Its amazing how far backwards reddit went. In browser on desktop it's incredibly slow, even just clicking the comment box to write takes a few seconds and lags out for no reason. No doubt they're employing an uber amount of user tracking and all manner of inefficient code.
It's really inexplicable. Old Reddit was fine, not great, just fine. The new Reddit UI is hideously bad. It was terrible when it launched, it was terrible months later, and it's still terrible now.
I'm honestly at a loss. Is this some galaxy brain "let's make the web experience terrible to force people to native apps" strategy?
It really is. Doesn't matter which browser you use, how beefy your computer is, OS, etc., the new redesign is super slow. It speeds up a bit when you run an adblocker, but even then just going through about 15 posts and things start to stutter and chug.
It's helping me stay off reddit though as a side-effect, which is one of my goals lately.
You can still use https://old.reddit.com. The UX is still bad, but at least it is fairly quick. Annoyingly it is common to get linked back to the new UI but still way better than using it full time.
Old reddit is all I will use, the new reddit may as well not exist. It funny how a good idea over time can turn into absolute trash if you try hard enough. I find it amazing how you can run a decent sized company and not see how horrific your UI/UX is.
The most obnoxious change for me is removing the "context link (basically what "parent" does on HN). As far as I can tell, the new reddit has no such function.
The new reddit is blazingly fast for an SPA, too. It has a <10 second time to interactive, after all. Front end development followed Google and Facebook right into the abyss.
What was your intent behind adopting the "Tweetdeck" style of UI for this presentation? Tweetdeck's intent is supposedly that you'd need to be monitoring multiple feeds efficiently (e.g. you are a social media manager with multiple accounts, or you need live-updating search queries to react to).
For Reddit though, most of the time subreddits aren't really meant to be consumed "live", or many-posts-at-once, which means that for me, this ultimately just ends up shrinking my Reddit browsing experience into a thin column surrounded by content I don't care about at the current moment, which goes against the "efficiency" that I imagine this design is intended for.
For folks who like this style of UI, what do you get out of it?
I'm using a very similar design[1] for a reddit-esque clone I'm working on, but I'm actually about to move away from it. The column approach makes sense at first - it seems like a great way to view multiple streams of content. The reality though seems to be that it creates more UX problems than it solves. One example is that when you have multiple frames inside a UI it destroys the page navigation. Back buttons may not do what you expect them to - does it go back to the previous view for the column you last interacted with, or does it go back to the previous url? It's very easy to simply open up another browser tab or tile a window, which gives you most of the benefits of a column UI without any of the downsides.
Great concept, but many buttons don't have any label or tooltip, please add at least one of the two. The "hot" button is very cryptic to me.
On my computer, i don't have an easy way to scroll left and right, so the layout is suboptimal.
Clicking on the link once to show the comments and a second time to follow the link is not ideal. It should at least be made clear what will happen when you click. Maybe make the title black when it's just a comment toggle, and then blue when it will link to the article
- It wasn't immediately obvious to me that modifying the UI on rddeck.com (by leaving subreddits) would actually modify my subscriptions on my account. There's a place for managing your subs in something like this, but it should be a lot more clear, and I think the main focus should be on the user customizing the UI without modifying their account
- The oblong pill loading bars at the top of each column look exactly like drag handles, and I was super confused why I couldn't rearrange the columns by dragging them. I think that making them drag handles would be useful, and reimplementing the loading bar as something else would be a good change.
- Dragging to rearrange the subreddit order is painfully janky in both safari and firefox for me on macOS. It's almost unusable.
- The subreddit sort order dropdown / active sort order implementation is strange. Simply having just the current sort order + a little chevron pointing down in a button would be much more intuitive.
If this was open source, I'd definitely be willing to contribute. Cool start, and a cool idea.
I'm also building, or trying to, a client for Reddit made with React. The thing I'm not achieving is properly rendering videos hosted on Reddit.
I've come to the conclusion that it's impossible. It's totally closed from being played outside of reddit.com by using CORS. I can't in any way play the DASH or HLS files from reddit.
I can load the mp4 fallback, but guess what? It's a video without audio. You can get the audio, but it's not documented anywhere (found on stackoverflow, I think). But of course, playing two files at once and syncing them is bound to break, specially on slow networks.
For a website dedicated to sharing stuff from all around the web (reddit didn't even have image hosting until a few years ago), it is really a dick move that you can't share stuff from reddit elsewhere.
It's a shame. Reddit is merely a shell of what it used to be, sadly.
Edit: You seem to have the same problem with video :(
> For a website dedicated to sharing stuff from all around the we
Reddit has moved away from being a sharing website to being a social network. This started years ago, but they have consistently move in the direction of siloing users. Strongly encourage users to upload images and videos directly to reddit; Reddit media cannot be hot-linked and always shows you the reddit thread; new features are only available in the official site and apps; certain media won't play properly on third party apps; website experience degraded by constantly pushing users to their app, where they can better control and track them.
You may want to try to track down u/iamthatis, he wrote the Apollo app for iOS and has been able to get reddit video/galleries/etc working natively. He regularly rants against the api not being well supported, maybe he can share how he got around it?
So it's not impossible to get around CORS, but it will be expensive if you are dealing with video. One option is to load the videos through a proxy server to ignore the CORS headers.
Really lame though. Reddit needs an embed thing like YouTube, but I have feeling they want people on Reddit, which is why links to Reddit media take you to the comment section.
Yeah, annoyingly on the web you need to be very careful what click events you prevent. The best practice is to only prevent clicks with no modifiers and check that the mouse button was the one that you intend. (Also avoid handling anything but a left click anyways). Of course the "default" is to block all clicks so it is inevitable that this happens :(
Interesting! But doesn't work on Firefox if you have Enhanced Tracking Protection enabled. Maybe this would work better as an extension? Similar to RES.
Feels clickbaity. The title made me expect there is a native desktop app built on a classic desktop widget toolkit. Nevertheless, I still like this one anyway - good job!
As I scanned this headline (and before I got to the end), I assumed you had in fact designed a tool that would help you design a real deck that was safe to post on Reddit. Posting pictures of your homemade backyard deck build is one of the more brave things you can do on the site as it will generally get destroyed in the comments with everything you did wrong and how it's going to sink into the swamp, after catching on fire.
[+] [-] devwastaken|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lazare|5 years ago|reply
I'm honestly at a loss. Is this some galaxy brain "let's make the web experience terrible to force people to native apps" strategy?
[+] [-] kactus|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevincox|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldcode|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0-_-0|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] non-entity|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] say_it_as_it_is|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] warent|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] y2bd|5 years ago|reply
For Reddit though, most of the time subreddits aren't really meant to be consumed "live", or many-posts-at-once, which means that for me, this ultimately just ends up shrinking my Reddit browsing experience into a thin column surrounded by content I don't care about at the current moment, which goes against the "efficiency" that I imagine this design is intended for.
For folks who like this style of UI, what do you get out of it?
[+] [-] birksherty|5 years ago|reply
I really hate mobile first whitespace trend of modern designs (not talking about reddit here).
[+] [-] jjcm|5 years ago|reply
[1] http://files.jjcm.org/columns.mp4
[+] [-] lecarore|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] varbhat|5 years ago|reply
https://i.reddit.com is one good frontend.
[+] [-] shultays|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 9935c101ab17a66|5 years ago|reply
- It wasn't immediately obvious to me that modifying the UI on rddeck.com (by leaving subreddits) would actually modify my subscriptions on my account. There's a place for managing your subs in something like this, but it should be a lot more clear, and I think the main focus should be on the user customizing the UI without modifying their account
- The oblong pill loading bars at the top of each column look exactly like drag handles, and I was super confused why I couldn't rearrange the columns by dragging them. I think that making them drag handles would be useful, and reimplementing the loading bar as something else would be a good change.
- Dragging to rearrange the subreddit order is painfully janky in both safari and firefox for me on macOS. It's almost unusable.
- The subreddit sort order dropdown / active sort order implementation is strange. Simply having just the current sort order + a little chevron pointing down in a button would be much more intuitive.
If this was open source, I'd definitely be willing to contribute. Cool start, and a cool idea.
[+] [-] pedrogpimenta|5 years ago|reply
I've come to the conclusion that it's impossible. It's totally closed from being played outside of reddit.com by using CORS. I can't in any way play the DASH or HLS files from reddit.
I can load the mp4 fallback, but guess what? It's a video without audio. You can get the audio, but it's not documented anywhere (found on stackoverflow, I think). But of course, playing two files at once and syncing them is bound to break, specially on slow networks.
For a website dedicated to sharing stuff from all around the web (reddit didn't even have image hosting until a few years ago), it is really a dick move that you can't share stuff from reddit elsewhere.
It's a shame. Reddit is merely a shell of what it used to be, sadly.
Edit: You seem to have the same problem with video :(
[+] [-] lopis|5 years ago|reply
Reddit has moved away from being a sharing website to being a social network. This started years ago, but they have consistently move in the direction of siloing users. Strongly encourage users to upload images and videos directly to reddit; Reddit media cannot be hot-linked and always shows you the reddit thread; new features are only available in the official site and apps; certain media won't play properly on third party apps; website experience degraded by constantly pushing users to their app, where they can better control and track them.
[+] [-] easton|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrgalaxy|5 years ago|reply
Really lame though. Reddit needs an embed thing like YouTube, but I have feeling they want people on Reddit, which is why links to Reddit media take you to the comment section.
[+] [-] pjc50|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] runawaybottle|5 years ago|reply
Side note: Whoever at Reddit came up with the idea to badger users on every other click to ‘open the Reddit app’ needs to be dealt with.
[+] [-] rayrag|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevincox|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beshrkayali|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] qwerty456127|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zer0-c00l|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fred_is_fred|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] zestyping|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] treebornfrog|5 years ago|reply
Reddit's redesign was an absolute catastrophy. Its sluggish and the mobile popups that direct users to app or Web is downright intrusive.
I use baconreader premium on mobile to keep my sanity.
Disclosure: I have no affiliation with baconreader app / team.
[+] [-] EricE|5 years ago|reply
I want that. Let me download the messages, sift through them how I want to and reply.
Oops - I forgot. Communication isn't the goal of forums these days; monetization is :(
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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