from Hacker News

Reddit's redesign could kill discussion subreddits

by Aoyagi on 4/12/18, 10:14 AM with 274 comments

• by jacques_chester on 4/12/18, 11:39 AM

  Mobile phones. Again.

  It's always mobile phones that ruin good websites these days.

  They optimise for swipe, scroll and tap. Look, like, emoji.

  They don't optimise for text. In fact they are increasingly hostile to it. The Tinderfication of online dating has been a depressing race to the bottom.

  The internet was never going to be as great as we thought it was. No other technology has been. Folks thought the telegraph would end wars and that TVs would have everyone soaking up a deep education. But that's not where the money was.

  But I felt it wouldn't be this shitty. At some point we're all going to look back on that moment when Jobs held up the first iPhone that could run an app and regret it.

• by StellarTabi on 4/12/18, 5:32 PM

  Two reasons why Reddit isn't "digg-ing" their own grave right now:

  1. This change is much smaller and less destructive than digg's big change (although the long term effects can be just as destructive).

  2. When Digg's redesign caused an exodus, Reddit was extremely well known as "that ugly digg clone" and "this digg link was on Reddit yesterday". Reddit doesn't have a well known established "number two" the way digg did. Raddleme is a leftist fringe site, voat is a racist fringe site, HN is a technology fringe site. Discord servers rely on Reddit for discoverability and member vetting. When this has been discussed before, I've never seen a viable candidate mentioned. Since the only people who can leave are people who only use fringe topics, Reddit won't be able to loose critical mass and then the fringers will have to come back.

  On the other hand, these changes appear to be a step into the Twitter/Instagram/facebook market. I'm curious if Reddit will be ready in time to take advantage of this upcoming Facebook exodus, also if there will even be an exodus.

• by dgreensp on 4/12/18, 1:06 PM

  From reading Reddit threads about the redesign: pretty much everyone hates it, especially Reddit’s most passionate users, who have been very articulate, consistent, and aligned about exactly what they don’t like, and Reddit just keeps brushing them off and dismissing their point of view.

  Maybe the purpose of the redesign is something like monetization? Or maybe they are just out of touch and by the time they really understood the community’s point of view, the decisions had been made, so the Reddit employees tasked with handling the community response can’t really say or do much.

• by joemi on 4/12/18, 7:00 PM

  I don't get it. What exactly is changing? From the screenshots from the reddit post about it, it looks.... like reddit. There's posts and the posts have upvote/downvote buttons, and there's a link to the comments that shows how many there are. Am I missing something? The OP article doesn't actually have any screenshots of changes, and I made it several paragraphs into the article still not understanding what is changing.

• by vesinisa on 4/12/18, 11:12 AM

  Sadly, the reddit website has become a travesty - especially on mobile. A huge "DOWNLOAD THE REDDIT APP" banner obscures literally 30% of the page. There is a teeny-tiny "view on mobille site" link in small, low-contrast text that can be used to dismiss the annoying banner. Due to its size and user-hostile design, the Reddit banner is even worse than most news sites that try to push their newsletter/app/subscription with similarly annoying banners.

• by baby on 4/12/18, 12:04 PM

  A day before the re-design announcement I was explaining to a friend why Digg died and why Reddit would never dare re-designing their page. Oh boy was I wrong.

• by dmix on 4/12/18, 2:35 PM

  Purely from a user perspective I personally love the new Reddit design, I don't find it detracts much from the previous design at all. BUT I use a top-end Macbook Pro and I find the new design to be terribly slow and a performance hog, where it simply kills the UX.

  Once you open up 10 tabs (how I typically browse Reddit, by shift clicking each thread I want to read) I can hear my CPU fans kicking in. I had to tune Firefox to use 6 cores instead of 4 to get any decent performance. I may just end up going back to the old design :/

  I'm not sure what computers/browsers Reddit's UI/UX team has been testing on, or if they've ever tried to open multiple pages at once, but this is a pretty blatant issue.

• by radiorental on 4/12/18, 11:46 AM

  Top tier sites like reddit should not drop large, disruptive, releases like this.

  Take Amazon for example. If they went from the design 5-7 years ago straight to the current design, there would be uproar, Stock price dip etc.

  The incremental approach allows the site owner to both roll back bad ideas but also condition users into where the design is heading.

  (Correction: not Conde Nast) The owner, has a plan, which is clearly not inline with the current Reddit usage, this is not the approach to get to that goal.

  I am struggling to think of big drops like this working, anyone?

• by s_dev on 4/12/18, 11:43 AM

  As long as redditors can choose between the designs I don't see a problem. Once this choice is removed though they've veered in to Digg territory. All the power users and influencers will use the old design because they're used to it. I can see why reddit wants a redesign -- reddit is ugly but people are used to it that way and grew to like it. The redesign is for new users.

  Reddit has already been down this path with Pao. If they don't like how the site is being run they will depart or revolt.

• by crankylinuxuser on 4/12/18, 11:29 AM

  I unfortunately saw this weeks ago. I did the checkbox accepting being in the Beta program.

  At first, I thought something was rewriting the whole content of my browser. And then, I realized, no, this is their "redesign". On mobile, the site is unusable - as in a overlay bar blocks all clicks or anything - for at least 30 seconds. Being on a laptop wasn't much better. There, it was 10 seconds of unusuability, per loaded page.

  It took me 3 minutes to navigate to turn off beta. From there, it went back to the decent site I'm used to. Well, except a button in the upper left band that states "TRY THE REDESIGN"... Uhh, no.

  All good things must come to an end. There is an end to everything, to good things as well.

• by Redoubts on 4/12/18, 3:27 PM

  All I wanted to see is what the comments section now looks like. It's literally the only thing I'm there for, and preview photos never show it. (My biggest complaint with many HN app previews too)

  Of course, when I try the preview myself, I'm greeted with this:

  https://imgur.com/a/PvRhk

• by brynjolf on 4/12/18, 11:48 AM

  Frustrating to discuss this on reddit as well. They always think we should watch and eait but that rarely works. Especially if they already added huge banners advertising their data collecting app and now autoplaying videos, before people complained they also autoplayed them with sound..

• by nhangen on 4/12/18, 7:47 PM

  How can an article about a re-design not actually show or compare the two designs?

• by adjunctme on 4/12/18, 8:09 PM

  The redesign adds a bit of lag from all the javascript and extra elements. The old plain text + expanding comments + images/gifs is much smoother and includes everything that's needed

• by atupis on 4/12/18, 11:45 AM

  There is certain design by committee feeling at new redesing, its like they are putting everything there chat, share, follow, fancy sidebar, options and more.

• by bkovacev on 4/12/18, 11:34 AM

  Reddit is pushing to become a news site rather than a community site.

• by rabboRubble on 4/12/18, 8:12 PM

  Reddit gave me the opportunity to try the new layout, and I lasted exactly 1 minute before reverting. The log in page was broken. I could see where to sign up for a new account, but could not see area to log in for existing users.

  The problem appeared to be one of resizing the old log in page correctly for the new layout. Regardless, not my issue as a stupid user to have to debug log in pages for a major website.

  If this sort of basic thing is missing in the redesign, they have big problems ahead.

• by dotcoma on 4/12/18, 11:08 AM

  The question is: By mistake or by design?

• by chaoticmass on 4/12/18, 4:57 PM

  I miss being able to collapse comments by pressing the minus-sign button.

• by spiderfarmer on 4/12/18, 11:29 AM

  The Apollo app is what official Reddit should be like right now.

• by sidkhanooja on 4/13/18, 7:19 AM

  Reddit has its issues (brigading, trolling, execssive politics, 12-year old level "memes" on serious discussions), but it was a site you could visit without regret, and get lost in for hours.

  With the new redesign, it is Facebook - people share a link, you click the comments section, it shows you the top comments, you upvote the top comments (or the ones that agree with your view), and rinse and repeat till infinity, because you have infinite scroll. Which is not how I want the future Reddit to look like.

  Yes, it is good for advertisers. Yes, it is good for the the new wave of people who will arrive from Facebook.

  But it is utterly disheartening for Reddit to stray so far from what I viewed its core emphasis as - comments.

• by agumonkey on 4/12/18, 11:31 AM

  wonder what will be the next reddit .. maybe the last push before some decentralized thing that needed some userbase.

• by ra88it on 4/12/18, 12:48 PM

  Can somebody please summarize what has changed? Maybe I don't use Reddit enough, but I just refreshed one of the subreddits that I like, and I can't find a difference. Possibly a caching issue?

• by tluyben2 on 4/12/18, 7:39 PM

  The design reminds me too much of the native iOS Reddit app; fine for mobile, but I really do not like it for desktop. It is absolutely annoying to me.

• by return1 on 4/12/18, 6:20 PM

  in other news how is their new profile design going? I keep adding /overview to mine and other profiles to be able to actually click on things . Why do they keep breaking functionality for no apparent reason? It's becoming a theme in many high-traffic websites (google adsense, analytics come to mind), it's as if new managers roll in and decide to piss all around their territory.

• by digi_owl on 4/12/18, 7:26 PM

  I find the new design noisy and distracting.

• by gm-conspiracy on 4/12/18, 11:28 AM

  digg v3?

• by reiichiroh on 4/12/18, 6:59 PM

  Is Fark still relevant? Their Cohen raid night thread was really long.

• by superkuh on 4/12/18, 12:15 PM

  I started using reddit in 2008. Although I doubt it was intentional reddit was a refuge from the "Best viewed with Javascript" modern web for many years. It worked just fine to browse and read with no JS enabled and was very snappy and low resource usage that way. Sure, you had to toggle JS back on to vote or post but that was easy enough.

  I left just before they pushed out the redesign due their increased censorship but from what I can see now it is a random chance that a sub will work with JS disabled. Half the time the post content in a div that only is rendered visible when you turn on JS. You can read it if you view source but not in the browser's native interface.

• by cup-of-tea on 4/12/18, 12:30 PM

  Reddit is terrible for discussion anyway. You can't have a discussion when people can "downvote" your post. Nothing of value has been lost here. I say that as someone who used reddit heavily until about a month ago when I kicked the addiction.

• by MikkoFinell on 4/12/18, 12:03 PM

  I had no idea there was "discussion subreddits" on reddit. I always thought it was a site for hoarding karma by posting memes and puns.

• by Vovka19 on 4/12/18, 11:01 AM

  What interesting?