But how else can we justify the salaries of all these PMs and designers? /s

i feel like with programming, im making this up, but like 99% of the time if you pitch a rewrite you'll be shot down and its probably right. of that 1% of rewrites,.9 of them probably should have been shot down.

do designers not do this or have this culture? "lets redo the design of everything", how does that not get shot down?

I guess it's because redesigning the UI is so much easier than rewriting the backend. There's not as many edge cases to test for, or that many dependencies.

Other than reddit, I think the vast majority of redesigns went well.

How many people are still wanting their iOS 6 or old YouTube designs back? It’s a bit of a shock when it happens but eventually you just get used to it and realise the old one actually did look worse.

Reddit is an exception. It looks fine, but it runs like shit.

Thinking of the Reddit redesign: depends what you mean by "works".

Does it work for end users? As long as too many don't leave or are replaced by new users who didn't know any better, who cares?

If it encourages people to download an app instead of using a broken web UI, allowing for better data collection and monetization, then it "works" just fine.

That depends on if they're using Reddit's own app or a third party one.

> I am very glad news.ycombinator.com is staying with a tried and true

Me too.

But I'd also enjoy laughing at a comically bad "Show HN: I redesigned HN".

Reddit doesn't care, the average age of their user has decreased significantly over the past few years, which coincidentally also means a large part of the user base has no idea what it looked like before the redesign. The new users are happy with the instagram-style, image-based, infinite scrolling design.

I like the Reddit redesign from a design POV but holy shit this is one of the slowest websites I've ever used.

Their shitty JS code slows to a crawl on my fucking AMD 5900X.