I know that Reddit admins read HN so please please do not kill off old.reddit.com. The redesign is absolute garbage.

Normally I don’t express such strong sentiment on HN but I’ve been a Reddit user for 10 years and I genuinely like the communities, but not enough to suffer through the new website.

I'm not sure how many of the current admins read HN. I just know some of us old guys hang around here.

And FWIW I agree with you. I've been a 15 year reddit user (and employee!) but if old.reddit goes away, I suspect my usage will go way down. The good news is that the current execs know this, because I have told them.

But at the end of the day they have to do what's best for the business, and I'm afraid those of us who like the old interface aren't large in number.

Edit to add: I don't think they'll kill off the old.reddit interface. I think they'll just stop updating and more and more things won't work there, like i.reddit.com.

> But at the end of the day they have to do what's best for the business, and I'm afraid those of us who like the old interface aren't large in number.

Do people actually prefer the new interface [on its merits], or do they just use it because it's the default?

One has to actively try to use Old. So, usage is being reduced by attrition (but attributed to design success). So, apathy looks like successful KPIs.

New UI sucks. Forgets settings, frequent load errors (which blank out an already loaded content) and hit-boxes for clickable items are small/overlap which increases page hits (cause you nav to the wrong page). It smacks of a hasty rewrite in $HOTFRAMEWORK.

I use reddit less because of it. And a result of that is I've also reduced spending to reddit.

Edit: reduced advertising spend, not award spend (which was already zero)

Thankfully there are some browser extensions to redirect automatically, provided you're comfortable using them:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...

Reddit Management Read This!! If one needs an extension you get around the way you annoy your userbase be prepared for the userbase to leave. You are actively pushing them away. Thanks for coming to my TED talk

> Thankfully there are some browser extensions to redirect automatically, provided you're comfortable using them:

And if you're not, greasemonkey scripts that do that aren't hard to write. If you know how to code in any language and have a little knowledge of HTML, you can probably bash one together in an hour, even if you don't know Javascript.

If you have an account, you can just flip a switch in the settings that disables the new UI.

False: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16865105

No, its true. I'm talking about the setting for your account, not the cookie one.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25308836

yeah except "just" doing this doesn't work always.

Exactly!

I just signed in, I'm in the new UI, there is nothing in my settings to turn it off.

In new reddit, there's an "Opt out of the redesign" option at the bottom of the "Account" section in new reddit. Turn that on.

There's also "Use new Reddit as my default experience" if your looking at the setting in old reddit, and you want to turn that off.

It's not there. Maybe that settings isn't on the Mobile UI (which goes back to my point about frustration and apathy being measured as "engagement")

I've set all of these, and none of them are sticky enough to work all the time.

Reddit user for 10+ years here, coder and designer for 20+. I know the site pretty well. If I can't figure it out, it's pretty fucked.

neither of these work with my browsers.

I think it looks better. Better fonts, better element spacing. It just does not perform very well and seems to have a lot of "state" issues or inconsistent design elements. Reading comments and browsing is slower than it used to be, but I prefer the new look to the old one.

The main feature that makes me use the new interface is the ability to collapse a thread from anywhere. It makes reading through comments much faster.

The main drawback is that it's really too heavy for what it does.

I don't understand the complains about the new design being image-heavy, or in general so much different from the old one. Once you set it (once) in "classic view", it's basically the same.

The complaint isn't that it's image-heavy, but javascript-heavy.

If I load an old/new reddit tab and go to 'about:performance', here's the comparison:

Old - Low impact - 22 MB memory usage - 4s to fully load on gigabit

New - Med impact - 70 MB memory usage - 10s to fully load on gigabit

Fully agreed, the performance is atrocious.

But a lot of other critics feel like the person haven't tried setting the view to "classic" or "compact".

> The main feature that makes me use the new interface is the ability to collapse a thread from anywhere. [...]

There is an add-on called "Reddit comment collapser" [0] that adds this to old reddit.

[0]: https://github.com/tom-james-watson/reddit-comment-collapser

Good UI, bad UX.

Yes, exactly!

The is a big generation of lots of pictures = good. I am sure it is better to those users. Think pinterest uses and Etsy shoppers.

Old reddit is more like BBS or old school message boards. People who grew up on this are a dying breed... probably also worth less to advertisers as we use adblock.

With any online community the group who consumes is far larger than the group who contributes, and I suspect with Reddit the people who are looking for community (especially those participating in mostly text-based subs) are few and far between compared to the huge number of users who browse big subs / the front page casually for memes, entertainment news, and cat pics.

The things which drive me nuts about the redesign are mostly things that drive me nuts because I comment far more than I post, and participate in a lot of discussion-heavy subs. Navigating comment trees is more difficult, lots more is hidden by default. Far fewer topics fit on a screen with the card-style layout that has huge previews. The old layout is information-dense, readable with minimal clicking to expand things, and fast.

But those are exactly the kind of changes that someone just browsing would be indifferent to, or even appreciate. The images/videos they're scrolling through are now big, front, and center. Many probably don't ever venture into the comments to begin with, of if they do, they're just seeing if the top comment is a good joke or not.

Wildly different use cases.

> But those are exactly the kind of changes that someone just browsing would be indifferent to, or even appreciate. The images/videos they're scrolling through are now big, front, and center. Many probably don't ever venture into the comments to begin with, of if they do, they're just seeing if the top comment is a good joke or not.

It really depends on the type of consumer. I don't post to reddit anymore, but I'm not looking to consume memes and videos. When I go there I'm almost always looking to consume a comment thread about something (say some weird feature of some motherboard), and the new UI is atrocious for that. I either switch to old or I don't bother with it.

I mean, you can just install RES...

What reddit should have done is to ship the RES UI with the old reddit interface.

old.reddit.com still have image thumbnails, and next to each thread you have an expand button allowing you to easily see the image in same size as the new reddit layout without leaving the page.

I definitely don’t think people preferring this layout are a dying breed, but I do agree that it’s easier for them to monetize the new layout.

Depends what you use reddit for. If you are just looking at news links then the thumbnails work best. On my ipad I only use reddit for searching for reference images/art so the big pictures work best for me.

I hate the new UI but I have to use it daily to get the WYSIWYG interface. Otherwise I have to convert my google doc to markdown before pasting it in. But I only use it for posting and then go back to 'old'. Most of my browsing happens from Apollo (iOS indie dev reddit client). That said I'd put effort into writing my own google->markdown->reddit-poster-script in a heartbeat if it meant killing off "new" and going back to "old".

The "reddit enhancement suite" add-on gives you a WYSIWYG editing UI on the old site.

The new interface is good for the pornography subreddits.

And that's really all that's going on at Reddit these days; let's be honest. It's a thin veneer over the world's largest porn portal.

I have a strong feeling that at some point Reddit is going to have internal struggles with this ala Tumblr. Their consistent amendments to what you can or can post, as well as culture policing in various subreddits is bound to create additional controversies.

>or do they just use it because it's the default?

Yes. My wife started browsing reddit only after the redesign. She had no interest the in the old interface. The new design really has a familiar look/feel for new users accustom to most common mainstream social media designs.

The only thing the new interface is better for is for scrolling through image-heavy subreddits. It's a lot better for that use case.

The old interface is a lot better for discussion.

Unfortunately, any subreddit that does not ban memes/low-effort media gets flooded in memes/low-effort media, so scrolling through images is how most people use reddit.

How much of this do you think is due to the redesign itself versus bad FE engineering decisions? Redesign aside, I find the new reddit often really broken from a FE architecture POV.

Facebook, for instance, has some similar design patterns, but generally the interface seems really well built. New reddit just breaks in all kinds of odd ways which kills the UX.

From the article:

>Reddit Inc. said it averaged 52 million daily active users in October, up 44% from the same month a year earlier

The redesign launched in 2018, so I'd say yes, the general public greatly prefers the redesign if they had almost 50% growth last year. Could there be other factors? Sure. But Occam's razor is a solid argument in this context imo.

Is it? You've taken two facts (1. Interface redesign and 2. 50% growth last year) and assigned causation to the first. In my persepctive, reddit has been digging into the cultural psyche for a long time and has been growing steadily. The news uses it to replace local journalism now. Anecdotally, a lot of people I know are now talking about things they saw on reddit (I've been a user for ~10 years). I think the interface design is not relevant to growth. If anything, it probably decreases it, although I think the type of users they are attracting now don't care as much as people who post on HN do.

The simplest argument is that the default is usually... defaulted to. And the default is the redesign -- you have to actively go out of your way to revert to the old design; so the simplest takeaway is that the general public greatly prefers doing nothing, than reverting the redesign.

Doing nothing may be for the reason that they prefer the redesign, but also numerous other reasons apply (including that they don't dislike it enough, or some key new feature, etc).

Did you know that tax revenue almost always increases after a tax cut? Did you also know that tax revenue almost always increases after a tax increase? Aren’t statistics cool?

October was also an election month, so I would assume that more people were checking in to read the screaming matches.

Zoomers find it relatable since it’s another facebook/instagram/twitter feed.

Downed but it’s true. Much easier to see the same recycled memes in a row if it’s optimized for scrolling through images over discussion

> Edit to add: I don't think they'll kill off the old.reddit interface. I think they'll just stop updating and more and more things won't work there, like i.reddit.com.

I've noticed this drift is already happening. It's like there are two reddits. It can be really confusing as a moderator when you are looking at a different website from your users. Eg new sidebar and the old sidebar.

>I'm not sure how many of the current admins read HN

there are DOZENS of us

Go home, you're drunk(en)!

I've been telling him this for years.

I've even tried malort. He won't listen.

Even just the direction and focus revealed by Reddit's constant pressuring toward the new design and behaviour, along with the failure to address long-standing architectural flaws in the site which render it useless for substantive discussion drove me off years ago:

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/8rq08y/i_wont_...

Yes, I (very occasionally) post. But it's absolutely in the spirit of "this is a horrible experience and I would prefer any viable alternative". Other options, even if (or perhaps because they are) much smaller, are emerging and preferable.

old interface was just way more information dense. That's my main complaint with new UI. Even with "compact" mode on the new UI, it's not as dense as the old one.

I agree completely. We intentionally designed the old interface to be information dense. When we made it slightly less dense, there was such a strong pushback that we had to add an option to go back to the more dense mode.

But there are a lot of users who don't care. And maintaining two interfaces is double the work of maintaining one, because you have test everything twice. And it's actually geometric, not double, because you have to test every new option combination in both interfaces.

The difference in information density really isn't that large. Here's a comparison of the current top posts (and not even using the compact view): https://imgur.com/a/WsI3pBj

According to your screenshots:

- Height of post list with 8 posts, redesign: 855 px

- Height of post list with 8 posts, old: 691 px

- Height of thread with 7.5 comments, redesign: 1008 px

- Height of thread with 11 posts, old: 1054 px

That's ~24% more space taken in the post list, and 40% (!) more space taken for the comment thread.

I disagree. At least, if I load www.reddit.com/r/programming and old.reddit.com/r/programming, it's immediately apparent that new UI is much less dense:

https://i.imgur.com/2NPpxyw

> But at the end of the day they have to do what's best for the business

Why? Why is this accepted in our society? Why do we have to overdo everything we do? To keep expanding in every way until we're met with opposition (of whatever form)? It is our nature as a dynamical system I guess. But why can't we just relax and chill for a change? Why do we work our lives away for things that do not matter?

Because they are a for profit business. As opposed to HN, which has a much more user friendly interface because this is not a for profit site.

> But at the end of the day they have to do what's best for the business

Why is an inferior UI good for any business? Unless it's about some dark patterns?

To the majority of users it is a superior interface.

Source? If you made old.reddit.com the default layout, how many users do you think would go through the same trouble to use the new.reddit.com layout?

No they wouldn’t seek out the new interface. They just bounce.

When they first launched the new interface some new users got the new one and some new users got the old one. The bounce rate for the new one was lower and the signup rate was higher.

I think this thread should be an important lesson for HN devs:

You are not normal. Even the fact that you are likely consuming this website on a computer with its own keyboard, is not as common as it might seem if you surround yourself with other software developers. What you want, and what the majority wants are not the same thing.

How was this measured? Because with the new layout then it’s incredibly easy to accidentally exit a thread (without leaving the site) and you have various dark patterns to force users to sign-up. For instance, whenever I open a reddit link through from a google search then I’m unable to view all comments without signing up, and I accidentally close the thread all the time. I see the exact same thing happen when a twitch streamer I follow visit reddit at the start of every stream (despite visiting reddit every single day using the new layout then he keep accidentally closing threads and getting lost on the subreddit page).

I wouldn’t be surprised if me reading a thread with all its 200 comments on the old version and then leaving the site is considered bouncing, whereas me reading a thread (or rather the 20 comments on the thread you make available) and then accidentally closing the thread to return to the subreddit on the new version is considered successful retention.

You were asked for a source though. You've just expanded on your point but without a source.

As it happens I am an old.reddit.com dinosaur that finds your argument plausible, but I'm interested to see the data as well.

jedberg is the former chief architect and operations manager of reddit, fyi.

I'm guilty of not clicking through to the profile page of everyone I reply to

I wouldn't say that, and my comment wasn't an accusation.

If you want to be guilty of something, I'd say it was approaching the conversation adversarially rather than charitably. "You were asked for a source" treats the other commenter as an inattentive schoolboy, and coming from a place of curiosity with a question like "But how do you know that's actually what happens?" might have done the job just as well.

just like the majority of americans voted for trump

That is factually incorrect, as he had millions less than each of his opponents:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidentia...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia...

And because half of the population didn't vote.

I forgot the /s.

If old.reddit is killed off I might have to resort to browsing through the rtv terminal client.. though this likely would be deprecated as well

Considering the original developer walked away from it in June 2019, I can see it being an issue.

https://github.com/michael-lazar/rtv/issues/696

The forks from it however keep it living for now.

Im waiting for the day when Reddit kills the version 1 API.

> I'm afraid those of us who like the old interface aren't large in number.

Count me among them! I do not like the new redesign at all.

How/can we (the users who like old.) help?

Presumably the best thing you can do is use it, to boost the metrics, and click through more adverts you see. Make it valuable for them

Seriously... like, do they want to consider open up some of the support for that UI to external contributions?

It _was_ open source, though they stopped updating the open source version a few years ago.

Here's the archived repository: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit

As a devoted i.reddit.com user, it's by far my favorite way to enjoy the site, but it's getting harder to use every year as the main site adds more features and gates that don't work in the i. site. The most annoying part of the new site is the embedded video player and there's no way around it right now.

Not even just the redesign. It's the constant forcing you to download the app, the broken amp layout (which is really just being used to trick google into showing them first). The site is just extremely hostile now if you don't use the app or sign in.

The amp stuff is beyond annoying. I click on "view more comments" from an amp page and it redirects me to a non amp page and then i have to click on view more comments again.

Yesterday I tried to visit https://reddit.com/r/gaming and received an infinite loading indicator through multiple refreshes until I gave up. It felt like loadshedding where they were encountering an issue and decided to drop my traffic, which is not a good UX.

>I know that Reddit admins read HN so please please do not kill off old.reddit.com. The redesign is absolute garbage.

People have ben telling them this for years. They know and do not give a shit or at the very least they are powerless to do anything. The redesign is so bad I'll stop using reddit completely if they ever kill the old domain. Its almost like they intentionally tried to make the least functional website possible.

What is the worst trash in the world is their mobile web ui. Impossible to search in Google and quickly browse results especially if I want to do it in incognito.

I hate that they show so much contempt for their users they deliberately broke many basic features (as in they used to work, then they removed them) on mobile web, especially when logged out, to force you onto their app.

Gods but it's shit on mobile!

It only shows about 2 comments by default, and it's difficult to see them all (and often impossible to see them all at once), because you've got to keep clicking at the end of threads to see more, with each click triggering a full page reload.

And recently you can't even do that without logging in - as soon as you hit "More replies" a login prompt appears.

That’s my biggest gripe as well. When opening a reddit thread from google I have to replace ‘www’ with ‘old’ in order to see all the comments, it’s truly absurd.

The only explanation I can think of for this behavior is sheer incompetence.

Its intentional. Even with the redesign it used to be somewhat usable on mobile but they make it worse every update to push you on to the app.

Yeah I would be fine using the app, but it still disables possibility to quickly search site:reddit.com some topic I want to research and go through mostly comments. Then back to search, go on and so on. This is how I browse Reddit a lot of the time anyway.

Maybe I am using wrong app for that though. I am using Relay right now. And it doesn't allow me yo select comments properly coming from Google search. I think I tried Reddit's official app and it didn't work very well too + the context switch of going from chrome to an app.

But yeah I get that they do it intentionally...

If I could give HN platinum to you I would give it. It is a strong "SECONDED".

Removing Old reddit might be the single biggest negative change that can occur to my daily internet life.

> The redesign is absolute garbage.

It really is unusually heavy; even for a "modern" web-page.

I legit tried to use the new reddit the other day to see if I could "get with the times". It's horrific. It's noisy and gets in the way. I couldn't last more than a day or two.

Huh, there's no difference for me. How do you tell if you're using the redesigned UI or not?

[edit] If I open reddit in incognito then I can see the redesign, otherwise I can't. Maybe I opted out of the redesign at some point? Can't see anything about it in settings though

It would be pretty ironic to see Reddit follow in Digg's footsteps and kill itself with their new redesign

I've been an everyday compulsive reddit user for 12 years. The day they kill old.reddit.com is the day I stop using reddit forever.

Funny thing. When you said this I wondered if it would be a good way to stop using Reddit. Then I remembered like generations ago I tried to stop using some website by making it hard to visit. Blocked it in the hosts file and everything.

One day I stopped what I was doing and looked at what it was. I was on the website I'd blocked. The way I'd done it was I'd forwarded the Xserver from a dedicated server I was running elsewhere and was browsing on a remote Konqueror or Epiphany or some shit.

It taught me something interesting about my Akrasia - the problem isn't a lack of focus on a specific task. It was a task choice problem and a long-term incentive awareness problem. I wasn't even aware I'd done all of these things to access the site I'd blocked. I'd auto-piloted through them. Fascinating.

That is interesting!

Same, and I feel like it's inevitable at some point. Either some day someone will do the math and determine they can get a lot more ad revenue if they force everyone to use the new design, or they'll decide the cost of maintaining two versions of the site's frontend is too high.

Is there much to maintain on old.reddit.com?

It lacks all the features that make new Reddit annoying and slow, and it doesn't need to gain any new ones.

It's basically a graphical version of the core api, which is solid.

The cost is probably relatively low (but not negligible). I could imagine a future though where they decide to make some big breaking changes to the API, and decide it's not worth updating the old site.

I started browsing the site on mobile without the extension on the new site because it makes Reddit's attempts to manipulate me more obvious and more annoying.

I have pledged this to myself, to the extent that I've been laying out plans to leave the subreddits I moderate.

Same. The new interface is an abomination.

I highly doubt that.

Exact same thing happened with digg.com

Yeah, the new Reddit design is such a step back in terms of both performance and user experience. It was probably optimized in some way to increase engagement, but it's just really bad.

On mobile I use Relay, which is really good.

Probably unpopular opinion on HN: but I really prefer the new design. finally something that doesn't scream "we have a sub-culture" but rather welcomes new users.

The new design literally doesn't work!

Trying to follow a link is now all but impossible - clicking a link takes me to the comments page. Not what I want. But on that page, the link that I expect to see at the top of the page doesn't load! So I shrug and go back to the index page, and now the link or image or whatever is attached to the post is gone from _that_ page too. Reloading the page doesn't fix it. So for that particular link or image, it's now impossible to even see it let alone have any hope of ever viewing the image or following the link...

And I've given up trying to write comments or upvote/downvote anything because usually tapping the arrows or whatever just redirects me to a page saying you've signed out, we'll sign you back in... followed by .... a reload where I'm back into the same state where I appear to be logged in but any interaction redirects me back to this page ....

The new design is complete garbage and I cannot understand how it has been allowed to get this bad.

I think you need to differentiate between the "design" and the "experience". The design itself is good e.g. the wireframes of the website. The actual engineering behind the design is not good.

I would disagree there, I think both the design and implementation are bad.

I think you have bigger problems if you can't figure out how to navigate to the article/link/image source of a reddit post.

What is it about the old design that screams "we have a sub-culture" to you? For me, it's just a clean, simple, fast interface.

sticking to a very old design, and refusing to update and adapt to current design patterns and styles while everything about technology/devices and how we use them changes daily: feels like a sub-culture

Well they tried to use "current design patterns and styles" for the redesign, and it led to a bloated, slow, bad user experience. That's either an indictment of modern web patterns or just a bad implementation of them. I think it's a bit of both.

The actual visual design of the new site is better. Its just functionally crap and loaded with spyware/adverts.

> it led to a bloated, slow, bad user experience

are you sure that this isn't mostly true for HN crowd? I have seen more and more people participate in reddit recently.

I'm pretty sure people visit Reddit for the content, not because they particularly enjoy the hoops Reddit makes them jump through before finally getting to said content.

Reddit has a problem: they are a subculture. Or rather, they’re a network of subcultures. The day they try to force everyone to go mainstream is the day they die. Or at best, the day they become yet another Facebook.

The subculture will move on and find a new place to congregate. But it will forever be pursued by the mainstream. This is Eternal September.

Do you get that vibe from Craigslist?

The only reason why I use Craigslist is for the network effect. The site is garbage but I haven't found a sufficient alternative.

Craigslist is utilitarian and ugly like a phone book. Reddit is a social media network, which strikes me as different.

Having said that, I used Reddit more like a phone book than a social media network, so the redesign is lost on me.

somewhat, but cragslist is way too simple and very well-known to keep new users away.

I think the main issues people take with the new design is not so much the aesthetics but more the atrocious performance and weird SPA bugs.

I find the new design horrendous if you're not signed in to an account. There's so many dark-patterns, it makes the site completely unusable. I suppose there's some metrics they optimize for that drove those decisions.

When logged in, the new design is fine I think. There's a couple minor annoyances, but nothing that makes we want to go and use old.

> I suppose there's some metrics they optimize for that drove those decisions

It's just the work of bean counters optimising metrics that are visible to them. We're lucky an API exists and quality third-party clients can still be built but I assume they'll shut this off one day too.

donno dude.

I want to absorb all the comments in least ammount of time.

The new design looks like it focus more on content than people commenting. I mean reddit is about all the juicy comments, no?

> but rather welcomes new users

Yes, from 9gag. And to be fair I think the 9gag interface is better than the newer Reddit one.

Sure, if you want to sell generic ads (even if "personalized" with all the cookies you have) with low conversion that's the way to go.

Yeah kill off the only good part of reddit and turn it into a TikTok clone. Of course I have no doubt most reddit leadership has this as goal #1.

yeah but it doesn't work though.

if you have replied multiple times in one thread, you can't reliably load the paginated history of the thread.

3rd party apps work better

I'm ok with the new design/look. It's the performance I have a problem with. It's so slow.

The world needs more subcultures, though.

I use old.reddit.com on mobile, after turning off automatic font scaling in my browser. My eyesight is good enough to read the small text and it's still a better experience than the mobile site.

Worth keeping an eye on Teddit development [1] [2], an alternative, open-source/self-hostable/JS-free interface similar to Invidious/YouTube, Bibliogram/Instagram, and Nitter/Twitter. Login functionality isn’t supported yet but apparently on the roadmap.

[1] https://codeberg.org/teddit/teddit [2] https://teddit.net

That is amazing. I've just replaced the bookmarks I had after 15 seconds. The UI is better on mobile than all reddit incarnations.

The problem is that the medium is the message, and while you might be using old.reddit.com, most of the other people posting are using the new site. That has lowered the quality of discourse.

I first noticed this when people on hobby reddits started asking FAQs that had already been answered in the sidebar – the new design now hid the sidebar from users. So, subreddits where newbies typically got answers before they had to post basic questions, have devolved into people asking the same basic questions over and over again.

I've also noticed more threads with a bunch of top level comments saying exactly the same thing-- eventually, it occurred to me that it's because users in the new interface can't easily see all the existing comments or search them to see if what they're about to post is already there. It was a jarring realization.

The admins can put messages and links in the new sidebar though.

There is no visible sidebar on the modern mobile interface, though.

Ah yes, not on mobile. Reddit on mobile is only bearable using a third-party app.

Redditisfun is the only thing that has kept me on there (and I'm still pissed somebody stole my username).

I haven't accessed the desktop site in years, because it defaults to the new reddit.

It smacks of when /. changed their layout; there was a huge to-do and users lost their mind. I haven't been back there in, what, 9 years?

I guess, the moral of this story is, what is the reddit replacement? Because so far I have found nothing that compares.

> what is the reddit replacement?

I keep looking and monitoring promising replacements but haven't found one yet. I do think the ultimate way forward is going to be some kind of federated system where each "subreddit" is hosted individually and there are aggregators which glue them together, either as a hosted portal or as individual apps.

One of the things that has been killing me is that small interesting subreddits keep getting either killed for not being actively moderated enough or invaded by people who have their own goals. It's very frustrating and it really hurts the longterm knowledge that gets generated in these subreddits.

If anyone is working in this space, please drop me a line.

I'm working on something that may interest you. It's still a work-in-progress, but we have communities (subreddits), publications/articles (medium), galleries, and normal user feeds. Emphasis on anonymity, custom domains, matrix integration, eventual federation.

https://gurlic.com

https://gurlic.com/programming

https://gurlic.com/classics (https://classics.wtf)

https://gurlic.com/art (https://gurlic.art)

I like it, maybe because it's small and not full of garbage, but I also like the simple layout.

That being said, your e-mail field doesn't generate an e-mail to sign up, from what I can tell.

I love RIF as well. It's so simple and straightforward but with all the features of the website. It seems be well down the list of Android app in popularity though, I don't know why.

People like overly fancy modern looking apps. RIF and other open source reddit apps like Diode (available on F-Droid) basically provide the same minimal and working experience old.reddit provides.

There is no replacement, the tight-knit community is just gone. When slashdot made beta permanent some users tried to spin off the old design (soylentnews is the only one I remember now) but it never caught on.

It's like when a favorite local family owned burger joint shuts down and is replaced by a McDonalds. It serves many more people but the core community and values are gone.

> (soylentnews is the only one I remember now)

Pipedot was another. I think there was a third attempt, but I can't remember its name (or even be sure it existed).

> I haven't accessed the desktop site in years, because it defaults to the new reddit

If you're logged in you can set it to always default to the old design. I do that, and disable all custom stylesheets, which is basically a necessity to make the site useable again.

Sync Pro for me, but I'm concerned for the upcoming major version that changes its UI

I suppose they will slow-boil old.reddit.com until it's dead. Things like gradually adding unwanted changes from the redesign, removing or not supporting features (is there a way to upload images to i.redd.it from it?), or causing random delays or errors. Something like the dark patterns used to force visitors using mobile devices into installing the app.

We need a distributed or federated reddit, and give it power. Lemmy ( https://lemmy.ml/ ) seems to be going into the right path.

I was wondering why no one mentioned this. I've bookmarked it to play with more but it seems to address lots of the issues here, at least at first blush.

I've been trying to use the redesign several times, and still haven't figured out how to perform a search in the current subreddit. In old reddit there's just a checkbox for that.

It's absurd but you have to first perform a search while in r/yoursubreddit and then on the results page click "Show results from r/yoursubreddit"

You run the search, and at the top of the search results there is a link that says 'limit to /r/subreddit'.

Great UX xD

Wasn’t a bad redesign how Digg ultimately lost to Reddit?

Digg also touched the ranking algorithm and external submission rules at the same time, which ended up prioritising "partner" content over user content. This was much more controversial than the UI aspect of Digg's redesign.

If old.reddit.com goes, so will I. I've already stopped using Reddit altogether on mobile devices because of being tricked into loading the redesign, and because of the nagging. It's really no skin off my back to stop using a site that's slow and has a bad user experience.

I use Slide for Reddit [0]. Some things don't work in the app like Reddit videos, but I get around that by opening those links in a separate browser. Other than that, I've enjoyed how I've set it up [1]; it's got the link's domain name displayed before clicking the link, and if you're signed in, you can save and vote on posts with one click.

What have you used and enjoyed?

[0]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=me.ccrama.redd...

[1]: https://imgur.com/a/9XhE3By

I use BaconReader Premium [0] and it does almost everything I want out of Reddit, including Reddit videos.

[0]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.onelouder....

I use i.Reddit.com, much better

I agree that it's better than the new mobile web, but its design still feels super clunky and dated.

I remember a certain version of mobile web in 2017/2018 that worked GREAT. But then reddit decided to mess it all up by forcing mobile web users to use their (bloated and ad-filled) app and making it hard to access certain communities and read more than 2 layers of child comments.

I guess that's what relentless pursuit of advertising money/monetization targets over actually listening to the community (that made the product what it is now in the first place) does to a company.

As someone who has had a luxurious career based on adding full-bleed photography to the websites of companies with more money than sense, all I can say the look of i.reddit.com is just beautifully minimal. UX is about more than intuitive controls, it's about speed and comfort and I can use that site with so quickly and smoothly. The color palette doesn't even register in my head anymore. It's also a somewhat forgotten rule that designing for occasional is very different than for habitual use. Habitual users don't need training wheels, they need shortcuts.

I even use a browser extension to make sure that 100% of the time old.reddit.com is being shown, even when linked from another site or when I have deleted my cookies.

Would that be Old Reddit Redirect?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...

Agreed. Also just wanted to note I have a smirk on my face every day as I open firefox and go "news.", enter, ctrl+t, "old." enter

Absolutely. I greatly enjoy Reddit but am unable to use the new interface.

If they kill old.reddit.com there will be a mass migration to HN.

DIGG-->reddit-->HN

Subreddits are the thing though and there's no way the next mass migration is back to a single page.

if they do they probably open up the market to competitors for that subsegment of users

As others have said, it being called old.reddit means it will get killed. And it's already happening, new features either don't work at all or are broken, existing features are rotting apart, it's definitely not a priority.

The future is in communities operating their own site and running it the way they want. Politics aside, thedonald.win is a great example. The interface is way better and less buggy, and the community is cohesive.

If you look at reddit facebook twitter instagram, their design paradigm is not to facilitate discussion, but to break it apart into a bunch of ad-separated pieces and then stash it away, never to be findable again. Almost like what people say about qwerty layout.