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Comment by tbrake | Hacker News Reader

I've long thought about making a thread like this so I'm happy to see it. Fed up with this actively user-hostile web experience to try and drive people to the app.

My main gripe is definitely expanding comments -

> First of all, only the top comment will be shown. Then you can tap view more which will load another two. But you cannot open all the comments.

Because the "create an account to continue" toast pictured is unclosable on my phone. Meaning not only can I not expand any more comments, but I can't even go back see other un-expanded comments. I need to refresh.

Just an absolute rancid experience all around.

View on HN

Reddit has become another VC invested company where crippling features, dark patterns on forced "adoption" and dark "growth" hacks du jours are the norms.

I'm a very early and long term user, and I slowly moved away after "the" investment.

HN on the other hand is still safe, as the huge success of YC and their aim of gathering talent and readers gives more financial freedom. What if some investor now invests in HN, gathers a board, assigns a CEO with the profitability and "growth" target? I'm afraid to ask this, but the same could happen.

HN is too niche to milk for profitability like Reddit. Only relatively technical people hang out here and will probably move to, or setup, an alternative if HN gets sold out.

"too niche...Only relatively technical people hang out here"

Sounds like early reddit.

As long as HN doesnt focus on pics, gifs and TikTok garbage, it's probably safe from those who have a 1 millisecond attention span.

If I could buy equity in HN I would do it in a heartbeat.

The value of HN to YCombinator is keeping a large community of plugged-in and knowledgeable people on-tap. If there were any hint of commercializing HN, it would be clear as day that Ycombinator was now run by idiots. Everyone would flee faster than a jackrabbit from a pack of wolves.

> has become VC infested company

FTFY.

If that happens, let's use Usenet?

It's atrocious that their main interface is like this, but have you tried i.reddit.com?

Not grandparent commenter, but I don’t. I switched to the logged out, default experience recently. It’s so user hostile it’s been pretty effective at curbing my Reddit addiction and making me waste less time on that site.

Haha, I did the same on my phone to reduve my Reddot useage.

old.reddit.com is usable too. But for some reason it keeps logging me out, recently.

you’re not alone and it’s a common complaint. along with the complaint that toggling “opt out of redesign” is constantly coming untoggled randomly and without warning. This doesn’t even happen between browser sessions where one would think a cookie got dropped, it can happen simply between pages. one moment you’re using old reddit, click a comment link, boom..you’re back on the redesign and having to change the setting again.

I use old.reddit.com exclusively (automatically enforced by a browser extension[1]) and haven't experienced unexpected logouts.

[1] https://github.com/tom-james-watson/old-reddit-redirect

> Meaning not only can I not expand any more comments, but I can't even go back see other un-expanded comments.

I'm pretty certain it used to work and they intentionally broke it so that you cannot close the modal popup.

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