It is touted to be better, but I don't see the appeal and it's slower. I also notice that old reddit randomly logs me out or "forgets" to use the classic design.
I’ve never seen a single site design repel me more quickly. I depend heavily on the simplicity and information-density of the old design (e.g. being able to pick from a dozen link titles that all fit on screen at once). I also depend on the pinch-to-zoom simplicity of focusing on exactly what I want, which only works well in the “normal” web pages of the old design. The new “design” breaks everything that made the old design convenient in these respects, and is almost impressively bad. It is so astoundingly different than what made Reddit work originally (i.e. its simplicity) that it quite honestly feels like someone tried their best to sabotage Reddit.
And all of this, I must say, is before I even mention the ridiculous spam-like additions they made. I think the new design finds no fewer than 3 places to shove something in my face like “USE APP / Better in app / HEY DID YOU KNOW WE HAVE AN APP!?!?!?”. Who is that for? Does anyone like this kind of crap? It virtually guarantees that I will never download the app.
Reddit’s days are numbered if it keeps this stuff up. I’m actually surprised that, historically, Digg died for much smaller redesign “sins”, and I think it was primarily because Reddit was an alternative. What’s the alternative?
If there was a cookie cutter reddit alternative and there was no content, would you use it? The network effects of reddit are a reasonably strong barrier of entry.
For a viable competitor to Reddit, you only need enough other users to fill a few pages worth of content, so the barrier of entry is much lower than if you wanted to outcompete something like Whatsapp. I mean, Hacker News has like 1% of the number of users that Reddit has, and it's already better.
Yes, in fact there are several and I use them all.
The network effect has a positive influence on curation but an often profoundly negative effect on conversation. The smaller reddit spinoffs tend to have users that are more passionate about the topic at hand, don't "shit post" as much and the comment threads aren't plagued by low-effort puns. A casual observation of this might have you believe that the engagement is low, but a closer examination often reveals that the conversations are much more on-topic.
> I’m actually surprised that, historically, Digg died for much smaller redesign “sins”, and I think it was primarily because Reddit was an alternative.
if you use reddit mostly on mobile then there are many unofficial apps to use, and some people might not even notice the redesign.
I hate it, it's infinitely worse. Here are a few issues:
- It's much slower/bulkier. I don't want a modern machine just render webpages.
- Infinite scrolling designs are good for addiction, but not actually good for reading. If I have to reload the page, my spot is gone.
- Much less content actually fits on a page, and I suspect this is done to encourage scrolling, similar to facebook's strategy. Increase addiction, tracking, and ad impressions through engagement.
- There seem to be a lot more emojis and post flair.
- There seem to be A lot more promoted posts
There's probably other stuff I haven't noticed. Between the redesign, the enhanced user tracking, their desire to go public, and tencent's investment, it's pretty clear that it's getting to be time to abandon reddit completely.
You're first point is my biggest pet peeve. I get the "Something went wrong. Press here to return home" error all the time when my connection is mediocre or like if my phone is about to drop wifi for data. For a site comprised of basically just text and images, they figured out very well how to complicate serving the data to the point of unusability.
Neither do I like being harassed by various banners to switch to redesign (recently sliding banners for "amazing" dark mode and infinite scrolling) or even finding it was loaded by force randomly during browsing random content and that seems to be happening way too often to count it as "accident".
I get the idea behind this: they set themselves a goal of luring in new people by making UI more attractive to the audience who's familiar with social network interfaces and such way of providing content (the default card is just same as twitter, facebook and instagram feed view). Still, they should still respect users who want to stay on faster-loading old interface and provide it as an option in preferences (old domain is just half-assed way to do it), not assuming that everyone will be enjoying this new UI.
Reddit keeps on putting a banner at the bottom of its pages saying "Try the redesign! It has INFINITE SCROLLING!" and I am like, guys, that's the last thing I want, I like having those little moments where I have to explicitly decide if I want more of what you have or not, that makes it easier to stop and go do something useful.
Infinite scrolling is a pet peeve of mine. When it's on a PC (and not mobile), it's a little disconcerting to not have breaks in the content, and it completely breaks scroll bar behavior if I'm dragging down the scroll bar when the next chunk loads.
I've also found that it leads to the browser using more and more memory to the point that my computer starts swapping unless I close the tab every so often.
No. Largely the dark pattern mobile "get the app" hassling. But also the sheer load time on desktop. And to a lesser extent the breaking of the "a bunch of mostly-static links with associated commentary" model. Using the site is quite unpleasant now.
And it's enough unpleasantness to keep me from going back to checking it regularly. I hope they keep it.
>I also notice that old reddit randomly logs me out or "forgets" to use the classic design.
This was happening to me too. I've switched to a add on to FF that forces everything reddit to old.reddit.com
I feel like the redesign wasn't for "Us". It was for those people used to a Facebook like feed. People that enjoy or easily digest pictures and videos more than they do words.
I have a friend that uses RES to view all images on the page. And basically scrolls past any threads that would have a text title. Doesn't even read the title unless an image catches his eye. And never EVER reads the comments. I feel like the redesign was for people like that.
It's dog slow. It uses small popup instead of leading to a new page. And it has less density of information compared to the old design, even in compact mode.
It's like new Gmail versus old Gmail, everything got bigger anv you got less information per page as a result.
Readit News
I’ve never seen a single site design repel me more quickly. I depend heavily on the simplicity and information-density of the old design (e.g. being able to pick from a dozen link titles that all fit on screen at once). I also depend on the pinch-to-zoom simplicity of focusing on exactly what I want, which only works well in the “normal” web pages of the old design. The new “design” breaks everything that made the old design convenient in these respects, and is almost impressively bad. It is so astoundingly different than what made Reddit work originally (i.e. its simplicity) that it quite honestly feels like someone tried their best to sabotage Reddit.
And all of this, I must say, is before I even mention the ridiculous spam-like additions they made. I think the new design finds no fewer than 3 places to shove something in my face like “USE APP / Better in app / HEY DID YOU KNOW WE HAVE AN APP!?!?!?”. Who is that for? Does anyone like this kind of crap? It virtually guarantees that I will never download the app.
Reddit’s days are numbered if it keeps this stuff up. I’m actually surprised that, historically, Digg died for much smaller redesign “sins”, and I think it was primarily because Reddit was an alternative. What’s the alternative?
The network effect has a positive influence on curation but an often profoundly negative effect on conversation. The smaller reddit spinoffs tend to have users that are more passionate about the topic at hand, don't "shit post" as much and the comment threads aren't plagued by low-effort puns. A casual observation of this might have you believe that the engagement is low, but a closer examination often reveals that the conversations are much more on-topic.
if you use reddit mostly on mobile then there are many unofficial apps to use, and some people might not even notice the redesign.
Deleted Comment
- It's much slower/bulkier. I don't want a modern machine just render webpages.
- Infinite scrolling designs are good for addiction, but not actually good for reading. If I have to reload the page, my spot is gone.
- Much less content actually fits on a page, and I suspect this is done to encourage scrolling, similar to facebook's strategy. Increase addiction, tracking, and ad impressions through engagement.
- There seem to be a lot more emojis and post flair.
- There seem to be A lot more promoted posts
There's probably other stuff I haven't noticed. Between the redesign, the enhanced user tracking, their desire to go public, and tencent's investment, it's pretty clear that it's getting to be time to abandon reddit completely.
Neither do I like being harassed by various banners to switch to redesign (recently sliding banners for "amazing" dark mode and infinite scrolling) or even finding it was loaded by force randomly during browsing random content and that seems to be happening way too often to count it as "accident".
I get the idea behind this: they set themselves a goal of luring in new people by making UI more attractive to the audience who's familiar with social network interfaces and such way of providing content (the default card is just same as twitter, facebook and instagram feed view). Still, they should still respect users who want to stay on faster-loading old interface and provide it as an option in preferences (old domain is just half-assed way to do it), not assuming that everyone will be enjoying this new UI.
Deleted Comment
The fact that they've called it an `onboardingbar` is not exactly reassuring.
And it's enough unpleasantness to keep me from going back to checking it regularly. I hope they keep it.
This was happening to me too. I've switched to a add on to FF that forces everything reddit to old.reddit.com
I feel like the redesign wasn't for "Us". It was for those people used to a Facebook like feed. People that enjoy or easily digest pictures and videos more than they do words.
I have a friend that uses RES to view all images on the page. And basically scrolls past any threads that would have a text title. Doesn't even read the title unless an image catches his eye. And never EVER reads the comments. I feel like the redesign was for people like that.
I don't see why Reddit shouldn't just publish its retention/cohort metrics. Of general interest to the community and certainly not a trade secret.
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reddit-enhancement...