People keep telling me that more whitespace is better, and I keep no longer using websites that manage to eclipse some breaking point of too much whitespace. Clearly folks like you & myself are in the minority, but I don't get it.

Information density has been cratering over the past decade. Every redesign adds centimeters of whitespace around every element. I guess maybe it's touchscreen-motivated, but it sure does get tiresome on desktops.

I'm not even sure it improves touchscreen UX. Most touchscreen devices also have small screens, and I really hate viewing a mobile site that's 50% whitespace. If my screen is only 2x5 inches, I don't want any of it wasted with useless whitespace forcing me to zoom in to see anything. At this point, I'm starting to suspect that most designers actually don't have any clue what they are doing and the entire discipline is 90% following the latest trends.

> At this point, I'm starting to suspect that most designers actually don't have any clue what they are doing and the entire discipline is 90% following the latest trends.

You could say the same thing about the software developers who work on these websites.

You have different definition of "better" than does Twitter the business

What I mean is that I've been told by UI/UX experts that more whitespace is demonstrably better for users. I personally disagree for me, but I'll buy that I'm in the minority.

I don't mean to be pedantic here, but again, I think you have to further unpack how different parties interpret the word "better."

A UI/UX expert trying to drive new user engagement has a different definition of "better" than one trying to lengthen the average user-session length of "power users" above some usage threshold, for a random example. Or someone optimizing the new user sign-up flow.

If the goal is information density, then yes, whitespace can often be antithetical to that. If you are trying to make money with a website/app, increasing whitespace can be done for any of a myriad of reasons depending on business goals.

The idea of having one answer to "is whitespace better," and saying "experts say yes but I say no" is just such a myopic view of the world of interface design...

FWIW, you can still use TweetDeck[1] which has better density, customizable media size, and multi-column views. Previously I just used it for following live events but switched when the desktop site got mobile-ified. I also left feedback on the redesign.

I pray they keep around the alternatives like this for a dense display format on desktop.

[1] https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/

Tweetdeck is lacking the built-in translation tool that's present on Twitter, though. (I just spotted that because there's a Tweet in Brazilian at the top of my timeline)

Tweetdeck also has strictly chronological order, with the Home and Activity feeds kept separate.

>reduced the density of information by splashing whitespace everywhere on the page and navigation on it was way inferior.

For some reason i'm noticing this happen on a ton of different platforms and I seriously don't like it. I didn't get a bigger phone screen so that devs could waste more space

> I didn't get a bigger phone screen so that devs could waste more space

But devs have unilaterally decided that bigger screens and more powerful hardware is for them to hog and not for you to do efficient/more things in the same time.

I really hope the next big competitive move in browsers is per site saving of zooming options, and automated tools to remove whitespace padding.

I would honestly pay good money for a browser that removed 95% of whitespace on most sites.

>I really hope the next big competitive move in browsers is per site saving of zooming options

If you use Ctrl-+ to make the text larger, both FF and Chrome already remember how large you made it and use that size every time you visit that site from then on. What am I missing?

So like new reddit? And digg before it

I went to take a look to a sub reddit this week, after a few months of not going there and their new design has gotten way worse. I mean only a comment depth of only ONE?

Edit: I retested it on Firefox and at least there I had a decent comment depth.

If/when old.reddit.com stops working, I will overcome my Reddit addiction once and for all.

The native mobile apps are good which is Reddit’s only saving grace.

It’s so easy to design something for designs sake while ignoring the fundamental reasons people use the site - first and foremost the content, not the site looking visually good or some clever card pattern or other UI concept.

The whole reason Digg got blasted was how it lost information density and jumped on the ‘web 2.0’ bandwagon without improving the user experience.

The new reddit is significantly worse but I think it got redesigned with ad revenue as top priority

And if you click read more, it's only to read 1 more level. You have to keep clicking read more all the way down...

As far as I can tell, subreddits custom sidebars are missing. That's insane they ignored that.

You realize the site redesign isn't why Digg failed, right? At least not the literal UI part, anyway.

They formalized power users by giving them outsized control of content, and that is what drove people off the platform, not because the site was less pretty...

Uh, is that just a kneejerk feeling of "there is more wasted space" vs. the reality? Because I did get an initial kneejerk "shove this mobile the fuck out of my desktop" reaction when I tried the new design.

But I checked, and the tweet boxes themselves are a bit wider and a bit taller in the redesign. Even so, though, I can see just as many text-heavy tweets on screen with the new UI as with the old one because the UI itself wastes less screen real estate - and that's with the second-smallest, default font option. The same applies to tweets with heavy picture use: I can see a larger portion of a chopped-off tweet with the redesign than I can with the old desktop UI. With the smallest font size option, it's not even a contest and the redesign wins handily.

I don't like it either. How do I use the older version?

Set your user agent to `Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko`

Thank you for this! I wonder how long I'll be able to get away with this trick. The new twitter is terrible!

My twitter followers have confirmed that this works!

For me, deleting all cookies and logging back in works.

Neither this nor resetting one of the cookies to "off" (another method) works at all times. These are client-side overrides.

However, the user-agent spoofing works because it fakes IE11 on Windows 7 and it triggers a server-side override.

Setting the cookies

rweb_optin=off

dnt=1

and then navigating to https://twitter.com/i/directory then your user profile via the settings dropdown (next to [tweet]) seems to set you back to Legacy Twitter permanently without breaking your user agent.

Download a User-Agent switcher extension and set it to IE11. Downsides: You can't paste anything or watch videos/gifs.

Or better yet just put Twitter into its own container and patch up the UA with a native config override - https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/comments/ce1bea/reverting_b...

There used to be an opt-out, but the endpoint has been removed. I'm not aware of a way to go back at this point.

I had the luck of nopping out of the new version pretty quickly.

I did too but they kept changing it back.

What? How can you switch back to the old style?