| 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. |
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.