[qwertox]

I ask myself on a weekly basis when old.reddit.com will disappear. And there is nothing more cruel than the new Reddit, UI-wise. Even Twitter's "threading" of conversations appears to make more sense, even though I have still not figured out how it works.

[paulpauper]

The 'new' Reddit has so much wasted space and bloat. The old one is slick and optimized for content display. It's also an eyesore. Garish colors, weird icons...just horrible in every way. It has been many years and I still cannot bring myself to use it.

[twostorytower]

I know some people at Reddit and sadly it's definitely going to happen.

[noir_lord]

Used Reddit for 14 years as a registered member and longer since before I signed up.

The day old.reddit.com stops working is the day I stop using reddit completely, I detest their new UI so much that it’s essentially unusable for me.

[hayst4ck]

I agree completely. I've used Reddit since at least 2008. I quit Facebook over what they did to WhatsApp and will never use another Meta product. Reddit is getting dangerously close.

It's very clear there is not an adult at reddit who can tell the people in power NO.

[croutonwagon]

Same. My account is some 16y 10m old.

I use Reddit less and less YoY and even day to day. But the day old goes I’m out.

Frankly I only use it for fairly niche subreddits and even then it’s more like 10 minutes a day.

I’m also not a core demographic at this point anymore.

[Firmwarrior]

yeah, it's pretty wild how bad it is

I ended up having to pay $2 for a Safari iOS extension to auto-redirect reddit links to old.reddit just so I could actually read the site when I got there via web searches. There's no usability whatsoever

I just painstakingly pinch and pan around old.reddit rather than try to wrestle with their dog-awful app or redesign

semi-related: I've been trying to get the WallStreetBets mods to just make their own version of Reddit instead of putting up with the admins' constant bullshit.. they're basically singlehandedly funding that whole shitshow and get nothing out of it but scam ads, users randomly banned for saying a no-no word, etc

[primax]

100% agreed, it is absolutely awful.

They learned nothing from the Digg apocalypse.

[sufficer]

It has seen 0 improvement since it was released lmao. Like wait 8 years ago?

[pier25]

Yeah. The new UI is terrible.

The moment they kill old Reddit I'm out too.

[snvzz]

I have mentally prepared myself to say goodbye to Reddit once it happens.

Complete with deleting my account for closure. This is what I recommend. It's pretty much facebook, pure dark UX at that point.

[hayst4ck]

That is the day I will quit reddit and never look back. 6 months ago I rarely used old.reddit.com, but now I run into more and more dark patterns all the time. They tried to TikTok my feed and it was an awful experience. I frequently default to it now instead of using it only when I get sick of the dark patterns.

Reddit got popular because Digg screwed up their comment threading. It's sad to see reddit is starting to make anti-user mistakes like digg. Maybe they think they can force it because there isn't a competent competitor.

The problem with all of these sites is they start to service the lowest common denominator in the name of next quarters profits. As their websites become more hostile to the educated, the quality of content drops and profit goes up, but the golden goose is slowly being strangled.

Reddit was fantastic around the time of digg because the average user appeared to be college educated or greater. Celebrities like Randall Monroe were submitting high quality content. It was common for a literal expert to write a well thought out post. Now it's an "Americas funniest home videos" feed of fart jokes with your liberal aunt and conservative uncle having an argument in the background.

It seems so clear to me that billionaires mean we can't have nice things. Twitter and Reddit both promoted a "truth to power" free speech ideology, and now billionaires are coercing these companies into becoming cess pits that reflect the worst parts of humanity. Power doesn't like to be threatened so they will destroy the weapon.

I still can't decide if these companies are being destroyed because they promote a "no more billionaires" ideology, or if it is simply capitalistic greed and the search for next quarters profits.

[stametseater]

> The problem with all of these sites is they start to service the lowest common denominator in the name of next quarters profits. [...] It seems so clear to me that billionaires mean we can't have nice things"

The pressure to increase quarterly profits to the detriment of the long-term emerges from the very nature of short-term investment, particularly as facilitated by stock exchanges. Eliminating billionaires would not eliminate this dynamic.

[lotsofpulp]

Yes, Reddit is not even part of a publicly listed company that has investor pressure to meet quarterly numbers, it is privately owned by the Newhouse family. People just like having more money than less money.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications

[Aloha]

I think reddit is majority owned by Reddit employees.

[lotsofpulp]

As of Jul 2015, per Wired article:

https://www.wired.com/2015/07/wired-conde-nast-reddit/

>Advance Publications, is Reddit's majority shareholder

[7373737373]

The lack of ownership transparency is an absolute failure. Reddit should not have been for profit anyway

[ROTMetro]

The entire Internet at the 'fantastic' time of Reddit was very much tilted towards the elite class that could 1. Afford an expensive computer or phone (or have access from University) 2. Afford Internet (and for an added bump of exclusivity add mobile Internet) (or have access from University) 3. Have the time/inclination to put lots of energy into CREATING Internet content (via either a hobby site, or composing well thought out posts). What you are complaining about is the quality of a restaurant that has gone from an exclusive new spot you discovered to a Chili's franchise. (Phil's Fish Market?).

What everyone on Hacker News seems to long for is an Internet limited to 'that class' of people. They complain about billionaires and advertising, but maybe they should take a broader look at what they are really longing for.

[hayst4ck]

> What everyone on Hacker News seems to long for is an Internet limited to 'that class' of people.

Yep, that is exactly what I want. I want to be around and interact with other educated people who act in good faith and I don't want to be around uneducated people who act in bad faith or can't see or aren't open to the contradictions in their own ideas.

Eternal September is the name of this idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News

  Graham stated he hopes to avoid the Eternal September 
  that results in the general decline of intelligent 
  discourse within a community.

http://paulgraham.com/hackernews.html

  The good things in a community site come from people more 
  than technology; it's mainly in the prevention of bad 
  things that technology comes into play. Technology 
  certainly can enhance discussion. Nested comments do, for 
  example. But I'd rather use a site with primitive 
  features and smart, nice users than a more advanced one 
  whose users were idiots or trolls.

[maeil]

Why are you phrasing things as if "educated" and "good faith" are related?

> I don't want to be around uneducated people who act in bad faith

Are you fine with being around educated people who act in bad faith? Those generally cause much more damage.

[hayst4ck]

In the game of prisoners dilemma, I want to be around people who practice the winning strategy.

A game to demonstrate why that is important: https://ncase.me/trust/

If you cooperate when others defect, you promote defection as a strategy.

If you defect when others cooperate, you undermine cooperation as a winning strategy.

So a community that shut down defectors and cooperates by default creates a community based around cooperation -- a high trust community.

Bad faith is another word for defection. It is hard to understand the game you are playing or see the consequences of your actions without education.

[Eisenstein]

Sure, having a group of people who are of the same general education, sensibilities, and class is desirable.

When people who are only in the same space due to shared interests and experiences become too inclusive then that gets diluted and they are left being around a lot of people who are just a lot of people. No one likes that except extroverts and attention seekers.

Trying to shame us for pining for the days of educated and interesting content made by people we relate to for reasons that are not tied to monetizing everything (because, well, we don't need it) is silly, because by pretending you think that is wrong means you are either short-sighted or bitter.

This is not to say that exclusivity is desirable, but to say that communities exist for a reason and being nostalgic about losing a healthy one does not make you a bad person.

[primax]

Unapologetically yes, this is what I want.

You can call it classist all you want but I want the ivory tower, not the swamp.

[mandmandam]

I think that's pretty unfair.

I don't give a toss if someone has an expensive device or university internet, and I resent the implication that only "an elite class" can compose a well thought out post.

The fact is, billionaires pay people to keep the status quo. Those people hire other people - to program bots, to hire PR goons, to spend millions or even billions on swaying vulnerable minds with echo-chamber media drones -- all to warp discussion online and IRL.

Tobacco companies did it, fossil fuel companies did it, and you can be certain tech companies and governments are doing it too.

You're discounting all of that, and then calling people classist for wanting good-faith discussion. Uncool.

[bmarquez]

I hope the Fediverse replacement for Reddit, Lemmy, will pick up in popularity before old.reddit dies.

It makes a lot of sense since each "subreddit" could be its own server.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

I don't think Fediverse solves the problems that we see in Reddit (or Twitter, or any of the others). Instead of admin meddling from a single group of closely-affiliated admins (they all work for the same company), you just get meddling from many small groups of admins, none of those groups affiliated with each other except via ActivityPub. They can't shut down conversations they dislike entirely, but they can sever you from the Fediverse thoroughly enough that they might as well.

And they can do it early enough that no one ever knew you were there in the first place. Even the Reddit admins didn't do that... I don't know if it was apathy and indifference, or just that they couldn't pay enough attention back in the early 2010s, but they didn't. And that likely allowed Reddit to grow so large, it could be the forum for everybody, about everything. Fediverse and Lemmy just ends up being those old phpbb forums, that won't talk to or link to each other unless everything is excessively sanitized and drips with insincere civility.

Lemmy doesn't even have an Elon Musk to piss everyone off of Reddit and drive them to search for an alternative.

[uthinter]

Are servers hosted on fediverse open to being indexed by search engines otherwise I doubt it can replace reddit. Reddit did discussion threads , subs, and searchable results from search engines really well. It was a really great version of "forums" . I am not sure fediverse or Discord can do such things.

[flangola7]

How do they plan to handle moderation? The strong majority of subreddit mods still use old Reddit because modding on new is suffering. Many will give up modding and some will abandon using Reddit entirely. Do they have a plan to replace the thousands of free employees that currently keep Reddit habitable?

[up_your_ass]

Have they given any hints as to when?

[paulpauper]

maybe plugins can restore the old look and functionality?

[m348e912]

old.reddit.com and it's imminent disappearance underscores that there is a still need for a user-centric web browser designed to combat user-hostile web ui. Here are some features I think the browser should have by default (without plugins)

Short feature list:

- Overwrite website code and display a user-hostile UI of popular sites like reddit/Facebook (this warrants a whole list in itself)

- offer a reader view of any website including pay walled websites

- easy access to archive a page using archive.today and to view already archived versions

- Right-click anything to download, images/videos/audio, even when sites like instagram and twitter make it difficult to do.

- Bypass field restrictions. Ever seen a password field where you can't paste text for whatever reason. That would not be a thing.

- Tab freeze for tabs not in focus - save CPU and battery energy

- Click the back button and end up at the same place on the page you clicked from instead of having to scroll endlessly to find where you were before

- Use a common user-agent so the browser doesn't get blacklisted by websites

- Accept only essential cookies by default

- Easy right-click and delete of paywall style overlays or other elements

- Ad block may not need to be built-in by default, but the ability to right-click and nuke a banner ad (especially the ones that don't disappear and block text even when you click the "x")

-Respect new lines when posting comments instead of users having to constantly go back, edit their comments, and add new lines to break up a wall of text

[djcannabiz]

I would love this. Almost all of these can be achieved using Firefox and tons of extensions, but its to much for some of my relatives who feel the same way about the web but don't have the technical knowledge to set everything up.

for example, bypass paywalls clean was removed from most (all?) web extension stores and now has to be sideloaded. I don't think most non techies would be comfortable doing this, so maybe something like a firefox distribution (a la librewolf) would be ideal, so you could build off the other extensions there, and the anti tracking tech built into firefox.

[snvzz]

There's some appeal on doing this client side, but I do not hate the Nitter approach.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

> Ever seen a password field where you can't paste text for whatever reason. That would not be a thing.

Can anyone explain this one to me? My passwords are impossible to type/memorize, and the password manager's Firefox extension sucks too much to rely on it. It's clearing the clipboard 10 seconds later anyway, so they website's not protecting me.

[dangus]

> offer a reader view of any website including pay walled websites

Not really possible if a paywalled website is a true paywall. Many paywalled websites don't even expose their content to crawlers.

I also think that, philosophically, the majority of the user base being able to bypass paywall isn't healthy for the Internet. It will only make content quality decrease and advertisement aggression increase. You can see this effect come into play with pages that use anti-adblocking tools, where you can't see anything until you disable ad blocking.

> Tab freeze for tabs not in focus - save CPU and battery energy

Chrome energy saver mode? Safari seems to effectively do this, tabs seem to be pretty dead until you are using them. I would also ask what kind of need there is to save battery life above and beyond present technology. Modern laptops sold on the market now can be in a web browser for an entire workday (e.g., ASUS Zenbook 13 OLED, any MacBook M1/M2).

Almost everything on this list is already available with browser extensions or existing browsers.

[djcannabiz]

Anecdotally i have never had a problem with anti adblockers with UBOs anti-anti-adblocker list turned on, but maybe anti-adblock will get better if more people start using adblockers.

[swalling]

If a link is paywalled and/or the content is not able to be crawled/archived for a reader mode, a browser that warned me before I wasted time opening a tab whose content is totally inaccessible would be appreciated. Contextual lock icons on links or a hover state with a preview.

If paywall status was exposed via a standardized API to the browser, it could further make it more seamless to buy a subscription iOS-style that I know I can cancel easily later. Looking at you, NYT and other new sites.

[CMay]

When you grow up with the internet, it can be kind of easy to take it personally when companies torpedo part of the culture like it has no value. It ends up feeling like an attack on the internet, which itself has almost an amorphous personality, behavior and appearance that can still be fairly defined at moments in time.

Really wish more sites were like HN where they established themselves, their purpose and what they believed in, then stuck to it. If HN cost $1/mo to use, I'd use it.

[RickHull]

When r/drama was given the boot, they made a simple reddit clone and open sourced it. I participate in a forum that uses it instead of phpbb or whatever. Works fantastic, but you may have to change the default styling, which was very um, dramatic, from what I've heard.

[victor9000]

Well, i.reddit.com just recently disappeared, so it might be sooner than later.