[feupan]

Old Reddit was awful and I always used alternative UIs for it.

New Reddit’s design was a great improvement if it weren't for the fact that its developers were and still are absolutely clueless. That paired with a user-hostile management made Reddit even worse.

But the redesign itself was not the issue, it was the implementation.

[kibwen]

I must emphatically disagree. On a single page, newreddit shows a fraction of the comments as oldreddit does. They expect you to manually click to expand dozens of "Read More" links and repeatedly suffer the associated loading times of their newly-bloated webpage. For reading comments, newreddit isn't just a disaster of implementation, it's a disaster of usability. It's obvious that their goal is to discourage commenting in order to get people back to scrolling the infinite feed, since that's where the ads are. But oldreddit, while it looks ugly, is (perhaps entirely by accident) an absolute dream for navigating large and highly branching conversations.

[Izkata]

> On a single page, newreddit shows a fraction of the comments as oldreddit does. They expect you to manually click to expand dozens of "Read More" links and repeatedly suffer the associated loading times of their newly-bloated webpage.

This sounds like the exceedingly stupid javascript override popup view a primary click on links gives. It's meant to make it easy to return to the list and keep scrolling forever.

Try opening the links in new tabs, or hitting "refresh" after clicking. That'll give you the full page view.

[feupan]

I don’t really use Reddit anymore, I’m just talking about their initial migration that everyone hated. Back then it wasn’t so user hostile, it was just a modernization effort with ajaxed loading and some initial bugs. Then things got worse instead of getting better.

[Trasmatta]

I disagree, new Reddit is fundamentally flawed, and worse than old Reddit in almost every way. I will stop using Reddit the day old.reddit.com stops working.

[smrtinsert]

I won't only because my mobile reddit client is fantastic, but agreed I will stop using web reddit once old.reddit is removed.

[barrkel]

New Reddit requires continual tapping in, and on the back button, to read a conversation tree, with painful amounts of page reloads and latency.

That's designed in. It's not an implementation problem.

[randycupertino]

The snake is eating it's own tail, reddit has become /r/assholedesign

[stjohnswarts]

Yeah it wasn't pretty but it was efficient and fast. I think those trump pretty any day of the week. With Reddit Enhancement Suite it's fantastic. However looks like RES has entered the "parked" status and they will only fix bugs now. I think the devs lost interest but in their defense it has been around for years. Unfortunately "new reddit" is still awful, but at least they tried to keep it alive long enough for reddit to get their shit together.

[Graffur]

Was there anything in particular you disliked about reddits 'old' design? How would you compare it to HNs design?

[feupan]

The main issue was that looking at the actual content meant visiting a different website, there was no way to see photos and videos in gallery view like you would on Facebook for example.

The difference with HN is that HN is not mainly for media. However HN isn’t great either. The button to collapse threads in on top of the thread in a 16x16-pixel touch target. Good luck finding it when you’re 12 comments down.

For being a text comment-only website, the HN experience is pretty poor. The only good thing HN has got going on technically is that it’s super fast. Heck it still doesn’t offer dark mode when it would literally be 7 additional lines of CSS.

[Graffur]

Oh I see, your main issue wasn't with the UI design, it was with the UX design. The original intention was that it acted as a gateway to content on the internet - like with Google.

Unfortunately that UX isn't the best because most sites linked to are slow, annoying or broken in some way. Imgur fixed that though.

[stjohnswarts]

Reddit Enhancement Suite fixed all that. Sure it's a plugin but that's not that big of an inconvenience. Reddit devs really should have took inspiration from that instead of building the monstrosity they have now.