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Comment by freyr | Hacker News Reader

Lots of justified criticism here about the mobile web Reddit, which is horrible.

But the desktop web Reddit has become unusable for me as well. My laptop heats up, the fans go into overdrive, and my browser slows to a crawl. It’s the anti-HN.

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Either Reddit has hired developers and designers who aren't very good at what they do or what we want from Reddit is different than what the management and investors want to deliver.

It's almost certainly the latter, right? Is this a case of Reddit chasing some specific metrics and quality, being hard to measure, just gets left behind?

Well users want a web-based forum. Reddit want money and influencing power.

I mean it's all a system (now, not necessarily at it's inception) to manipulate us either to get our vote or our money and offer just enough utility to entice us in.

Would really like to see a public interest company run a major forum; even HN has an element of bias to serve YCombinators interests.

I'd like 'reddit but purely serving the interests of the users as closely as possible', as much as anything just to see what is possible.

Isn't all of that orthogonal to my point about quality though? I don't see any reason why you can't build an ad-supported service, even one that is manipulative, that's of high quality.

Like Wikipedia but a Forum?

Yeah, maybe?

clickable: https://old.reddit.com/

If you have an account you can set this as the default. old.reddit.com + RES works really well for me. I really hope old.reddit.com does not go away.

yes I have this, with some curation of the content, it's can be reasonably pleasant. If they get rid of the old UI, reddit becomes digg.com and dies a quick death.

If old.reddit.com ever does go away, I'll stop using it. Even on a modern computer, with a decent internet connection, the "improved" one is sluggish and slow to load, almost as bad as Facebook. It's effectively the opposite of Hacker News.

Same. This is especially bad on Apple laptops, which heat up like crazy before fans kick in. For my 2015 MBP, it's almost unusable. I'm using reddit less and less.

I feel bad for the engineers because surely they knew the new site was incredibly slow and poorly optimised, so it must have been pushed through by management. It looks alright, but dear god the performance.

> ... because surely they knew the new site was incredibly slow and poorly optimised...

I wouldn't be so sure. It really depends on the quality of the engineers. And if they're quality why are they working for Reddit pushing out crappy software? Could be a case of resume driven development.

I'd like to give the engineers and designers the benefit of the doubt, but there are better ways to do what they tried to do.

Somewhere in the engineering hierarchy, some very poor decisions were made.

That is true as well. I feel that espacially when I switch between computers - on some I have "old reddit" turned on and it works fine. On the new one I have no idea what's going on.

Web interface transitions on sites we love are always harsh but I'm supposed to get used to new one by now. I can't.

preferences:

  [ ] Autoplay Reddit videos on the desktop comments page
  [ ] allow subreddits to show me custom themes
  [x] show legacy search page
  [ ] Use new Reddit as my default experience

similarly disable all under "personalization options"

add umatrix rule for "USE THE NEW REDDIT" nag and then it's actually sane, at least for me in ff.

Try old.reddit.com

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