Tell HN: Reddit does not allow comments post via old.reddit.com | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Reddit does not allow comments post via old.reddit.com

188 pointsalle2022222 comments

Can Reddit go much worse than this... I can accept the pain of using new.reddit.com to login. But as soon as switch to old.reddit.com it shows that I am logged out? What are the product dev teams aiming for?

1. Reddit now forces you to use new.reddit.com to dismiss the cookie banner

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21780092

2. Since forcing people to mobile all the time to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24208958

3. To forcing create account to read threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21780092

View on HN

Uh, I have none of those issues. Everything works for me on old.reddit.com, login, posting, reading. No idea about the logged-out experience, but logged-in everything works.

edit: cookie banner dismissal does indeed not work, I guess I had it blocked and didn’t realize

Same for me.

Yeah I just tried it to see what the fuss was about, and it works just fine as usual.

I have the same cookie banner dismissal problem, and it does seem to be logging me out more recently, but everything is fine when you're logged in.

Yes, same here. OP has jumped to some conclusions, I fear...

Same here. How is this not the most upvoted comment? Did anyone even check OP's claims? Maybe it's some sort of weird A/B test on reddit's side?

I draw the same conclusions whether or not it’s an A/B test. I’m not concerned about merely my own access, but that of my peers, and the effect that this hostility and filtering has on the character of the community.

Yeah... everything on old.reddit works fine for me as well.

Maybe OP was confused that Reddit blocks all comments on posts older than a certain amount...?

Not really sure what to make of this.

You have a way to dismiss the cookie banner on old.Reddit? For me the cookie banner has one button, ‘continue’, which takes you to new Reddit

Same for me. I use old.reddit.com and am not logged out, and can comment without any problem.

It seems OP's claims are disputable...

Cookie banner dismissal does NOT work on Old Reddit. It explicitely sends you to new.reddit.com to dismiss it.

You are correct, edited

This one. Until you accept it you would get a pretty weird behavour (maybe it depends on the browser?) byt you can't accept it on the old. subdomain, you need to go to the new one, accept it and after that the old one would work fine.

The easiest way to experience that is to access it through the European address and with old. URI as the first one.

Me too. I've even activated Firefox's strict cookie mode and still can use it fine (except that cookie banner, but a custom filter removed that one). Either an A/B test (but I don't see anyone else complaining...) or more likely user error.

It seems to work fine for me. I’ve noticed a change in the past couple of days where when I sign in through old.reddit.com, the page doesn’t refresh - it stays the same and continues to show the sign in box. However if I refresh manually I am signed in as normal. No problems commenting.

It's the same on mobile from the browser, so it's probably a bug.

That has happened to me as well.

Seems to permit my login, although it just tosses me back to the page without acknowledging that I'm logged in, and it doesn't show that I'm actually logged in. Trying to reply to comments gives a login box, even though going to the doom scroll site shows I am logged in on that browser session.

So, yeah, seems to be a thing and one that I'm more than happy to leave behind. I have noticed a couple other of my hobby sites have recently put their forums behind login-walls. Which I have a problem with, because I think having these sites indexed by search engines promotes activity and interest in the hobby.

Oh well, is it too late to come up with a new Usenet standard and bring back newsgroups?

Well, 'everything' besides links breaking when users post them from new reddit, which for some godawful reason inserts escape characters, and removes them when displaying in new reddit only.

Same here, it works fine except for the cookie banner which doesn't matter lol

Not me. Logging in and writing child-comments (top level comments seem to work for both old and new) does not work for me when I'm using old reddit. But if I visit new reddit, the child comments appear and it also says that I am logged in. Oh well, it's a good time to leave reddit anyway

I am so glad, that new redesign probably saved me hundreds of hours of free time, now I cringe every time I have to use Reddit, pretty radical productivity boost.

Couldn't agree more. They lost me after 8+ years of Reddit.

For those of us struggling with online distractions, I couldn't agree more. One thing that made Reddit so hard for me to control was that, even after deleting your account, browsing subs and comments was just entertaining enough. Now, it's horrible. Thanks Reddit!

Never thought of this way. Social media hubs have become so bad over the years that it’s just not fun anymore to use them. It’s a huge win.

I nuked pretty much all my comments and walked way from my account perhaps a year ago now. That sounds kinda absurd in the context of a website, but I personally did need that kind of 'clean break' in my head to put it behind me. Now I only touch the site briefly by happenstance when seeking some particular piece of information, my starting point being elsewhere, and I quickly dip out. That pattern of use is starkly different to how reddit is commonly used, as a starting point and jumping-off-point for a session of low-to-no-direction browsing.

I've lost nothing. My time goes on things that are significantly more productive, like online gaming and polishing my nails. I'm only half joking.

I hope reddit's slow decline continues rather than hitting some sudden turning point, because the alternative is some new clone coming along and everyone migrates like happened with digg redesign. That would just perpetuate the situation for another decade or two, and that would be a shame.

The new reddit is an embarrassment.

Old reddit load time: ~0.5 seconds / ~1-2mb transferred

New reddit load time: ~15 seconds / ~14mb transferred

After those 15 seconds new reddit threw a popup in my way, asking me about my interests. Once I dismiss it I'm in some weird information-scarce hellscape where I need to scroll to even get past the first submission.

It's inexcusably bad. It's throw it out the window and try again bad.

Any somewhat experienced developer would be embarrassed if that was their weekend project. Reddit had how many people work on that for how long?

It’s much worse than the infamous Digg redesign that drove many people to Reddit, but I guess things have changed in ten years, and anyway most users these days consume Reddit via the app.

> much worse than the infamous Digg redesign

Having used reddit on & off since ~2008, it's amusing to see them make virtually the same mistakes as Digg. I'm surprised that there hasn't been a similar exodus.

I think there's a reason you NEVER see people on HackerNews admitting to working at Reddit.

Talented frontend engineers have for many years given Reddit information on how to address this; Paul Irish did one in 2015[0] and they are still suffering from problems he outlined.

I could do one for them to keep it current, but I could also just pipe it to /dev/null for how much action I expect to come from it.

What's fairly horrifying are the mobile call to actions trumpeting "this page loads faster in the app." Cool: so you agree this is slow.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20150705021035/https://github.co...

> "this page loads faster in the app."

And then a link to "Open in App" which just sends you to the App Store and not the actual content, in the app, which I've already got installed.

Ironically, frontend engineers are exactly why we ended up with this problem in the first place. The rewrite of the frontend wasn't about engagement or dark patterns (those could have been implemented just fine with the old UI), it's that they had a significant dev team (& managers, UI/product designers, etc) and needed them to do something, so a rewrite was kicked off, and now it's too late to turn back while saving face.

They would've ended up in a better position had they just given these people one year of PTO instead of having them "fix" things that aren't broken just to keep them busy.

I'm grateful for this. It's a good incentive to finally quit Reddit completely. It's pretty much down there with Facebook these days but so far I've kept scanning it out of habit. But the new UI is so bloody toxic, I'd rather quit than undergo that.

I would have stopped using it ages ago, except for the wasteland the rest of the internet has become. I'm trying to research a medical condition today and made it to page three of Google with nothing but SEO junk and content that is clearly ai generated. Putting Reddit as the site list gave good results.

Reddit has increasingly become an advertisement target. And I don’t mean official, paid ads.

There are some niche communities that are small enough to retain credibility though.

But yes, SEO spam has become really bad. And the the topic you looked at seems to be one of the worst.

What's so much worse / "toxic" about the new user-interface compared to the default old. one?

The fact that they have purposefully sabotaged the mobile web interface to block you from reading new comments to push you into installing their data slurping app is up there.

I mean, yes that's stupid, but also makes the site pretty much inaccessible in the first place and I wouldn't put that under an "user interface" complain. That's also not the redesign the op is talking about. (Unless he's using his mobile browser in desktop mode... then he afaik won't run into that restriction and it's a 100% better than the old. desktop version.)

If you see a link to a post using the default user-disrespecting site, you see the article text and maybe 2-3 “hot” comments, and then a bunch of stuff made to look like the same article but which are not. I literally cannot find how to get all of the comments for a particular topic in a threaded view while not logged in on a phone or iPad browser. The “old” site meanwhile presents exactly that.

Information density is worse and the design is too heavy/bubbly.

Some what true for comments - that is if you always just go with reddit's old theme and not custom sub ones. But also way nicer to read, that might of course be personal choice.

Not true for the feed though. If you switch to the compact feed on the redesign you'll even see more posts than you'd see on default old.

Infinite scroll is one of the most obvious. Infinite scroll promotes content consumption and not creation and is one of the most addictive patterns in web and app design. It's also less dense and totally irrelevant to what made reddit great, which was niche discussions and not image macros or whatever.

Compact and Classic mode aren't less dense - you can switch to those in the top right of the feed.

But I do agree with the infinite scroll point, or at least the way they implemented it.

Literally everything. I've used it for a grand total of about 3 minutes but from what I remember:

* Defaults to some stupid instagram wall-like view where every link takes half the page

* The whole thing is now centered in a tiny slice of the screen

* Threads open in some weird modal mode where accidentally clicking outside of the content takes you to the previous page

* Opening a direct link on a phone loads like 5 comments, then it continues with endless irrelevant content

* You can't open random subreddits that have been set as NSFW on the phone because "This community is 18+, please open it in the app"

Every time I had the displeasure of interacting with the new design there was some upsetting regression compared to old Reddit.

> Defaults to some stupid instagram wall-like view where every link takes half the page

Which is changed with a single click in the top right of the feed and it never defaulted back for me. (At least not the last 2+ years.)

> The whole thing is now centered in a tiny slice of the screen

If you're talking about the feed, it's not. At least not in classic or compact mode. Besides that, depends on your screen / windows size of course.

> Threads open in some weird modal mode where accidentally clicking outside of the content takes you to the previous page

Guess that's a matter of taste? I like it, I know there are people who force similar behaviour on old with plugins, so... - The implementation is still wonky though and the overall still existing, at least at times, slowness of the redesign (/api) fucks with it.

Last two points are less of an UI more of an UX thing and Reddit pushing their app. Still sucks of course. For mobile I can only recommend using third party apps - better than the mobile view and the official app.

The amount of critical thinking has plummeted and the amount of kneejerk judgement has exploded across the site in the last 5 years. Reddit has become the kind of place it used to make fun of ten years ago. It is little better than Twitter at this point, although my engagement with Twitter is limited, as I have never had an account there.

That has less to do with the user interface though :) But in general, and for many subs, I agree.

It depends - the UI could act as a filter, just like it does on HN.

The new UI, by virtue of its very low information density and pushing or irrelevant crap definitely encourages quicker & shallower interactions.

It's interesting to read comments like this because this sentiment has literally always existed. When I used Reddit in 2014 people used to say the exact same thing, yet nothing ever changed from my perspective. It was always bad.

Phasing out old.reddit.com would cause such a riot that the Reddit bosses have decided to make it more and more nonfunctional until most people have migrated out of frustration to the new version.

Sometimes Hanlon's razor is wrong and it's malice, not incompetence.

old.reddit users are like 2% of pageviews now, 5-10% of uniques (Source - traffic stats for a mid-sized sub), they could just phase it out.

By contrast the official mobile app has become the overwhelming way that people consume the site's content.

Edit: added uniques

I wonder how many of these users are contributors? I could imagine that these 2% might be power users that could be contributing significantly more than a casual user on the new UI?

I would presume that, especially since those users are disproportionately at a computer where it's simply easy to contribute.

Only Reddit knows how much old UI users contribute, user activity in online communities is very unevenly distributed.

In the end running the old version probably doesn't cost Reddit much, nobody expects them to update or maintain it and so they have no reason to shut it down as long as it keeps working. It isn't worth the inevitable backlash.

Yeah I generally agree with that, I just think reddit is at the point of not giving a shit if they break the old.reddit site, and that somebody in every meeting is probably calling for them to axe it entirely, and if they actually did that it wouldn't kill the site even if it would be bad for it.

I honestly think one of the biggest issues with axing old reddit is that old reddit users are disproportionately moderators (even though new reddit has unique mod tools). Reddit survives off of unpaid labour, it may be a bit wise to rock the apple cart too much.

>Only Reddit knows how much old UI users contribute, user activity in online communities is very unevenly distributed.

Which is why they don't phase https://old.reddit.com out.

They know the contributors use the "old" reddit.

Also the reason why they don't publish those stats. Too ashamed.

Yes, based on this, it is possible that the quality of conversation could get worse.

I feel pretty strongly that the quality suffering is also a reflection of the type of engagement the new layout encourages.

Does it make a difference if they contribute or not? All you really want them to do is view the ads.

You need some content to put next to the ads to encourage users to go there.

Its Reddit, the bots will just repost something from a few days ago.

For the vast majority reddit is just the 15 or so default subs ran by a tiny number of power mods regurgitating content. Has been for years now.

It's easy to forget how strong the filter bubble is on Reddit. I very rarely encounter any of the gigantic subs and to me, the quality of discussion is fairly good. But geez, if everything devolves to r/politics then I'm out, permanently.

I'd be really curious on that breakdown of comment/posting volume. Reddit has a lot of lurkers.

Does that include RES where I access reddit via normal URL but it still displays old experience?

Not sure, their traffic stats page isn't super informative. It just has a breakdown of old reddit / new reddit / mobile web / official app. 3rd party apps are not counted.

Are these analytics coming from Reddit themselves? Call me paranoid, but I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that they were massaging numbers to make it seem like fewer users were hitting old reddit.

They are coming from Reddit's own analytics. I do find it interesting how many more pageviews they see on mobile vs uniques?

To add another statistic, I'm seeing 3500 uniques from old reddit and nearly 15k from new reddit (plus 3000 mobile web and nearly 90k from "Reddit Apps") last month; the subreddit has ~1.5m subscribers and is heavily image based.

How many are on New Reddit? From a cursory research, the subreddit stats are split in "Reddit Apps", Mobile Web, Old Reddit and New Reddit.

Since 72% of Reddit users are on mobile [1], the difference is smaller than your comment suggests.

1: https://backlinko.com/reddit-users#reddit-statistics

My breakdown of page views (sampled for 2 months) is

78% - official mobile app 14% - new reddit 6% - mobile web 2% - old reddit ??% - 3rd party mobile apps (not counted)

Uniques are basically the same way but skewed towards the desktop more than mobile.

>By contrast the official mobile app has become the overwhelming way that people consume the site's content.

because it's forced down people's throat. you can't read anything there except possibly for the default subs populated with shills and redditors. you get "unreviewed content, please install our botnet to proceed" popup as soon as you scroll down half a screen past the op

If I want to read something on Reddit on my phone I just use Chrome's "Desktop site" option.

Everything about these nags is idiotic to the point of insulting the user's intelligence. The randomness, the timing, and the messages themselves.

What is the browser for then? Is a browser such as Chrome not enough for a fucking forum in 2022? This circlejerk is completely out of control.

> insulting the user's intelligence.

If it's true that the majority of users are using the app, does that not suggest that it's effective?

I put .compact at the end of the URL for mobile viewing:

https://www.reddit.com/.compact

the same result can be achieved by replacing www. with i. (for some reason it redirects on desktop, it works on mobile though)

I love that there are like 5 different ways to get around Reddit’s new site design.

> Everything about these nags is idiotic to the point of insulting the user's intelligence. The randomness, the timing, and the messages themselves.

Mine says "come to the app, it has more cats/dogs". Some "UX engineer" ab/testing usage patterns, maybe?

It annoys me to the point of sadness. Some of the greatest minds, the most capable programmers of our time spending their meager existance using their skills to make people "install our app". Disgusting.

>If I want to read something on Reddit on my phone I just use Chrome's "Desktop site" option.

Same. It's still awful though. It really is insulting. How is it that I could do this perfectly fine 10 years ago but _now_ I have to use an app?

Exactly, this cycle seems to repeat everywhere:

1. Product Owner: "Users want to use [crappy feature]."

2. Make [crappy feature] the default, add pop-ups nudging people to use [crappy feature], constantly "forget" when users opt out of [crappy feature], limit other product benefits only to users of [crappy feature], do everything possible to sabotage users who deliberately avoid [crappy feature].

3. Product Owner: "Look, boss, the numbers from last month are in: 92% of users are using [crappy feature]. I was right!"

4. More investment into [crappy feature], since obviously users love it.

The worst part is the official app, at least on iOS, is a horrible experience. Apollo is so much better even though I don’t love the UI

Does usage by third-party apps get bundled with the official mobile app?

No, they're not tracked at all.

It may be one of these cases where most users are on the new Reddit, but "old" has the most valuable users. That is: top posters, moderators, etc... that is, the reason people go to Reddit in the first place.

Except not everything is about percentages. It's the same calculation Ballmer (big fan otherwise) did to let windows terminal rot. You need to multiply this with their effectiveness. Are those people looking at ads and making money for reddit directly? Probably 99% of them have adblock and res installed. But those are also likely to be the kind of users who would build bots and extensions for your website and help its growth.

Well the thing is those who use new layout are more likely casual users that have no res or adblock installed, compared to old reddit users.

A lot of people who actually create content or administer subs are on the old site, I have to guess.

Anecdotally I would stop using Reddit if they for rid of old reddit. The new design is shit

That's exactly the kind of calculation that led to phasing out Google Reader. How did that go? ;)

It never ‘led to’. That just happens to be the publicly communicated reason; RSS had to go for strategic reasons.

> the official mobile app has become the overwhelming way that people consume the site's content

By virtue of them making it unpleasant to use the site on a mobile device other ways.

Of course “most people using Reddit on mobile do so via the app” masks the fact that a fair few, including myself, simply no longer use Reddit on mobile at all. Though I assume we are a small enough minority that they don't care about losing us in the push to force the rest towards the app.

Only mobile? The "new" (several years now but anyway) interface on web is super bloated. I'n not talking about ads, I get it, you serve ads and monetize, but the interface is sluggish to scroll smoothly, I can literally feel a complete lag almost close to a second when clicking a link, all on a newest MacBook Pro that keeps running smoothly at 120Hz at any other website other than reddit.

Seriously, they are killing themselves for no reason. Whoever greenlighted the new web should be fired immediately, if not already.

I'd recommend using [Apollo](https://apolloapp.io/) on iOS and Apple silicon MacOS devices. I use that almost exclusively these days, as their web interface is absolute ass by comparison (their own reddit app is as well)

To be frank, if a service makes using their stuff unpleasant for me, I'll just try not use the service rather than installing third-party apps. In fact there is very little “try” involved in this case, avoiding Reddit on mobile completely and only occasionally bothering on desktop when it comes up in specific searches or passed on links, doesn't leave me feeling I'm missing out on anything useful.

Indeed I don't think the new UI was caused by a desire to increase engagement. All the dark patterns and annoyances can trivially be implemented on the old UI, up to the slowness if needed (just add sleep(500) on every HTTP endpoint).

I believe the problem is that there's a significant frontend/JS team (along with managers, etc) that needed something to do so a rewrite was planned. It probably started with good intentions (and the initial MVP/prototype probably was lightning-fast), but now once all the bloat is they ended up with a pile of shit, but bonuses have been paid, people have been hired/promoted and can brag about this new "achievement" on their resumes, so turning back while saving face is impossible.

Yeah, there is no such thing as migration, Reddit is reddit.com. Yes the new interface is awful, buggy, etc... But that's what Reddit is. The majority of Reddit users only know the new interface. Can you use old.facebook.com or old.youtube.com? Were they better before? Maybe, but that's irrelevant it's the past, old.reddit.com is a special easter egg for old timers at that point.

Don't forget that you can use new.reddit.com while logged in with your account that is configured to show you the old layout.

This skews the numbers on how many people will bail once they drop support for the old layout. I'll definitely be part of that exodus and it will surely be bigger than 2%.

That makes sense as the newer design seems to encourage the more superficial and judgemental type of engagement and conversation that dominates the site. Other than small subreddit communities, the quality has been dismal for a while.

At this point I would consider moving a valuable community that I was invested in and considered worth saving to one of the reddit alternatives.

Are the niche subreddits still a safe haven from the superficial glib comments that dominate the default subs? They used to be, but there's so much cross pollination that I no longer find them tolerable either.

That approach to customer retention is exactly how you sink companies.

Some folks may have "Use new Reddit as my default experience" unchecked under Preferences (waaaaay at the bottom, under "beta options"):

* https://old.reddit.com/prefs/

How do those percentages change when only considering the top 10% of users?

>old.reddit users are like 2% of pageviews now, 5-10% of uniques (Source - traffic stats for a mid-sized sub), they could just phase it out.

Yes, let's just phase it out, and drive away people who actually contribute to that forum by adding the comments and posts that are reason d'etre of reddit.

Go figure, you didn't include posts, comments, and karma breakdown in that analysis.

To be clear, I’m getting my stats from Reddit, who provides no information on those topics.

Yes, but without this information one can't arrive at the conclusion that it's OK to phase out https://old.reddit.com

The information you provided may not serve as a basis for such conclusion.

When it comes to "growth & engagement" business models, Hanlon's razor is always wrong.

Frankly to me no reddit at all is a better option than the hellscape that is the new site.

If they get rid of old reddit, I'm gone. I've said so for years, and if this post is true (I was still able to comment without a problem), it's coming soon. SO much for 10 years on Reddit.

I quit Reddit during the pandemic because all the covid discussion was driving me round the bend a bit, but I came back when things got back to normal. I'm pretty much in the same boat, if Reddit make it impossible to use anything but the new site on desktop I'm gone. I just hope general dissatisfaction with Reddit leads to a rebirth of the forums Reddit killed off during its rise to prominence.

I'd literally rather use Reddit though the terminal than their awful new site! I have no idea what their designers were thinking when they came up with it, it's such a faff to actually do anything with.

I unjoined everything about that time. My home page is empty and I don't feel like I'm missing out.

I have multis (maybe custom feeds now?) for the topics I actually want to see.

It's worked for me.

For what it's worth, as much as I loved reddit in the past, staying off it along with facebook have made such an improvement upon my life. I totally get wanting to just relax and scroll interesting topics but similar to tiktok, a lot of stuff is just "nonsense" and "noise."

Felt like I was missing everything after I got off but then I realized I really wasn't lol.

I actually now append the word reddit to Google searches. I never did do the Reddit front page for some reason so I have never understood why Reddit is classed with other social media. I always used Reddit for the subreddits. Apart from HN and Stackoverflow and one or two other sites like instructables.com I don't think there is many other sites with better curated useful information on specific subjects.

I bet it’s the developers. Don’t want to maintain legacy code so are phasing it out.

If only the new code were working.

You cannot browse some subreddits on mobile because it shows a message saying that you need to install the app to see its contents.

Why is Reddit not banned from Google search? Showing Google a different page to a human mobile visitor gets websites blacklisted from the Google search indexes. Are they too big to get banned?

This is a good point. That's pretty much what is happening. Any result you click prompts you to use the app after a few seconds with the only way to get around it being to "use desktop" which most people probably don't know.

Google allows you to show them your full content while only showing normal visitors less. It's when you show completely different content that you get banned. Paywalls are allowed.

I recommend using slide on android: https://github.com/Haptic-Apps/Slide

There are also other apps to choose from, just search “reddit” on F-Droid.

Strangely new reddit is still more nonfunctional to me than old reddit. Why not make the new version functional instead of crippling the old version?

> Reddit does not allow comments post via old.reddit.com

The title is incorrect/misleading. You can still post via old.reddit.com

Have they reversed this? Just tried and old.reddit still works as usual.

Honestly, I went read-only on reddit via teddit.net and blocked main domain (reddit.com) in /etc/hosts. This forces me to make a conscious choice on opening a Reddit link.

All the forums that Reddit took over are making a comeback, this time with Discourse (probably Baader-Meinhoff, but I'm seeing it everywhere now).

Reddit had a good run, but as a place for real people to go to, its time is over.

I used to run some pretty decently sized forums and did paid jobs customising forums for various niche hobbies. I’ve had more emails in the last 6 months asking me to help old forums get going again, than I’ve had in the last 5-6 years combined.

Most are going Discourse or Vanilla, some are wanting more custom things these days. All are saying that their userbase (that previously migrated to Reddit) are all crying out for an off-Reddit solution.

Reddit did a Digg, which is endlessly hilarious.

I'm getting the same sort of vibe from my corners of the Internet: people moving away from the big walled gardens and doing more distributed things like forums and running their own Mastodon instances. Some long-lived forums are undergoing amazing resurrections, seeing more posts in 2022 than they have between 2017-2021. I do pick up a general theme of being able to control the experience, whether that's the UI or being able to set moderation policies.

IMO Reddit killed their vibe when they removed the distinction between post karma and comment karma, in the subs I visited it seemed to encourage the upvoting of very basic questions and observations that were easy to farm karma from by posting the same answers, comments and jokes every time. (I'm aware that some of the smaller and more actively moderated communities have escaped this, sadly it didn't cover the main ones I was interested in.)

Discord while useful is pretty awful for finding information from communities you are not in given that you can't just google for 'random thing site:discord.com'. Forums might be coming back but even some of the bigger topics I follow don't really have a good forum (e.g. chess or Machine Learning), and with smaller communities I'm more likely to find a closer equivalent in a Facebook Group than a dedicated forum (e.g. Berlin or Berghain).

Discourse, not discord. Discord is a "we sell your data" app directed towards zoomers and gamers, nobody sane should promote it.

My bad, I automatically read Discord since it has been gaining huge popularity in the last few years while Discourse wasn't at the top of my mind for 'recently very popular communication software'.

If you want to start your own forum, I recommend FlaskBB. Discourse is awful on so many levels.

As someone who has never (at least knowlingly) encountered a flaskBB forum in the wild, what do you like about it? And what are your gripes about Discourse (the interface is bit whitespace-heavy and 'pop', but serviceable IMO)? Discourse has a LOT of moderation and QoL stuff baked in, so I'm just wondering. Is it the missing old-world feel?

What do I like about it? It's simple, it's written in Python using a fairly lightweight framework, it's easy to adapt and extend with plugins, and it rarely goes wrong in any remarkable way. It's run https://rangerovers.pub since it started.

I just don't like Discourse because it seems to have so many particularly colourful failure modes, like not ordering comments in a sane way, layout-breaking bugs if all 20GB of javascript doesn't download, and that bloody awful infinite scroll "hey instead of just clicking to go to the next page, why not wait a few minutes for an ajax request to time out and blank the page?"

It's not just you (as others have mentioned). In the last year, I've found myself with 3-4 Discourse-based forums that I check at least weekly. They're all special purpose and most of them I use for a single thread, but still, it's something.

You can comment from the old interface just fine. I use the old interface without going to old.reddit.com - there's a toggle in the settings to stick to the old design. The only time you need to use the old.reddit URL is when you aren't logged in but then you can't comment anyway.

reddit vs old reddit to be a poster child for all transitions from vanilla websites to fancy SPA bullshit nobody had fucking asked for

they wanted the endless scroll, they've decided to write the whole thing from scratch while they're at it, and the end result is a steaming pile of shit

Based on their traffic coming overwhelmingly from their mobile app, I'm going to say as a pure business decision that moving to a SPA was absolutely the correct decision. It also made it easier for them to shove more ads in users faces.

I don't think it made the site higher quality...

A workaround for #1:

- on any post or comment click 'report'

- the popup that opens is an iframe with the new reddit

- dismiss the cookie banner from within that iframe

- close the report dialog

future visits to reddit will now have cookie policy accepted

I just posted a comment 30 seconds ago. No issues.

> I can accept the pain of using new.reddit.com to login

Huh? Reddit never made me do that. The only thing that doesn't work on old reddit for me are those free medal unlocks, which I don't care about. Otherwise it's still 100% functional.

There are a few newer features that don’t have an old.reddit.com version, such as galleries and prediction threads.

(Just ran into predictions for the first time recently - https://www.redditinc.com/blog/a-new-way-to-interact-on-redd... ).

I don't know if Reddit has some A/B testing results that suggest otherwise, but they are making their website more and more unusable as time goes on. I am not a regular user by any means, but every time I get sent a link to a post on Reddit, it fills me with dread. The UI feels messy, bloated, dirty even, and their content works only intermittently (referring specifically to videos).

By far, one of the worst UXs of any large social media platform and I feel like they're on a path to make it worse.

Reddit web has to got be the worst example of JS bloat that i know. Truly horrible website.

The reddit mobile experience:

Do a google search and see a promising result on reddit.

Click the link, be asked if you want to view the page via the app, click no.

Go to the next link, say no to the app again.

Go to the next link, say no to the god damn app again.

Repeat.

Why can you just remember that i dont want your crappy app instead of asking me on every single page load?

There is also an annoying flow in Incognito mode where it asks you to switch to the app, but then directs you to the app store instead. I assume for some security reason they cannot launch the app from Incognito mode.

I don't know why they are so annoying with this mobile app stuff as I would be a big supporter otherwise.

Reddit user experience is awful. I like the Reddit communities I follow but my god is it annoying af to use it on mobile browser or even the desktop client. I don’t want to install your app. Deal with it, because I’m dealing with it by not using it and I hope more people follow. The app which I’ve tried crashes often, and the video auto play sometimes breaks which is annoying and requires a restart. If I was logged out and login, I get taken to the fucking home tab. Why doesn’t it redirect me on the page I had open, I mean I can understand not being able to code (considering half the other stuff that doesn’t work) the position in the thread I was in, but at least put me on the same thread. Anyway GG no RE, barely use Reddit anymore because of this poor ux.

They had something good and ruined it due to investors squeezing out ad revenue. Shame.

It’s all a cycle. I’m sure something like early Reddit will pop up soon (might already exist).

You might already be posting on it :)

No? HN is not in any way, shape or form a replacement for Reddit.

Eh, HN is very much like reddit /r/technology + /r/programming but without fancy editor.

More like Reddit in the days before subreddits.

Well it actually IS what reddit used to be. It's almost a carbon copy of the early versions before subreddits were a thing, though HN has slightly worse css and usability, presumably to keep out the normies and to make it run from that one raspberry pi that ycombinator has allocated to hosting it.

I do sorta wish HN had reply notifications.

> I do sorta wish HN had reply notifications.

There is a 3rd party app for that, though I haven't tried it yet.

https://www.hnreplies.com/

I use it. It's excellent and works well.

The only problem with it is that it does not send you replies to your submissions, e.g. AskHN posts.

It's by design to make flame wars harder to sustain

I'd believe that if it wasn't computationally intensive and HN wasn't already struggling under the 5 people that visit. I'm sure it's merely this way to reduce server load.

I personally use it as my reddit replacement ;) But I agree.

FYI both Ycombinator and reddit have the same age, both were created in 2005 according to Wikipedia.

It kinda weird because for some reason in my mind Ycombinator was 5 year-ish older.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy

PSA: Don't use this for a Tor hidden service forum as it heavily relies on JS to be functional.

>selfhosted

AAAAAND you lost literally 95% of every single person who might even consider using this. Stop trying to make "fediverse" happen. It's not going to happen. All you do is end up putting great developers into projects that will literally never, ever amount to anything due to an insistence on decentralization.

I disagree, I think slowly communities of reddit will migrate to self hosted versions of it, be them lemmy or any of the other federated alternatives that are out there. I work on one of those, and I have been contacted twice by moderators of small/medium subreddits being interested in using my software for taking their users off reddit. Sadly, nothing concrete happened, but it shows me that there really is an interest.

I think that Lemmy is not really a replacement for the old reddit. Lemmy devs are too fond of frontend Javascript to qualify in my opinion.

The federated alternative that I'm building[1], is trying to specifically keep some of the benefits of old reddit (and of HN, and of lobste.rs), most important of which being that it has no reliance on Javascript and that it has a minimal size footprint.

[1] https://littr.me (just a demo instance)

I think tildes.net is an interesting one and has potential, though I must confess that I don’t really go there all that much because there’s too little activity for me to find what I’m interested in, so far.

Tbf there are third party apps that work quite well, I'm somewhat fond of Relay for Reddit myself and never have any issues with it. The official app is unfortunately complete trash.

Right now I'm not seeing any of these problems that OP is talking about when using old.reddit either. I think I may have ublocked all the banners and popups at some point.

On iOS I went from Alien Blue (which reddit bought and killed, fuck 'em) to Apollo and it's been a bliss, would never be able to use reddit if it wasn't for Apollo and RES on my desktop browser... Not really sure how they are attracting new users, the "new" reddit UI on a SPA is really, really awful.

It's impressive how much engineering effort reddit is able to waste, that isn't cheap.

Apollo is a really good mobile app for Reddit, but I expect Reddit will eventually buy it.

As for new users, it's likely a lot of people that reach Reddit from Google - their SEO seems to have gotten loads better in recent years. They also don't remember how simple oldreddit was, so they have no reference point.

API is being removed soon, which will break all third party apps.

Really? Have they announced this or is it speculation/inside information on your side?

I can't see any mention of that being the case anywhere, are you sure?

Source: trust me bro.

I use Boost for Reddit and it's great! So much better than the website in any form or the official app.

I have the app and use it to casually browse. But the moment someone sends me a link on Discord, it opens in the built-in webview and tells me to fuck off unless I open it in the app I just abandon my attempt. Sorry but I value the second it takes to switch the app more than the content.

Maybe it’s just me but when I Google something, and land on a reddit result, and then am forced to open it in the app, the link opens the app but doesn’t navigate to the post. Therefore it’s actually impossible to see the full result, even if you have the app installed, without re-finding it in the app. Super frustrating!

The official client is rubbish, but the 3rd party ones are OK. BaconReader works well for me.

https://baconreader.com/

P.S.

I suspect that one of the issues with Reddit is a large number of regular visitors who lurk. No account, no login, never post, never upvote... but spend hours a day on the site.

Serving them means that features for actual active contributors have low priority. I suspect that looking at the site and its features with that in mind may explain a lot.

I used to use baconreader but switched to Boost for Reddit

Hmmm. I am happy for now but I will take a look on a spare device. Thanks!

> I suspect that one of the issues with Reddit is a large number of regular visitors who lurk. No account, no login, never post, never upvote... but spend hours a day on the site. Serving them means that features for actual active contributors have low priority.

They would be shooting themselves in the foot because the lurkers are looking for posts and comments. Prioritizing contributors would keep lurkers engaged longer, watching more ads.

Also, never underestimate the need of people to voice their opinions. Controversial topics will tempt lurkers to contribute.

I don't disagree. It's a rare model for a social media site, though, and so it's noteworthy.

Try out Boost for Reddit. Better than website in any form, the official Reddit app, and every other 3rd party app imo

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/ml.docilealligator.infinityf...

https://f-droid.org/packages/org.quantumbadger.redreader/

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/me.ccrama.redditslide/

I quote from https://www.reddit.com/r/TronScript/: “! -- YOU NEED TO VIEW THE SUB IN OLD MODE TO GET NECESSARY INFORMATION FROM THE SIDEBAR -- ! GO HERE AND READ THE INSTRUCTIONS --> https://old.reddit.com/r/TronScript/ ”

On mobile, my Reddit experience seems to be ads, some wierd livestreaming events, posts from subreddits I don't belong to (or have unsubscribed from).

I rarely browse reddit on mobile, and on desktop normally go straight to the subreddits I'm interested in (and even that's decreasing).

There's probably some axiom that's relevant to this inevitable degradation of user experience on all social networking / UGC sites. If there isn't there should be.

What? I log into my account (which is set to use old.reddit.com by default) and I have never had a single one of these issues.

Before you all flip your shit and accuse them of everything evil in the world (when really, their video player is worse than all of it combined), as it stands, this looks much more like a bug than intended malice, and reddit admins seem to confirm it : https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/us8i9a/old_reddit_on_...

New reddit also doesn't properly fetch your default subreddits. Something is screwed with their entire auth system.

Going to new reddit and refreshing and going back to old does work. Additionally, if logged in, just tick the "use old reddit experience" option in settings and you have old reddit, everywhere.

> a bug

You're trying to tell me they released a feature without even testing the login flow? That's going beyond "oh this is a little accident" straight into almost unbelievable amounts of incompetence. At that point it is more charitable to attribute it to malice.

>traight into almost unbelievable amounts of incompetence

Have you seen the state of new reddit, of chat, of their video player, or literally any feature they've released in the past 4 years ?

There is a difference between not being able to do any engineering at all (and if you don't test your basic use cases, you did not move past scripting/messing around) and having terrible ideas. The things you list are terrible ideas nobody wants, but probably look good on a powerpoint slide deck.

> New reddit also doesn't properly fetch your default subreddits. Something is screwed with their entire auth system.

The problem with assuming that this specific issue is targeted is that they also broke the system that they want people to move to.

Reddit definitely does want to push people to the new interface, and is very likely going to decrease support for the old interface and invest less effort into bugfixing/maintenance. However, just because something is true, that doesn't mean every single thing you see that reinforces that idea is also true.

There are lots of ways in an incompetent company to break a login flow late in testing, especially if they're pushing fixes in real-time or during testing. I don't know what Reddit's setup actually is, but it is unlikely to me that they would purposefully introduce auth bugs that broke both the old and new interface. I do believe that they are trying to get people off of the old interface and would be willing to resort to underhanded methods to do so. But I don't think it's likely that this specific bug was a deliberate effort to do that.

Banners hidden via cookies (that expire) are just ads trying to upsell you. Use Adblock to hide them.

I've display:none CSS in stylus to hide all the unnecessary stuff on Reddit to make it is to toggle off when needed.

    .link.recommended-link { display: none; }
    .tabmenu a[href="https://www.reddit.com/promoted/"] { display: none !important; }
    #redesign-beta-optin-btn { display: none !important; }
    .premium-banner-outer { display: none !important; }
    .awardings-bar { display: none !important; }
    .infobar.listingsignupbar  { display: none !important; }
    .infobar.commentsignupbar  { display: none !important; }

I don't have much issues with old.reddit.com... But I use the Firefox extension that automatically redirect my reddit traffic to that domain.

You could also try https://ns.reddit.com

What's the difference between old. and ns.?

nothing as far as I know, but who knows, it might become a backup in the future if old. disappears...

How come always throwaway accounts start flame baiting threads like this? 0 account history, makes a thread, never replies to any other comments. At this point I'm not even surprised HN have threads like this more and more. Feels like intentional?

Also, most of the comments here are showing that old reddit works perfectly, maybe it was an error on your side? Overtuned ad- and contentblockers (like just blindly using uBlock Origin + uMatrix + Noscript together) are causing errors like this

Reddit shut down ?depth=n sorting for threads between 6 and 12 months ago and ?context=n in the last three months but posting and commenting still works for me on the latest releases of Chrome, Safari, the android Samsung browser and an old release of android Chrome, across 5 different reddit logins. Post it, with screenshots, to /r/bugs and you'll probably get an answer sometime soon. If not, maybe they are A/B testing a decline in product quality?

I have 'Use new Reddit as my default experience' under Preferences unchecked. My reddit appearance is the old one, everything works fine.

You know what, let them do it. Let them kill all the good things about reddit and shoot themselves in the foot with literally everything they've been doing to the platform.

This is the only way to kill it completely and start over with a new platform that could keep their core values while still making money (which reddit fails at former, miserably).

I just went to old.reddit.com and clicked on a thread and I have a comment box like I always have had.

So I logged out and I see a login form on old (in a subreddit), but it doesn't seem to work.

Then I went to / on old and I am logged in. Going back to the subreddit shows me logged out.

I'd say this is broken somehow and if it's intentional then it's still very buggy.

Has anyone else noticed that you sometimes cannot view links that a reddit post is linking out to, if you visit it on the mobile site? I'm starting to see that more and more, though I'm unsure how to pin it down. Normally I have to switch to my libreddit instance or old.reddit.com (not using the app)

I've been sticking to old.reddit.com as much as possible, but hate all the new nags to switch. Using the mobile site (https://i.reddit.com/) is another somewhat acceptable workaround.

Quite fascinating to spectate a product systematically destroy its own user experience over time.

> I can accept the pain of using new.reddit.com to login. But as soon as switch to old.reddit.com it shows that I am logged out? What are the product dev teams aiming for?

Cross origin cookies are maybe being blocked by your browser

Cannot duplicate.

Works fine, logged in, switch to old.reddit, pages, commenting all fine.

Also, HN readers. You can enjoy the thread without upvoting the post.

Even Reddit thinks the new website is terrible. Every time I visit on mobile they tell me the app is so much better and do everything in their power to keep me from using the website.

I can still post via old.reddit.com

I'm using Firefox with uBlock origin and a Raspberry Pi-Hole.

I'm with others on this post. You can force me off .old, but you can't force me to use the new interface.

Just go to your settings and set the old design as default. I'm still using the old design without the subdomain, and I've no problem to post.

You sure there isn't some other ad blocking tech or something breaking your experience?

No issues here on old.reddit

Anyone notice that if you paste anything into the new.reddit comment box everything goes haywire?

I'm not sure what you're talking about, old.reddit.com still let's me comment.

The default mobile webpage is unusable. Why do they want to drive users off the website?

Because "apps are the new thing" or something like that

still works for me

Same here (Even though I've not used reddit in an age!), However I do have "Use new Reddit as my default experience" disabled in my prefs - https://old.reddit.com/prefs/

Reddit, glad im not using it anymore. The new design is such a pain in the ass.

I hope this happens. This will make me finally quit reddit!

It’s almost like they’re trying to copy Digg’s demise.

If reddit is new digg, what's the new reddit?

old.reddit.com works fine here. Perhaps it's either you or you're on the wrong side of some new A/B testing?

Try from a private browser window.

i still use old reddit, but via www.reddit.com, it's a preference set in the settings.

Works for me... Just tested

old.reddit is will be removed soon, that is inevitable.

A bigger storm will come when the API is removed. That is also inevitable when they go public. The API allows third-party apps, which takes away people downloading the official app.

For 10 years Reddit has been collecting high quality UGC. The next step is to lock all the content behind the official app. That is the obvious goal.

I consider Reddit to be a sociopath/psychopath corporation. The company is designed to make money from people screaming divisive hate at each other. The front page is magnitudes worse than Facebook/Twitter. Assume they will do the very worst thing imaginable, as they have been doing for 5 years now.

It doesn’t let me log in from the old site. Been happening for two days. I suspected it was a problem with my browser protections such as referrer hiding, but I didn’t investigate further. It wouldn’t surprise me if it was an honest mistake since the Reddit engineers are… less than competent.

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