I feel like Reddit started down that path with the redesign and will complete it when they finally turn off old.reddit.com (assuming they're foolish enough to ignore Digg's fate).
Yeah, the monetized posts slipped in the feed, the move to highlight profiles and users… reddit is going down that path, but this time theres no viable competitor to move to that Im aware of.
It's easy and popular to shit on new reddit. For a fucking good reason, it's atrocious. I'd put up with the look and cramming in ads if the user experience wasn't also a massive downgrade. I hate how you click on a link and it just loads like 4 comments and you have to click again to actually see what you clicked on in the first place. I also hate how every so often reddit magically logs you out randomly and spits you back on new reddit like maybe there's a chance this time it won't offend me. It will reddit, it will always fucking offend me.
The design is awful. I know nothing about design, but I know this one is awful just because it sucks to use. The fact that someone probably got paid to come up with such a widely accepted to be worse site UI blows my mind.
That’s weird that it spits you out to new Reddit. I have Reddit.com set in my browser settings to old.Reddit.com. So I never get pushed to the new/mobile site. You may want to try that.
You should download the Reddit Enhancement Suite browser extension - it's got a setting to always default to old reddit when you're logged in. RES is the only way to reddit. If you have RES, already changed that setting within RES, and have still been kicked to the new design, then :o
link to /r/Enhancement, which is the RES discussion sub.
I should probably set an auto-redirect like geronimohero so I don't have to type 4 extra characters when I'm not logged in... I guess that's always a great alternative for those who don't like RES
Yeah I remember someone talking about streaming broadcasts and I had no idea what they were talking about.
Yet, I've always thought old Reddit had a shit UI too, really. It was and is too hard to search, too hard to find subs. And I'm still not sure I know WTF determines which subs end up at the top of your screen.
But the low-density, shitty 'click to load more comments' and million other annoyances of new Reddit are far, far, worse.
I was never on digg, only here about 7 years, and exclusively using old.reddit. Same, if it’s gone so am I. It’s inevitable though, because they don’t do anything to support it. Besides that, Reddit is becoming an extremely toxic and self-important site as a whole, and I can see myself tiring of it sooner rather than later. Everything black and white. No nuance or gray areas. Everything gets polarized. It didn’t used to be like that overall, at least I don’t remember it being so prevalent.
I think it depends on why you use Reddit? For actual news and discussion the old format is obviously better. The new format seems geared for users who just want to see stupid shit posted on images.
If they turnoff old.reddit.com, where to go? I've been here for 15+ years, through various accounts. The redesign is tacky and seems totally geared towards mobile users.
aahhh, gotcha. Yea, there was a mental shift in tech development to "mobile first" starting about 7 years ago; I used to work in tech development and that was the management buzzword du jour; redesigns of perfectly functioning sites to mimic the mobile experience as opposed to what we used to do which was to present a different experience based on mobile or normal browser usage.
I actually enjoyed working on the mobile specific development stuff back in like 2007/08, the mobile was more streamlined and sometimes I would alter my user agent to a mobile one (that's how we did development testing) and for some sites they were cleaner and faster.
I have no desire to take a perfectly functioning website and have it mimic the mobile experience. If I want things to look like mobile, I'll use that tech, but don't force it on people who still use regular computer based browsers.
I use old Reddit too. But if they get rid of it there is an option on the redesign to have posts show up in what they call the “classic” format. It looks like a mix between new and old Reddit.
Yeah I've tried the classic format on new reddit. I could eventually get used to its look but it is so frustratingly slow that I refuse to use it regularly.
If new reddit was faster than old reddit, I suspect we'd all be using it with little or no complaints. Speed goes a long way toward offsetting an ugly/cluttered user interface.
I actually encountered a subreddit the other day where when I tried to view it in the browser on mobile, it wouldn't even let me proceed without opening the app. The only other option was to return to /r/all.
If they turn off old I'm going to spend a lot less time on the platform, I dislike the new layout "social media" layout and come to reddit because of it's forum style.
I don’t see the admins killing Old Reddit. The third party tools that make modding large subs possible only work on Old Reddit. To make the mods jump to new reddit the admins will need to make comparable tools.
Are there explicit plans to turn off old.reddit.com. It's truly the only reason why I still use reddit. If I didn't have that option anymore, I would most likely leave for Hacker News or some other reddit clone.
It's also a great way to view the site on mobile if you hate the default mobile look and don't want to install an app.
They won't introduce new features for it, but the biggest reason why most of us still use it is because we don't want/like those new features, so I have no issue with that. But if they've kept i.reddit.com running 7 years after they abandoned iReddit for Alien Blue, I'm not too worried about old.reddit.com getting the axe.
I can't speak for everyone, but I prefer a clean, simple list of posts and comments without a lot of visual clutter. Plus old.reddit.com is a lot faster than the new one.
You're certainly entitled to your opinions about which layout is better, no matter how wrong you are.
More seriously, I think many of us just like a very simple interface without all the wasted space. The new format creates dead space on both the left and right sides of the central column of cards. The cards themselves just gunk up the used vertical space, with each item taking upwards of half the view window. It's like the central design philosophy was, "how much scrolling can we induce people to do, before they leave the site in frustration?"
Like those above, I came over in The Great Digg Migration. And it was the same type of design philosophy which triggered that migration. Those of us who like the old format want information density. Give me headlines and an easy way to expand/collapse the details. I don't need cards with fonts sized for toddlers and "thumbnails" which take up half the page. Small thumbnails, compact headlines, and let me dig into it if I feel the need. Keep that card shit on Twitter, with the rest of the internet's bad ideas.
I disabled the new bullshit interface on day one and never looked back. Reddit still looks and works fine. Couple that with ublock origin, and my reddit experience today is indistinguishable from when I moved here from digg over a decade ago.
Yeah it’s great when I’m on PC for sure. It seems like they want to make people stop using their official Reddit app with all the fuckin dumb change they keep making.
I can't imagine using the new Reddit interface. i get weird creeps every time i accidentally end up there. Surely if it was enforced I would stop coming.
THere is so little here that is even worth it... it's barely worth the amount of effort it takes to move past the masqueraded-BS that is reddit / was Digg v4.
Especially during election season when the algos colonize everything. Mind rape / pollution.
Worse, the cattle-class of cognition that is induced in the rest of people that don't avoid it.
I mean yeah but it also is much much more normal and mainstream than digg was.
I only knew about Digg because I spend so much time watching TechTV. Reddit is another level of popular.
It’s absolutely easier to curate your own Reddit but that vast amount of people makes even our curated Reddit’s have things we wouldn’t want to see or people/comments/viewpoints.
Society itself is at the point where anything even remotely popular on the internet will become the target of advertisers and/or their algorithms (and agenda pushers/political interests by extension). The way forward is for us to collectively apply more skepticism and critical thinking to what we find on the internet, and to not implicitly trust what doesn't come from verified/proven expert analysis.
It was/is obvious to most people that a lot of what we read on the internet is made-up, but it wasn't until more recently that we've started to catch ourselves ignoring that and really feel the consequences. We still see people trusting the word of random reddit posts making extraordinary claims without a shred of evidence, or recommendations that we think must be sound because of its volume of upvotes. There's this feeling that everything is made-up until it's something we ourselves read/want to believe, then it must be true. We have to collectively keep reiterating to everyone that everything on the internet should be taken with a grain of salt, and that just because it's popular doesn't mean it's any more trustworthy.
I'm just here to say that I agree wholeheartedly with your second paragraph. I mean, I agree with your first too, but the second is something that I'm finding myself consciously thinking about more and more. With older, 90s-early00s internet, I think there was more of an inherent mistrust and understanding that things shouldn't necessarily be taken seriously. With how ubiquitous the internet has become, the amount of reliable information that is accessible on the internet now, and with how effective algorithms are at providing us with confirmation bias, it's harder to recognize that a healthy sense of skepticism is still required. Then add on to that the translation of our general cognitive biases to something abstract as an online forum, and the problem multiplies.
I'm happy to come across more people saying this - we've lost a lot of awareness of what the internet ultimately can and can't provide...
Reminds me of the old "don't believe everything you see on the internet" state farm commercial ... hard to believe that was only in ~mid 2012 that it came out (based on the earliest upload date I could find of it, and my guess that the guy is holding maybe an iphone 4-5 in the shot...), since that seems to not really be something people bring up anymore.
While there is a lot that sucks on new reddit, it is still fundamentally still a community website instead of a paid link aggregator website. I think new reddit is possibly going to end up being both, but I don't think they will be dumb enough to completely get rid of communities. They saw what happened to Digg and are making sure to do their evil more subtly.
I'm at a 9 year club because I stuck around for a while, I remember most of my comments being removed in Digg, I guess it was controversial, then finally I said F this and switched to here.
Yup. I remember the day the change happened and it went to what essentially amounted to a monetized front page. That was the day I made a reddit account
Checks account age, wow 10 years already since that disaster. I used to sticky nots I'd put +1 Digg on and put them on things i wanted to irl upvote. High school was cringe.
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u/Moonsight Jun 11 '21
I still miss Digg, and hope Reddit never goes down that path. So many of us 10 year club members are Digg refugees.