Hacker News Reader

Comment by meerita | Hacker News Reader

We usually see many downfalls when companies redesign. To remember one that really took off of their products: Dropbox. I couldn't stare at such destruction. Another company that I liked and had hopes was Typeform. Another example of horrible hipter design from a team who was quite bored and possible, a clueless head product.

View on HN

Dropbox is the only SaaS I have ever used that fucked up its redesign badly enough to make me—a previously-thrilled customer—jump ship to a technically-inferior and more-expensive product. I don't regret it whatsoever.

For me Dropbox is still better than the competition (don't know about iCloud, never used it) and I don't even remember what redesign you're talking about. I've always used it as set and forget sync, I rarely see the interface or the web page.

I switched to iCloud and apart from not seeing the sync status in the menu bar (and the folder location being .. worse) it's as good as Dropbox. Set and forget.

Totally! iCloud is quite transparent and well integrated. It works like a charm on macs. No need to use horrible Google's Drive or Dropbox anymore.

I disliked the Dropbox redesign as well, then I went back to using it exactly the same way I've done for the previous 10 years -- not seeing any UI whatsoever.

I was on the free plan (which I'd worked up to 10.5GB of storage through various incentive programs they ran) and specifically objected to

1. Limiting me to three clients at once. (Work computer, personal computer (Linux), personal computer (Windows), phone—oops!

2. Bombarding me with "your storage is almost full!" notifications either by email or when I visited dropbox.com to, e.g., get a share link for someone. Usually I had over a gigabyte of storage left. The webapp was at times unusable due to the volume of notifications.

3. Prohibiting me from keeping offline copies of entire directories on my phone.

Now I'm spending $20/month on a VPS running Nextcloud and am much happier.

Seems like all of your issues could be resolved by paying for it, which is WAY cheaper than $20/month.

I would expect them to be getting more value from the $20/month VPS, otherwise they could go with a $5/month plan (half of Dropbox’s cheapest plan).

Myself, I resolved the 3-client limit (which they hit me with when switching to a new phone — trying to use backups stored in Dropbox) by a swift migration to OneDrive (where I have 40 GB of free space due to various offers and grandfathering, that’s plenty enough for me). The Linux situation isn’t ideal (there’s a reasonable CLI-only not-real-time client), but otherwise, it’s great. And if I did decide to pay, there’s a neat and cheap 100 GB plan for 2€/month, or a 69€/year plan with 1 TB and desktop Microsoft Office — a bargain compared to Dropbox’s 2-TB-and-not-much-else for €120/year plan. The only thing Dropbox has these days is name recognition and intertia, everyone else’s offerings are cheaper and have more features.

> We usually see many downfalls when companies redesign.

Exactly! I'm still salty about "new reddit."

We care about your redesign because we don't want to have to get used to a whole new less functional UX.

"But where are we going to put all these new features to mimic competitor X that nobody cares about that we promised to our investors we would add before next investment round to pump the valuation?" /s

Old Reddit was awful and I always used alternative UIs for it.

New Reddit’s design was a great improvement if it weren't for the fact that its developers were and still are absolutely clueless. That paired with a user-hostile management made Reddit even worse.

But the redesign itself was not the issue, it was the implementation.

I disagree, new Reddit is fundamentally flawed, and worse than old Reddit in almost every way. I will stop using Reddit the day old.reddit.com stops working.

I won't only because my mobile reddit client is fantastic, but agreed I will stop using web reddit once old.reddit is removed.

Was there anything in particular you disliked about reddits 'old' design? How would you compare it to HNs design?

The main issue was that looking at the actual content meant visiting a different website, there was no way to see photos and videos in gallery view like you would on Facebook for example.

The difference with HN is that HN is not mainly for media. However HN isn’t great either. The button to collapse threads in on top of the thread in a 16x16-pixel touch target. Good luck finding it when you’re 12 comments down.

For being a text comment-only website, the HN experience is pretty poor. The only good thing HN has got going on technically is that it’s super fast. Heck it still doesn’t offer dark mode when it would literally be 7 additional lines of CSS.

Reddit Enhancement Suite fixed all that. Sure it's a plugin but that's not that big of an inconvenience. Reddit devs really should have took inspiration from that instead of building the monstrosity they have now.

Oh I see, your main issue wasn't with the UI design, it was with the UX design. The original intention was that it acted as a gateway to content on the internet - like with Google.

Unfortunately that UX isn't the best because most sites linked to are slow, annoying or broken in some way. Imgur fixed that though.

I must emphatically disagree. On a single page, newreddit shows a fraction of the comments as oldreddit does. They expect you to manually click to expand dozens of "Read More" links and repeatedly suffer the associated loading times of their newly-bloated webpage. For reading comments, newreddit isn't just a disaster of implementation, it's a disaster of usability. It's obvious that their goal is to discourage commenting in order to get people back to scrolling the infinite feed, since that's where the ads are. But oldreddit, while it looks ugly, is (perhaps entirely by accident) an absolute dream for navigating large and highly branching conversations.

I don’t really use Reddit anymore, I’m just talking about their initial migration that everyone hated. Back then it wasn’t so user hostile, it was just a modernization effort with ajaxed loading and some initial bugs. Then things got worse instead of getting better.

> On a single page, newreddit shows a fraction of the comments as oldreddit does. They expect you to manually click to expand dozens of "Read More" links and repeatedly suffer the associated loading times of their newly-bloated webpage.

This sounds like the exceedingly stupid javascript override popup view a primary click on links gives. It's meant to make it easy to return to the list and keep scrolling forever.

Try opening the links in new tabs, or hitting "refresh" after clicking. That'll give you the full page view.

New Reddit requires continual tapping in, and on the back button, to read a conversation tree, with painful amounts of page reloads and latency.

That's designed in. It's not an implementation problem.

The snake is eating it's own tail, reddit has become /r/assholedesign

Yeah it wasn't pretty but it was efficient and fast. I think those trump pretty any day of the week. With Reddit Enhancement Suite it's fantastic. However looks like RES has entered the "parked" status and they will only fix bugs now. I think the devs lost interest but in their defense it has been around for years. Unfortunately "new reddit" is still awful, but at least they tried to keep it alive long enough for reddit to get their shit together.

Well, Reddit was smart enough to keep the old interface online (and the one before that [0]), so when someone "oldschool" links to Reddit, they'll simply use the old link; slightly salty maybe, but they're still on Reddit. New, less technical users, on the other hand, will get the shiny, streamlined new interface.

You can say what you want about them, but they managed to push out a conversion optimized interface for new users while still keeping their core group/addicts at bay, which is not easy.

[0] https://i.reddit.com/

there is a setting in user settings to use the old interface "always", if you didn't already know. Then you don't have to type "old.reddit.com"

anecdotal but I have that set and it almost "always" never works.

You have something wrong with your set up. I've had it set for years and it works fine. Maybe you have some strict cookie settings or tracking blocker interfering with it. Try with an unadorned browser (read no-plugins) and you'll find it works great.

I've encountered the behavior on three separate devices in two separate browsers, with and without plugins.

I don't entirely hate "new reddit" but I prefer the old version and greatly appreciate them keep the old style around. The new version is so badly coded and slow. I think if they would stop "updating" and optimize efficiency of their interface it would be useable again.

I use the old reddit. I'm glad they give that option because the new one it sucks. Just the fuck it doesn't profit the entire width of the screen bogged me.

Just imagine a HN redesign, lot of bored designers tried it long time ago and for sure if it goes like this it will perish.

If you're old enough you remember the crappy Slashdot redesign after which you couldn't follow threads anymore.

I remember that one too! Damn it was long time ago, but another example of "let's redesign maybe things gets better".

Gumroad's recent redesign is also quite ugly.

For now I won't stop using the service, but it disgusts me every time I see it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com