Layouts with heavy information density (as old.reddit.com) are more user friendly, as you they allow you to just scan the list and be done with it. But are bad for ads.
If you just reshape shape old.Reddit.com it wouldn’t be a horrible UI/UX. Maybe not great either.
Back button is effectively broken with constant reload of front page. 2 links you wanna read? You need to click around carefully especially on mobile if you don’t want the page to reload and show you a different set of stuff.
I can’t imagine people will tolerate this when they’re forced to use this UI and not their favourite app.
It's also the cards.
Old reddit was designed for a larger monitor (laptop/desktop) and mimics the best design practices on that device over the past couple decades of bulletin board/forum software; makes sense why people like it so much
Design decisions aside, the site performance is horrible. I don't understand why serving content is so difficult. I get they have large scale, but they've also had that for quite a while and employ enough people to solve it if they actually cared enough
In compact mode, they (new/old) have a similar number of posts on the screen (old: 11, new: 9). It has less because the "promoted" has a larger button, one could even argue this makes them stand out more than on old reddit.
I would agree that the lack of link colors make it slightly more annoying to read compact mode on the new one though, compared directly.
Old reddit has 25 posts per page and my screen can fit 14 vertically at once.
Around 2007-08 I read in a(physical) Brazilian web design magazine that you can have two types of design: - for short, ephemeral experience, your design should be striking - the user will just look at the thing once anyway, so you should capture the attention in spite of how ease of navigation. Eg. a website for a rock band tour. - for experiences that will need to be repeated lots of times (eg. using a corporate system, reading the news), you want the design to be boring and predictable.
I think that minimalism has been used to push interfaces that reduce information density - regardless of how the density would be useful in that context!
After the original Material Design video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrT6v5sOwJg the writing was on the wall: if you want to build a google-grade portfolio, create designs that resemble this. After some time users got used to that kind of look and now sites with high density of information look alien.
That's another interpretation. You'd think ad buyers would have a problem with this, but I guess not.
I've begun dragging a small "ultraportable" laptop with me, because it makes a lot of things bearable again: youtube, reddit, stackoverflow ... I'm not sure why people treat mobile users so horribly bad, but here we are.
Alas, no, I wouldn't think that. :(
Maybe because those people "don't care" about usability, or better said, never got to know what this even means. The young generation was socialized on mobile. They just don't know better so you can treat them like that without consequences.
Supposedly supposed to get side loading later this year which hope to god means Firefox with extensions on iOS
I guess there's no money in that.
Tiktok and Instagram is the kind of design they are used to.
Do you mean like... HN?
I meant that HN is very popular without having an amazing user experience, specially on mobile.
What is your complaint about mobile?
Due in part to the excellent UI and user-friendly reading experience, both on that mobile app and in a browser on my laptop, HN is the site I visit most often every day for a pleasant break to learn new things.
Reddit on the other hand is something I look at maybe once a month, where I'm reminded each time it's disorienting and hard work to use, so it's not somewhere I go to enjoy a calm read. So for me Reddit is just for finding specific information from a search result then leaving.
The Reddit UI has a lot to do with that. It ties to the "randomness" of the content. HN content also has randomness but because of its UI you can skim a lot in seconds so it's easier to pick out things of interest with low stress and just enjoy them.
Typically I glance through the top 100 to 150 headlines of HN to pick a few of interest, several times a day. It takes about 10-20 seconds to read those headlines, and to know I'm done - which is very different from scrolling-oriented sites which deprive the reader of perspective. I can see how this might be different for people who cannot skim text quickly or who find that difficult, or who are trained to infiniscroll through things showing only a tiny number of large cards on the screen at a time. The latter is how you destroy perspective.
I had no idea it was gone from the Play Store or not updated in a long time - or maybe I forgot soon after installing. I'm using the version installed via F-Droid.
The good news is it still works :-)
It has a lot of forks. I wonder if anyone's developed it more.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.simon.harm...
I'm typing this comment on a third-party app (Hacki) I'm trying out for the first time, so that's another option.
The arrows could be better, but they aren’t actually an essential part of the site from an individual user point of view. They are there to help HN. If they decided that getting this help from mobile users isn’t a priority, that’s fine.
No way to keep up with new comments on a post (Reddit doesn't have this either).
No notifications on reply, so it's difficult to get answers to clarifying questions (/threads helps but isn't it).
Ever-increasing indentation makes deep threads hard to read.
Generally hard to read and hard to click on mobile.
None fatal, but also none particularly tough to fix!
I'm pretty sure this is intentional in order to avoid shallow discussions and not grab too much attention. I actually like this, but I agree with you that it can make it harder to get answers sometimes and you do miss some replies on especially older comments.
Not sure what you mean by this, the lists of posts are very obviously paginated, as (admittedly a bit awkwardly) are larger comments threads. Maybe you mean auto-scrolling pagination?
> No notifications on reply, so it's difficult to get answers to clarifying questions (/threads helps but isn't it).
While not a HN feature, there is a simple solution - http://www.hnreplies.com/
The lack of response notification is a feature, though yes, it can be annoying, and I find the degree to which comments or questions go unresponded is ... disappointing. That said, notifications abuse by modern Web / App systems is rampant. I'd like some sort of middle-ground, perhaps a responses / notifications link which would consolidate these. "Threads" is the closest there is to that, though it includes all a person's comments whether (newly) responded to or not.
Mobile experience is pretty poor, agreed, though it's sufficient for reading logged-out (my preferred mode). Composing text on mobile devices is a category error.
Deep threads (and greyed text with downvotes) is a very intentional site design. pg's discussed that in the past, see:
"What I've Learned from Hacker News" (2009) <https://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html>
Discussed at the time: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=495053>
And four years ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19210923>
Some of the site styling can be overridden with CSS. I apply the following on desktop:
Dred's HN CSS Madhackery: https://pastebin.com/gLXiqKyd
There's also a dark mode I've created:
Dred's HN CSS Madhackery -- Dark Mode: https://pastebin.com/6PF3dCXH
- Long threads become unreadable due to shifting right with no end as replies come in, occasionally becoming comical
- Supports just enough markdown (asterisk italics, indented code blocks) to lead people to think they can use all of it (want bold, or in-line code? You lose.)
- Code blocks are unreadable on mobile since they cannot be scrolled
- Despite being an obvious design choice, breaking accessibility by reducing the contrast of unpopular comments is a deficiency.
I’m not sure why it’s user base doesn’t seem to understand this. They have to make UI changes to make money. It’s either that or everyone pays for subscriptions.
2. The AI threat is real.
It’s not even remotely fair that the large tech players of the world get to train their models on others content for cheap. It’s sad what’s happening to Apollo but they need to beef with Microsoft and Google. Reddit does not owe that guy a cheap pipe.
It’s no different from any other situation where market conditions shift and impact existing models.
Yes, it sucks but welcome to capitalism.
Ironic for Reddit to be angry at this considering the reason their company has any value at all is because of both the free content provided by users and the army of moderators who aren’t paid a cent for their work.
For the record, I am not happy about it, but I disagree with your assertion that LLM is not part of the consideration here.
Give it another 12 months when the rest of the web has been gunked up with AI written crap and reddit will be one of the few reliable sources of useful opinion out there.
Hell, it is right now given how frequently I and others append "reddit" to our google queries.
You need to append "reddit" to get any useful result, but unless you're on desktop, the mobile site is essentially broken if you're looking for answers. The app nag is omnipresent and the comment section is always broken after 2 or 3 comments with a "show more" button and lists of other posts.
If information is hard to glean from reddit, and the rest of the internet is AI blogspam, what is to be done?
In fact making the UI garbage will chase away users and will make them less money in the long-run, or maybe even run the company into the ground if people starts to migrate to some alternative with non-sucky UI.
There's also nothing about the UI that's related to AI.
1. Make money while preserving the UI
2. Make money while destroying the UI
... then why would anyone bother to preserve the UI? It's completely irrelevant even in the best case scenario. But allow me to present another more cynical:
They both hate anything good/competent/well-made, and the users too, and also want to make money.
> In fact making the UI garbage will chase away users
When I first started reading reddit in early 2006, the web was a larger place with many thousands of fora. But reddit's growth was at their expense, most are dead or dying. It's depressing when you're looking for something specific, and you end up on one of the old phpbbs... no one's bothered to post a comment in months. If they have, no one ever replied. But in their archives, it shows that just 15 or even 10 years ago, an hour wouldn't go by without someone saying something.
They've solved the "chasing away users" problem by making certain there's nowhere to flee to. Some small fraction might just cut that sort of internet use out of their lives entirely out of spite, but not enough to matter.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
With the new soundboards, change of usernames and the likes, it's feels like it's starting the cycle.
Discord is still at the beginning of the endhittification path so I guess it is not a super pressing issue.
The first warning shot for me was when they pushed stages really invasively in the UI to compete with clubhouse. I'd thought the high rate of nitro subscribership might have stalled it longer, but no.
I'd imagine that's quite mainstream, no?
(Of course I use old.reddit or a third-party client.)
What they want is lots of comments and little to no nfsw. Aka the metrics that are easy to sell to advertisers and to IPO with.
You can see every action taken through the lense of "does it affect IPO price" and understand almost all their choices. And because it is so transparent, its almost offensive when you consider their entire moderation happens with free workforce. All the mods see 0 benefit from the increased traffic, increase polarization and stalled content refresh that the website pushes, they get more work, less tools and more abuse but the IPO price is gonna make the owners rich
Yes, the greedy idiot MBA's whose idea this was.
At work a newly hired (and newly graduated) developer got the responsibility to completely redesign some core functionality in our application. Of course he had no experience with the system or how it was being used, but he was still rewriting it and designing future use-cases.
This was also done with as far as I can tell no code reviews, tests or supervision, only vague directions of "this sounds good, do it!".
It's been years since he left for greener pastures, and we're still reeling from the consequences.
They were just about finished with making their Polymer 1.x components ready for Polymer 2 when the Polymer project once again did an overhaul and split off to lit-html or whatever.
I mean they picked an experimental / in development project that was best known for running McDonalds menu displays. We had to fix basics like memory leaks because it didn't have proper routing - it wasn't a web application framework, but they tried to use it as such.
Reddit very successfully moved away from being the techy nerd basement dweller site to becoming a trendy young "normie" people site. Dumb everything down to shoot for the lowest common denominator, maximizing the size of your target demographic.
So hiring someone who probably loved instagram, facebook, pinterest, tumblr, but never used reddit (but had likely been to the site perhaps a few times before) is exactly who they wanted to redesign the site.
IIRC something like 95% of users are using the official app and/or the new website. And reddit has exploded in popularity in recent years.
I'm not convinced the redesign contributed to this. I think it was already happening prior to the redesign.
I think reddit's demographic still is young , and has always been so .
Personally I don't understand how people can use the new design. My opinion that it's terrible is one thing, but it doesn't even work. For the first few years I repeatably made bug reports, then I just gave up. The "new" design is slow as all hell, the video player doesn't work and if you want to read more than a few comments... well to bad, because 80% of them are buried and you don't get to read them. The redesign is five years old, it has been worked on for longer, and it still doesn't work.
Maybe it has attracted more people, if so, it's the wrong kind, because Reddit has developed into a cesspit of negativity. Everyone appears to have be depressed, poor, angry, hostile towards people not who thinks differently and most seems to be medicated. It not a good place to visit, if you want to keep your sanity. I'd rather debate politics on /b/ on 4chan.
I feel the topics on their have gotten less interesting. Especially in stuff like travel and cooking. I used to really like the travel content on their but it feels useless lately. It just seems to basic and low effort.
Reddit lives and dies by the moderation. Communities with very strict moderation often get a lot of flack for not allowing the low effort drivel. Communities that "let the votes decide" are overrun with low effort memes, waves of "DAE <super common opinion>?" and repost after repost. Often times to have a truly unique and useful experience with the site you need to manage your own content moderation with blocks/filters/etc. This is why there's a lot of inertia to the 3rd party apps and plugins we use, because seeing those as on the chopping block means we're going back to a wild forest of low effort dredge.
If Reddit Is Fun, RES, or old. gets killed off I'm going to leave the site. It will absolutely be difficult, but it will be for the best. I avoid certain subs that are massively popular because they mostly play on the ragebait engagement or outright ignore core issues solved by the moderation. Having that put back to the forefront of my experience will feel like re-opening Facebook or signing up for Twitter. No thanks.
Didn't that transition happen in the early 2010s? When I was in grad school a decade ago basically everyone I knew (which included many "normies") was scrolling through reddit when they were bored. I don't think the dumbing down really started until new reddit was introduced, which was 5-6 years ago IIRC.
There exists this entire class of business theory now based on the principle of hatred towards the users. Think about the products you actually like and purchase/use... how many of those companies' behaviors are completely inexplicable unless they hate you and want to punish you for buying their stuff?
PHB: "We hired a new CTO with no experience in our industry, because we want somebody who doesn't know what can't be done!"
Wally: "Boy, I went the wrong way on my resume"
It's called modern frontend, I'm afraid :-)
By the way the next iteration of Reddit web UI, which this time is based on web components with Lit rather than on React, is less garbage — at least in terms of raw performance. Design-wise it may still be horrible; but at least technologically, it feels like a step in the right direction. You can check it out if you browse Reddit not logged-in.
https://i.imgur.com/OSfzPDa.png
That was when I fully appreciated both that raw performance is important for me, and how truly horrible it was on the Reddit site.
It feels like Reddit is in the same place Twitter was pre-Musk. Kind of lost in terms of purpose/trajectory for monetization. Or maybe it’s the other way around: it’s where Twitter will be in a few years, stagnated because it was bought to be part of a larger portfolio, a bauble that sits on the shelf and doesn’t really have anything innovative going for it.
To me there isn’t anything interesting about Reddit anymore. I only use it to hear from people who claim to live in a place I’m living or visiting, or to get very specific troubleshooting advice, where I find a specific post using an external search engine. Mostly I think the culture of the site itself is annoying. Any time I stray outside of regional or technical subreddits it feels like I’ve accidentally landed in a middle school cafeteria.
That’s a big problem when you have thousands of employees. It’s like youtube or google. What can you really do with all these people?
A rational person would say fire them. But firing people feels wrong because growth is good and big is good. So the only solution is to make a project for them to work on.
The natural project for them is a UI change because it won’t break the product and it caters for their lack of ability. So that’s why finished products like reddit and youtube have a new worse UI every year for seemingly no reason.
One of the third-party apps effected is Apollo, which is the vision of a single, talented iOS developer/designer who isn't beholden to investors and the whims of every other team and committee within a large org.
Are there people who even thinks these designs are good? How do you even end up with something like this? Is it just garbage requirements thrown out by clueless managers? There must be some force here, because Twitter's UI is also garbage.
Some part of me hope that Reddit will kill all third-party apps and remove old.reddit, so I'll stop using the site.