I notice that when browsing Reddit day-to-day I am constantly getting either "Sorry, we couldn't load posts for this page" on a subreddit page or "Cannot load comments" on a thread page. This isn't just happening occasionally, it's been happening daily over the course of weeks.
There's been a lot of hate for the "new" Reddit design but outside of the actual usability of the site, there seems to be some huge problems from a technical perspective.
I've tried multiple browsers, internet connections,VPN enabled/disabled and it's always the same. I now just use https://old.reddit.com, but I'd be interested to hear if other people have the same experience?
It boggles my mind that a redesign could be implemented so poorly on such a popular site.
It's such a awful design. I've explicitly opted out of the new design on my account, and I use old.reddit.com whenever I'm not signed in.
When you click the comments link on a story from the story list, it opens the comments in some kind of overlay on top of the story list. There is a "close" link near the top that dismisses the overlay to get back to the stories. The story list is still loaded in the browser, just not visible because the comments are in front of it.
Well, not visible to you. The story list is still visible to the browser's "search on page" feature, often making such searches useless. Also, scrolling in the overlay is way off on some browsers.
If you hit refresh, you get the more useful comment view. It's just the comments, without the story list lurking behind, and with unmolested scrolling.
They should just scrap this redesign, except for the fancier post editor. Port that to the old reddit and call it done.
This redesign has been years in the making and a solid half of the basic features used every day don’t work.
It’s probably the single worst redesign I’ve ever seen a major site do.
Unrelated, but I also use m.facebook.com and the non JS version of gmail.
Takes minutes(!) to load(multiple powerful machines - i7 3770k, i5 6th gen and i7 7700, tested on fresh OS installs of both Win10 and Ubuntu) - it fakes loaded status usually by displaying your last viewed page - which is very annoying as it has no loading bar nor a throbber.
It is horrible when you are waiting for 2FA code in email, or when resetting a password.
The weirdest thing is that successful alternative reddit UIs exist, so all they would have to do is incorporate the features people are using alternative UIs for. They did virtually the opposite of that. This is exactly what Digg did, and the solution for Digg wasn't "allow people to use old Digg", it was "Everyone left and went to reddit".
Yes, but in a big company developers don't define the product, (product) designers do.
https://m.signalvnoise.com/why-i-love-ugly-messy-interfaces-...
i liked the old reddit BECAUSE it was a simple list of links that all behaved exactly as a link should when i click it, and didnt attempt to put visual flair over usability.
an example: filtering a large table of data on multiple fields in an otherwise fully-server-rendered project. doing it server-side is likely mostly sql queries using existing stack and re-rendering the page after some “submit” click.
doing it client side means the data can react immediately to selections and never require a full page refresh (which might be costly, depending on the rest of the page). the dev downside is that this might require an enormous amount of new stack and complexity.
Focus shifted from building userbase and sustaining business to milking ad revenue.
They are, because the business wants you to download the app.
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They also really, really want you to use the mobile app, which presumably means it does something privacy-violating.
With regard to the layout, the head of the redesign really emphasized that user choice was important, and that they will never deprecate old.reddit (in fact, they still have .compact from their very early days!). In a way, it makes sense. "Hardcore" users will use RES / old.reddit, while casuals will be pushed to new.reddit, which may be a better fit for them.
My takeaway from talking to them was that, even if I don't believe in their product vision (I hate the app and redesign passionately), I do believe in their team to do the right thing. I hope my trust is well placed.
Why would new.reddit be a better fit for "casuals" when it is worse is pretty much every way?
Reddit's management is driving the site as a business, which means doing things for the purpose of maximizing revenue according to the perception of what's "successful". Facebook is evil but successful at it, Instagram is (was) successful.
The path they see to making money is to try to become the next XXXX, where XXXX is the "successful" social media site of the month.
Reddit was originally driven by user need and the desire for functionality, and innovation and working with the user community helped it grow. Not so anymore.
Ultimately, someone/something has to pay for the resources such a site uses, and finding a working profit model that can keep businesses like Reddit functioning is not easy.
Reddit is a zombie at this point - there's no solid alternative to it, despite what some people seem to think, so there's nowhere for people to go. Once there's another option, Reddit is going to rather quickly become a ghost town.
One can hope, but if Reddit really is taking their lessons from FB then they'll buy up the nascent competition and strangle the market.
I do, however, notice that it does tailor the content to you in a way it didn’t before. The “hot” queue used to be the same for everyone viewing the same page. I like to read AskReddit posts, and on my front page I get many AskReddit posts that have very very little activity.
This is great life advice, and true of almost any app.
The irony of this statement is that Reddit _really_ became popular when Digg, who was the top link sharing site at the time, rolled out a new clunky ad-friendly redesign that caused a mass exodus of users to Reddit.
Reddit usurped Digg because it was technically superior. Could another technically superior website overtake Reddit?
It is a form of backwards compatibility on a UX level.
With that said, I am throwing my hat into the "I disagree" camp. I do not find the new design unusable. It is not slow for me (American cable ISP, Firefox browser, uBlock Origin enabled, JavaScript enabled). My experience is just as fast as the old design. I have direct access to both the shared link and comments (the title now goes to the comments and the shared link is the orange link to the right of the title). I admit I did have to retrain my brain to the new design's conversation-focused design vs. remote-link-focused design, but that took all of a week. I do not have any slowness managing text formatting, but then, I do not comment a lot and I do not write long comments. I appreciate that the new design, on most subreddits, appears cleaner and the information, for me, is more clearly laid out. To me, the site appears "prettier." With the ad-blocker on, some of the sidebar ads get blocked. I do not know how that impacts my experience.
I have also not experienced any of the page loading errors that people have described. Not once, unless it was a known outage causing the Internet to collectively scream.
I am mostly a reader on reddit. I visit my subreddits twice a day, during what are probably peak usage times in North America.
Tried https://www.reddit.com/r/france/: more than 4 seconds before the page is loaded.
Loading : https://old.reddit.com/r/france/comments/ccs5tx/emmanuel_mac...
is about 2 seconds. Loading: https://www.reddit.com/r/france/comments/ccs5tx/emmanuel_mac...
about 6 seconds.
The new reddit looks therefore 2 to 3 times slower.
There are almost 3 times more people using the redesign and the official reddit app together than the old site. However, engagement (number of page views per unique IP) is half or less of the old desktop or third party app.
So the new styles (cards, content focused) have more unique users overall, but those users engage less with the content.
There may be other reasons for this -- but to me it makes sense. The redesigns are harder to use and make reddit less addictive. You simply see a smaller volume of content and can't interact with it as well. But hey, it's a modern looking website I guess.
I would expect that only the most engaged users would be using old desktop or third party app, since those are much harder to find and require much more effort (such as digging through settings, or investigating other app options). The less engaged, casual users would be using the default options (new web or default mobile app) because they're much easier to find.
Therefore I propose the causation goes the opposite direction of what you're suggesting: it's not that old web/3rd party app cause users to be more engaged, but rather that being highly engaged causes users to use old web/3rd party app.
I am confused at what you mean by engagement.
Is that three times more users by unique ip?
Overall, are their more unique users or less?
Just replace www with old.
But even worse than the redesign is the new corporate culture of censorship. I left after they banned r/gundeals. They're boiling the frog over there. Nowadays I mostly use RSS feeds and if I want to talk about something I post on the notabug forums (federated+p2p capable).
"Should I complain about a nXXXXr cashier braying like a donkey?"
That's not a great first impression...
As a side note, anyone know how to do multiple asterisks on HN? Backslash doesn't seem to work as an escape character.
There's no need to ever turn it off. New users will overwhelmingly use the new design (if they don't think it's fine, how would they ever become engaged enough to even find out that there's a different option?) and eventually it's just something that makes some long-time power users happy and everyone else doesn't care about.