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