5 ms·

I always wondered how Reddit justified the old.reddit effect. If your new design is so awful that a large percentage of users refuse to use it, and prefer the (

by tdeck 2mo ago

I always wondered how Reddit justified the old.reddit effect. If your new design is so awful that a large percentage of users refuse to use it, and prefer the (more performant!) version from more than a decade ago, shouldn't that be a strong signal that you've made some mistakes? Why not try making the new version more appealing by investigating and fixing the issues that cause people to use the old one. I guess credit to whoever fought internally to keep old.reddit running all these years. I'm sure it's been a candidate for the axe many times.

vovavili 2mo ago
Reddit redesign strikes me as a convenient excuse to enforce infinite scrolling by a company looking to IPO.
- walt_grata 2mo ago
  I read it as management only knows how to evaluate and reward change even if its just for the sake of the promotion process
- malfist 2mo ago
  Reddit has already IPO'd
  - vovavili 2mo ago
    I was thinking from a timeframe when redesign was introduced.
asddubs 2mo ago
While I do use old.reddit and genuinely think it's better UI-wise, in the general case users tend to be resistant to any UI change because it breaks their habits and muscle memory. This is valid but applies even if the new design is easier to use/better in one way or another.
- tdeck 2mo ago
  I'm not really a regular user of Reddit, but I'm reminded to use old.reddit every time I open a Google result and can't quickly skim or search the comments. That was an issue for years before LLMs so I'm not sure what the justification is for such a poor experience.
- Gormo 2mo ago
  > While I do use old.reddit and genuinely think it's better UI-wise, in the general case users tend to be resistant to any UI change because it breaks their habits and muscle memory. It's funny how often people say "it's just habit / muscle memory / etc." in response to these kinds of discussions, as though it were somehow a counter-argument, and not something that corroborates the argument against making sudden, drastic UI changes. It's really weird how common it is for people to say "well, Y is only true because of X" in response to "Z doesn't work because of Y", and thinking they're somehow defeating the argument against Z. If you acknowledge that X exists and causes Y, and accept that Y isn't compatible with Z, then you are conceding that Z does not hold!
  - throwaway27448 2mo ago
    I don't see it as a persuasive argument so much as resignation that quality doesn't matter (in this case, and in many cases of incremental enshitification)
  - asddubs 2mo ago
    My point is that it's not an objective measure of design quality, i.e. how well does a person who hasn't used the software before use it, or how quickly do they learn it. Whether that matters more than your existing users is up to you
    - Gormo 2mo ago
      There are no objective measures of design quality. Every aspect of interface design can only be measured in the extent to which it facilitates the user's access to the functionality of the software, so the only metrics that apply are ones that reflect the users' subjective experience. And that experience is determined as much by the users' own expectations and prior experiences -- yes, including habits and muscle memory -- as any quality of the interface or the design of the software. It's not merely a matter of optimizing the new-user experience for your own particualy software, either, as new users to your software will still be bringing with them the expectations and habits they've acquired through experience with other software. We're not in the '70s anymore, with new users likely never having used any software before, and where you're starting from a clean slate. People today have lots of particular expectations of software, informed by conventions evolved over decades and their own years of experience.
dzonga 2mo ago
Reddit had to make a business decision. old reddit - wasn't bad before the age of mass scrappers of LLM labs. now - yeah - they need to put everything behind a wall. LLM scrappers don't contribute, steal traffic.
- tdeck 2mo ago
  I agree, but I'm not sure how this is a response to my comment? If we time travel back to, say, 2020, it was still weird that they felt the need to keep two parallel versions of their site running because the new one was so unappealing to people who knew what the old one was like.
chongli 2mo ago
Enshittification is the answer. Old Reddit doesn’t make any money. Users block what few ads there are and it’s free so there’s no subscription revenue otherwise. New Reddit is full of ads plus social media engagement-bait garbage. New Reddit makes money. Reddit the company wants people to use New Reddit. So why does Old Reddit still exist? Because that’s where the content creators live! Old Reddit is a cost centre but a necessary one to keep the old guard of high-effort posters around. Alienate them and the New Reddit users won’t have any new content to engage with.
- r721 2mo ago
  I wonder how new Reddit users manage to post nowadays, given that many default subreddits have karma restrictions. You need esoteric knowledge, like knowing that /r/askreddit allows you to build initial karma via comments, to be able to do that.
- yuck39 2mo ago
  Why couldn't old reddit make money? Just going by my napkin math, serving 125M DAU compute and storage shouldn't cost more much than $2M/mo in cloud hosting. If I serve a single adsense banner at the top of each page at a low ($2) RPM, I should pull between $15-30M/mo off those 125M daily users depending on engagement. Realistically this type of lazy ad integration could be much higher. Given the maturity of the platform, salary spend shouldn't be more than another $5M/mo (realistically this could be even lower). That would net me a cool $8M/mo minimum. I really don't understand how old reddit couldn't make money.
  - chongli 2mo ago
    Infinite scrolling + algorithmic ads. That's how Facebook, Instagram, and Tiktok all make their money. You get way more ad impressions per hour than from people who click on links and read / participate in discussions (which is what Old Reddit is all about). Young social media addicts can scroll hundreds of ads per hour because they scroll so fast.
    - alex1138 2mo ago
zacharycohn 2mo ago
I mod a reasonably popular subreddit for work, and, looking at the stats as a die hard old reddit user, I was floored at how few of us there really are.
- bix6 2mo ago
  Numbers please
  - Eisenstein 2mo ago
    Here are stats from from a 100k member subreddit with 15k unique visitors a day. * https://imgur.com/UTJyyl8 https://imgur.com/UTJyyl8
    - bix6 2mo ago
      So the takeaway is there’s a lot of members but only about 15% are active daily? And of that 15% it’s unknown how many are human vs bot?
      - Eisenstein 2mo ago
        Unless bots subscribe to the subreddit they wouldn't count as members.
- al_borland 2mo ago
  Most people accept what is given to them and won’t go through the effort to change it. Are there any stats on account age as well? I wonder if Reddit figured the old Reddit user problem would be solved through attrition as people naturally left and new users join the site only knowing the new interface.
- jazzypants 2mo ago
  I mean, I used the old design for a couple years, but now I genuinely prefer the new design. I mostly view Reddit on my phone, and new reddit is much more mobile friendly. I have to pinch and zoom and scroll all over the place on old reddit. I know that's an unpopular opinion around these parts, but I also hate viewing this website on my phone so I use an app. This website really needs a mobile redesign, but I can't imagine the shit fit that the users would throw.
bob1029 2mo ago
I think there is a possibility that this is simply someone's ego trip that has evolved into a monster. One "nepo hire" in the correct position of power is all it would take for something like this to happen. I believe that's what occurred with the GitHub refactor too. That happened way too early to be attributed to the AI/Copilot stuff. If business was truly driving the ship a lot of these bad ideas would have been killed and buried on day one. The React tribalism was unbelievably hot for a while there. Not going along with it was a great way to not get hired at a lot of places. This is still the case. The reason the business tolerates this bullshit is because they are so afraid of losing certain people. I'm watching it happen in real time for two smaller startups right now. The business would be much better off if they simply fired the "revolutionaries" right now (i.e. today without warning or preparation), but they've become convinced by the propaganda of these very same people that their removal would be catastrophic to the business. So, these people get to torture all of the employees and end customers with their ridiculous schemes (ego trips) and the business covers up for them. As long as everyone survives to the weekend, no one seems to care enough to change anything. The customers in this case are other businesses who are also sucked into the scheme (they don't want to look stupid for signing a contract), so the issue propagates ever deeper.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
evan_a_a 2mo ago
According to stats on a relatively small local sub I mod, most people interact with Reddit through the mobile app these days. All of the web interfaces make up a small percentage of visits, and old.reddit is even smaller.
MrMember 2mo ago
Very few people use old.reddit, I believe it's like 1-2%.

by tdeck 2mo ago

vovavili 2mo ago

Reddit redesign strikes me as a convenient excuse to enforce infinite scrolling by a company looking to IPO.

walt_grata 2mo ago
I read it as management only knows how to evaluate and reward change even if its just for the sake of the promotion process
malfist 2mo ago
Reddit has already IPO'd
- vovavili 2mo ago
  I was thinking from a timeframe when redesign was introduced.

asddubs 2mo ago

While I do use old.reddit and genuinely think it's better UI-wise, in the general case users tend to be resistant to any UI change because it breaks their habits and muscle memory. This is valid but applies even if the new design is easier to use/better in one way or another.

tdeck 2mo ago
I'm not really a regular user of Reddit, but I'm reminded to use old.reddit every time I open a Google result and can't quickly skim or search the comments. That was an issue for years before LLMs so I'm not sure what the justification is for such a poor experience.
Gormo 2mo ago
> While I do use old.reddit and genuinely think it's better UI-wise, in the general case users tend to be resistant to any UI change because it breaks their habits and muscle memory. It's funny how often people say "it's just habit / muscle memory / etc." in response to these kinds of discussions, as though it were somehow a counter-argument, and not something that corroborates the argument against making sudden, drastic UI changes. It's really weird how common it is for people to say "well, Y is only true because of X" in response to "Z doesn't work because of Y", and thinking they're somehow defeating the argument against Z. If you acknowledge that X exists and causes Y, and accept that Y isn't compatible with Z, then you are conceding that Z does not hold!
- throwaway27448 2mo ago
  I don't see it as a persuasive argument so much as resignation that quality doesn't matter (in this case, and in many cases of incremental enshitification)
- asddubs 2mo ago
  My point is that it's not an objective measure of design quality, i.e. how well does a person who hasn't used the software before use it, or how quickly do they learn it. Whether that matters more than your existing users is up to you
  - Gormo 2mo ago
    There are no objective measures of design quality. Every aspect of interface design can only be measured in the extent to which it facilitates the user's access to the functionality of the software, so the only metrics that apply are ones that reflect the users' subjective experience. And that experience is determined as much by the users' own expectations and prior experiences -- yes, including habits and muscle memory -- as any quality of the interface or the design of the software. It's not merely a matter of optimizing the new-user experience for your own particualy software, either, as new users to your software will still be bringing with them the expectations and habits they've acquired through experience with other software. We're not in the '70s anymore, with new users likely never having used any software before, and where you're starting from a clean slate. People today have lots of particular expectations of software, informed by conventions evolved over decades and their own years of experience.

dzonga 2mo ago

Reddit had to make a business decision. old reddit - wasn't bad before the age of mass scrappers of LLM labs. now - yeah - they need to put everything behind a wall. LLM scrappers don't contribute, steal traffic.

tdeck 2mo ago
I agree, but I'm not sure how this is a response to my comment? If we time travel back to, say, 2020, it was still weird that they felt the need to keep two parallel versions of their site running because the new one was so unappealing to people who knew what the old one was like.

chongli 2mo ago

Enshittification is the answer. Old Reddit doesn’t make any money. Users block what few ads there are and it’s free so there’s no subscription revenue otherwise. New Reddit is full of ads plus social media engagement-bait garbage. New Reddit makes money. Reddit the company wants people to use New Reddit. So why does Old Reddit still exist? Because that’s where the content creators live! Old Reddit is a cost centre but a necessary one to keep the old guard of high-effort posters around. Alienate them and the New Reddit users won’t have any new content to engage with.

r721 2mo ago
I wonder how new Reddit users manage to post nowadays, given that many default subreddits have karma restrictions. You need esoteric knowledge, like knowing that /r/askreddit allows you to build initial karma via comments, to be able to do that.
yuck39 2mo ago
Why couldn't old reddit make money? Just going by my napkin math, serving 125M DAU compute and storage shouldn't cost more much than $2M/mo in cloud hosting. If I serve a single adsense banner at the top of each page at a low ($2) RPM, I should pull between $15-30M/mo off those 125M daily users depending on engagement. Realistically this type of lazy ad integration could be much higher. Given the maturity of the platform, salary spend shouldn't be more than another $5M/mo (realistically this could be even lower). That would net me a cool $8M/mo minimum. I really don't understand how old reddit couldn't make money.
- chongli 2mo ago
  Infinite scrolling + algorithmic ads. That's how Facebook, Instagram, and Tiktok all make their money. You get way more ad impressions per hour than from people who click on links and read / participate in discussions (which is what Old Reddit is all about). Young social media addicts can scroll hundreds of ads per hour because they scroll so fast.
  - alex1138 2mo ago

zacharycohn 2mo ago

I mod a reasonably popular subreddit for work, and, looking at the stats as a die hard old reddit user, I was floored at how few of us there really are.

bix6 2mo ago
Numbers please
- Eisenstein 2mo ago
  Here are stats from from a 100k member subreddit with 15k unique visitors a day. * https://imgur.com/UTJyyl8 https://imgur.com/UTJyyl8
  - bix6 2mo ago
    So the takeaway is there’s a lot of members but only about 15% are active daily? And of that 15% it’s unknown how many are human vs bot?
    - Eisenstein 2mo ago
      Unless bots subscribe to the subreddit they wouldn't count as members.
al_borland 2mo ago
Most people accept what is given to them and won’t go through the effort to change it. Are there any stats on account age as well? I wonder if Reddit figured the old Reddit user problem would be solved through attrition as people naturally left and new users join the site only knowing the new interface.
jazzypants 2mo ago
I mean, I used the old design for a couple years, but now I genuinely prefer the new design. I mostly view Reddit on my phone, and new reddit is much more mobile friendly. I have to pinch and zoom and scroll all over the place on old reddit. I know that's an unpopular opinion around these parts, but I also hate viewing this website on my phone so I use an app. This website really needs a mobile redesign, but I can't imagine the shit fit that the users would throw.

bob1029 2mo ago

I think there is a possibility that this is simply someone's ego trip that has evolved into a monster. One "nepo hire" in the correct position of power is all it would take for something like this to happen. I believe that's what occurred with the GitHub refactor too. That happened way too early to be attributed to the AI/Copilot stuff. If business was truly driving the ship a lot of these bad ideas would have been killed and buried on day one. The React tribalism was unbelievably hot for a while there. Not going along with it was a great way to not get hired at a lot of places. This is still the case. The reason the business tolerates this bullshit is because they are so afraid of losing certain people. I'm watching it happen in real time for two smaller startups right now. The business would be much better off if they simply fired the "revolutionaries" right now (i.e. today without warning or preparation), but they've become convinced by the propaganda of these very same people that their removal would be catastrophic to the business. So, these people get to torture all of the employees and end customers with their ridiculous schemes (ego trips) and the business covers up for them. As long as everyone survives to the weekend, no one seems to care enough to change anything. The customers in this case are other businesses who are also sucked into the scheme (they don't want to look stupid for signing a contract), so the issue propagates ever deeper.

deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]

evan_a_a 2mo ago

According to stats on a relatively small local sub I mod, most people interact with Reddit through the mobile app these days. All of the web interfaces make up a small percentage of visits, and old.reddit is even smaller.

MrMember 2mo ago

Very few people use old.reddit, I believe it's like 1-2%.