Reddit's new UI is still hilariously terrible. The day they remove old.reddit.com is the day I stop using the site.

Who the hell thinks what I want when I click on an article is to bring it into a related article feed with 1.5 comments showing? If I accidentally click outside of the article area the whole thing vanishes with no way to get back where I was. I had thought these issues would be obvious and they would clean it up, but here we are months later and it is still broken from a UX standpoint.

I guess all of the devs moved over to work on their bespoke media player? You know, the one that barely works half of the time.

Someone posted on HN within the last week that Reddit hired some product managers who pushed a lot of these dark patterns/anti-user features to increase conversions towards account signups and app installs. Nobody thinks you actually like all that broken shit. Though I fail to understand the business reason for hosting/serving videos through a custom media player.

Reddit doesn’t want you to lurk without an account or browse on mobile on a browser. They make less money that way. Eventually I am sure they will break old.reddit.com once they think they no longer need the holdouts (who I suspect are a lot of power users).

As someone who has used Reddit for probably 10 years at this point, it makes me sad that some place that I at times legitimately felt like a “member of a community” would break my use case like this (I have accounts but on mobile I sometimes just want to lurk/browse without logging in). But it’s their website and they can do what they want with it. Our only recourse is to complain and try alternatives.

The video player bit seems fairly straightforward if you imagine a monetization strategy involving video ads (which tend to have higher CPMs).

Likewise, the "1 comment displayed" thing seems like a "please consume the media and move on" effort potentially. Remember, they don't make money from you reading comments. They make money from you going back to other surfaces where ads are displayed. Namely your feed or another post.

They're already breaking old.reddit.com. The image gallery viewing UI is hilariously bad on old, and recently I've had a lot of post links having the wrong href (usually to the page you're on or the same as the Next link at the bottom of the screen).

Oddly enough, the video player on old still works way better than the one on new.

Agreed about old.reddit.com. I feel pretty old saying this, but I really miss the days of straightforward web design. Everything now is so chaotic that I'm never really sure what clicking anything will do. It feels like design for the sake of design, not for the sake of the users.

I'm still shocked Craigslist has survived, virtually unchanged, since 1996.

It's may not be the cleanest interface, but it's a nice reminder of the more utilitarian days.

IMHO Craigslist is a good example of a design that nailed it right from the start and avoided the temptation to redesign year after year. Choose a region, choose the category, enter your search and bam, there are your listings. It's all bookmarkable too. What a great website.

You're not wrong but they could really afford to improve the user experience without 'ruining the design'. Unless something's changed from what I remember

- the categories page is cluttered.

- results page is messy and annoying to parse.

- the site only supports plaintext posts and has an annoying POSTing funnel.

I haven't looked but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a QoL extension made to cover all the holes left by the 'nailed design'. It's good but not great, as no web design lasts forever.

It's still privately owned and the owners actively refuse to "modernize" it AFAIK.

Why would they? It works.

Reddit's aggressive push to login , to use app, and the new web UI : together, these nudged me away from reddit and helped me stop my huge timesucking & mindless reddit habit. Happy ending. Thanks reddit !

What is really boggling is people paying to 'gild' posts, which is very profitable, while the company also employs all these dark patterns / user tracking / data selling

The new Reddit on desktop is quite bearable if you do 3 things:

- Be logged in.

- Set the view to "classic".

- Always open threads into a new tab. Never just do a left click to open them, use a middle click.

Just commenting to say that there are third-party reddit apps that are pretty good. Boost for Android is the only way I browse reddit anymore.

The back button is broken, too. Was it that hard to bring you back to the comment you were reading when you clicked the link? Guess so.

And their video player is utterly fucked. The video will load and reload about 3 times before it becomes playable, on the desktop. On the mobile site, usually the video freezes and the audio track plays. Gifs will overflow and play under the UI, and that's not been fixed for over a couple of years.

And now it renders Gifs inside replies and every single fucking thread has the "omg gifs!" thread voted to the top.

The modern Reddit UI is a complete and utter tragedy of design and engineering. But it serves ads, so who cares.

They only redesigned it so that they could make ads first-class.

In fairness, I see that on a lot of sites now and I almost want to say that's something browsers should be fixing. "Back" should take me to the exact page state, almost as if I had been following every page in a new tab (which is what they recommend now if you want to preserve where you were). It should be instant. But on most sites it hasn't been for a while.

> which is what they recommend now if you want to preserve where you were

And which becomes more difficult when sites break middle-clicking and other shortcuts to open links in new tabs, or when the "links" ain't actually links but just something on which they tack on an onClick() and run a bunch of JS to reinvent the concept of a link.

Yes! I made a post about that just recently on Facebook, about how annoying that is. And I was told the workaround was to use the browser’s “duplicate tab” feature before opening one. But that doesn’t help either: it just loads the current url in a new tab, which loses page state.

What we need is something that locally duplicates the page state into another tab. But then, sites already break that by a) firing off requests that can be dangerous to duplicate (not idempotent) and b) synchronizing state across tabs (argh!) so you can’t have different state in different tabs for the same domain (or just session, idk).

Facebook is notorious about that last bit and won’t let you eg have one tab with your feed best visible and another with a conversation hovering over it all.

Not broken.. working just as intended unfortunately. It is a lot harder to remove that functionality entirely to force users to stay on a signup modal.

It's gotten to the point where if I saw "Software Engineer - Reddit" on a candidate's resume, I would seriously question this person's chops, even if it's just one small signal in an otherwise great background. How did this site's quality to get so poor? Why couldn't you do anything about it? It's so bad that you have to believe it was deliberately made bad.

It is absolutely deliberately made that way!

There was a Reddit tech lead on YC News a day or two ago who straight up admitted that they do this on purpose to drive up DAU/MAU. He also said that his options are up, so fuck you.

And maybe that poor soul agrees with you and that's why they left? Cause management wanted X and they opposed X?

What is worse, is that even though I installed the official app to squelch this nonsense (the Fuck You Pattern is effective) the mobile site still prompts with "Open in the Reddit App".

When I click it my iPhone opens the App Store. The App Store then has a big blue "Open" button to launch the app, but of course all context is lost and opening from there brings you to your Reddit front page.

I'll one up this - I use an alternative, unofficial app for reddit. Until recently the 'open' button on their website would take me into that specific app - as you would expect - but since last week or so it's started sending me to the Google Play store page for the official app instead.

Reddit's app registers itself as a uri handler for reddit links but (thanks to google) AMP or iframe results don't prompt the actual system uri handler that would take you to the app.

Oh wow, is this what happens when multiple Fuck You Patterns collide?

I think you just encountered the clusterfuck pattern

"Don't cross the streams."

Whoa, is that what this is? I’ve been wondering for quite some time why in the world Reddit hasn’t figured out how to make the “open in the app” links actually work. It’s bonkers that they spend so much effort making the web site push you to the app, but don’t even provide a working way to open a piece of content in the app.

Isn't that a failure of the reddit devs rather than of Google? They could have the app register for amp.reddit.com links.

So much this. Now that I know it works this way, I just try to ignore any promising-looking search results from any of the sites that do this, because I don’t feel like trying to search for the same thing in their app because they broke their mobile site and broke the “open in app” by assuming I don’t already have it.

I use Baconreader on Android and its great. I've heard loads of great things about unofficial reddit apps and nothing good about the official app.

Use Apollo or (better) quit reddit, IMHO.

What browser are you using on your phone?

Safari, nothing fancy.

I don't have a Reddit account, and every time I use it I am reminded why. Their patterns have taken me from "I should create an account one of these days" to "there is nothing on the Internet that I need to see so badly that I would let Reddit see anymore about me than my IP address." It's almost as if they are taunting users: "give up and create an account, or go home. Oh, and use the fucking mobile app while you're at it, or the suffering will continue."

OTOH, once I get there, a lot of Reddit content makes me wonder why I bothered. :-)

Sadly, it's a humongous amalgamation of forums that has taken all the users from niche forums I used to frequent.

Reddit is diverse, there still are some good corners here and there. You need to know where to look.

Appending "reddit" to google searches still produce better results than the alternative of 100% autogenerated listicles. For now, at least.

For what it's worth, google search understands the /r/ part of the URL as well, e.g. site:reddit.com/r/linux . It still gets the time of posting completely wrong, though...

To make this more ergonomic, you can add the URL as a search engine with a keyword, e.g.

URL: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site:reddit.com+%s

Keyword: red

In Firefox you most likely want to use a bookmark with a keyword instead of their new search engine crap.

Use the old interface available at old.reddit.com. Its mostly fine. There are some really good corners of reddit, though the popular subs have been infected with the well washed masses.

What I don’t understand is why Reddit wants us to use the app so badly. Is it just for ads? Is it data collection?

My guess is because it’s harder to block ads through the app than it is in the browser-based version (at least in iOS). Whatever the actual reason is, the asshole design (which ironically they have an entire subreddit for) actually discourages me from using Reddit, so I’ve been using it a lot less in the past couple of years.

It’s like the Nigerian Prince email scam but the other way around : 99% of the people who receive such an email will identify the scam and ignore it. This is totally fine for the scammers. Working as expected.

Now, in the Reddit scenario 99% of the Reddit users don’t mind downloading an app. It’s just us, techies, that 1% who cares. This is totally fine for Reddit. Working as expected.

I suspect it’s all that and their metrics show that mobile users are the most “engaged” so they want more mobile users to have an even higher count of engaged users. Also, it’s harder to spam notifications without a mobile app.

They deliberately make their mobile web experience awful, so I don’t think that’s why (how can you trust a metric that you’re deliberately sabotaging?). I suspect mobile apps just allow for more data collection than web apps.

I think it's time for lawmakers to start drafting up an "engagement tax" and start penalizing companies for demanding peoples' attention.

They get a lot more data more reliably from the app and have a lot more control of the ad surfaces and how they are served.

This is more or less "social network publisher side monetization" SOP.

I suspect it's for neither. It's to fulfil some metric. They either want investor money or IPO money and either way, they want people in their app because their app is way over-valued compared to monthly impressions.

Likely both. It sure as hell ain't to make your experience any better.

Ads, tracking, notifications, with higher overall engagement due to faster and more content available.

another possibility is to increase traffic, which I guess also increases ad revenue. It's a lot easier to tap an icon on your home screen than it is to open a browser and type in reddit and whichever subreddit you want to browse. The less friction there is, the more likely you are to be a daily user, driving their revenue.

This is my guess — phone-screen real estate and the potential for push notifications.

The answers to questions like this are always extremely simple - it is better for their business.

Gmail webmail too. I’ve hit « I’m not interested » to their app prompt around 500 times in a row. Will i change the 501st? No.

Then again, my ATM machine still asks me which language I want service in. It’s my hope if I choose something other than English, it calls 9-1-1, slows down the prompts and does nothing irreversible.

Reddit's usefulness has waned dramatically and continues to do so.

The web reddit is just awful. Leave a thread open for some time, and navigation even breaks.

The Reddit AMP implementation on top of Reddit Web is even worse. For the first few times I encountered it, I assumed there was a bug or something that would be fixed soon.

I just use old.reddit.com on my mobile and laptop.

Try i.reddit.com on mobile, it's easier on small screens. Click the cog on the right for options like collapsing comments.

Try teddit.net. It's not perfect, but mostly works fine. There are extensions that will replace reddit.com by teddit.net in the URL to make it even easier.

It is better to use i.reddit.com on your mobile

Same.

saved reddit for me: https://teddit.net/

The best part is clicking a link, loading a page, and it just says “Something broke”

Twitter does this too. How the fuck is it even possible?

Glad it's not just me. Twitter seems to break more often when a page is loaded from the browser cache, but I can't pin down any other pattern for the “Something broke” errors on both mobile and desktop.

Will Twitter ever have more than two 9s of reliability as measured from the user's POV?

Oh, I just posted a question about this elsewhere in the thread. I've come to assume this is intentional and probably doesn't happen if you're logged in or using the app (though I don't know). It's been like this for years. Like every time I follow a link to Twitter I seem to get a random roll whether it works, and same random roll on each refresh. After n refreshes, where n may be 0-10, it works. Browsing the site doesn't do this.

I literally can't open Twitter links on my phone (Firefox as browser). It always says "something went wrong" and reloading a bunch of times doesn't help either. If I use the same link on Desktop (or change my phone browser's user agent) it works. I think its a fuck you pattern to get me to install the app.

I only use reddit.premii.com on mobile. That's what their mobile site should look like

I was initially annoyed by this, and then thankful. I have learned never to install apps of this kind, and thus the fact that Reddit has made itself unpleasant to use from a browser is a helpful little nudge away from a time-waster.

Microsoft Windows is even worse. Constant disruptive updates, forcing you to make an account during install, ads in the start menu, that creepy "Cortana" process that you can't kill...

This may have been true when Win10 just came out, but it isn't anymore. You can schedule your updates (and if you don't, they try to schedule them for you in non-use hours), there are ways to bypass the MS account creation and just use a local account, I haven't seen an ad in my start menu in ages, even after multiple large system updates and there is not a single reference to Cortana in my Task Manager or Services (I turned Cortana off in settings).

Granted, I'm aggressive at turning off startup items, managing what services run on boot, and so on, but my point is, each of the things you mention may have been true at one time, but they are not necessarily true today.

edit to note: I'm not defending Microsoft's use of dark patterns, they definitely do push them out and then sometimes back off if there is enough pushback. And that is bad, and should be called out. Just aiming for accurate information here.

they've lately been trying to get me to make a cloud account to login. i remember when i installed it i made an "offline account", but now after a few updates im occationally getting a nag to "finish setting up your computer" before i can start using it which leads to a place wanting me to make an account which I now have to cancel out of rather than have a permanent method of removing it.

it's just a matter of time at this point

From this perspective it's amazing. I ditched Windows completely for about 5 years (coinciding with my time in Software). And had to deal with none of these problems any more, I always remember that I hated windows for some reason but can't seem to pinpoint/remember, but now you've reminded me.

What OS did you switch to?

macOS and Linux.

I disagree. Reddit is worse because if you don't have an account, you are constantly pushed to make one, or get pop-ups to download the ad. They also seem to limit functionality, like seeing all comments, unless you have an account.

The Windows installation process is annoying for sure, but once you get through it, you are able to disable or rework everything you mentioned. iOS honestly has everything you mentioned as well; in fact, it's installation process pushes even more services than Windows does, but I never see people complain about it. I find both process annoying, but I forget about them once I get everything setup because it goes away. I don't want a reddit account because I basically only visit the site when a friend sends me a link. I am guessing I can also have their stuff go away if I download the app and sign up, but it's not as essential to me as using Windows or iOS.

Additionally, the experience of using reddit is very different with an account versus without. The same argument cannot be made for Windows 10.

One of the few good things from Windows 11 is that Cortana has been evicted (the Bing stuff is still there though).

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-11-specifica...

These are the primary reasons I moved off Windows and onto a combination of macOS and *nix. Plus, macbooks have native Thunderbolt 3 support, which is essential for near-zero latency audio production.

I use Reddit is Fun app on android and haven't noticed any changes in UX for more than 5 years. When a I rarely go to reddit.com on my pc, I can't even recognize the original site.

The cookie prompt on old.reddit.com is so obnoxious now. You can't close it and the "continue" button takes you to the new.reddit.com homepage

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

I just used ublock origin to delete it. They still think they serve it, but I never see it.

Try

https://libredd.it/

Or

https://teddit.net/

I know! Isn't it lovely? I used that to break my reddit addiction. Haven't been on for a while.

I think they're trying to push it to just before the point where people actually consider how useful the content is (not very), or maybe past that point, after which they'll put out some superficial "we're sorry" bs.

I now use https://libredd.it with Privacy Redirect browser extension.

I don't even need to use old.reddit.com for daily browsing now. (Unless need to comment)

I never use reddit on mobile, but also there the whole new reddit design thing is so terrible I just don't bother going there anymore. It's sad, there were a few really nice communities there.

I get around this by not using their app or website at all and using an alternative Reddit client (Apollo for iOS). Wonder if they'll do the Twitter and shut down third party clients eventually.

old.reddit.com is acceptable, with uBlock Origin and the like, and on mobile Relay for Reddit is a nice app.