We are the Starlink team, ask us anything

Re:We are the Starlink team, ask us anything by chmod775 on Saturday November 21, 2020 @12:39PM (#25171155)

Old reddit: loads instantly, pleasant to use.

New reddit: takes what feels like a minute to fully load while my laptop's fans are working overtime, and even once it's fully loaded it only shows a fraction of the comments. It is also necessary for them to use a tiny font so they can even fit anything on the screen, because they insist on having 60% of the screen as empty space. If you try to zoom into the page so you don't have to squint reading a tiny font, the experience becomes really horrible.

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Re:We are the Starlink team, ask us anything by TechBro8615 on Saturday November 21, 2020 @12:40PM (#25171170)

Beating a dead horse here, but new reddit is an embarrassment and the devs should be ashamed. It's awful. Do better.

If you do want to save your reddit addiction, and you've got iOS, I recommend the Apollo app. It's made by one guy and is 100x better than anything from Reddit itself.

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Re:We are the Starlink team, ask us anything by dewey on Saturday November 21, 2020 @01:00PM (#25171336)

> but new reddit is an embarrassment and the devs should be ashamed.

Do you really think the developers come up with the ideas to add a promotion banner for the app and other annoyances like that?

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Re:We are the Starlink team, ask us anything by bigbubba on Saturday November 21, 2020 @01:23PM (#25171574)

Bad annoying design may have been imposed on the devs by idiotic management, but that doesn't excuse their failure to even implement a shitty design well. There is no reason for it to perform like dog shit, no matter how ugly management demands they make it, yet it certainly does perform like dog shit. I honestly think any devs who worked on this should think twice before admitting it on their resume, because it really does reflect poorly on them.

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Re:We are the Starlink team, ask us anything by heavyset_go on Saturday November 21, 2020 @01:13PM (#25171469)

I've witnessed enough developers excitedly implement dark patterns and justify doing so with convoluted reasons like it improves engagement, it's good for the company, or that users will have an enhanced experience using the app, etc.

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Re:We are the Starlink team, ask us anything by spurgu on Saturday November 21, 2020 @01:40PM (#25171700)

> I recommend the Apollo app

Seconded. I used Apollo on iOS and now I use Boost on Android.

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Re:We are the Starlink team, ask us anything by WaxProlix on Saturday November 21, 2020 @01:00PM (#25171341)

If you use firefox, I've found redirector[1] to be super useful for this. It just converts URLs based on regexes, so all links to www.reddit get turned automatically into old.reddit. Some other fun uses too, and you don't have to go through the hassle of making your own extension boilerplate and such.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/

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Re:We are the Starlink team, ask us anything by candiddevmike on Saturday November 21, 2020 @01:28PM (#25171615)

Recently reddit started showing ads below the main post (above the comments), and it's almost comical how self aware they are.

"Our comment section takes almost a minute to load on mobile, how can we fix it?"

"Fix it? Seems like a perfect place to show ads!"

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Re:We are the Starlink team, ask us anything by dgritsko on Saturday November 21, 2020 @01:04PM (#25171390)

If you're on Chrome, I use the "Old Reddit Redirect" extension and it works great: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...

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Re:We are the Starlink team, ask us anything by spurgu on Saturday November 21, 2020 @01:42PM (#25171715)

It's available for Firefox as well: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...

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Re:We are the Starlink team, ask us anything by deeblering4 on Saturday November 21, 2020 @01:03PM (#25171370)

Fun fact — links to old.reddit still open in their mobile app. Have to manually open the url.

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Re:We are the Starlink team, ask us anything by woah on Saturday November 21, 2020 @01:19PM (#25171536)

My wife has tens of Reddit tabs open on a 5 year old bottom of the line 12” mini MacBook. HN users seem to have a lot of difficulty getting their computers to evaluate JavaScript normally.

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Re:We are the Starlink team, ask us anything by chmod775 on Saturday November 21, 2020 @01:33PM (#25171649)

Here's a video of myself doing a cold load of the new reddit in a private tab: https://streamable.com/3qk7rw

It takes a good minute before the site even becomes interactive. If I was logged in it would be even worse with it having to load the text editor thingy etc.

Don't mind me typing "what?" in the search bar there, I thought the close button would just dismiss the bar at the top. Also note that I had uBlock active which blocked some requests. I don't even want to know how long it would take without it.

And for comparison here's old reddit: https://streamable.com/z2ath6

Do you seriously want to defend this?

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Re:We are the Starlink team, ask us anything by lukevp on Saturday November 21, 2020 @01:55PM (#25171828)

The render looked fast. Perhaps the buttons have click events intercepted by an analytics library, and the async requests to load analytic libraries have to time out first? Can you network tools the load? I’m not saying the new site is fast or anything but it surely doesn’t take a minute to become interactive in most cases. Also are you using any dns based blocking like pi holes? Sometimes this can cause a network request to time out rather than instantly fail.

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Re:We are the Starlink team, ask us anything by chmod775 on Saturday November 21, 2020 @02:04PM (#25171895)

New reddit: https://streamable.com/o6wy2x

Old reddit: https://streamable.com/k99kuo

Looks like the reddit servers are just slow, but the old reddit doesn't need to load so many JS files to become usable. Even if it is only halfway loaded you can already interact with it.

Because of the amount of JS files that the new reddit needs, it's not even a contest.

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Re:We are the Starlink team, ask us anything by eska on Sunday November 22, 2020 @10:28AM (#25178166)

The render looked fast.

Gigabit internet, super computers in our pockets.. and people think this is "fast". This is why we can't have nice things..

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Re:We are the Starlink team, ask us anything by celsoazevedo on Saturday November 21, 2020 @01:27PM (#25171613)

Pages don't take 1 min to load on my 2019 16" Macbook Pro, but the experience is worse than old.reddit.com. For example, scrolling isn't smooth.

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Re:We are the Starlink team, ask us anything by superkuh on Saturday November 21, 2020 @01:07PM (#25171410)

You can't expand comments to look at replies on old.reddit without running their javascript. The comments with replies aren't visible on the i.reddit or the ceddit.com js interface. Compare this yourself by searching for "ipv4" on old vs i.

The only way to look at the contents of the replies to comments is to run reddit's arbitrary code. They've gone from document to application.

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