[Sukera]

> Oh and web apps of the era were slow. Like, dog slow. However bloated and crappy the reddit app is, the old Slashdot site was slower, even on broadband.

Which reddit app are you talking about, the redesign or old.reddit.com? I ask because the old version of reddit itself certainly wasn't slow on the user side, iirc reddit moved to the new SPA because their code on the server side was nigh unmaintanable and slow because of bad practices of the time.

> Time to first paint is another concern, but that is a much more complicated issue.

That's the thing though, with static sites where JQuery is used only on updates to your data, the initial rendering is fast. Browsers are really good at rendering static content, whereas predicting what JS is going to do is really hard..

[com2kid]

The new reddit site on desktop is actually really nice. Once I understood that it is optimized around content consumption I realized how it is an improvement for certain use cases. Previously opening comments opened either a new tab, or navigated away from the current page, which meant when hitting back the user lost their place in the flow of the front page. The new UI fixes that.

Mobile sucks, I use RIF instead, or old.reddit.com if I am roaming internationally and want to read some text only subreddits.

> That's the thing though, with static sites where JQuery is used only on updates to your data, the initial rendering is fast. Browsers are really good at rendering static content, whereas predicting what JS is going to do is really hard..

Depends how static the content is. For a blog post? Sure, the content should be delivered statically and the comments loaded dynamically. Let's ignore how many implementations of that are absolutely horrible (disqus) and presume someone at least tries to do it correctly.

But we're all forgetting how slow server side rendering was. 10 years ago, before SPAs, sites took forever to load not because of slow connections (I had a 20mbps connection back in 1999, by 2010 I was up to maybe 40, not much has changed in the last 10 years) but because server side was slow.

If anything more content (ads, trackers..) is being delivered now in the same amount of time.

[reciprocity]

New reddit makes it easier to push ads; any other motivation for its implementation is an afterthought. There's plenty of valid criticism that can be levied against the claim that the redesign is "superior" by default. And I think often we confuse amount of information with quality of information exchange. Due (mostly) to the ever increasing amounts of new users that it desires, you could easily make the point that the quality of content on reddit has nosedived. Optimizing for time on site is not the same thing as optimizing for time well spent.

Reddit as a company obviously wants more users; a design that lets people scroll on through images ad nauseam is certainly better than a design that is more information dense, so if that's something you'd cite as an example of "better in certain use cases" then I agree, otherwise there's plenty of reasons to use old.reddit.com from an end user's perspective.

The concept of Eternal September applies.