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?