Tell HN: Reddit just made their website even more unusable | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Reddit just made their website even more unusable

12 pointsc7DJTLrn12 comments

Not sure if I'm part of an A/B test right now, but I'm seeing a new design which is absolutely crap.

Subreddits still have the "old new" design but instead of seeing a modal when I click a post, it navigates to another page and completely changes design. Colours, padding, even the font looks different.

I cannot believe how bad it is. It's like Windows at this point. What is going on over there that prevents them from building a decent interface?

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It's worse than that. Try accessing these three URLs. They all render differently. The "old" site is expected to render differently, but why are the "www" and "new" sites vastly different? And it's not just the "look and feel", the content is also different??

https://www.reddit.com/r/popular/

https://old.reddit.com/r/popular/

https://new.reddit.com/r/popular/

For me, at Tue Apr 11 03:07:12 2023 UTC, 'www' and 'old' are both looking like I would expect 'old' to look like, that's got to be temporary ?

The 'new' looks a bit better than 'www' did when I last saw it so a bit of a win there.

for me just now ... 'www' and 'new' are apparently identical

ad neither seems notably different from how it's looked for years

Subreddits can have their own themes/styling, for better or worse. You can change it in:

https://www.reddit.com/prefs/

"allow subreddits to show me custom themes"

They also recently killed the i.reddit.com and /.compact mobile layouts, meaning there's no mobile web layout available other than the "new" one which is practically unusable if you're not logged in (I browse reddit occasionally for news, but don't have an account).

Does old.reddit.com not work anymore?

Yep, hanging on in there, thank gawd.

I read somewhere that most moderators use that version, so hopefully that's sufficient reason for Reddit to not disable it.

That's why you replace reddit.com URLs with https://teddit.net

Libreddit (https://github.com/libreddit/libreddit) is a great, free and fast alternative frontend to reddit that you can self host. It's got none of the problems all the different official front ends have.

they want you to get disoriented, click mindlessly, hit an ad, ka-ching!

Noticed that today. I see to be getting different layouts depending on if I'm clicking a search result or just browsing

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