Reddit is lightning fast, and is very stable...

...oh. I got it! You might be trying to use the dumpster fire that's https://reddit.com

Ignore that, and head over to the actually functional Reddit at https://old.reddit.com

It's like HackerNews in terms of performance. You can still set it as default.

The "new" UI they have is unusable, and may God have mercy for the poor souls that walk into it.

IMO this has dual meaning. Of course, the (new reddit) UI is not my preference for sure. But the content on (not logged in) reddit.com is just so unbelievably different from what I see when logged in (to old.reddit.com). Therein lies the dumpster fire. I've had thumbnails disabled since forever ago, and picked a handful of subreddits across a couple of multireddits. I never really understood why people would think Reddit was anything like Facebook or any such similar site. Until one day I saw what it looked like to everyone else.

Reddit for me looks a lot like it looked back in ~2004, but with comments :)

All you have to do is learn to type "old" instead of "red" in the address bar, and your browser will do the rest.

Kind of like typing "n <Enter>" probably brings you here, and typing "p <Enter>" brings up, erm, Pinterest.

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

The clock is ticking on that. I'd wager we see it shut down within the next 2 years. There will be insane pressure to increase ad revenue now, even more pressure than was already there. 3rd-party clients are a "leak" in this regard.

This would be reasonable if there weren’t subreddits that are totally broken on old.reddit.com and proclaim loudly in their sidebar that they no longer support it.

Could you link to an example? In curious :)

Reddit's product managers very much want me to check out my 'Reddit Recap'.

Well I've navigated to my recap about 30 times now in the last week, from multiple links, in app and desktop, and it's still totally broken.

On desktop now, it doesn't show anything except a "retry" button which is incorrectly stuck to the left side of my screen (CSS fail).

I can understand things being broken, but its really bad form to funnel a user to a prominent feature, have that feature be broken, and then have a broken and terrible error state.

I do wonder what kind of engineering team bungles a big feature release like this.

I'd wager $1 that over the next few years Reddit becomes even more of an Attention-Vampire (or tries to)

It's almost feeling Reddit, Facebook, Twitter -- these "social" echo chamber sites are all getting to the contempt phase of life -- the next disruptor cannot come soon enough.

Already the real action is happening on chat apps these days. These are your discords and slacks and clubhouses. In them I see the vitality of the old IRC and forum culture eras.

Also, I just discovered that the built-in screenshot generator for Reddit recap is broken as it only captures the rendered portion of each card, leaving out the scrollable overflow.

This case alone offers a strong testament to the poor quality of most Reddit features.

To me, Hackernews is what Reddit was 10 years ago, just without subreddits. Clean top quality content.

It's 2021, I don't want to see a "Loading..." icon like I'm on dial-up in the 90s.

Compare with https://old.reddit.com — open them side by side, refresh, click around.

We can have a serious discussion about what sucks in the "new" UI, but I really hope it's obvious.

Whereas about 80% of other sites on the Internet were unbrowseable until I installed an adblocker.

My main driver isn't the fastest (skylake i5) but it's much slower than any of the other sites I use. And on my gaming pc (Ryzen 5 5600) it's slow too. And I have 1gbit fibre.

Ps serious question, isn't it difficult being a UX designer when you've been off the internet for 8 years? Stuff has really changed a lot.

I really don't think the Web has changed very much at all in the time I was gone. Pages are much better at being responsive. Bloat is 100X worse, but was solved by installing an adblocker. The cookie pop-ups can fuck themselves. But, fundamentally, nothing is different. I like that CSS and HTML have advanced to the point where it is simpler and cleaner to write good code if you are a decent human being.

1. Stability: videos rarely play for me. Sometimes I break Reddit too (their words, not mine).

2. Slow: if I want to read the comments, I have to wait 3-5 seconds for them to load. I know that the comments could load instantly because the i.reddit.com interface can do it.

3. Unhelpful interface: it is not easy to identify how to expand a comment thread. But more important, the interface often won't tell me that a comment chain keeps going - it looks as if it just ended, even though it keeps going several levels deep. You can keep reading the chain if you click on the last comment, but again, why would you click on it if you don't know whether it keeps going?

3b. In relation to the previous point: I saw your comment because I was scrolling pretty deep into this thread. In the new Reddit UI it would have been cut off.

4. Annoying: if you're not logged in, content is kept from you just because. Again, the i.reddit.com interface shows everything, but the "regular" interface keeps pestering you with "Log in to see this content" or "Open in app". These popups cannot be dismissed.

All of these changes are pro-metrics and anti-user. Sure, the interface itself looks fine (once it rendered, if it renders). But interaction-wise? It sucks.

I've posted on own blog on Reddit and found that a search for the exact title has, as the first hit, that reddit post. And my blog itself is on page three. It's infuriating.

So I am afraid Reddit won't care about the web UI much now.