The "new" web UI is so bad that I barely if ever use reddit on desktop. 99.5% of my usage is through the iOS client Apollo, which is leagues better than not only the official web client but also the official mobile client.
Both Reddit and Twitter are great examples of bafflingly bad first-party UIs, and it's comical because these vastly better third party clients are often solo side projects. How on earth are solo indie devs outperforming entire well-paid teams?!
I use the old reddit redirect plugin in firefox. If they ever take away old.reddit, that'll be very sad, since reddit will be practically unreadable then for me (due to the large and too image/video-focused new layout), and it still is some of the best sources of actual non-blogspam human generated content
I will entirely stop using reddit if they take away old. I already refuse to visit it on my phone because of their annoying popups to download their app literally every single time you load a page.
I use rif, which used to be called reddit is fun an android third party app. For some legal reason more likely than not they changed the name to "rif is fun" so technically it is named "reddit is fun is fun"...
But yeah, it works very well, I have used it for many many years, and in the same vein if someone has got high recommendations to hn apps I am all ears, I have used materialistic for couple years but it has fallen short on more than a couple things and seems to not be updated anymore
How on earth are solo indie devs outperforming entire well-paid teams?!
As the classic saying goes, "well, there's your problem!"
Work expands to fill the available capacity, regardless of whether it's beneficial to others besides the ones doing it, because those who are being paid will always try to justify their existence.
The "solo indie dev" is, just by virtue of being limited in capacity, not going to add complexity where it isn't absolutely necessary, nor spend countless amounts of time on redesigning something that already works well.
Over the years I've rewritten a lot of internal sites (after the relatively large teams responsible for their maintenance were cut) and turned them from huge monstrosities that would definitely require a large dedicated team to maintain into small, fast, simple ones which could almost be treated as a side-job.
It's not that; or not only that. For a while scrolling on my laptop happened at ~2 FPS. Granted, my laptop is not very fast, but plenty of fast enough for compiling stuff and even some 3D games and it was slower than any other website I've ever used by a considerable margin. I can't be bothered to check what the performance is like now, but for a long time the entire thing was slow, janky, and objectively just didn't work well.
They could implement all the ads and user-hostility into Old Reddit just find and it would still be fast. In fact, I bet that Old Reddit with ads and trackers will still be faster than the New one without any of that.
That seems to be a new new web reddit, build on web components via lit and it seems rather performant in contrast to whatever stuff reddit is using now. I’m no convinced about the UI choices, but at least they seem to recognized that the "new reddit" wasn’t the best. Hope dies last.
(In my dreams there would be a real Apollo for Mac OS. Real as in AppKit, not UIKit/Catalyst. Won’t ever happen, of course. As productive Selig is with Apollo for iOS, there are limits.)
There's chrome/FF plugins that rewrite every url you're linked to old.reddit.com which is better than the builtin user setting. I'm a frontend dev who should like the type of JS stuff Reddit tried to do last time around but it was a UX failure.
HN is still the ideal UX model for Reddit style sites (besides comment formatting + images/video submissions + long comment threads + native search integration). and anything that adds to that via JS/async should start from there and improve it by loading it faster. Like a lot of redesigns its 2 steps forward in one direction and 2 step back as a whole.
Things like speed of opening threads and video thumbnails etc were a big improvement but they weren't better than the 5yr old RES extension on top of the much simpler base of old Reddit.
The previews beta Reddit that came out a few months ago had a way better search UI and nice redesign but also made the comment UX way worse requiring hitting "load more" 10x more often favouring non threaded comment threads (scrolling > interaction) which is not how Reddit works IRL.
The real teams are not trying to make the best experience. They are actively trying to not do so for the sake of advertising probably. But that is just a guess.
> The real teams are not trying to make the best experience.
They are trying to exist somewhere between not getting fired and getting promoted, occasionally something more if it doesn't conflict with those goals.
> How on earth are solo indie devs outperforming entire well-paid teams?!
They don't outperform them, they have a different goal. The indie devs develop for the user. The company develops for the money, meaning more revenue, and whatever metrics for success they have.
You can gather much more data (the principal source of income for twitter and reddit) in a mobile app than a web one. The deliberately turfed their web offering to drive traffic towards official apps.
I love that reddit now wants you to log in to view 18+ subreddits, and that the work-around is to replace "www" with "old" in the URL, asserting that you are indeed old enough.
I was under the impression that most high value content producers and moderation tools that make the bigger subs usable rely on old. They know they'll drive away all the power users if it goes.
I don't go on there much these days anyways... but if they remove "old.reddit" I just can't justify going on there at all.
More space is generally a good rule of thumb for UI/UX but when the "value" of the site/app is being able to grok through text fast, a "mobile-like" UI is awful.
As soon as they remove old.reddit.com that's a wrap for Reddit for me. That's the last thing to do before it goes the way of Digg way back when. Related where is Kevin Rose these days?
I've drawn the same line, their new UI is just absolute trash. I can't tell if it's done on purpose or if they're just that bad at creating web interfaces.
It's 100% on purpose. One person can make a much better interface, as various alt clients have shown. Log in to show your age? How dare you browse without giving us data?
It must be on purpose. What really drives this home for me is the aggressive folding of comment threads, sometimes requiring 3-4 clicks/navigations to be able to read all <10 comments on a post.
I think some of the higher ups must realize that all of the content in the site that isn't TikTok-esque drivel is coming through old.reddit, or they would've cut it off long ago
They reverse engineered the Reddit API used by the official web client. It's not the same as the public API. Shutting down this API would break the website.
The design yes, but I love so many of the subs like woodworking, gardening, baking, boardgames, etc. I’d hate to have to go to separate sites for all my interests.
I'll rephrase: I hate the reddit default subs and the "reddit culture" in general. I am a frequent reader of some absolute treasures of a sub, like /r/askhistorians or /r/boardgames
only way to look at some (surprisingly tame, 100% SFW content) too. gotta be old.reddit.com.
honestly the zooming isn't too bad and doesn't have to be done much. a well done mobile app would be preferable but it's perfectly fine for 10 minutes of casual browsing.
To whoever from Reddit corporate that is reading this - you’ve done something bad and unnecessary. The new “mobile optimized” UI is slow and buggy. The net result is that I’ll use Reddit less instead of clicking on more ads on your new site.
Interestingly, Steve Huffman has gone on record at least 5 years ago stating that he will continue use to ensure i.reddit.com is supported. I think he said it in an AMA shortly after he became CEO. I figure as long as he is still at the helm it will continue on.
Huffman is not exactly known to stick by his words if it hurts his bottom line... Remember when he and Ohanian advertised Reddit as a "bastion of free speech" back ten years ago when it brought them new users, and then he did a 180 on that when it was convenient to raise advertising revenues in 2015?
Thanks for linking! Based on your comment it feels like I interpreted the original wrong. The person in your comment is not Steve, but their comment is basically equally valuable! So in practice what I said is still true, it’s just that whoever delivered the comment is not Steve
The "new" web UI is so bad that I barely if ever use reddit on desktop. 99.5% of my usage is through the iOS client Apollo, which is leagues better than not only the official web client but also the official mobile client.
Both Reddit and Twitter are great examples of bafflingly bad first-party UIs, and it's comical because these vastly better third party clients are often solo side projects. How on earth are solo indie devs outperforming entire well-paid teams?!
I use the old reddit redirect plugin in firefox. If they ever take away old.reddit, that'll be very sad, since reddit will be practically unreadable then for me (due to the large and too image/video-focused new layout), and it still is some of the best sources of actual non-blogspam human generated content
I will entirely stop using reddit if they take away old. I already refuse to visit it on my phone because of their annoying popups to download their app literally every single time you load a page.
I use rif, which used to be called reddit is fun an android third party app. For some legal reason more likely than not they changed the name to "rif is fun" so technically it is named "reddit is fun is fun"...
But yeah, it works very well, I have used it for many many years, and in the same vein if someone has got high recommendations to hn apps I am all ears, I have used materialistic for couple years but it has fallen short on more than a couple things and seems to not be updated anymore
These are called recursive acronyms. GNU (GNU's not Unix) is the most popular example, at least for us Linux folk.
How on earth are solo indie devs outperforming entire well-paid teams?!
As the classic saying goes, "well, there's your problem!"
Work expands to fill the available capacity, regardless of whether it's beneficial to others besides the ones doing it, because those who are being paid will always try to justify their existence.
The "solo indie dev" is, just by virtue of being limited in capacity, not going to add complexity where it isn't absolutely necessary, nor spend countless amounts of time on redesigning something that already works well.
Over the years I've rewritten a lot of internal sites (after the relatively large teams responsible for their maintenance were cut) and turned them from huge monstrosities that would definitely require a large dedicated team to maintain into small, fast, simple ones which could almost be treated as a side-job.
Those teams are optimizing for things that the business wants, not what the users or the devs want.
>How on earth are solo indie devs outperforming entire well-paid teams?!
Easy, no PMs!
One is optimizing for ad revenue and the other is not.
It's not that; or not only that. For a while scrolling on my laptop happened at ~2 FPS. Granted, my laptop is not very fast, but plenty of fast enough for compiling stuff and even some 3D games and it was slower than any other website I've ever used by a considerable margin. I can't be bothered to check what the performance is like now, but for a long time the entire thing was slow, janky, and objectively just didn't work well.
They could implement all the ads and user-hostility into Old Reddit just find and it would still be fast. In fact, I bet that Old Reddit with ads and trackers will still be faster than the New one without any of that.
Some weeks ago someone here linked to https://sh.reddit.com
That seems to be a new new web reddit, build on web components via lit and it seems rather performant in contrast to whatever stuff reddit is using now. I’m no convinced about the UI choices, but at least they seem to recognized that the "new reddit" wasn’t the best. Hope dies last.
(In my dreams there would be a real Apollo for Mac OS. Real as in AppKit, not UIKit/Catalyst. Won’t ever happen, of course. As productive Selig is with Apollo for iOS, there are limits.)
Oh that actually seems fast and doesn’t crash my browser
> How on earth are solo indie devs outperforming entire well-paid teams?!
They have different goals. The solo indie devs are performing horribly on the metrics the internal dev team is judged by, and vice-versa.
There's chrome/FF plugins that rewrite every url you're linked to old.reddit.com which is better than the builtin user setting. I'm a frontend dev who should like the type of JS stuff Reddit tried to do last time around but it was a UX failure.
HN is still the ideal UX model for Reddit style sites (besides comment formatting + images/video submissions + long comment threads + native search integration). and anything that adds to that via JS/async should start from there and improve it by loading it faster. Like a lot of redesigns its 2 steps forward in one direction and 2 step back as a whole.
Things like speed of opening threads and video thumbnails etc were a big improvement but they weren't better than the 5yr old RES extension on top of the much simpler base of old Reddit.
The previews beta Reddit that came out a few months ago had a way better search UI and nice redesign but also made the comment UX way worse requiring hitting "load more" 10x more often favouring non threaded comment threads (scrolling > interaction) which is not how Reddit works IRL.
The real teams are not trying to make the best experience. They are actively trying to not do so for the sake of advertising probably. But that is just a guess.
> The real teams are not trying to make the best experience.
They are trying to exist somewhere between not getting fired and getting promoted, occasionally something more if it doesn't conflict with those goals.
> How on earth are solo indie devs outperforming entire well-paid teams?!
They don't outperform them, they have a different goal. The indie devs develop for the user. The company develops for the money, meaning more revenue, and whatever metrics for success they have.
You can gather much more data (the principal source of income for twitter and reddit) in a mobile app than a web one. The deliberately turfed their web offering to drive traffic towards official apps.
> How on earth are solo indie devs outperforming entire well-paid teams?!
Because the UI for the first party apps have to be approved by MBA types who have different goals than 'make it good for users'.
scroll views increase impression metrics
You have to use old and compact together. /thread.
https://old.reddit.com/r/news.compact
I love that reddit now wants you to log in to view 18+ subreddits, and that the work-around is to replace "www" with "old" in the URL, asserting that you are indeed old enough.
Lol i noticed this. I can guarantee they're removing old.reddit soon, i can't see why else they'd do blocking on the front end this way.
I was under the impression that most high value content producers and moderation tools that make the bigger subs usable rely on old. They know they'll drive away all the power users if it goes.
And this is gone too now :( no more reddit on the phone
Thanks. Alas, this is more annoying for adjusting the URL on mobile. Previously you could just double-tap the “www” or “old” and type “i”.
I don't go on there much these days anyways... but if they remove "old.reddit" I just can't justify going on there at all.
More space is generally a good rule of thumb for UI/UX but when the "value" of the site/app is being able to grok through text fast, a "mobile-like" UI is awful.
As soon as they remove old.reddit.com that's a wrap for Reddit for me. That's the last thing to do before it goes the way of Digg way back when. Related where is Kevin Rose these days?
I've drawn the same line, their new UI is just absolute trash. I can't tell if it's done on purpose or if they're just that bad at creating web interfaces.
It's 100% on purpose. One person can make a much better interface, as various alt clients have shown. Log in to show your age? How dare you browse without giving us data?
It must be on purpose. What really drives this home for me is the aggressive folding of comment threads, sometimes requiring 3-4 clicks/navigations to be able to read all <10 comments on a post.
> requiring 3-4 clicks/navigations to be able to read all <10 comments on a post.
3-4 times the ad impressions and 3-4 times the profit!
Kevin is doing NFT stuff these days.
What a shame.
That tracks.
I think some of the higher ups must realize that all of the content in the site that isn't TikTok-esque drivel is coming through old.reddit, or they would've cut it off long ago
Is there a good replacement for old reddit that's not so political? I just want to look at memes, discuss niche topics, and shitpost.
Same here. It'll probably be healthy for me when they finally remove it.
teddit.net and libredd.it are alternative interfaces that still work (until they shut down the API)
They reverse engineered the Reddit API used by the official web client. It's not the same as the public API. Shutting down this API would break the website.
I'm definitely sure that (at least) Teddit uses official APIs (https://codeberg.org/teddit/teddit/wiki#oauth-vs-non-oauth). Are you confusing it with Nitter (which does use Twitter's undocumented APIs)?
Yes, oops!
> They reverse engineered the Reddit API used by the official web client.
Curious, how do they get away with CORS?
CORS is enforced within browsers, not servers. Libreddit and teddit require you to self host or use publicly hosted instances.
Ah, I thought they are simply JS UIs to reddit servers. That explains it, thanks.
Its handled at the server level
libredd.it has gotten the hug of death now.
List of available public instances: https://github.com/libreddit/libreddit-instances/blob/master...
Still accessible with old.reddit.com/.compact, but I wonder for how long.
Finally my cue to quit my reddit addiction? God I hate that website.
The design yes, but I love so many of the subs like woodworking, gardening, baking, boardgames, etc. I’d hate to have to go to separate sites for all my interests.
I'll rephrase: I hate the reddit default subs and the "reddit culture" in general. I am a frequent reader of some absolute treasures of a sub, like /r/askhistorians or /r/boardgames
For android users, I can strongly recommend Infinity[1], a FOSS reddit client distributed through F-Droid. Infinity is just a joy to use.
[1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/ml.docilealligator.infinityf...
Does it allow for tabs, bookmarking, etc?
It allows bookmarking, subscription fkr user, subreddit and even multireddits (follow multiple subreddits together)
After some testing, it looks that it still works if you logged in (and use "old" reddit, i assume, since my account do).
Then you can visit https://i.reddit.com/ just fine.
With non-logged-in session, you will be redirect to https://www.reddit.com/?rdt=55049
if you're using mobile firefox, i think the redirect doesn't happen from i.reddit.com (not yet anyway?).
Use old.reddit.com instead.
Not great on mobile phone
That what I’ve always used. I just zoom in and out as needed. (Same with Hacker News.)
only way to look at some (surprisingly tame, 100% SFW content) too. gotta be old.reddit.com.
honestly the zooming isn't too bad and doesn't have to be done much. a well done mobile app would be preferable but it's perfectly fine for 10 minutes of casual browsing.
Is any reddit ?
The i.reddit (compact reddit) was good on phone
Although there were issues with invisible edit button
Just a matter of time before they remove that as well.
Reddit admin's comment on the topic: https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/11zso11/an_improved...
> reducing load time by 2 seconds
I really can't believe their site was so bad, and yet it was.
To whoever from Reddit corporate that is reading this - you’ve done something bad and unnecessary. The new “mobile optimized” UI is slow and buggy. The net result is that I’ll use Reddit less instead of clicking on more ads on your new site.
Finally an excuse to quit reddit
The new ui is unusable in my opinion. I dare them to get rid of the old interface.
Seems to be still working for me: https://i.reddit.com/r/ottawa/
If you like compact reddit, try out https://rdddeck.com, its like Tweetdeck but for Reddit.
I just realized that after unsuccessfully trying to load it for the last 4 minutes. What a sad day this is.
Using libreddit (r.nf) all day long. It’s been a while since I’ve used Reddit’s default web site
I highly recommend Slide IOS app! I don't know how they're able to block ads.
Have you tried Apollo?
i.reddit.com works for me still.
https://i.reddit.com/
Yeah, it still works here.
Interestingly, Steve Huffman has gone on record at least 5 years ago stating that he will continue use to ensure i.reddit.com is supported. I think he said it in an AMA shortly after he became CEO. I figure as long as he is still at the helm it will continue on.
Huffman is not exactly known to stick by his words if it hurts his bottom line... Remember when he and Ohanian advertised Reddit as a "bastion of free speech" back ten years ago when it brought them new users, and then he did a 180 on that when it was convenient to raise advertising revenues in 2015?
The relevant comment in which he claims it's also one of his favourite methods to browse the site:
https://old.reddit.com/r/beta/comments/8lv96l/feedback_pleas...
Thanks for linking! Based on your comment it feels like I interpreted the original wrong. The person in your comment is not Steve, but their comment is basically equally valuable! So in practice what I said is still true, it’s just that whoever delivered the comment is not Steve
Redirects to www for me.
i.reddit.com is giving me a mobile website right now but never having seen it before, I don't know of it's new or old. It's reminiscent of IOS 4.
That’s what it’s always been. I recall it’s a leftover piece of the “iOS-focused” web from the late 2000s.