experience. I frequently default to it now instead of using it only when I get sick of the dark patterns. Reddit got popular because Digg screwed up their comment threading. It's sad to see reddit is starting to make anti-user mistakes like digg. Maybe they think they can force it because there isn't a competent competitor. The problem with all of these sites is they start to service the lowest common denominator in the name of next quarters profits. As their websites become more hostile to the educated, the quality of content drops and profit goes up, but the golden goose is slowly being strangled. Reddit was fantastic around the time of digg because the average user appeared to be college educated or greater. Celebrities like Randall Monroe were submitting high quality content. It was common for a literal expert to write a well thought out post. Now it's an "Americas funniest home videos" feed of fart jokes with your liberal aunt and conservative uncle having an argument in the background. It seems so clear to me that billionaires mean we can't have nice things. Twitter and Reddit both promoted a "truth to power" free speech ideology, and now billionaires are coercing these companies into becoming cess pits that reflect the worst parts of humanity. Power doesn't like to be threatened so they will destroy the weapon. I still can't decide if these companies are being destroyed because they promote a "no more billionaires" ideology, or if it is simply capitalistic greed and the search for next quarters profits.
  - stametseater 4y ago
    > The problem with all of these sites is they start to service the lowest common denominator in the name of next quarters profits. [...] It seems so clear to me that billionaires mean we can't have nice things" The pressure to increase quarterly profits to the detriment of the long-term emerges from the very nature of short-term investment, particularly as facilitated by stock exchanges. Eliminating billionaires would not eliminate this dynamic.
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      Yes, Reddit is not even part of a publicly listed company that has investor pressure to meet quarterly numbers, it is privately owned by the Newhouse family. People just like having more money than less money. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications
- flangola7 4y ago
  How do they plan to handle moderation? The strong majority of subreddit mods still use old Reddit because modding on new is suffering. Many will give up modding and some will abandon using Reddit entirely. Do they have a plan to replace the thousands of free employees that currently keep Reddit habitable?
victor9000 4y ago
Well, i.reddit.com just recently disappeared, so it might be sooner than later.
m348e912 4y ago
old.reddit.com and it's imminent disappearance underscores that there is a still need for a user-centric web browser designed to combat user-hostile web ui. Here are some features I think the browser should have by default (without plugins) Short feature list: - Overwrite website code and display a user-hostile UI of popular sites like reddit/Facebook (this warrants a whole list in itself) - offer a reader view of any website including pay walled websites - easy access to archive a page using archive.today and to view already archived versions - Right-click anything to download, images/videos/audio, even when sites like instagram and twitter make it difficult to do. - Bypass field restrictions. Ever seen a password field where you can't paste text for whatever reason. That would not be a thing. - Tab freeze for tabs not in focus - save CPU and battery energy - Click the back button and end up at the same place on the page you clicked from instead of having to scroll endlessly to find where you were before - Use a common user-agent so the browser doesn't get blacklisted by websites - Accept only essential cookies by default - Easy right-click and delete of paywall style overlays or other elements - Ad block may not need to be built-in by default, but the ability to right-click and nuke a banner ad (especially the ones that don't disappear and block text even when you click the "x") -Respect new lines when posting comments instead of users having to constantly go back, edit their comments, and add new lines to break up a wall of text
- dangus 4y ago
  > offer a reader view of any website including pay walled websites Not really possible if a paywalled website is a true paywall. Many paywalled websites don't even expose their content to crawlers. I also think that, philosophically, the majority of the user base being able to bypass paywall isn't healthy for the Internet. It will only make content quality decrease and advertisement aggression increase. You can see this effect come into play with pages that use anti-adblocking tools, where you can't see anything until you disable ad blocking. > Tab freeze for tabs not in focus - save CPU and battery energy Chrome energy saver mode? Safari seems to effectively do this, tabs seem to be pretty dead until you are using them. I would also ask what kind of need there is to save battery life above and beyond present technology. Modern laptops sold on the market now can be in a web browser for an entire workday (e.g., ASUS Zenbook 13 OLED, any MacBook M1/M2). Almost everything on this list is already available with browser extensions or existing browsers.
paulpauper 4y ago
The 'new' Reddit has so much wasted space and bloat. The old one is slick and optimized for content display. It's also an eyesore. Garish colors, weird icons...just horrible in every way. It has been many years and I still cannot bring myself to use it.
CMay 4y ago
When you grow up with the internet, it can be kind of easy to take it personally when companies torpedo part of the culture like it has no value. It ends up feeling like an attack on the internet, which itself has almost an amorphous personality, behavior and appearance that can still be fairly defined at moments in time. Really wish more sites were like HN where they established themselves, their purpose and what they believed in, then stuck to it. If HN cost $1/mo to use, I'd use it.
RickHull 4y ago
When r/drama was given the boot, they made a simple reddit clone and open sourced it. I participate in a forum that uses it instead of phpbb or whatever. Works fantastic, but you may have to change the default styling, which was very um, dramatic, from what I've heard.

twostorytower 4y ago

I know some people at Reddit and sadly it's definitely going to happen.

snvzz 4y ago
I have mentally prepared myself to say goodbye to Reddit once it happens. Complete with deleting my account for closure. This is what I recommend. It's pretty much facebook, pure dark UX at that point.
bmarquez 4y ago
I hope the Fediverse replacement for Reddit, Lemmy, will pick up in popularity before old.reddit dies. It makes a lot of sense since each "subreddit" could be its own server.
- uthinter 4y ago
  Are servers hosted on fediverse open to being indexed by search engines otherwise I doubt it can replace reddit. Reddit did discussion threads , subs, and searchable results from search engines really well. It was a really great version of "forums" . I am not sure fediverse or Discord can do such things.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 4y ago
  I don't think Fediverse solves the problems that we see in Reddit (or Twitter, or any of the others). Instead of admin meddling from a single group of closely-affiliated admins (they all work for the same company), you just get meddling from many small groups of admins, none of those groups affiliated with each other except via ActivityPub. They can't shut down conversations they dislike entirely, but they can sever you from the Fediverse thoroughly enough that they might as well. And they can do it early enough that no one ever knew you were there in the first place. Even the Reddit admins didn't do that... I don't know if it was apathy and indifference, or just that they couldn't pay enough attention back in the early 2010s, but they didn't. And that likely allowed Reddit to grow so large, it could be the forum for everybody, about everything. Fediverse and Lemmy just ends up being those old phpbb forums, that won't talk to or link to each other unless everything is excessively sanitized and drips with insincere civility. Lemmy doesn't even have an Elon Musk to piss everyone off of Reddit and drive them to search for an alternative.
up_your_ass 4y ago
Have they given any hints as to when?
paulpauper 4y ago
maybe plugins can restore the old look and functionality?
noir_lord 4y ago
Used Reddit for 14 years as a registered member and longer since before I signed up. The day old.reddit.com stops working is the day I stop using reddit completely, I detest their new UI so much that it’s essentially unusable for me.
- hayst4ck 4y ago
  I agree completely. I've used Reddit since at least 2008. I quit Facebook over what they did to WhatsApp and will never use another Meta product. Reddit is getting dangerously close. It's very clear there is not an adult at reddit who can tell the people in power NO.
  - croutonwagon 4y ago
    Same. My account is some 16y 10m old. I use Reddit less and less YoY and even day to day. But the day old goes I’m out. Frankly I only use it for fairly niche subreddits and even then it’s more like 10 minutes a day. I’m also not a core demographic at this point anymore.
- Firmwarrior 4y ago
  yeah, it's pretty wild how bad it is I ended up having to pay $2 for a Safari iOS extension to auto-redirect reddit links to old.reddit just so I could actually read the site when I got there via web searches. There's no usability whatsoever I just painstakingly pinch and pan around old.reddit rather than try to wrestle with their dog-awful app or redesign semi-related: I've been trying to get the WallStreetBets mods to just make their own version of Reddit instead of putting up with the admins' constant bullshit.. they're basically singlehandedly funding that whole shitshow and get nothing out of it but scam ads, users randomly banned for saying a no-no word, etc
- sufficer 4y ago
  It has seen 0 improvement since it was released lmao. Like wait 8 years ago?
- primax 4y ago
  100% agreed, it is absolutely awful. They learned nothing from the Digg apocalypse.
hayst4ck 4y ago
That is the day I will quit reddit and never look back. 6 months ago I rarely used old.reddit.com, but now I run into more and more dark patterns all the time. They tried to TikTok my feed and it was an awful experience. I frequently default to it now instead of using it only when I get sick of the dark patterns. Reddit got popular because Digg screwed up their comment threading. It's sad to see reddit is starting to make anti-user mistakes like digg. Maybe they think they can force it because there isn't a competent competitor. The problem with all of these sites is they start to service the lowest common denominator in the name of next quarters profits. As their websites become more hostile to the educated, the quality of content drops and profit goes up, but the golden goose is slowly being strangled. Reddit was fantastic around the time of digg because the average user appeared to be college educated or greater. Celebrities like Randall Monroe were submitting high quality content. It was common for a literal expert to write a well thought out post. Now it's an "Americas funniest home videos" feed of fart jokes with your liberal aunt and conservative uncle having an argument in the background. It seems so clear to me that billionaires mean we can't have nice things. Twitter and Reddit both promoted a "truth to power" free speech ideology, and now billionaires are coercing these companies into becoming cess pits that reflect the worst parts of humanity. Power doesn't like to be threatened so they will destroy the weapon. I still can't decide if these companies are being destroyed because they promote a "no more billionaires" ideology, or if it is simply capitalistic greed and the search for next quarters profits.
- stametseater 4y ago
  > The problem with all of these sites is they start to service the lowest common denominator in the name of next quarters profits. [...] It seems so clear to me that billionaires mean we can't have nice things" The pressure to increase quarterly profits to the detriment of the long-term emerges from the very nature of short-term investment, particularly as facilitated by stock exchanges. Eliminating billionaires would not eliminate this dynamic.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    Yes, Reddit is not even part of a publicly listed company that has investor pressure to meet quarterly numbers, it is privately owned by the Newhouse family. People just like having more money than less money. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications
flangola7 4y ago
How do they plan to handle moderation? The strong majority of subreddit mods still use old Reddit because modding on new is suffering. Many will give up modding and some will abandon using Reddit entirely. Do they have a plan to replace the thousands of free employees that currently keep Reddit habitable?

victor9000 4y ago

Well, i.reddit.com just recently disappeared, so it might be sooner than later.

m348e912 4y ago

old.reddit.com and it's imminent disappearance underscores that there is a still need for a user-centric web browser designed to combat user-hostile web ui. Here are some features I think the browser should have by default (without plugins) Short feature list: - Overwrite website code and display a user-hostile UI of popular sites like reddit/Facebook (this warrants a whole list in itself) - offer a reader view of any website including pay walled websites - easy access to archive a page using archive.today and to view already archived versions - Right-click anything to download, images/videos/audio, even when sites like instagram and twitter make it difficult to do. - Bypass field restrictions. Ever seen a password field where you can't paste text for whatever reason. That would not be a thing. - Tab freeze for tabs not in focus - save CPU and battery energy - Click the back button and end up at the same place on the page you clicked from instead of having to scroll endlessly to find where you were before - Use a common user-agent so the browser doesn't get blacklisted by websites - Accept only essential cookies by default - Easy right-click and delete of paywall style overlays or other elements - Ad block may not need to be built-in by default, but the ability to right-click and nuke a banner ad (especially the ones that don't disappear and block text even when you click the "x") -Respect new lines when posting comments instead of users having to constantly go back, edit their comments, and add new lines to break up a wall of text

dangus 4y ago
> offer a reader view of any website including pay walled websites Not really possible if a paywalled website is a true paywall. Many paywalled websites don't even expose their content to crawlers. I also think that, philosophically, the majority of the user base being able to bypass paywall isn't healthy for the Internet. It will only make content quality decrease and advertisement aggression increase. You can see this effect come into play with pages that use anti-adblocking tools, where you can't see anything until you disable ad blocking. > Tab freeze for tabs not in focus - save CPU and battery energy Chrome energy saver mode? Safari seems to effectively do this, tabs seem to be pretty dead until you are using them. I would also ask what kind of need there is to save battery life above and beyond present technology. Modern laptops sold on the market now can be in a web browser for an entire workday (e.g., ASUS Zenbook 13 OLED, any MacBook M1/M2). Almost everything on this list is already available with browser extensions or existing browsers.

paulpauper 4y ago

The 'new' Reddit has so much wasted space and bloat. The old one is slick and optimized for content display. It's also an eyesore. Garish colors, weird icons...just horrible in every way. It has been many years and I still cannot bring myself to use it.

CMay 4y ago

When you grow up with the internet, it can be kind of easy to take it personally when companies torpedo part of the culture like it has no value. It ends up feeling like an attack on the internet, which itself has almost an amorphous personality, behavior and appearance that can still be fairly defined at moments in time. Really wish more sites were like HN where they established themselves, their purpose and what they believed in, then stuck to it. If HN cost $1/mo to use, I'd use it.

RickHull 4y ago

When r/drama was given the boot, they made a simple reddit clone and open sourced it. I participate in a forum that uses it instead of phpbb or whatever. Works fantastic, but you may have to change the default styling, which was very um, dramatic, from what I've heard.