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Reddit's redesign could kill discussion subreddits

253 points by Aoyagi 8y ago

Vovka19 8y ago
What interesting?
dotcoma 8y ago
The question is: By mistake or by design?
- akerro 8y ago
  There are no mistakes in it. This was planned years ago, they spent a lot of time evaluating different technologies and UI mockups. I'm interested to see if AMA with Barak Obama will be still readable, or will start consuming gigabytes of RAM.
vesinisa 8y ago
Sadly, the reddit website has become a travesty - especially on mobile. A huge "DOWNLOAD THE REDDIT APP" banner obscures literally 30% of the page. There is a teeny-tiny "view on mobille site" link in small, low-contrast text that can be used to dismiss the annoying banner. Due to its size and user-hostile design, the Reddit banner is even worse than most news sites that try to push their newsletter/app/subscription with similarly annoying banners.
- zmb_ 8y ago
  They have also periodically been A/B testing a popup with only two options, login or get mobile app, when clicking on a topic -- as far as I could tell it was not possible to just pass to the comment thread. Luckily that seems to have been phased out.
- netzone 8y ago
  I think that's now removed no? Or at least, I haven't noticed it for a while. I got hit with the Google hammer regarding a similar banner, where they threatened to stop indexing the site completely, so I assume they had a similar message. Or maybe they're large enough to be exempt. I don't know.
  - azernik 8y ago
    For logged-in users, the banner goes away (I think after the first time you click to stay on the mobile site).
    - stochastic_monk 8y ago
      I'm always logged in, but it often asks me to consider using the app. I detest it. Why are they pushing it so hard?
      - opencl 8y ago
        You have to be logged in and toggle a preference to disable the popup. But then it forgets I'm logged in and I see it again. I agree that it's extremely obnoxious and has just resulted in me never bothering to look at Reddit on a phone anymore.
  - dmitriid 8y ago
    It's a small banner on Reddit's AMP pages. Once you click "view more comments", you're taken over to the mobile version which has the huge banner. Shamless plug: you can see this behaviour in the two screenshots in lower left corner in this post https://grumpy.website/post/0PhBPyfR- https://grumpy.website/post/0PhBPyfR- Reddit redesigned the AMP page to include some comments, but the behaviour is essentially the same.
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  Hit https://old.reddit.com https://old.reddit.com Unfortunately intra-reddit links cause all the usual problems. But yes, mobile behaviour is rage-inducing.
  - syrrim 8y ago
    You can ask to always recieve the desktop website via the hamburger menu. Really the best option IMO.
    - dredmorbius 8y ago
      You've got to: 1. Click though the Mobile nag overly. 2. Turn off the Mobile nag, or you'll see it again. 3. Specify "desktop" via, for the second time, the motherfucking hamburger. That is: this is what I'm doing. Every. Goddamned. Time. It's motherfucking rage inducing. I've mentioned this more than once at Reddit.
- liotier 8y ago
  On Android, use the "Reddit if fun" application - classic Reddit, fit for mobile: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andrewshu.android.reddit&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andrewshu....
  - StavrosK 8y ago
    "Relay" is also amazing. I realized just today that I browse HN from mobile Firefox, but reddit from Relay, and I realized that that's because Relay is so much better than any HN mobile app. It really makes a difference.
    - severine 8y ago
      Have you tried Materialistic[1] for HN? Apache licensed, also on F-droid[2]. [1] https://github.com/hidroh/materialistic https://github.com/hidroh/materialistic [2] https://f-droid.org/packages/io.github.hidroh.materialistic/ https://f-droid.org/packages/io.github.hidroh.materialistic/
      - StavrosK 8y ago
        Yes, it's what I currently use, but it has some problems (comment formatting shows up weirdly, the built-in browser uses desktop mode and doesn't let me resize sites so many are illegible, etc). It's the best I've found, though.
      - Outpox 8y ago
        I use both Relay for Reddit and Materialistic for HN and they're absolutely brilliant. Didn't take me that long to pay for Relay Pro.
      - hivacruz 8y ago
        Materialistic is nice. The only feature I miss with it would be a custom filter. If I could hide automatically stories based on keywords (like "Facebook"), that would be great.
    - skykooler 8y ago
- actsasbuffoon 8y ago
  Their mobile app rarely works for me. There was a bug for a few months(!) where I couldn't log in. It worked again for a month, and now the app can't connect to the server at all. To be clear, I'm running this on a brand new iPhone X, so I've got plenty of power to run the app. The site works in my mobile browser, but the app has serious reliability problems. If anyone at Reddit is reading this, please stop pushing the mobile app so hard. You're actively making things worse by pushing a highly unreliable app! Also, please make it possible to sort by "Rising" on the mobile site and app (should I ever be able to connect again). On busy news days, things move fast enough that "Rising" is the only way to keep up, yet the option is mysteriously inaccessible on mobile.
  - chii 8y ago
    use the .compact version of reddit's website: append a '/.compact' to the end of a normal reddit url like www.reddit.com/r/programming/.compact , and see how fast and user friendly it is!
    - yoodenvranx 8y ago
      The day they kill the .compact page is the day I stop using reddit.
    - knz 8y ago
      I agree that .compact is their most mobile friendly website but I'm not sure I'd call it "user friendly". It's difficult to edit comments, difficult to switch between subreddit's, and defaults to their main mobile format or prompts you to download their app if you click on any internal links that don't have .compact in the URL (include the default /r/$subreddit formatting).
    - grogers 8y ago
      Luckily taking 15 seconds to type this in the address bar and load the old version is still faster than loading any "normal" mobile Reddit page. This is what I've been doing for years.
    - nostromo 8y ago
- josefresco 8y ago
  I dropped the mobile app because it was occupying over 200MB of space, and my inadequately equipped iPhone ran out of space. I switched to the mobile site, but now avoid that as well due to the constant, in-your-face app promotion. Every website with a mobile app these days: "I get it, you have an app, I don't want the app, stop telling me to download it." Edit: Thanks for the helpful replies - however staying completely off Reddit is probably better for my overall wellbeing. Reddit is no longer a "happy place" for me, the racists, trolls, shills, and bigots have ruined it for me. To top it off, I was recently banned by admins (not mods) for "attempting to evade a subbreddit ban" which was a result of my using a VPN - no thanks.
  - wor3q 8y ago
    It actually has a switch to turn nagging about app off. It's 'ask to open in app' in menu. No banners or popups about the app since I've flipped it.
    - bdefore 8y ago
      Which not useful if you prefer to lurk rather than login or use incognito/firefox focus to browse.
      - josefresco 8y ago
        This is why I never saw the setting to disable the app prompt. Reddit tracks every single action on their site (no duh) and I don't feel like being monitored when I'm on the toilet looking for LULZ
        teach 8y ago
        For the record, I'm sure they track you just as much even if you've never created an account.
        josefresco 8y ago
        I smiled when writing that, expecting this very response ;) - I'll just stay away completely as per my parent comment edit. The kicker is that Reddit's "activity feed" in the right hand sidebar is what revealed, or reminded me of this behavior. Without it, I probably would have continued to ignore the obvious / bury my head in the sand. Thanks Reddit!
- ChrisSD 8y ago
  It's not just the splash that's frustrating on mobile. I dislike staring at a logo for ages just so I can eventually read one comment page. I'm sure this is fun for people who use reddit regularly but as only an occasional visitor I would rather do without it.
- Vinnl 8y ago
  You can disable that banner in the hamburger menu when logged in. Yes, you'd expect it to be gone after the first time you dismiss it, but you will probably still want to know that you can remove it :)
- hyperpallium 8y ago
  protip: append ".compact" to the URL (before the "?" query string, if any). All reddit links will also now automatically have .compact. Bookmark it. Starter pack: https://www.reddit.com/.compact https://www.reddit.com/.compact https://www.reddit.com/r/all.compact https://www.reddit.com/r/all.compact https://www.reddit.com/message/inbox/.compact https://www.reddit.com/message/inbox/.compact This gives the old reddit mobile experience, which is far lighter and better. But some things are broken, e.g. "submit" is broken; "parent" take you to the modern mobile version (but "conext" works); "sidebar" needs a separate page. To any reddit admins reading: please don't take this functionality away.
  - wanda 8y ago
    You can also just change the subdomain to i.reddit.com instead of www.reddit.com to achieve the same effect. e.g. https://i.reddit.com/r/all https://i.reddit.com/r/all I personally find this quicker to type.
    - hyperpallium 8y ago
      TIL BTW another breakage is no comment "delete" link; need to switch back for that.
- api 8y ago
  I never download "the app" because I know the privacy and security settings of my browser will not apply there and everything on my phone will get hoovered.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- Fifer82 8y ago
  I completely agree and even when you just accept all this and actually get the App, it is pretty terrible (on IOS). As in, it stops loading posts, and stops infinite scrolling, so you have to basically kill the app, then go back into it. I don't see how that is more useful than the website or a better experience. Also another issue is that many links just don't work. I can't see `streamable` and many others because the page that opens has no touch detection. I have to select `...` then go to `Open in Safari` to make it work. Reddit and YouTube are the only things stopping my IPad from gathering dust.
- dingaling 8y ago
  There's not even any content to be obscured if JS is disabled, as I tend to do on phones to minimise data usage.
- andrepd 8y ago
  Try i.reddit.com. I still use it, and I'm still annoyed to no end when the "modern" mobile website loads instead, with its ~5 second splash screen that loads less information than the former does in goddamn instant.
- akkat 8y ago
  And after clicking that small hard to see button, get ready for another popup if you want to watch a gif
- josteink 8y ago
  > the reddit website has become a travesty - especially on mobile. A huge "DOWNLOAD THE REDDIT APP" banner obscures literally 30% of the page. Somewhere under preferences you can disable this bullshit forever. The website is still a travesty though.
  - dredmorbius 8y ago
    Not: 1. That I've found. 2. For unauthenticated sessions. I hit Reddit via Incognito mode frequently. That goddamned nag shows up every goddamned time.
- akvadrako 8y ago
  It's a lot worse than that; m.reddit.com hasn't displayed anything except a white blank page on Safari on iOS for over a year.
- hiccuphippo 8y ago
  I use one of the third party apps. I tried the official app but it forces you to open external links in their embedded chrome/webview. The third party simply opens them in my browser.
- nimbix 8y ago
  It's because they want your device's advertiser ID so they can associate it with your interests based on subreddits you visit. There's gold in them ad targeting data hills.
- ProAm 8y ago
  i.reddit.com is what I was using. Super compact and pretty easy to use. But its not meant for participating only for browsing.
- JoshMnem 8y ago
  Also too much animation. Material Design has accessibility problems for motion sensitivity.
- steveklabnik 8y ago
  Even worse, the app loses features of the site that are super super important, like the "duplicates" tab.
gm-conspiracy 8y ago
digg v3?
- sreyaNotfilc 8y ago
  I thought it was digg v4 that was Digg's undoing. Which was taken over by...Reddit. I guess its time for some other community site to take over. Maybe those Amino apps.
crankylinuxuser 8y ago
I unfortunately saw this weeks ago. I did the checkbox accepting being in the Beta program. At first, I thought something was rewriting the whole content of my browser. And then, I realized, no, this is their "redesign". On mobile, the site is unusable - as in a overlay bar blocks all clicks or anything - for at least 30 seconds. Being on a laptop wasn't much better. There, it was 10 seconds of unusuability, per loaded page. It took me 3 minutes to navigate to turn off beta. From there, it went back to the decent site I'm used to. Well, except a button in the upper left band that states "TRY THE REDESIGN"... Uhh, no. All good things must come to an end. There is an end to everything, to good things as well.
- Max_Mustermann 8y ago
  What browser are you on? new.reddit.com works just fine on updated Firefox... biggest annoyance is the lack of sidebars on subreddits, apparently they need to be enabled by the mods.
spiderfarmer 8y ago
The Apollo app is what official Reddit should be like right now.
- FridgeSeal 8y ago
  Or Reddit Sync.
agumonkey 8y ago
wonder what will be the next reddit .. maybe the last push before some decentralized thing that needed some userbase.
- mantas 8y ago
  PhpBB or vBulletin reincarnations?
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    Actually I wouldn't mind, I miss the spirit of these boards. phpbb was hell, but it seems a lot of php things are now based on clean modules (even though a quick googling sheds doubts on the status of phpbb over symfony modules)
    - mantas 8y ago
      Definitely didn't want to give impression that it's somehow worse. A well moderated board is lightyears ahead of a subreddit or, god forbid, FB group. Even half assed categorisation and search awesome. Today's forums could have proper full text search and pimped up moderation tools, possibly with some AI helpers on top.. Just thinking about it makes me drool.
      - agumonkey 8y ago
        I don't know if my interests shield me from bad subreddits but most of the one I glance at are fine, at worst they're just comatose but never toxic. I like reddit quite a bit, it has that weird organic value that overcome a lot of weirdness and subpar features. Still old boards were .. much more home like than most of the web 2.0 ever dreamed of.
        mantas 8y ago
        Not that they're bad. There's definitely a lot of subreddits with a good charm. But they're PITA from information archive point of view. Browsing old threads is much harder than in classic BB. Thus people keep asking same question over and over again even more than in the old days :) Hundreds-of-pages-over-a-decade historical threads don't happen on either of new platforms either :( Which is one of the lovely quirks of the old boards IMO.
bkovacev 8y ago
Reddit is pushing to become a news site rather than a community site.
- mrweasel 8y ago
  I don't think that's an unreasonable assumption. People already view Twitter as a source of news, no reason they wouldn't accept Reddit as a news media as well.
- TremendousJudge 8y ago
  I don't think so. Most content on the frontpage is pictures and videos, not news. They added image and video hosting relatively recently so users wouldn't leave the site while consuming media. They can't do that with news
jacques_chester 8y ago
Mobile phones. Again. It's always mobile phones that ruin good websites these days. They optimise for swipe, scroll and tap. Look, like, emoji. They don't optimise for text. In fact they are increasingly hostile to it. The Tinderfication of online dating has been a depressing race to the bottom. The internet was never going to be as great as we thought it was. No other technology has been. Folks thought the telegraph would end wars and that TVs would have everyone soaking up a deep education. But that's not where the money was. But I felt it wouldn't be this shitty. At some point we're all going to look back on that moment when Jobs held up the first iPhone that could run an app and regret it.
- Aoyagi 8y ago
  And yet so few of the designers consider dark/black colour themes, which are not only more easier on the eyes, but also notably save the battery.
  - rwnspace 8y ago
    Easier on the eyes surely, but I understood it that dark themes only save battery for OLED/AMOLED screens. For LCD/TN dark themes use slightly more. I am not an Electrical Engineer though.
    - Aoyagi 8y ago
      Well yes, that's what I meant. I keep forgetting there are still mobile devices with LCD screens...
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
        Which makes AMOLED still not old enough to enter the general consciousness of the designers. They're optimizing for the screens they (and everyone they know) are used to.
        Aoyagi 8y ago
s_dev 8y ago
As long as redditors can choose between the designs I don't see a problem. Once this choice is removed though they've veered in to Digg territory. All the power users and influencers will use the old design because they're used to it. I can see why reddit wants a redesign -- reddit is ugly but people are used to it that way and grew to like it. The redesign is for new users. Reddit has already been down this path with Pao. If they don't like how the site is being run they will depart or revolt.
- ploggingdev 8y ago
  Any good tl;dr on what happened between Ellen Pao and reddit? I didn't follow the story when it was playing out.
  - thomasz 8y ago
    She closed some long running hatefests like fatpeoplehate and took the fall for the very controversial firing of an employee, which later turned out to be Ohanian's decision.
    - ApolloFortyNine 8y ago
      She basically opened the floodgates for banning subreddits Reddit doesn't like. Up until the ban of fatpeoplehate, the only subreddits that would get banned were CP related or based around doxing. Now pretty much anything is on the table.
      - TremendousJudge 8y ago
        >Now pretty much anything is on the table. Not really. The_Donald hasn't been banned even though Reddit doesn't like it. They have kind of hidden it though.
        dehugger 8y ago
        They shut down a huge number of firearm/alchohol/tobacco related subreddits in the last month, many of which were very mature and welcoming communities, without any warning they they were going to do this to the moderators. Places like r/beerswap and r/pipetobaccomarket, which allowed users to swap product unavailable in their local areas. Now the moderators of big subreddits like r/pipetobacco are organizing alternative websites for their users to go to, before the inevitably get banned without warning for not aligning with Reddit's new image.
atupis 8y ago
There is certain design by committee feeling at new redesing, its like they are putting everything there chat, share, follow, fancy sidebar, options and more.
radiorental 8y ago
Top tier sites like reddit should not drop large, disruptive, releases like this. Take Amazon for example. If they went from the design 5-7 years ago straight to the current design, there would be uproar, Stock price dip etc. The incremental approach allows the site owner to both roll back bad ideas but also condition users into where the design is heading. (Correction: not Conde Nast) The owner, has a plan, which is clearly not inline with the current Reddit usage, this is not the approach to get to that goal. I am struggling to think of big drops like this working, anyone?
- siddboots 8y ago
  To be fair, they are only "dropping" it on a small subset of users for the time being.
  - solarkraft 8y ago
    I read 1%, which is a whole lot. But the previous poster's (very valid, I find) point is not to roll out a vast redesign slowly to all users, but rather small changes (possibly with testing on small groups beforehand).
- intended 8y ago
  As I recall, Conde nast no longer controls reddit
- iampims 8y ago
  I believe they are no longer owned by Condé Nast.
  - notatoad 8y ago
    Correct, sort of. They are still owned by Conde Nast's parent company
    - dkasper 8y ago
      Reddit is not owned or controlled by Conde Nast or Advance Publications anymore, however they are still a large shareholder.
brynjolf 8y ago
Frustrating to discuss this on reddit as well. They always think we should watch and eait but that rarely works. Especially if they already added huge banners advertising their data collecting app and now autoplaying videos, before people complained they also autoplayed them with sound..
MikkoFinell 8y ago
I had no idea there was "discussion subreddits" on reddit. I always thought it was a site for hoarding karma by posting memes and puns.
- slap_shot 8y ago
  I can't down vote your comment, but if I could, I would. It isn't constructive to the conversation at hand. But on a personal note, if you can't find interesting, intelligent content on Reddit, that is a criticism of yourself, not Reddit. Reddit houses some fascinatingly talented, smart, engaging people across a vast array of subject matter.
  - gldalmaso 8y ago
    In order to find that interesting content, you need to learn about it. I can imagine many new users coming to reddit, seeing just the front page and drawing their conclusions, turning around and not look back. Should they be criticized by that? Maybe take the time to share some of that interesting content here to parent to change his view instead of denouncing him. (https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/)
  - MikkoFinell 8y ago
    I upvoted your comment because it's so constructive, telling me I'm an idiot because I don't find reddit interesting.
- zyx321 8y ago
  That does seem to be the owners' plan going forward. The type of content that Reddit's design encourages most would be meme-blogging in the style of r/me_IRL
baby 8y ago
A day before the re-design announcement I was explaining to a friend why Digg died and why Reddit would never dare re-designing their page. Oh boy was I wrong.
- michel__ 8y ago
  You make it sound like this came out of nowhere. Reddit has been letting people beta test this for months.
  - anc84 8y ago
    And I told them it is terrible and stopped beta testing within minutes.
    - Kiro 8y ago
      And you were wrong. Time to admit it.
      - TremendousJudge 8y ago
        You're right. I love it when websites run slow and hog resources to provide less functionality than they used to.
- boobsbr 8y ago
  To me Digg died with the AACS censorship debacle. In hindsight, I understand Kevin Rose was trying to protect Digg from lawsuits that would effectively destroy the site, but the censorship did the same.
  - DaiPlusPlus 8y ago
    Digg died for me when they shifted the focus of their front-page from Technology and Headline News to more “mainstream” topics - eventually the frontoage was entirely NFL-related story links - this was a while after the AACS incident.
superkuh 8y ago
I started using reddit in 2008. Although I doubt it was intentional reddit was a refuge from the "Best viewed with Javascript" modern web for many years. It worked just fine to browse and read with no JS enabled and was very snappy and low resource usage that way. Sure, you had to toggle JS back on to vote or post but that was easy enough. I left just before they pushed out the redesign due their increased censorship but from what I can see now it is a random chance that a sub will work with JS disabled. Half the time the post content in a div that only is rendered visible when you turn on JS. You can read it if you view source but not in the browser's native interface.
- bluedevil2k 8y ago
  It's 2018 and you're criticizing a site for not running well with JS disabled. You're the one actively deciding to make websites harder to use, why should they design the site for you?
  - blub 8y ago
    It's 2018 and web developers are still not competent enough to build simple websites (blogs, news, reddit) without forcing visitors to use JS. JS is the technology responsible for most of the malware infections and spyware ad-tracking. It's not like people disable it just to piss off developers, there are very good reasons to turn it off.
    - atonse 8y ago
      Running content blockers have solved this problem for me while keeping JavaScript enabled.
    - inapis 8y ago
      >JS is the technology responsible for most of the malware infections and spyware ad-tracking. It's not like people disable it just to piss off developers, there are very good reasons to turn it off. While I agree that JS is part of the malvertising problem but this statement is blowing things to an exaggeration. Chrome, Firefox and Safari are equally responsible for the infection that occurs because of JS.
ataturk 8y ago
The peasants were getting too uppity with their free speech and free exchange of ideas and need to be smacked back down into the mud again.
cup-of-tea 8y ago
Reddit is terrible for discussion anyway. You can't have a discussion when people can "downvote" your post. Nothing of value has been lost here. I say that as someone who used reddit heavily until about a month ago when I kicked the addiction.
- andybak 8y ago
  Weirdly enough, I just downvoted you because I disagree. Not sure what to deduce from that.
  - Karunamon 8y ago
    That people carry the toxic "make this post go away because I don't like it" mindset everywhere, even when they're explicitly asked not to? At this point, the only reason I still hold a (read only) Reddit account is so I can turn implicit censorship like thresholding and front page blocks off. HN, unlike reddit, still has value as a discussion medium, but I wish that "showdead" didn't make the posts unreadable.
    - krapp 8y ago
      >HN, unlike reddit, still has value as a discussion medium, but I wish that "showdead" didn't make the posts unreadable. Here you go: https://openuserjs.org/scripts/kennethrapp/Hacker_News_Text_Tweaks https://openuserjs.org/scripts/kennethrapp/Hacker_News_Text_...
      - _cereal 8y ago
        I was doing something similar: var downvoted = document.querySelectorAll('.comment > span:not(.c00)'); for(let i = 0, c = downvoted.length; i < c; i++) { downvoted[i].style.color = '#70798C'; }
  - cup-of-tea 8y ago
    You can deduce that this is terrible for discussion too.
ra88it 8y ago
Can somebody please summarize what has changed? Maybe I don't use Reddit enough, but I just refreshed one of the subreddits that I like, and I can't find a difference. Possibly a caching issue?
- krtkush 8y ago
  Maybe this will help - http://new.reddit.com/ http://new.reddit.com/
  - jvagner 8y ago
    is this supposed to be the new reddit? it's the same ol' reddit for me.
- beejiu 8y ago
  It is not yet widely available... https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/891stx/starting_today_more_people_will_have_access_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/891stx/start...
dgreensp 8y ago
From reading Reddit threads about the redesign: pretty much everyone hates it, especially Reddit’s most passionate users, who have been very articulate, consistent, and aligned about exactly what they don’t like, and Reddit just keeps brushing them off and dismissing their point of view. Maybe the purpose of the redesign is something like monetization? Or maybe they are just out of touch and by the time they really understood the community’s point of view, the decisions had been made, so the Reddit employees tasked with handling the community response can’t really say or do much.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Of course it's about monetization. There's a difference between how Reddit-the-company (and its investors) view the site, and how its users do. It's like with cafés - visitors likes them quiet, and would very much enjoy having an electrical outlet near the table (to charge up phone) and even free Wi-Fi. But cafés aren't in business of making peoples' life better and more enjoyable, they're in business of selling coffee - so they'll actively remove electrical outlets, remove their Wi-Fi and make the place noiser, to increase turnover.
  - pvg 8y ago
    Statistically, cafes don't do that.
  - mprev 8y ago
    Genuinely interested to know where in the world the cafes are like that.
    - 1123581321 8y ago
      I’m in the Midwest. All of them do something to discourage staying all day. Most don’t have many seats with access to electrical. WiFi is restricted to a couple hours per session and not any faster than it needs to be. Most of them are echoey on purpose. It’s been several years since one tried to make bringing a computer at all difficult, though. I credit this to the re-emergence of Dunkin Donuts in our area, reducing the gain from competing for customers without much time for coffee.
dmix 8y ago
Purely from a user perspective I personally love the new Reddit design, I don't find it detracts much from the previous design at all. BUT I use a top-end Macbook Pro and I find the new design to be terribly slow and a performance hog, where it simply kills the UX. Once you open up 10 tabs (how I typically browse Reddit, by shift clicking each thread I want to read) I can hear my CPU fans kicking in. I had to tune Firefox to use 6 cores instead of 4 to get any decent performance. I may just end up going back to the old design :/ I'm not sure what computers/browsers Reddit's UI/UX team has been testing on, or if they've ever tried to open multiple pages at once, but this is a pretty blatant issue.
- orky56 8y ago
  Agreed. The design aesthetic actually works but the technical overhead in implementing is the problem. HN works so well because not only does it prioritize information density but it consumes less resources. The Reddit redesign pushes thumbnails, infinite scroll, and a useless right sidebar. Thumbnails waste space depending on the subreddit. Infinite scroll destroys the idea of a discrete "front page" which is core to Reddit being the front page of the Internet. In addition the infinite scroll makes no sense in the comments where on Mobile you can jump between top-level parent comments whereas on Desktop it's too busy loading child comments before you can get to the next top-level parent comment. The right sidebar is persistent and serves little purpose for a power user. The left sidebar which provides core navigation for a power user is useful when persistent but loads asynchronously with the middle, main content for it to be a consistent user experience.
Redoubts 8y ago
All I wanted to see is what the comments section now looks like. It's literally the only thing I'm there for, and preview photos never show it. (My biggest complaint with many HN app previews too) Of course, when I try the preview myself, I'm greeted with this: https://imgur.com/a/PvRhk https://imgur.com/a/PvRhk
- crowbahr 8y ago
  Your link is dead (on mobile at least).
  - jml7c5 8y ago
    imgur appears to be having server difficulties of some sort; every image page on mobile currently gives "not found".
- teddyfrozevelt 8y ago
  Here's an example. https://imgur.com/a/RfioM https://imgur.com/a/RfioM
  - shostack 8y ago
    I'm not seeing any significant differences there. Am I missing something obvious?
chaoticmass 8y ago
I miss being able to collapse comments by pressing the minus-sign button.
- pknopf 8y ago
  I'm not seeing that in the images I've seen so far, got a link? That would be a huge issue if they really did that. RES will probably step in and fix that.
  - TheBeardKing 8y ago
    You have to click the vertical line next to the comment which is a ridiculous change. The minus/plus signs were intuitive, now it's a line that switches to a plus sign.
    - funkymike 8y ago
      I will disagree with this. Clicking on the bar has been part of the interface for some subreddits for a while now (though not many). I find it quite nice because if you are reading a deep thread and want to collapse to the next N levels up, then you don't have to carefully scroll up while watching the vertical bar to find the top comment in order to minimize that thread. This makes it very easy to skip to the next top-level comment when a topic has lots of comments.
      - chaoticmass 8y ago
        I think the way it works is nice, and what you described is a good use for it. It could use some better UI to make it easier to discover. It didn't occur to me to hover over or click it because I thought it was merely an indicator.
- noxToken 8y ago
  The long bar (beneath the upvote/downvote buttons) that shows what level the current comment is at collapses comments by clicking it. Very unintuitive, and I only found it by accident.
StellarTabi 8y ago
Two reasons why Reddit isn't "digg-ing" their own grave right now: 1. This change is much smaller and less destructive than digg's big change (although the long term effects can be just as destructive). 2. When Digg's redesign caused an exodus, Reddit was extremely well known as "that ugly digg clone" and "this digg link was on Reddit yesterday". Reddit doesn't have a well known established "number two" the way digg did. Raddleme is a leftist fringe site, voat is a racist fringe site, HN is a technology fringe site. Discord servers rely on Reddit for discoverability and member vetting. When this has been discussed before, I've never seen a viable candidate mentioned. Since the only people who can leave are people who only use fringe topics, Reddit won't be able to loose critical mass and then the fringers will have to come back. On the other hand, these changes appear to be a step into the Twitter/Instagram/facebook market. I'm curious if Reddit will be ready in time to take advantage of this upcoming Facebook exodus, also if there will even be an exodus.
- 2bitencryption 8y ago
  You've painted a picture in my mind of Reddit as this massive blob connecting Discord, so-called "fringe communities", etc. It actually makes me appreciate Reddit a bit more -- it can be garbage, but it's also a bit of a centralized meeting place for so many smaller communities. Even if the bulk of those smaller communities doesn't take place on Reddit itself, they still flow through Reddit. Reddit is like the central bazaar of discoverability. The community you end up in might not live on Reddit, but in all likelihood, you discovered it through Reddit. So despite how terrible the big communities can be (which is not a Reddit-exclusive problem), I'm still glad it exists. Maybe an alternative is needed, but at the very least, I respect how Reddit has mostly retained this unique ability over the years.
  - lbotos 8y ago
    Right! I've always appreciated that through one login, I got the equivalent of basically endless forums. Sure, I do miss the "tight-knit" nature of the forums of the late 90's, but reddit still gives value.
    - 8y ago
return1 8y ago
in other news how is their new profile design going? I keep adding /overview to mine and other profiles to be able to actually click on things . Why do they keep breaking functionality for no apparent reason? It's becoming a theme in many high-traffic websites (google adsense, analytics come to mind), it's as if new managers roll in and decide to piss all around their territory.
reiichiroh 8y ago
Is Fark still relevant? Their Cohen raid night thread was really long.
joemi 8y ago
I don't get it. What exactly is changing? From the screenshots from the reddit post about it, it looks.... like reddit. There's posts and the posts have upvote/downvote buttons, and there's a link to the comments that shows how many there are. Am I missing something? The OP article doesn't actually have any screenshots of changes, and I made it several paragraphs into the article still not understanding what is changing.
- Izkata 8y ago
  Not sure what reddit post you're referring to, but the images on Wired make it look like Facebook, not Reddit: https://www.wired.com/story/reddit-redesign/ https://www.wired.com/story/reddit-redesign/
  - joemi 8y ago
    The reddit post I meant was this announcement from 10 or so days ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/891stx/starting_today_more_people_will_have_access_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/891stx/start... Thanks for the Wired link. That actually shows it. Yeah, I agree it looks quite facebook-like.
- strifey 8y ago
  You should be able to interact with the redesign directly at https://new.reddit.com https://new.reddit.com. The main complaints I've seen leveled at the redesign are: user profiles becoming more like Facebook profiles, the new chat functionality missing core features, and the newly created "best" ranking becoming the default.
  - joemi 8y ago
    Not sure why, but that link just brings me to the normal homepage (as it's looked for years).
    - Fifer82 8y ago
      This confused me as well. See Izkata below your comment with a wired link to screenshots. But I see the old reddit as well.
digi_owl 8y ago
I find the new design noisy and distracting.
tluyben2 8y ago
The design reminds me too much of the native iOS Reddit app; fine for mobile, but I really do not like it for desktop. It is absolutely annoying to me.
nhangen 8y ago
How can an article about a re-design not actually show or compare the two designs?
- Consultant32452 8y ago
  https://www.wired.com/story/reddit-redesign/ https://www.wired.com/story/reddit-redesign/ This one at least has some screenshots of the new design. It feels like a Facebook clone to me. In particular it looks like they're flattening comments to be like FB rather than the thread? model that Reddit has today.
  - relin 8y ago
    The only significant change I've noticed re: comments are how the nested chains collapse: instead of the intuitive [+] and [-] at the parent comment, there's a line that runs alongside the chain. Click that line and it collapses. It's not as easy to figure out on your own, but it's a significant improvement IMO.
adjunctme 8y ago
The redesign adds a bit of lag from all the javascript and extra elements. The old plain text + expanding comments + images/gifs is much smoother and includes everything that's needed
rabboRubble 8y ago
Reddit gave me the opportunity to try the new layout, and I lasted exactly 1 minute before reverting. The log in page was broken. I could see where to sign up for a new account, but could not see area to log in for existing users. The problem appeared to be one of resizing the old log in page correctly for the new layout. Regardless, not my issue as a stupid user to have to debug log in pages for a major website. If this sort of basic thing is missing in the redesign, they have big problems ahead.
sidkhanooja 8y ago
Reddit has its issues (brigading, trolling, execssive politics, 12-year old level "memes" on serious discussions), but it was a site you could visit without regret, and get lost in for hours. With the new redesign, it is Facebook - people share a link, you click the comments section, it shows you the top comments, you upvote the top comments (or the ones that agree with your view), and rinse and repeat till infinity, because you have infinite scroll. Which is not how I want the future Reddit to look like. Yes, it is good for advertisers. Yes, it is good for the the new wave of people who will arrive from Facebook. But it is utterly disheartening for Reddit to stray so far from what I viewed its core emphasis as - comments.

253 points by Aoyagi 8y ago

Vovka19 8y ago

What interesting?

dotcoma 8y ago

The question is: By mistake or by design?

akerro 8y ago
There are no mistakes in it. This was planned years ago, they spent a lot of time evaluating different technologies and UI mockups. I'm interested to see if AMA with Barak Obama will be still readable, or will start consuming gigabytes of RAM.

vesinisa 8y ago

Sadly, the reddit website has become a travesty - especially on mobile. A huge "DOWNLOAD THE REDDIT APP" banner obscures literally 30% of the page. There is a teeny-tiny "view on mobille site" link in small, low-contrast text that can be used to dismiss the annoying banner. Due to its size and user-hostile design, the Reddit banner is even worse than most news sites that try to push their newsletter/app/subscription with similarly annoying banners.

zmb_ 8y ago
They have also periodically been A/B testing a popup with only two options, login or get mobile app, when clicking on a topic -- as far as I could tell it was not possible to just pass to the comment thread. Luckily that seems to have been phased out.
netzone 8y ago
I think that's now removed no? Or at least, I haven't noticed it for a while. I got hit with the Google hammer regarding a similar banner, where they threatened to stop indexing the site completely, so I assume they had a similar message. Or maybe they're large enough to be exempt. I don't know.
- azernik 8y ago
  For logged-in users, the banner goes away (I think after the first time you click to stay on the mobile site).
  - stochastic_monk 8y ago
    I'm always logged in, but it often asks me to consider using the app. I detest it. Why are they pushing it so hard?
    - opencl 8y ago
      You have to be logged in and toggle a preference to disable the popup. But then it forgets I'm logged in and I see it again. I agree that it's extremely obnoxious and has just resulted in me never bothering to look at Reddit on a phone anymore.
- dmitriid 8y ago
  It's a small banner on Reddit's AMP pages. Once you click "view more comments", you're taken over to the mobile version which has the huge banner. Shamless plug: you can see this behaviour in the two screenshots in lower left corner in this post https://grumpy.website/post/0PhBPyfR- https://grumpy.website/post/0PhBPyfR- Reddit redesigned the AMP page to include some comments, but the behaviour is essentially the same.
dredmorbius 8y ago
Hit https://old.reddit.com https://old.reddit.com Unfortunately intra-reddit links cause all the usual problems. But yes, mobile behaviour is rage-inducing.
- syrrim 8y ago
  You can ask to always recieve the desktop website via the hamburger menu. Really the best option IMO.
  - dredmorbius 8y ago
    You've got to: 1. Click though the Mobile nag overly. 2. Turn off the Mobile nag, or you'll see it again. 3. Specify "desktop" via, for the second time, the motherfucking hamburger. That is: this is what I'm doing. Every. Goddamned. Time. It's motherfucking rage inducing. I've mentioned this more than once at Reddit.
liotier 8y ago
On Android, use the "Reddit if fun" application - classic Reddit, fit for mobile: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andrewshu.android.reddit&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andrewshu....
- StavrosK 8y ago
  "Relay" is also amazing. I realized just today that I browse HN from mobile Firefox, but reddit from Relay, and I realized that that's because Relay is so much better than any HN mobile app. It really makes a difference.
  - severine 8y ago
    Have you tried Materialistic[1] for HN? Apache licensed, also on F-droid[2]. [1] https://github.com/hidroh/materialistic https://github.com/hidroh/materialistic [2] https://f-droid.org/packages/io.github.hidroh.materialistic/ https://f-droid.org/packages/io.github.hidroh.materialistic/
    - StavrosK 8y ago
      Yes, it's what I currently use, but it has some problems (comment formatting shows up weirdly, the built-in browser uses desktop mode and doesn't let me resize sites so many are illegible, etc). It's the best I've found, though.
    - Outpox 8y ago
      I use both Relay for Reddit and Materialistic for HN and they're absolutely brilliant. Didn't take me that long to pay for Relay Pro.
    - hivacruz 8y ago
      Materialistic is nice. The only feature I miss with it would be a custom filter. If I could hide automatically stories based on keywords (like "Facebook"), that would be great.
  - skykooler 8y ago
actsasbuffoon 8y ago
Their mobile app rarely works for me. There was a bug for a few months(!) where I couldn't log in. It worked again for a month, and now the app can't connect to the server at all. To be clear, I'm running this on a brand new iPhone X, so I've got plenty of power to run the app. The site works in my mobile browser, but the app has serious reliability problems. If anyone at Reddit is reading this, please stop pushing the mobile app so hard. You're actively making things worse by pushing a highly unreliable app! Also, please make it possible to sort by "Rising" on the mobile site and app (should I ever be able to connect again). On busy news days, things move fast enough that "Rising" is the only way to keep up, yet the option is mysteriously inaccessible on mobile.
- chii 8y ago
  use the .compact version of reddit's website: append a '/.compact' to the end of a normal reddit url like www.reddit.com/r/programming/.compact , and see how fast and user friendly it is!
  - yoodenvranx 8y ago
    The day they kill the .compact page is the day I stop using reddit.
  - knz 8y ago
    I agree that .compact is their most mobile friendly website but I'm not sure I'd call it "user friendly". It's difficult to edit comments, difficult to switch between subreddit's, and defaults to their main mobile format or prompts you to download their app if you click on any internal links that don't have .compact in the URL (include the default /r/$subreddit formatting).
  - grogers 8y ago
    Luckily taking 15 seconds to type this in the address bar and load the old version is still faster than loading any "normal" mobile Reddit page. This is what I've been doing for years.
  - nostromo 8y ago
josefresco 8y ago
I dropped the mobile app because it was occupying over 200MB of space, and my inadequately equipped iPhone ran out of space. I switched to the mobile site, but now avoid that as well due to the constant, in-your-face app promotion. Every website with a mobile app these days: "I get it, you have an app, I don't want the app, stop telling me to download it." Edit: Thanks for the helpful replies - however staying completely off Reddit is probably better for my overall wellbeing. Reddit is no longer a "happy place" for me, the racists, trolls, shills, and bigots have ruined it for me. To top it off, I was recently banned by admins (not mods) for "attempting to evade a subbreddit ban" which was a result of my using a VPN - no thanks.
- wor3q 8y ago
  It actually has a switch to turn nagging about app off. It's 'ask to open in app' in menu. No banners or popups about the app since I've flipped it.
  - bdefore 8y ago
    Which not useful if you prefer to lurk rather than login or use incognito/firefox focus to browse.
    - josefresco 8y ago
      This is why I never saw the setting to disable the app prompt. Reddit tracks every single action on their site (no duh) and I don't feel like being monitored when I'm on the toilet looking for LULZ
      - teach 8y ago
        For the record, I'm sure they track you just as much even if you've never created an account.
        josefresco 8y ago
        I smiled when writing that, expecting this very response ;) - I'll just stay away completely as per my parent comment edit. The kicker is that Reddit's "activity feed" in the right hand sidebar is what revealed, or reminded me of this behavior. Without it, I probably would have continued to ignore the obvious / bury my head in the sand. Thanks Reddit!
ChrisSD 8y ago
It's not just the splash that's frustrating on mobile. I dislike staring at a logo for ages just so I can eventually read one comment page. I'm sure this is fun for people who use reddit regularly but as only an occasional visitor I would rather do without it.
Vinnl 8y ago
You can disable that banner in the hamburger menu when logged in. Yes, you'd expect it to be gone after the first time you dismiss it, but you will probably still want to know that you can remove it :)
hyperpallium 8y ago
protip: append ".compact" to the URL (before the "?" query string, if any). All reddit links will also now automatically have .compact. Bookmark it. Starter pack: https://www.reddit.com/.compact https://www.reddit.com/.compact https://www.reddit.com/r/all.compact https://www.reddit.com/r/all.compact https://www.reddit.com/message/inbox/.compact https://www.reddit.com/message/inbox/.compact This gives the old reddit mobile experience, which is far lighter and better. But some things are broken, e.g. "submit" is broken; "parent" take you to the modern mobile version (but "conext" works); "sidebar" needs a separate page. To any reddit admins reading: please don't take this functionality away.
- wanda 8y ago
  You can also just change the subdomain to i.reddit.com instead of www.reddit.com to achieve the same effect. e.g. https://i.reddit.com/r/all https://i.reddit.com/r/all I personally find this quicker to type.
  - hyperpallium 8y ago
    TIL BTW another breakage is no comment "delete" link; need to switch back for that.
api 8y ago
I never download "the app" because I know the privacy and security settings of my browser will not apply there and everything on my phone will get hoovered.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Fifer82 8y ago
I completely agree and even when you just accept all this and actually get the App, it is pretty terrible (on IOS). As in, it stops loading posts, and stops infinite scrolling, so you have to basically kill the app, then go back into it. I don't see how that is more useful than the website or a better experience. Also another issue is that many links just don't work. I can't see `streamable` and many others because the page that opens has no touch detection. I have to select `...` then go to `Open in Safari` to make it work. Reddit and YouTube are the only things stopping my IPad from gathering dust.
dingaling 8y ago
There's not even any content to be obscured if JS is disabled, as I tend to do on phones to minimise data usage.
andrepd 8y ago
Try i.reddit.com. I still use it, and I'm still annoyed to no end when the "modern" mobile website loads instead, with its ~5 second splash screen that loads less information than the former does in goddamn instant.
akkat 8y ago
And after clicking that small hard to see button, get ready for another popup if you want to watch a gif
josteink 8y ago
> the reddit website has become a travesty - especially on mobile. A huge "DOWNLOAD THE REDDIT APP" banner obscures literally 30% of the page. Somewhere under preferences you can disable this bullshit forever. The website is still a travesty though.
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  Not: 1. That I've found. 2. For unauthenticated sessions. I hit Reddit via Incognito mode frequently. That goddamned nag shows up every goddamned time.
akvadrako 8y ago
It's a lot worse than that; m.reddit.com hasn't displayed anything except a white blank page on Safari on iOS for over a year.
hiccuphippo 8y ago
I use one of the third party apps. I tried the official app but it forces you to open external links in their embedded chrome/webview. The third party simply opens them in my browser.
nimbix 8y ago
It's because they want your device's advertiser ID so they can associate it with your interests based on subreddits you visit. There's gold in them ad targeting data hills.
ProAm 8y ago
i.reddit.com is what I was using. Super compact and pretty easy to use. But its not meant for participating only for browsing.
JoshMnem 8y ago
Also too much animation. Material Design has accessibility problems for motion sensitivity.
steveklabnik 8y ago
Even worse, the app loses features of the site that are super super important, like the "duplicates" tab.

gm-conspiracy 8y ago

digg v3?

sreyaNotfilc 8y ago
I thought it was digg v4 that was Digg's undoing. Which was taken over by...Reddit. I guess its time for some other community site to take over. Maybe those Amino apps.

crankylinuxuser 8y ago

I unfortunately saw this weeks ago. I did the checkbox accepting being in the Beta program. At first, I thought something was rewriting the whole content of my browser. And then, I realized, no, this is their "redesign". On mobile, the site is unusable - as in a overlay bar blocks all clicks or anything - for at least 30 seconds. Being on a laptop wasn't much better. There, it was 10 seconds of unusuability, per loaded page. It took me 3 minutes to navigate to turn off beta. From there, it went back to the decent site I'm used to. Well, except a button in the upper left band that states "TRY THE REDESIGN"... Uhh, no. All good things must come to an end. There is an end to everything, to good things as well.

Max_Mustermann 8y ago
What browser are you on? new.reddit.com works just fine on updated Firefox... biggest annoyance is the lack of sidebars on subreddits, apparently they need to be enabled by the mods.

spiderfarmer 8y ago

The Apollo app is what official Reddit should be like right now.

FridgeSeal 8y ago
Or Reddit Sync.

agumonkey 8y ago

wonder what will be the next reddit .. maybe the last push before some decentralized thing that needed some userbase.

mantas 8y ago
PhpBB or vBulletin reincarnations?
- agumonkey 8y ago
  Actually I wouldn't mind, I miss the spirit of these boards. phpbb was hell, but it seems a lot of php things are now based on clean modules (even though a quick googling sheds doubts on the status of phpbb over symfony modules)
  - mantas 8y ago
    Definitely didn't want to give impression that it's somehow worse. A well moderated board is lightyears ahead of a subreddit or, god forbid, FB group. Even half assed categorisation and search awesome. Today's forums could have proper full text search and pimped up moderation tools, possibly with some AI helpers on top.. Just thinking about it makes me drool.
    - agumonkey 8y ago
      I don't know if my interests shield me from bad subreddits but most of the one I glance at are fine, at worst they're just comatose but never toxic. I like reddit quite a bit, it has that weird organic value that overcome a lot of weirdness and subpar features. Still old boards were .. much more home like than most of the web 2.0 ever dreamed of.
      - mantas 8y ago
        Not that they're bad. There's definitely a lot of subreddits with a good charm. But they're PITA from information archive point of view. Browsing old threads is much harder than in classic BB. Thus people keep asking same question over and over again even more than in the old days :) Hundreds-of-pages-over-a-decade historical threads don't happen on either of new platforms either :( Which is one of the lovely quirks of the old boards IMO.

bkovacev 8y ago

Reddit is pushing to become a news site rather than a community site.

mrweasel 8y ago
I don't think that's an unreasonable assumption. People already view Twitter as a source of news, no reason they wouldn't accept Reddit as a news media as well.
TremendousJudge 8y ago
I don't think so. Most content on the frontpage is pictures and videos, not news. They added image and video hosting relatively recently so users wouldn't leave the site while consuming media. They can't do that with news

jacques_chester 8y ago

Mobile phones. Again. It's always mobile phones that ruin good websites these days. They optimise for swipe, scroll and tap. Look, like, emoji. They don't optimise for text. In fact they are increasingly hostile to it. The Tinderfication of online dating has been a depressing race to the bottom. The internet was never going to be as great as we thought it was. No other technology has been. Folks thought the telegraph would end wars and that TVs would have everyone soaking up a deep education. But that's not where the money was. But I felt it wouldn't be this shitty. At some point we're all going to look back on that moment when Jobs held up the first iPhone that could run an app and regret it.

Aoyagi 8y ago
And yet so few of the designers consider dark/black colour themes, which are not only more easier on the eyes, but also notably save the battery.
- rwnspace 8y ago
  Easier on the eyes surely, but I understood it that dark themes only save battery for OLED/AMOLED screens. For LCD/TN dark themes use slightly more. I am not an Electrical Engineer though.
  - Aoyagi 8y ago
    Well yes, that's what I meant. I keep forgetting there are still mobile devices with LCD screens...
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Which makes AMOLED still not old enough to enter the general consciousness of the designers. They're optimizing for the screens they (and everyone they know) are used to.
      - Aoyagi 8y ago

s_dev 8y ago

As long as redditors can choose between the designs I don't see a problem. Once this choice is removed though they've veered in to Digg territory. All the power users and influencers will use the old design because they're used to it. I can see why reddit wants a redesign -- reddit is ugly but people are used to it that way and grew to like it. The redesign is for new users. Reddit has already been down this path with Pao. If they don't like how the site is being run they will depart or revolt.

ploggingdev 8y ago
Any good tl;dr on what happened between Ellen Pao and reddit? I didn't follow the story when it was playing out.
- thomasz 8y ago
  She closed some long running hatefests like fatpeoplehate and took the fall for the very controversial firing of an employee, which later turned out to be Ohanian's decision.
  - ApolloFortyNine 8y ago
    She basically opened the floodgates for banning subreddits Reddit doesn't like. Up until the ban of fatpeoplehate, the only subreddits that would get banned were CP related or based around doxing. Now pretty much anything is on the table.
    - TremendousJudge 8y ago
      >Now pretty much anything is on the table. Not really. The_Donald hasn't been banned even though Reddit doesn't like it. They have kind of hidden it though.
      - dehugger 8y ago
        They shut down a huge number of firearm/alchohol/tobacco related subreddits in the last month, many of which were very mature and welcoming communities, without any warning they they were going to do this to the moderators. Places like r/beerswap and r/pipetobaccomarket, which allowed users to swap product unavailable in their local areas. Now the moderators of big subreddits like r/pipetobacco are organizing alternative websites for their users to go to, before the inevitably get banned without warning for not aligning with Reddit's new image.

atupis 8y ago

There is certain design by committee feeling at new redesing, its like they are putting everything there chat, share, follow, fancy sidebar, options and more.

radiorental 8y ago

Top tier sites like reddit should not drop large, disruptive, releases like this. Take Amazon for example. If they went from the design 5-7 years ago straight to the current design, there would be uproar, Stock price dip etc. The incremental approach allows the site owner to both roll back bad ideas but also condition users into where the design is heading. (Correction: not Conde Nast) The owner, has a plan, which is clearly not inline with the current Reddit usage, this is not the approach to get to that goal. I am struggling to think of big drops like this working, anyone?

siddboots 8y ago
To be fair, they are only "dropping" it on a small subset of users for the time being.
- solarkraft 8y ago
  I read 1%, which is a whole lot. But the previous poster's (very valid, I find) point is not to roll out a vast redesign slowly to all users, but rather small changes (possibly with testing on small groups beforehand).
intended 8y ago
As I recall, Conde nast no longer controls reddit
iampims 8y ago
I believe they are no longer owned by Condé Nast.
- notatoad 8y ago
  Correct, sort of. They are still owned by Conde Nast's parent company
  - dkasper 8y ago
    Reddit is not owned or controlled by Conde Nast or Advance Publications anymore, however they are still a large shareholder.

brynjolf 8y ago

Frustrating to discuss this on reddit as well. They always think we should watch and eait but that rarely works. Especially if they already added huge banners advertising their data collecting app and now autoplaying videos, before people complained they also autoplayed them with sound..

MikkoFinell 8y ago

I had no idea there was "discussion subreddits" on reddit. I always thought it was a site for hoarding karma by posting memes and puns.

slap_shot 8y ago
I can't down vote your comment, but if I could, I would. It isn't constructive to the conversation at hand. But on a personal note, if you can't find interesting, intelligent content on Reddit, that is a criticism of yourself, not Reddit. Reddit houses some fascinatingly talented, smart, engaging people across a vast array of subject matter.
- gldalmaso 8y ago
  In order to find that interesting content, you need to learn about it. I can imagine many new users coming to reddit, seeing just the front page and drawing their conclusions, turning around and not look back. Should they be criticized by that? Maybe take the time to share some of that interesting content here to parent to change his view instead of denouncing him. (https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/)
- MikkoFinell 8y ago
  I upvoted your comment because it's so constructive, telling me I'm an idiot because I don't find reddit interesting.
zyx321 8y ago
That does seem to be the owners' plan going forward. The type of content that Reddit's design encourages most would be meme-blogging in the style of r/me_IRL

baby 8y ago

A day before the re-design announcement I was explaining to a friend why Digg died and why Reddit would never dare re-designing their page. Oh boy was I wrong.

michel__ 8y ago
You make it sound like this came out of nowhere. Reddit has been letting people beta test this for months.
- anc84 8y ago
  And I told them it is terrible and stopped beta testing within minutes.
  - Kiro 8y ago
    And you were wrong. Time to admit it.
    - TremendousJudge 8y ago
      You're right. I love it when websites run slow and hog resources to provide less functionality than they used to.
boobsbr 8y ago
To me Digg died with the AACS censorship debacle. In hindsight, I understand Kevin Rose was trying to protect Digg from lawsuits that would effectively destroy the site, but the censorship did the same.
- DaiPlusPlus 8y ago
  Digg died for me when they shifted the focus of their front-page from Technology and Headline News to more “mainstream” topics - eventually the frontoage was entirely NFL-related story links - this was a while after the AACS incident.

superkuh 8y ago

I started using reddit in 2008. Although I doubt it was intentional reddit was a refuge from the "Best viewed with Javascript" modern web for many years. It worked just fine to browse and read with no JS enabled and was very snappy and low resource usage that way. Sure, you had to toggle JS back on to vote or post but that was easy enough. I left just before they pushed out the redesign due their increased censorship but from what I can see now it is a random chance that a sub will work with JS disabled. Half the time the post content in a div that only is rendered visible when you turn on JS. You can read it if you view source but not in the browser's native interface.

bluedevil2k 8y ago
It's 2018 and you're criticizing a site for not running well with JS disabled. You're the one actively deciding to make websites harder to use, why should they design the site for you?
- blub 8y ago
  It's 2018 and web developers are still not competent enough to build simple websites (blogs, news, reddit) without forcing visitors to use JS. JS is the technology responsible for most of the malware infections and spyware ad-tracking. It's not like people disable it just to piss off developers, there are very good reasons to turn it off.
  - atonse 8y ago
    Running content blockers have solved this problem for me while keeping JavaScript enabled.
  - inapis 8y ago
    >JS is the technology responsible for most of the malware infections and spyware ad-tracking. It's not like people disable it just to piss off developers, there are very good reasons to turn it off. While I agree that JS is part of the malvertising problem but this statement is blowing things to an exaggeration. Chrome, Firefox and Safari are equally responsible for the infection that occurs because of JS.

ataturk 8y ago

The peasants were getting too uppity with their free speech and free exchange of ideas and need to be smacked back down into the mud again.

cup-of-tea 8y ago

Reddit is terrible for discussion anyway. You can't have a discussion when people can "downvote" your post. Nothing of value has been lost here. I say that as someone who used reddit heavily until about a month ago when I kicked the addiction.

andybak 8y ago
Weirdly enough, I just downvoted you because I disagree. Not sure what to deduce from that.
- Karunamon 8y ago
  That people carry the toxic "make this post go away because I don't like it" mindset everywhere, even when they're explicitly asked not to? At this point, the only reason I still hold a (read only) Reddit account is so I can turn implicit censorship like thresholding and front page blocks off. HN, unlike reddit, still has value as a discussion medium, but I wish that "showdead" didn't make the posts unreadable.
  - krapp 8y ago
    >HN, unlike reddit, still has value as a discussion medium, but I wish that "showdead" didn't make the posts unreadable. Here you go: https://openuserjs.org/scripts/kennethrapp/Hacker_News_Text_Tweaks https://openuserjs.org/scripts/kennethrapp/Hacker_News_Text_...
    - _cereal 8y ago
      I was doing something similar: var downvoted = document.querySelectorAll('.comment > span:not(.c00)'); for(let i = 0, c = downvoted.length; i < c; i++) { downvoted[i].style.color = '#70798C'; }
- cup-of-tea 8y ago
  You can deduce that this is terrible for discussion too.

ra88it 8y ago

Can somebody please summarize what has changed? Maybe I don't use Reddit enough, but I just refreshed one of the subreddits that I like, and I can't find a difference. Possibly a caching issue?

krtkush 8y ago
Maybe this will help - http://new.reddit.com/ http://new.reddit.com/
- jvagner 8y ago
  is this supposed to be the new reddit? it's the same ol' reddit for me.
beejiu 8y ago
It is not yet widely available... https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/891stx/starting_today_more_people_will_have_access_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/891stx/start...

dgreensp 8y ago

From reading Reddit threads about the redesign: pretty much everyone hates it, especially Reddit’s most passionate users, who have been very articulate, consistent, and aligned about exactly what they don’t like, and Reddit just keeps brushing them off and dismissing their point of view. Maybe the purpose of the redesign is something like monetization? Or maybe they are just out of touch and by the time they really understood the community’s point of view, the decisions had been made, so the Reddit employees tasked with handling the community response can’t really say or do much.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
Of course it's about monetization. There's a difference between how Reddit-the-company (and its investors) view the site, and how its users do. It's like with cafés - visitors likes them quiet, and would very much enjoy having an electrical outlet near the table (to charge up phone) and even free Wi-Fi. But cafés aren't in business of making peoples' life better and more enjoyable, they're in business of selling coffee - so they'll actively remove electrical outlets, remove their Wi-Fi and make the place noiser, to increase turnover.
- pvg 8y ago
  Statistically, cafes don't do that.
- mprev 8y ago
  Genuinely interested to know where in the world the cafes are like that.
  - 1123581321 8y ago
    I’m in the Midwest. All of them do something to discourage staying all day. Most don’t have many seats with access to electrical. WiFi is restricted to a couple hours per session and not any faster than it needs to be. Most of them are echoey on purpose. It’s been several years since one tried to make bringing a computer at all difficult, though. I credit this to the re-emergence of Dunkin Donuts in our area, reducing the gain from competing for customers without much time for coffee.

dmix 8y ago

Purely from a user perspective I personally love the new Reddit design, I don't find it detracts much from the previous design at all. BUT I use a top-end Macbook Pro and I find the new design to be terribly slow and a performance hog, where it simply kills the UX. Once you open up 10 tabs (how I typically browse Reddit, by shift clicking each thread I want to read) I can hear my CPU fans kicking in. I had to tune Firefox to use 6 cores instead of 4 to get any decent performance. I may just end up going back to the old design :/ I'm not sure what computers/browsers Reddit's UI/UX team has been testing on, or if they've ever tried to open multiple pages at once, but this is a pretty blatant issue.

orky56 8y ago
Agreed. The design aesthetic actually works but the technical overhead in implementing is the problem. HN works so well because not only does it prioritize information density but it consumes less resources. The Reddit redesign pushes thumbnails, infinite scroll, and a useless right sidebar. Thumbnails waste space depending on the subreddit. Infinite scroll destroys the idea of a discrete "front page" which is core to Reddit being the front page of the Internet. In addition the infinite scroll makes no sense in the comments where on Mobile you can jump between top-level parent comments whereas on Desktop it's too busy loading child comments before you can get to the next top-level parent comment. The right sidebar is persistent and serves little purpose for a power user. The left sidebar which provides core navigation for a power user is useful when persistent but loads asynchronously with the middle, main content for it to be a consistent user experience.

Redoubts 8y ago

All I wanted to see is what the comments section now looks like. It's literally the only thing I'm there for, and preview photos never show it. (My biggest complaint with many HN app previews too) Of course, when I try the preview myself, I'm greeted with this: https://imgur.com/a/PvRhk https://imgur.com/a/PvRhk

crowbahr 8y ago
Your link is dead (on mobile at least).
- jml7c5 8y ago
  imgur appears to be having server difficulties of some sort; every image page on mobile currently gives "not found".
teddyfrozevelt 8y ago
Here's an example. https://imgur.com/a/RfioM https://imgur.com/a/RfioM
- shostack 8y ago
  I'm not seeing any significant differences there. Am I missing something obvious?

chaoticmass 8y ago

I miss being able to collapse comments by pressing the minus-sign button.

pknopf 8y ago
I'm not seeing that in the images I've seen so far, got a link? That would be a huge issue if they really did that. RES will probably step in and fix that.
- TheBeardKing 8y ago
  You have to click the vertical line next to the comment which is a ridiculous change. The minus/plus signs were intuitive, now it's a line that switches to a plus sign.
  - funkymike 8y ago
    I will disagree with this. Clicking on the bar has been part of the interface for some subreddits for a while now (though not many). I find it quite nice because if you are reading a deep thread and want to collapse to the next N levels up, then you don't have to carefully scroll up while watching the vertical bar to find the top comment in order to minimize that thread. This makes it very easy to skip to the next top-level comment when a topic has lots of comments.
    - chaoticmass 8y ago
      I think the way it works is nice, and what you described is a good use for it. It could use some better UI to make it easier to discover. It didn't occur to me to hover over or click it because I thought it was merely an indicator.
noxToken 8y ago
The long bar (beneath the upvote/downvote buttons) that shows what level the current comment is at collapses comments by clicking it. Very unintuitive, and I only found it by accident.

StellarTabi 8y ago

Two reasons why Reddit isn't "digg-ing" their own grave right now: 1. This change is much smaller and less destructive than digg's big change (although the long term effects can be just as destructive). 2. When Digg's redesign caused an exodus, Reddit was extremely well known as "that ugly digg clone" and "this digg link was on Reddit yesterday". Reddit doesn't have a well known established "number two" the way digg did. Raddleme is a leftist fringe site, voat is a racist fringe site, HN is a technology fringe site. Discord servers rely on Reddit for discoverability and member vetting. When this has been discussed before, I've never seen a viable candidate mentioned. Since the only people who can leave are people who only use fringe topics, Reddit won't be able to loose critical mass and then the fringers will have to come back. On the other hand, these changes appear to be a step into the Twitter/Instagram/facebook market. I'm curious if Reddit will be ready in time to take advantage of this upcoming Facebook exodus, also if there will even be an exodus.

2bitencryption 8y ago
You've painted a picture in my mind of Reddit as this massive blob connecting Discord, so-called "fringe communities", etc. It actually makes me appreciate Reddit a bit more -- it can be garbage, but it's also a bit of a centralized meeting place for so many smaller communities. Even if the bulk of those smaller communities doesn't take place on Reddit itself, they still flow through Reddit. Reddit is like the central bazaar of discoverability. The community you end up in might not live on Reddit, but in all likelihood, you discovered it through Reddit. So despite how terrible the big communities can be (which is not a Reddit-exclusive problem), I'm still glad it exists. Maybe an alternative is needed, but at the very least, I respect how Reddit has mostly retained this unique ability over the years.
- lbotos 8y ago
  Right! I've always appreciated that through one login, I got the equivalent of basically endless forums. Sure, I do miss the "tight-knit" nature of the forums of the late 90's, but reddit still gives value.
  - 8y ago

return1 8y ago

in other news how is their new profile design going? I keep adding /overview to mine and other profiles to be able to actually click on things . Why do they keep breaking functionality for no apparent reason? It's becoming a theme in many high-traffic websites (google adsense, analytics come to mind), it's as if new managers roll in and decide to piss all around their territory.

reiichiroh 8y ago

Is Fark still relevant? Their Cohen raid night thread was really long.

joemi 8y ago

I don't get it. What exactly is changing? From the screenshots from the reddit post about it, it looks.... like reddit. There's posts and the posts have upvote/downvote buttons, and there's a link to the comments that shows how many there are. Am I missing something? The OP article doesn't actually have any screenshots of changes, and I made it several paragraphs into the article still not understanding what is changing.

Izkata 8y ago
Not sure what reddit post you're referring to, but the images on Wired make it look like Facebook, not Reddit: https://www.wired.com/story/reddit-redesign/ https://www.wired.com/story/reddit-redesign/
- joemi 8y ago
  The reddit post I meant was this announcement from 10 or so days ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/891stx/starting_today_more_people_will_have_access_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/891stx/start... Thanks for the Wired link. That actually shows it. Yeah, I agree it looks quite facebook-like.
strifey 8y ago
You should be able to interact with the redesign directly at https://new.reddit.com https://new.reddit.com. The main complaints I've seen leveled at the redesign are: user profiles becoming more like Facebook profiles, the new chat functionality missing core features, and the newly created "best" ranking becoming the default.
- joemi 8y ago
  Not sure why, but that link just brings me to the normal homepage (as it's looked for years).
  - Fifer82 8y ago
    This confused me as well. See Izkata below your comment with a wired link to screenshots. But I see the old reddit as well.

digi_owl 8y ago

I find the new design noisy and distracting.

tluyben2 8y ago

The design reminds me too much of the native iOS Reddit app; fine for mobile, but I really do not like it for desktop. It is absolutely annoying to me.

nhangen 8y ago

How can an article about a re-design not actually show or compare the two designs?

Consultant32452 8y ago
https://www.wired.com/story/reddit-redesign/ https://www.wired.com/story/reddit-redesign/ This one at least has some screenshots of the new design. It feels like a Facebook clone to me. In particular it looks like they're flattening comments to be like FB rather than the thread? model that Reddit has today.
- relin 8y ago
  The only significant change I've noticed re: comments are how the nested chains collapse: instead of the intuitive [+] and [-] at the parent comment, there's a line that runs alongside the chain. Click that line and it collapses. It's not as easy to figure out on your own, but it's a significant improvement IMO.

adjunctme 8y ago

The redesign adds a bit of lag from all the javascript and extra elements. The old plain text + expanding comments + images/gifs is much smoother and includes everything that's needed

rabboRubble 8y ago

Reddit gave me the opportunity to try the new layout, and I lasted exactly 1 minute before reverting. The log in page was broken. I could see where to sign up for a new account, but could not see area to log in for existing users. The problem appeared to be one of resizing the old log in page correctly for the new layout. Regardless, not my issue as a stupid user to have to debug log in pages for a major website. If this sort of basic thing is missing in the redesign, they have big problems ahead.

sidkhanooja 8y ago

Reddit has its issues (brigading, trolling, execssive politics, 12-year old level "memes" on serious discussions), but it was a site you could visit without regret, and get lost in for hours. With the new redesign, it is Facebook - people share a link, you click the comments section, it shows you the top comments, you upvote the top comments (or the ones that agree with your view), and rinse and repeat till infinity, because you have infinite scroll. Which is not how I want the future Reddit to look like. Yes, it is good for advertisers. Yes, it is good for the the new wave of people who will arrive from Facebook. But it is utterly disheartening for Reddit to stray so far from what I viewed its core emphasis as - comments.