Indeed. That's why, when they finally kill old.reddit, I may legitimately stop using it entirely. They've already banned most of the good apps, forcing the pretty terrible official one.

RedReader is a lovely, lightweight Android app for Reddit.

Development is slow, but I've been happily using it since RiF was killed.

Recently the old reddit szopped working for me even after going to account settings and opting out of new design again (it was already marked as being opt out) across all my devices. Even after manually navigating to old.reddit.com, clicking any link would take me to new again. I had to install special extensions to reroute to old reddit everywhere.

Same thing happened to me, this fixed it: https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/1odehgj/is_old_reddit...

Had that happen a few times but switching the use old reddit box off and back on fixes it.

New reddit is a travesty. It feels a satirical mockery of modern webdev

My favorite feature is how you click a reply notification and it takes you to a page that doesn’t show the reply half the time.

And 6 years later it's still as terrible.

I've got a pet theory that old.reddit is actually codified in legal language somewhere as "must always exist."

Otherwise, I can't believe Reddit is actually keeping it around out of the goodness in their cold, dead corporate heart.

Let's try this one: Reddit is selling "we'll let your AI training scrape our data" and have lazily implemented it by just pointing at old.reddit.com.

Possibly, but doesn't old.reddit predate the LLM craze?

Oh I'm not saying it was created for that. I'm saying that could be why it's still alive.

> but also navigation and accessibility

Counterpoint, HN is notoriously hard to use on mobile (still better than some, but it's clearly designed for desktop, and not super responsive).

But agreed, that's independent of the slim nature of the webpage (which is still possible with a good mobile UX).

> Counterpoint, HN is notoriously hard to use on mobile

No it's not, it's perfect on Vanadium with the zoom set to 125%. Much better than some bloated Javascript monstrosity.

It's very frustrating whenever this topic comes up that people see no middle ground between "the website as it is right now" and "some bloated JavaScript monstrosity". There is lots of room for improvement that would not turn it into "a bloated JavaScript monstrosity". How about bigger touch targets? Half the time when I go to vote on a comment on mobile I vote in the wrong direction and have to undo it. Same goes for using the search feature: I constantly fat-finger the drop-down search options on mobile.

Even though I usually prefer mobile websites to apps, most of the time for HN I browse using Octal instead of the website because the website is such a pain. And it wouldn't take very much to make it better, which makes it so annoying that people have knee-jerk anger to the prospect every time the subject comes up.

> How about bigger touch targets?

And lose even more precious space for reading? No thanks. Zoom in before you vote if it's a problem for you. You might say "how about drag up/down?" but then you can't scroll reliably on the page.

There's all this blank space to the left of the comment. Some of that could be used for bigger arrows.

Or some of the buttons on a comment could be hidden until you tap the comment. (And you can do it in CSS if div toggle is an offensive amount of javascript.)

There are some low-hanging fruit that would make the experience better. It's fine but it's not great.

The Octal app has better touch targets on mobile and manages to show more text at the same time. Here’s a pair of screenshots from my iPhone of the top of the “Is Rust Faster than C” comments. [0] is mobile Safari, [1] is Octal. The app shows more text.

This is exactly what makes me nuts about this whole debate: the complete lack of empiricism or nuance. People would rather just have their knee-jerk outrage about JavaScript or web design fads, instead of actually checking whether the things they’re saying are true.

[0]: https://imgur.com/a/aOvLFcM

[1]: https://imgur.com/a/7R14m4d

The font is bigger in your first example, the text uses twice the space (or your screenshots are different resolutions?). I greatly prefer it because it's easier to read. You could zoom out if you want, I guess.

But you could move the arrows to be to the right of the [-] and space them out a bit, sure, so they're easier to touch.

Anything that would introduce any amount of unneeded Javascript would make HN worse. It's the cancer of the modern Web. The current design shows that it isn't needed at all.

You do not need JS to make some things (vote arrows, for example) bigger on mobile, just CSS.

I find it works perfectly on Safari on iPhone.

Agreed. To upvote I often zoom out to make sure I tap the upvote botton and no the downvote one!

I've found HN pretty easy to use with both Chrome and Firefox on Android, at default zoom, with my own pocket supercomputer.

Sometimes I manage to hit the updoot or downdoot buttons incorrectly, but that error happens so rarely that I'm amazed at my success.

Responsiveness is very good, as well. Loading is lightning quick in all but the very worst network environments.

It's not perfect by any means (the text box I'm writing this into really should be resizeable, for instance), but it's not bad at all...for me.

Reader mode is nearly a must for me. Our eyes need a break.

HN in reader mode would be a such hugh blessing!

I dont get this. HN is probably one of the easiest sites i regularly use on mobile.

The uptoot and downtoot buttons are a liiiiitle too close to eachother tho

I'm using the "Glider" app for Android to access HN and its pretty awesome

CBC News has a lite version of their news site that they tend to promote around times of natural disaster.

(1) https://www.cbc.ca/lite/news

NPR has one too: https://text.npr.org

CNN: https://lite.cnn.com/

The dutch news (NOS) has their Teletext available via ssh on teletekst.nl.

no lite version as far as I know.

Maybe someone can build a service that translates webpages into "reader mode" format, which you can then consume on mobile devices with low bitrates.

That's effectively what Opera Mini did. (And apparently still does, I had no idea it was still functional.)

This is a pretty promising vector for man in the middle attacks.

So is Manifest v2 ad blocking and plenty of people are screaming about killing that one.

For a proper HN technical-solutions-only response, have the rewrite functionality reside in a WASM module cached locally and run in the browser, with a transparency ledger proving everyone sees the same WASM modules. This way any MitM attempts by the service are reproducible and undeniable.

v2 is not a MitM concern (but it is a malicious code concern). Before quibbling about this consider that if v2 qualifies as a MitM concern then pretty much every other piece of software also does. That isn't in keeping with the spirit of the term.

The outrage is threefold, because there is no viable alternative, because it infantilizes users, trampling their agency, and because it clearly serves corporate interests at the expense of the user.

As to your proposed solution - the rewriting needs to happen on a separate device in order to avoid pushing extra data across the network. If you're already self hosting that service then there's no need for a transparency ledger.

It's auto updating JavaScript maintained by some unknown that can rewrite html on any page, how is that not an MitM risk?

The html itself is rarely a lot of data, most things in this space remove or resize images etc.

If only we could make that conducive to resume-driven development for web developers.

One more realistic option could be to have an "LLM browsing proxy" where you chat with an LLM via text, and it does the browsing and parsing and extracting, with links etc.

lol. It’s called Gemini.

NoScript gets you part way there.