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Comment by piinbinary | Hacker News Reader

It seems that the content isn't included in the HTML in the page. Instead, the HTML loads some JS in a second network request. That JS is compiled and run, and makes a third network request to fetch the content.

Using server-side rendering might help get the initial page loaded faster.

The endpoints themselves also seem to be very slow. I clocked a page taking 800ms to just return the bare html (vs. about 90 ms for hacker news).

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It's more than that, though. I've been working this weekend on a basic Reddit frontend (https://reddit.spiffy.tech) and it feels much faster to load the front page there on my phone than the mobile Reddit web app.

Any way to see what the frontend looks like without giving a weekend project full access to my Reddit account? :)

You can always make a new account.

I've updated it to allow anonymous browsing. The github is also here if you want to self-host: https://github.com/spiffytech/LurkerForReddit

So far it just does read-only behavior, but in comparison to the Reddit mobile web app, it does enough network traffic to replicate the same view: (1) fetch the front page, (2) fetch your list of subscriptions.

I like the idea of a split view, so you can continue browsing frontpage/possibly a subreddit while still looking at a comment section.

If there was a way to incorporate mod controls and refresh just for the right pane, this would be a GODSEND for monitoring active threads.

I would consider going that direction. I haven't moderated subs; can you point me towards a resource that lists the most crucial mod features to have?

Sounds like some slow authentication middleware, and who knows what else.

TL;DR: the new framework uses multiple roundtrips to fetch content in different requests.

I think there is also an illusion of unresponsiveness at play here. With a traditional interface, the browser doesn't refresh until the main content is already ready, whereas with the new framework, the new page is eagerly displayed, before the content is retrieved. So you have a period of noticeable lack-of-content and this is perceived as slowness.

Slowness and deception: they prepopulate the empty framework with grey placeholder non-text that implies "here will be text once it rezzes in" but is never what the layout suggests.

A bunch of fake paragraphs that just resolve to "F" are an aggravating user experience.

> deception

Whoa, that's some strong language!

> never what the layout suggests.

I suppose that the current fashion's major problem is that the silhouettes are too sharply defined. Probably, one way to fix it is to have multiple of them with some offset, so that the silhouette suggest the kind of media (text) that would eventually be displayed, without also suggesting how they would be formatted.

> aggravating user experience.

That's a legitimate criticism for the choice of placeholder, but not pertinent to the current topic. My claim was that the lack of actual text presented to the user makes the user more conscious of the delay.

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