I almost hesitate to share these because I too found that Reddit's dark patterns were a large part of what helped me break that habit.

I recently discovered teddit.net which is a frontend for reddit with all dark patterns removed.

There is also an alternative front end for twitter called nitter.net that you can use the same way to avoid the app / login.

For reddit, IMO the simplest things you can do to improve the experience is to force the old reddit design (old.reddit.com) when on desktop, and use any app except the official app when on mobile.

The problem with old.reddit.com (as opposed to teddit) is that numerous links on Reddit will redirect you to the New experience. Absent DNS hacks, you'll find yourself consistently frustrated by this.

With Teddit, AFAIU the rewrites will keep you on Teddit rather than bouncing from old (or i) to www.reddit.com.

Mind, Reddit shoud GDIAF. The growth hacking crap has also broken my own usage habit. I'll check in periodically, but quite infrequently. I've long since stopped adding new substantive content to my own subreddit(s) there.

With RES I've never seen new reddit, everything always goes to old.reddit.com

Not all browsers support extensions. Even those that do may support only a subset.

(Mobile most especially.)

I'd be amazed if many people are using reddit via browser on mobile, when there are so many good open source reddit apps out there.

> The problem with old.reddit.com (as opposed to teddit) is that numerous links on Reddit will redirect you to the New experience. Absent DNS hacks, you'll find yourself consistently frustrated by this.

I have found that keeping the "Use new Reddit as my default experience" box unchecked on reddit.com/prefs results in almost never being redirected to the "new" site. The only exception is when someone uploaded a gallery - you have click on the "comments" link to see the gallery photos in oldreddit style.

This solution works for me on both mobile browser and desktop browser.

Are you using "old.reddit.com" to visit, or "www.reddit.com" and relying on JS for the old-site experience?

I'm doing the latter (in large part so that I post old.reddit.com links), and I can assure you It Does Not Work As Expected Or Desired.

uh... I go to www.reddit.com not old.reddit.com - I don't actively do anything at all, other than change a flag in my user settings. Looking at old.reddit.com in an incognito window looks the exact same as what i see at www.reddit.com. Firefox, ublock origin, no other addons. On mobile and desktop.

> I can assure you It Does Not Work As Expected Or Desired.

in what sense? Seems like it's been the same for ~8yrs, other than having to re-set the flag in settings now and again. Like I said, the only time i've seen an issue is the odd time someone posts an image gallery - I can't see it in oldreddit style unless I click on comments.

That's a significant difference.

I both want myself and others to experience Old Reddit. So I use Old Reddit URLs, both for my own interactions and when posting links to the site.

And if I do that, I do not remain on Old Reddit.

With JS disabled for New Reddit (one mechanism for reminding me not to use it), the interface doesn't persist.

Note that this has similarly been a long-standing issue when using i.reddit.com, the lightweight mobile interface. So long as you're clicking on interface-related links, you're OK (e.g., posts within a subreddit, or short-style links to users or subs: /u/<username> or /r/<subname>). But if there's a hardcoded fully-qualified link to a given Reddit URL (post, comment, wiki, user, etc.), then whatever the governing host-part is is applied, and bang, I'm off my preferred interface.

Many subreddit sidebars explicitly code the fully-qualified hostname to their Wiki or various support pages. This is especially infuriating.

Disabling JS makes you keep going back to the new layout? Interesting that it's essentially being done client-side then.

I don't use any blanket JS blocking browser addons. I find it frustrating how much of the web gets broken with them, and having to manually flag damn near every site just to get them to work is tedious. Just using uBlock Origin to block all the trackers and ads is good enough for me.

Personally, I do the latter.

I never type "old.reddit.com". I'm always on www.reddit.com, and I'm always on the old site experience.

Of course, I don't know how much of that has to do with the fact that I use RES.

I don't use RES but otherwise have the same experience as you. I never end up in new reddit.

Curious, do you stay logged into reddit?

Logging out is the only thing I can think of that would cause you to keep seeing the new layout.

It occurs regardless of status.

there are browser addons to auto-redirect to old.reddit.com

I use old.reddit on mobile as well. Personally I prefer panning & zooming on the desktop version of a site to the mobile design in general

You might like i.reddit.com

The old mobile interface (i.reddit.com) works well too

That's the one I use. The downside is you can't see pictures or gifs in comments nor the rules of a sub-reddit if you want to submit something. Also submit doesn't work correctly sometimes, especially when you need to tag a submission with flair.

You have changed my life.

Thank you.

I've been using red reader for the better part of a decade. Its far from the flashiest but its clean, easy to read and performant. Its also FOSS. Since my reddit experience revolves mostly around special interest subs with text heavy discussion, it suits my needs well. If you wanted something to scroll through the media heavy meme subs or the front page there are better options.

Unfortunately, I think they are going to decommission that version eventually.

Something that irritated me, for instance, was how they decided to remove the account activity panel, making revisiting recent links waaay harder. That coupled with the fact that they also remove a link from the front page too quickly is also making me to use the site less. So much for the dark patterns, heh.

I don't care, because as soon as they do that I'll be quitting.

Yeah, heartily recommend the Apollo app and you don't have to sign in.

I'm speculating but recently they added a gdpr/cookie popup that forces you to got on non-old reddit to opt-in/out.. they're trying hard.

Thanks. I broke my reddit habit when I realized that most of the communities on reddit are just ideological echo chambers where you get banned for saying anything the community doesn't agree with. It lost most of it's value when honest conversations couldn't take place anymore. Now the only time I use reddit is when the only search results with the answer to a question I have point to reddit, and I've grown very weary of their tracking and harassing me to use their spyware app. Teddit is a nice way to get the information I'm looking for without being jerked around by those stalkers at reddit. We'll see how long it lasts before being blocked.

While HN definitely becomes a bit of an echochamber at times too, at least you can still voice opinions that go against it without people going through your history to attack you rather than your arguments. Occasionally you get downvoted/flagged enough that people can't reply anymore, but again: That stays with just that comment/thread.

the hive-mind propaganda circle jerk took over, and many dont even realize they are still jerkin'

I'd argue that any site with like/dislike functions which influence the visibility of posts end up this way.

A lot of it has to do with being able to see the points. People think “it has a lot of points so it must be right”, which is rarely true, especially on Reddit. HN hides the points on comments and has a bit of unpredictability to the sorting to allow things to float up provided they haven’t been flagged/downvote bombed. I think it is the largest reason HN is still healthy, other than the great moderation.

Android has a client called RedReader that makes Reddit highly tolerable: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.quantumbadger.redreader/

Part of me wishes there was something as nice as this for the desktop, the other part of me thinks I already waste too much time on Reddit. (The signal-to-noise ratio is just largely not worth it compared to my hand-curated list of blogs I follow via RSS.)

I second red reader. To you SNR point, I think that is entirely due to the communities you join and how you manage it. Unsub from all of the default subs. They are all garbage. And any that gets beyond a certain size will inevitably fall to low effort reposts and click bait.

Reddit is best as a platform for effortlessly making focused special interest forums. In the past these would have required a PHBB instance and hosting, would have nonexistent SEO and would be almost impossible to find. But they would have some of the best content the internet had to offer.

Second teddit

Will mention though that I’ve had wholly uncontroversial HN accounts, with positive karma, deleted after suggesting teddit.net, only stating a link to the about page, in a thread.

I am mostly unbothered by it since the bar of entry for creating an account on HN is so low, and you can read it without one, but am still confused.

Perhaps there is auto moderation that deletes an account if it posts a comment with only a link?

New accounts that post links often get auto-flagged, because they're mostly spammers. You can probably recover your account by emailing [email protected].

+1 for teddit.net, I discovered it because it’s a default Insight Browser extension, as is old.reddit.net.

Using a 3rd party mobile client also does the trick - no ads either. Apollo on iOS is awesome.

I always saw some comments of people saying "RIP Inbox" after one of their posts became popular in Reddit. I kid you not, it was not until earlier today that I found out that the reason for those comments is that apparenlty Reddit sends replies to your post to your email inbox. My reddit account is so old that it doesn't have a linked email, so I never realized that.

This is the same reason I don’t tell people how I get around HN’s “noprocrast.”

Just log out, I guess? I don't comment very frequently, the links are what keeps me coming back.

My trick for getting around noprocrast is being too dumb to set it up correctly.

Is there no similar frontend for facebook? It seems like its impossible to view facebook posts and timelines without an account.

There’s also libredd.it

I'm using old.reddit.com, and it's ok. Shame if they would turn that off though.

The day they turn off old.reddit.com reddit is dead to me. I've been on reddit 10 years and it was hard to understand why they chose this new disastrous design.

What is it with modern UI and the tendency to be slow, to have a ridiculous amount of whitespace, and to have a copious number of round button-icons that are not intuitive? It's fucking insulting.

Several years ago, I went to a tech roundtable hosted by a well-known company, and this topic came up.

Half the devs in the discussion sincerely didn't believe the new sluggish UI trend found on various social media and news sites was slow at all, because their metrics (presumably which measure some sort of server compute time) said they were not slower. It's some sort of religious fervor.

"Who are you going to believe? Me(trics) or your own lying eyes!?"

It seems that, at least in reddit's case, the issue is preloading a lot of stuff that on the old website wasn't preloaded. Like videos.

Ben Awad[0] made a quick technical comparison between the two websites and this was his conclusion.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jkSiIBDDZ8

That's also what makes it pretty much unusable when you are on a slow mobile connection

It's that companies let the designers design without any constraint on usability.

Typically these designers are just fashionistas following the trendy crowd.

It is slow because very few people can write effective and fast React code. And then they use WebGL to do fancy overlay animations

That's their objective, to get rid of users who they can't monetize. Including veteran users with ad blockers who refuse to use the new site or any of its features.

It's not just the design, it's the fact that it's buggy and frequently unresponsive. If it was well done I might be able to forgive them, but my phone tells me I have messages I can't see on the desktop even after I refresh the page.

It’s more buggy, less responsive, has less features and consumes more resources. Literally its only pro is that it looks pretty.

It looks "pretty" in the crappy modern way though where there's loads of whitespace and everything is hidden in a menu or tab somewhere.

Give me "ugly" plain-ish text that is information dense.

The post-view in compact mode is actually denser than before (thought it has some ugly spacing issues at the top). It’s amazing. Sadly, there seems to be no compact mode for comments, so those look horrible.

And well, considering how slow it is to use, I wouldn’t even use new Reddit then. New Reddit is really only for people who have a high tolerance to slow sites.

> Literally its only pro is that it looks pretty.

Which is very subjective.

New reddit is certainly more modern than old reddit, but I find it kinda ugly.

fewer features

I thought it is one of these “don’t end sentences with prepositions” weird rules no one really follows.

The prepositions one was invented after the fact, it has never been a real grammatical rule.

“Fewer” versus “less” for countable things is more of an actual rule (but of course that doesn’t mean you’re obliged to follow it).

Reddit has had 5 second page loads for over a decade. Extremely embarrassing of them to be honest. I can understand them not fixing their search because that increases engagement, but you always want your site to be fast. I guess they don't because they know they have no competitors.

>I guess they don't because they know they have no competitors

There are lots of clones, but they typically become havens for the ones who get the boot from reddit (remember the chimpire?), who proceed to drive away the users who don't agree, or they are either trying to lure reddit's current demographic (i.e. not very technical) or are super niche and could easily be served by a traditional forum.

The worst part of reddit killing so many forums is that there used to be plenty of places to go to discuss fairly niche interests. Now that they're gone, many communities have no fallback if their userbase is mostly old reddit users aside from trying to migrate, and that will inevitably result in many just leaving the community entirely.

> "I can understand them not fixing their search because that increases engagement..."

Do you have any citations for this?

I may be alone, but I prefer the new design. On the old reddit I didn't like how I had to click into a post to view its contents. On the new design most of the post contents are right there on the list page.

You use RES for that. It shows everything and plays every video.

Get RES

It isn't hard for me to understand their reasoning at all;

1. Appeals more to the mainstream, and to new users who are used to Facebook-style feeds. 2. Easier for them to disguise ads in user's feeds.

I think Reddit knows it too, that's why old is still around. The Digg fiasco was a long time ago but must be still in their corporate subconscious.

They wanted to give Digg some company.

Same.

old.reddit.com + RES is still the best Reddit.

RES is godsent.

I exclusively use new Reddit. The increased friction around every single interaction is great for limiting the amount of time I spend there: it raises the bar for deciding to actually view a discussion, and the incomprehensible nesting-collapse algorithm keeps me from going down rabbit holes in threads unless it's something that genuinely interests me.

It's similar to my YouTube usage. All the pre-roll ads ensure I only start videos I'm reasonably sure I'll want to watch, and mid-rolls are a perfect reminder to bail if I'm not fully invested in what I'm watching.

Actually that's a great idea - actively feeling pain every time you interact - whats more effective limiting consumption than that.

Sounds like how I like my afternoon coffee, bitter without any additives. It reminds me I need to leave work if I've finished the important stuff for the day. A much needed kick in the guts that makes you purse your lips as you drink it down that puts the rest of the day in perspective.

What I've noticed is a few of the newer things breaking on it (unsurprisingly). I think over time it'll get to a point where there's enough of these new things where they'll just pull the plug, which is really too bad. Also love it much more than the "new" experience.

Give teddit.net a look.

Nitter.net for Twitter.

I don’t know how long these sites will last with the demand there is for avenues that don’t prompt login.

There are a lot of mirrors, too, as anyone can host an instance, so if those don't work you can always try others.

There is also i.reddit.com, which is more mobile friendly than old.reddit.com.

There's a Chrome extension for redirecting to old.reddit.com: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...

You can just uncheck "Use new Reddit as my default experience" in settings and get the old experience without an extension, if you have an account anyway.

If you click the button to get rid of the cookie prompt on the bottom of the site while on old.reddit.com, it redirects you to new.reddit.com. Amazing.

They are killing the feed, I don't know for you, but for me it has seemed static.

Wow... I forgot how much better reddit on desktop used to be.

Yes this. Life is getting progressively better now Twitter, Reddit and Apple pissed me off. I’ve got more time, money and a healthier outlook on life.

Now if only I could shake HN.

I use RSS to stay updated on news. Complete control over what I receive.

The noprocrast option in the user settings can help. You can set minaway to a much longer time to avoid checking in constantly.

I did that once, 10 years ago or so. My reddit account is coincidentally 10 years old now. Beware of unintended consequences.

I tried it, but it didn't make it any easier. I just shifted devices and back on the front page. If that works for you, then that's cool!

Reddit is unusable without which app, the official one? Because I've been on reddit for a decade and never once used their app. It's either reddit is fun on android or the browser. Never had a problem. Even if you don't have an account, old.reddit.com and i.reddit.com (for mobile) bypass all the atrocious new UI changes

Probably referring to the regular reddit mobile website. It constantly bombards you with requests to open the app, you can't open anything from NSFW subs. It's pretty unusable. At least Twitter and Instagram I can use in the browser without 3rd party sites or apps.

It's also started blocking subs that aren't on r/popular, so it's become even more unusable.

Slide is also a pretty good FOSS(?) Reddit client for Android. I don't use it anymore since I'm trying to get myself to use Reddit less and less but Slide was a pretty good experience for me.

It's going to be tough because of how much of the Internet treats Twitter as a primary source. So this in effect becomes yet another stream behind a pay-wall (in information, not in money) that balkanizes people's view of "what is happening" in the world.

The first place I knew about the January 6th riots was from Twitter. I guess I'll learn about subsequent such events from other sources after people on Twitter do.

Exactly. This is good since this corporations are basically killing themselves since people, slowly but steady, are realizing they can get info elsewhere on the internet (and people start sharing outside them). So yeah, they are basically forcing users to migrate to more open services.

Eh maybe. The problem is that IMO there aren’t any obvious alternatives to Reddit. I remember when Digg committed suicide with a pretty bad redesign and most disgruntled users moved to Reddit. I’ve been pretty annoyed with the changes Reddit has implemented in the past couple of years, but I haven’t found another place to go (that’s not necessarily a bad thing). HN is the closest alternative but the scope of topics we discuss is limited. That’s probably part of HN’s success but then where do you go for other topics?

My Reddit habit has been all but replaced with private Slacks and Discords these days. Either hobby / interest groups, or an "alumni Slack" full of old work friends from a company I worked at a long time.

I think that's the future, for geeks and nerds anyway. Small private forums, where you can actually have real discussions without getting drowned in memes and downvotes.

For the masses, I think the cement is pretty much dry at this point. You might see a TikTok replace an Instagram once per decade, or something like that. But whatever people migrate to will probably be extremely similar to the thing they migrated from. It's just what the casual masses want.

> Slacks and Discords

I find these terrible for any kind of information discovery. I hate that so many communities are using them as an alternative to a subreddit or focused forum. Hell most "modern" forum software is horrific as well.

I think that the advantage in using some kind of instant-message system like Discord/Slack is that you might end up getting a faster response, which is quite helpful when I'm feeling impatient and want my problem to be solved faster. On the other hand, the questions aren't as easily searchable and archived for future people to find.

And we are back to a "decentralised" web, although it's only decentralised between a few servers in Discord's and Slack's basements.

It is a problem for ephemeral vs evergreen.

Chats are a horrible place for evergreen knowledge. Forums are pretty good though.

It’s only a slight difference but a big one.

Ok, shows over. Everyone back to IRC.

I rather like my reaction GIFs and discussion threads. What I want to see is a modern IRC with these features, and an optional per-channel/per-server message persistence to deal with not knowing what happened while you were away, or while the mobile IRC app of your choice was killed by the Google/Apple background task manager that only allows you to dodge it with proprietary push support.

This is Slack, mostly, kinda.

Slack also smacks of terrible usability, and is proprietary up the wazoo. There is no way to automate anything on it unless your organisation gives some approval.

The sooner reddit dies the better. What a toxic and manipulated hellhole it has become.

For larger subs, yeah. For smaller, specialised topical subs, I will defend them until Reddit forces a similar requirement as Twitter here.

I used to feel the same way, but even the smaller ones are increasingly being co-opted by partisan screechers. Especially in the State/City/Town subreddits.

In the UK, at least one sub has adopted the "no politics" role. Political subs still exists, so there are places to vent political views too.

It already does on mobile. It is impossible to view subreddits unless you sign in, you only get a "preview"

IMO they are just creating an opening in the market by continuously shooting themselves in the foot like that. I don't really understand it. Requiring a login to view content is the reason why I never got into Tumblr or Pinterest... I'm not going to bother signing up for your site if you don't first show me it has content that is worth my time, these people have it the wrong way around.

As a Reddit alternative, Ruqqus has the UI and responsiveness down pretty good. However, it branded itself as anti-reddit, and attracted a lot of right-wing people as a result. However, their platform is open source, so IMO, it's only a matter of time before someone steps up to the task.

I don’t have Chrome installed on any of my devices but I’ve noticed when I’m on reddit.com on my iPhone it prompts me to either use the Reddit app or “continue browsing” using the Chrome app. Does Google pay for this as some sort of an advertisement? Or is Reddit incentivized in some way to plug Chrome over Safari or DDG “browser”? When I click “continue” it lets me just keep using my current browser but I always wonder if it would open in Chrome if the app were available on my device.

Probably just classifies webkit based browsers as Chrome.

I get a button for Safari on my iPhone and iPad.

I’m on ios using firefox (though I think I’ve heard that under the hood it is using Safari’s renderer or something like that because of application store requirements? Not sure.), and it shows the chrome logo for me, uh, when I click a link that goes to new reddit, or something.

Or, I guess when viewing through the browser window that twitter embeds?

Just now I tried viewing new.reddit in safari and it told me my browser was old (though perhaps this is because I’ve refrained from updating ios)

pretty sure that's reddits doing

I think the Instagram experience is better on mobile web than it is on the app with regards to consuming less. The "timeline" on mobile web is only people I follow with no inserted ads. Same with stories, there are no ads.

The best thing is that the "Explore" tab is just a bit too slow in terms of responsiveness on mobile web. I spend a less time on there because it's not as pleasant to use as the app.

Remarkably, Reddit has managed to organize two teams of programmers competing to make a worse experience between their app and website

I find that you can get used to a change of habit very quickly. Youtube introduced unblockable commercials for iOS/safari. After 15 years of adblockers and not watching TV, I have developed an intolerance to ads and I just lost the reflex of clicking on any youtube link or going on youtube to find something. Don't really miss it.

I used to love reddit, it was my favourite social media but I can't use it since they redesigned it, they really need to look at hacker news for inspiration.

Reddit seems perfectly usable as an unauthenticated user. I know they present a more spammy version to users landing from google, but nothing is blocked behind more than a click or two. I think that's just good business sense because you want to monetize your firehose of less engaged users and coddle the ones that are more engaged and producing content.

> Reddit seems perfectly usable as an unauthenticated user.

On desktop. The main mobile version blocks essential features, like browsing subreddits or viewing all comments on a post.

(Alternatives like old.reddit, i.reddit and teddit aren't completely broken but aren't great on mobile either)

The flipside is that anyone now signing in now are going to have harder time getting off later.

This is what has prevented me from joining tik tok. Now it also requires a login after you view like three videos. I just close the tab afterwards. It works great!

I agree but unfortunately their mobile website got better (when logged in) and now works really well on my phone.

I don't know my facebook password or save it on any of my devices save for the home pc for this reason.

methink the coming decade will be a few websites, a bit of IRC and a whole lot of non digital things. the information highway of freedom is becoming a parkour competition