Ask HN: Why is new Reddit so bad?
7 by fnfjfk | 1 comments on Hacker News.
New Reddit is so bad that it's a meme at this point. Why is it this way? I'm not asking about why the growth-hacking features exist - recommendations, larger images, looking like TikTok, steering people towards the mobile app. I don't like those, but I can understand why they do them (they want more money). I'm just asking why the implementation is so terrible: - The video player is so bad that it itself is a meme. - Loading more comments often just doesn't work, the loading state disappears and no comments appear. - The back button is totally broken, the entire page resets when going back. - On mobile there are multiple "use the app" upsells, and clicking them takes me to the App Store. I already have the app installed! I wouldn't even be mad if these would just properly link me to the matching post in the actual app! - Really bad memory usage and general performance, and so on. It's just a genuinely awful website. Do they not notice this? Surely fixing this would improve revenue at least somewhat (people watch more videos on websites with functioning video players!), which they seem to be desperate for? The weird thing is that old Reddit is a really good website. It works, I use it all the time and have a redirect installed, so that I never see new Reddit. It's performant. New Reddit could have just been a layer of CSS and some relatively minor markup tweaks (for inline images etc.) on top of that. Why build an entire new thing that barely works ? Anyways... it's been around for so long that someone internal has quit and can speak on a throwaway, or maybe someone still employed on a personal computer with Tor :)