Comment by protomikron | Hacker News Reader

Comment by protomikron | Hacker News Reader

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Agreed. And I wouldn't consider myself to be nit-picky regarding design, as I mostly read Reddit for the content in specific subs.

Despite some questionable design decisions my main grip with the new design is that it often just does not work at all. I rarely alter default options in software but I had to use old.reddit.com quite often to even use the site:

  - sometimes the whole page does not work because of cookie issues
  - sometimes posts don't load (I have to manually refresh)
  - sub's sidebars missing: there was often useful information (might be the job of the moderators though)
  - unable to do local search (CTRL-F) due to endless scroll

Regarding my last point, Reddit is not the only culprit and many websites unfortunately switch to this style - hopefully at least Google keep their pagination - but I find it terrible.

With traditional pagination you can CTRL-F for keywords, go to the next page, and repeat the process, but with endless-scroll content is usually loaded dynamically depending on your viewport, so it's nearly impossible to search in a reliable way.

> sub's sidebars missing

I'm a mod for a few subs and for that reason was forced to start using the new UI. Most of the sidebar can be developed to look and work similar to the old markdown sidebar, but without all the custom css styling.

I see the new UI as the a less dramatic version of myspace as the old, and facebook as new.* This includes but not limited to stripping out custom CSS. (You don't have to be a front end developer to style your sub anymore.) The reddit ecosystem as a whole will now look and function much the same everywhere. Some sub designs were getting out of hand. This gives Reddit execs and admins much more control and the lowly mod a lot less.

Alas the reddit mod is further relegated the jerk the community maligns for setting arbitrary rules and unfairly limiting free speech. Also a lot of the mod tools are streamlined, link/user flair, user access/banning, etc. I really don't like the look and feel of the new UI and after a month of constant use still prefer the old UI.

*(Avoiding any reference to dig 4.0)

> Some sub designs were getting out of hand

Hey, /r/ooer is a treasure, and the redesign is a lesser beast for not allowing its like!

Exactly. There are often times where I get a blank page and have to refresh. Combine that with the fact that CPU usage is way higher on the redesign for me, and after about a month or so of testing it I reverted to the old design.

The fact that Reddit even considered making this the default design for logged out users is laughable.

There are ways to have fast scrolling while maintaining ctrl-f compatibility by rendering a lightweight text-only copy of the content outside the viewport. It's unfortunate most websites don't bother doing that.

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