Very niche, but my least favorite web re-design was the used camera retailer KEH.com (this was probably at least a decade ago). They went from a craigslist style listing (text dense, easy to drill down to any level from one page: Nikon Manual Focus ->Fixed length lenses->Nikon Brand || other brand. I think it was one or two clicks to get to a list of stock for a given category) to a regular e-commerce style page. Takes much longer to get to a nice looking page with less info and products displayed.

FWIW I haven't bought any gear from them since that happened, and they used to be my first stop for used equipment.

I think when you are selling to a buyer that knows what they want, its best to stick to a simpler information dense interface (Digikey, McMaster-Carr, etc.). I think a lot of websites try to "chase the trend" and look like Amazon, or whatever, without realizing that it is much harder to get that right than it is to get an ugly page right.

They load faster, too.

I'm presently grocery-shopping in another tab, and I am continually amazed at what a terrible UX I put up with. Compare any grocery website to McMaster-Carr and it's not even 10x, it's like 100x worse. But I give them my business because the competition is actually even worse.

There must be something about grocery sites that makes them so awful. I've even submitted feedback to a delivery service that I used to use with comments like

"enabling a filter for meat shows recommended items from other categories above the meat products"

"clicking on page 2 of results resets all filters"

"searching for item X returns a list of results that does not contain it, but navigation shows it clearly exists"

etc.

How can it be so bad??

> "clicking on page 2 of results resets all filters"

My favorite is when you add a filter when you're on page 2 and now you're on page 2 of the filtered results.

Instacart's "plugin" for Aldi is sooooo slow compared to Amazon. It's some weird amalgamation of single page and multi page "post" type designs. It's kinda pretty though I guess.

Grocery apps are almost universally tedious trash.

Want me to on board? Probably 70 percent of every grocery trip is the same essentials, so just let me scan my recipes and offer the opportunity to quick select from that list of items next time.

McDonalds has at least figured that one out; you can just "reorder last order" from like the last 10.

If you want to feel real pain, try using the grocery apps or similar on slow cell signal; it's death. No! I do NOT need a 12 MB image of the bottle of milk I buy each week, I just want to see if it's back in stock!

Functionality always trumps jazzy designs. (E.g. Craigslist vs olx.in).

Specifically, I prefer Old Reddit because it shows me all the comments in the thread, rather than just some of them, plus a completely different thread I didn't click on. The visual design is a push for me.

>Lots of folks prefer "Old Reddit".

Moderators can see the traffic breakdown and old reddit traffic hovers around 5-10% of total traffic depending on community.

I think the "loud minority" is a concept that is very very applicable here.

While im skeptical old reddit would be overall more popular, its not valid to look at traffic. You have to know what old reddit is to even get there -- few do. The fact that its up to 10% is frankly astonishingly high imo.

10% of users intentionally choosing anything besides a default is crazy high

Probably incredibly subreddit dependent.

I think it speaks volumes that Old Reddit hasn't been removed. Even the maintenance burden of continually supporting it is outweighed by its value.

They announced new API terms and will be charging for access. I think such a bold move means the demise of old.reddit.com is closer than ever.

When old reddit dies, so will much of the content reddit has; I suspect that the percentage of good posts that are made from old.reddit is much higher than 10%.

But what do I know? TikTok is a thing, apparently.

Old man proceeds outside to yell at the Cloud

…but that may be the loud minority who posts the content that attracts all the New Reddit users.

New Reddit unbelievably enough still hasn't fixed the bug where it crashes if you paste text in the input. Whoever is using it is sure not overlapping with the segment that ever participates in any sort of discussion on desktop.

... and also clearly none of the reddit development team is using it either. How else would they miss a breaking bug for five years?! It's not like inputting text is a niche feature.

Old reddit loads faster and has higher information density. The New design is form over function.

Old reddit has less bugs too. First time, using reddit, I used the new version. But my internet connection was too bad, this caused a lot of problems with the new version.

When I knew about the old version, I tried. And wow, almost every bugs I had with the new one went away. Faster load too.

Reddit says something funny about this test, I’m not sure what, though.

Old Reddit is of course so much better. I guess “new” Reddit is shitty either due to the requirements of monetization, or maybe second-system syndrome.

I think the Craigslist test is good, but it is interesting to note that the first, thrown together interface could possibly provide a “false positive,” in the sense that the first implementation could have the advantages of not expecting to be monetized yet, and not having been infected too much by current design fads.