The moment old.reddit.com stops working is the moment I will stop using Reddit generally, the new design is just too slow for me to create a pleasant experience (and the UX of the redesign is overall very unpleasant). Ever since they began limiting viewing on mobile browsers I already stopped using Reddit with my mobile phone completely.
There are ways to circumvent that of course, but I just can't be bothered.
The one comment I did not expect to see leveled against old.reddit.com was that it was slower. I generally hit it only because it is an order of magnitude faster than the main site in Safari. The dynamic/lazy loading of what must be megabytes of assets make the experience 100% jank. The wasted space is actually a preference. The 10,000 ft view is nice and lets you achieve your preferred level of zoom for quickly browsing things, as opposed to being forced to view everything at a certain size/speed.
Is someone willing to share why old.reddit.com is so much better UX/UI wise? It's not obvious to me for some reason. Is it simply the load time is better - and that it doesn't have the shenanigans trying to lead you to a "better experience" via downloading their mobile app?
Information density, load times, speed of navigation, UX simplicity, effort required client-side...
TBH I struggle to see how the new interface could be considered better in any respect worth considering. The only good feature is, I believe, showing images by default, which you can achieve trivially with Reddit Enhancement Suite and would have not required a complete re-engineering on a SPA model.
There might well be server-side improvements that make it worth to Reddit, but from a user perspective the new UI was a straight UX downgrade; without old.reddit.com they would probably have become another Digg.
The main feed has infinite scroll on the main feed (I am not especially a fan of that). When you click a link it is a popup over the top of the infinite scroll page. Close the popup and you are at the same position in the infinite scroll list. I didn't like the new design at first, but after using it for a bit it's not that much difference. The low quality of posts combined with heavy handed moderation is far more of a problem for Reddit than the UX.
the main thing that I dislike about it is that they try to highlight certain - relevant - comments instead of showing the comment thread as is
this happens a lot when searching, and is especially annoying on mobile where it's not clear at all on how to view the entire thread.
This could follow with information density in general, I think another important piece to consider is most of the people who are using old.reddit.com probably still use RES (reddit enhancement suite).
I am very interested to know what is the engineering overheads and increase in code complexity incurred in maintaining 2 different views.
At NetApp, backward compatibility and ability to rollback across multiple releases was a hard requirement. This made the codebase real hard to understand and maintain.
For you. And for me. But Reddit has many more users now then it did in the days when old.reddit.com was just reddit.com.
As much as many people hate UI/UX changes they happen for a reason. Due to the much more mainstream adoption of reddit I'd say that reason was wider adoption.
I had the pleasure of working at Reddit for a few years. I even worked with Chris from time to time. He's one of those people that you can just tell is genuinely a good person shortly after meeting him. I'm happy for the success he and Reddit have seen recently.
After reading "We are the Nerds"... well, I don't want to say I got the impression he was treated poorly. But it was very odd. He seems like a hidden founder which is weird considering how many treat Aaron Schwartz, given the stories told about them both in the book.
Well people don’t write stories about Aaron Swartz because he worked at Reddit, they write about him because he was persecuted by the corporate-government complex.
> because he was persecuted by the corporate-government complex.
This isn't quite right either. They write them because he was awesome.
Aaron helped in the development of RSS and Creative Commons. He was everywhere you looked, and all around incredibly insightful (his book reviews and blog are still amazing). He was also well connected: Tim Berners-Lee, Lawrence Lessig, John Gruber, Paul Graham, ...
He was one of the brightest beacons for open source, open knowledge, the web, and open culture. He was incredibly well known and liked before the MIT / JSTOR witch hunt killed him.
We lost a luminary. Our world would have been brighter if he were still around.
> I can’t tell you how many times I was on a call and the other person on the phone was referring to their engineering staff as “IT.”
Can someone elaborate the difference? To me IT is more on the operation side while engineering is on development side. Would love to hear other perspective
My impression at this point is that while non-technical people can't tell the difference and don't care to learn, there IS a split in the two sides of things now.
This is a little weird to me, because for my age group (I'm 50), both sets were typically made up of the same tribe of computer-obsessed folks who begged a 6502 machine from their parents in the early 80s and took degrees in unrelated fields because of how far behind industry most university CS programs were in the early 90s. (And there really weren't any MIS programs.)
Somewhere along the way, though, a split happened. And in many (but not all) companies, IT became a lower-tier support organization. Salaries stagnated, and a quality gap happened. It might just be that, in lots of places, developers are a revenue source while IT is nearly always overhead. It's a rule of thumb that the more talented folks will probably venture towards being revenue and not overhead, because the compensation is typically better, and the organization will treat you with more respect.
So now, in many but not all places, there's a perception of a class difference between the two. The IT guy is derided as someone 5 hours short of an associate's degree with a cheap certification, no ability to troubleshoot beyond obvious steps, and zero interest in computing when off the clock while the developer is an ivory-tower whiz kid with hobby projects in Haskell and his/her fingers in half a dozen FOSS projects.
I am obviously exaggerating. But this view, which is not uncommon, and reflects a shift that IS real even if not to the degree I lampoon above, is probably why a developer would make the distinction.
I sell (well, implement -- but it's a small company, so I wear lots of hats) software to big enterprise companies.
My exposure to big-co IT is that BOFH attitudes are sadly common.
One thing that stuck with me from an early mentor -- who as NOT, I should be clear, talking about IT or software at the time -- is that too many people think there is power in saying "no"; real power comes from the ability say "yes".
This doesn't cover the millions of developers across the world who do neither - they code internal (i.e. not customer-facing) apps used by employees of the company.
Cultural difference. In a broad sense we are all in IT of course. However, the IT department usually means what the parent wrote inside of US corporations.
In my country "IT" is all engineering, and what USA means by IT is called "IT support". Was surprised when I read about this on Reddit, also in some discussion when some developer complained about being called IT.
In the UK, it varies. At large companies, "IT" is roughly analogous to the US usage — think "The IT Crowd", for example. Amongst the general populace, it varies. Those who work at large companies might draw a distinction, for many it simply means "works on computers doing stuff I don't understand". It has very derogatory connotations in general. I spent a lot of time trying to correct people and always referred to myself as a Developer or, occasionally, Software Engineer, never "someone who works in IT".
I think in that context the expectation is that “IT” would refer to the people at your company who would fix the printer or remove a virus from someone’s workstation.
"To me IT is more on the operation side while engineering is on development side. "
In my company (a big Fortune 500) engineering and IT are totally different things if you look from the bottom of the hierarchy. BUT (this is a big but) when you talk to management the higher you get, the more SW engineering and IT are the same. I have been in several meetings where the CEO always referred to the CIO whenever a tech question came up. So the CIO answered all these questions although in reality she has no input into any software development decisions that are being made for our products and her knowledge basically consist of reading vendor whitepapers. It's quite annoying because this way IT often gets multi million dollar budgets for fancy AI/digitization/ML projects that are all wasted because they have no clue about SW engineering.
In summary, there is a very common perception that everybody that uses a computer is part of IT.
In many countries that aren't the US, IT is used to refer to engineering too. For example, software engineers working in a Brazil bank are considered part of IT.
This probably shows a lack of understanding of cultural differences by the person surprised by the use of the term rather than the speaker.
IT is internal facing, their customer is the business and they are a cost centre.
Engineering is external facing, their customer is the end user and they generate revenue.
The terms being so clearly deliniated is more obvious in the US, in my experience. But some old brick and mortar companies still treat their engineering departments as a cost centre and it shows.
> Engineering is external facing, their customer is the end user and they generate revenue.
I have always seen Engineering to be a cost center and not revenue generating. This is the case, since Engineering doesn't directly add to profit but still costs money to operate.
My Norwegian company calls it IT, with developers, devops, UX and the whole shebang. Generally the best-paid department of the whole company, which is in finance.
IT support isn’t even employed here, it’s contracted out.
I hate when people call engineering staff "IT". It's a derogatory term to use that minimizes their contributions, and I wish I had some equally derogatory term to refer to the jobs of people who say that.
It’s been years. With that said Reddit’s UX is /terrible,/ a subtle touch to the navbar scrolls to the top of the page which is a daily frustration when reading comments halfway down a huge page on my tablet. Videos on their site is another one, it doesn’t matter if I mute them when I scroll down and back up it unmutes. I wish their was an alternative I would love to never use Reddit again at this point, but all my obscure communities for TV shows, movies and stock trading are on there.
And having to constantly click on "Continue this thread" to read another comment or two (or maybe even 0). I understand that they wanted to stop endless threads from polluting the comment section, but they should make it possible to easily disable this behavior.
It's getting worse. On mobile they put the "load more comments" button behind a login wall a couple of months ago (i.reddit.com still works, but has other limitations).
What is crazy is that they just didn't roll back. Even if they had lost a ton of users surely they could have kept at least 30% and built on that for the next few years.
The amount of traffic both sites had at the time was minuscule to what Reddit has now.
When you become huge, inertia is incredibly strong.
It's all about enthusiasts and early adopters (who are very fickle) and late adopters and laggards (who are very much the opposite of fickle). Crossing the chasm. Reddit has crossed the chasm.
One thing you have to remember with Reddit (and Facebook & co.) is that they're international. I think for Reddit about half the audience is American. A small subset of those are willing to leave Reddit for political problem, say, 5%.
Even though the rest of the world is literally flooded with US political news (less so now that Trump is gone), most of the rest of the world doesn't really care about those things Americans are super passionate about.
Reddit can remain huge even if half its US userbase leaves it.
This point is even more salient for Facebook outrage, BTW.
For the record, reddit had more traffic than Digg before "the exodus". We had about double their traffic. There was a slight jump at that time, but for the most part most Digg users were already reddit users, they just became more active.
I doubt that it will happen exactly like this. Reddit has become a behemoth that caters more to the average consumer of social media than to the original tech crowd that represented its first members.
The only way a new platform can compete with them is by having the individual communities of reddit move to it with individual governance and then, allowing these communities to interact with each other in some way. The alternatives that look promising today are based on ActivityPub, but they fall into the same trap that reddit has: they want to appeal and attract as many users as possible without regard for suitability or community building. I'm hoping that the ting I'm working on will be better, but I'm not there just yet.
Slightly OT, but what's a good flight search tool now that hipmunk has shut down? I was super bummed when that happened because they just presented so much useful information on a single screen.
I've always heard that ITA Matrix is the most powerful flight search tool that exists. Not a polished UI like Hipmunk though. https://matrix.itasoftware.com/ I have no real complaints with Google Flight search though.
The problem with Matrix is that it only searches through standard GDS, and you don't get the direct fares that some airlines publish. A metasearch like kayak also aggregates the direct feeds from airlines
That's true, it was acquired a few years back, but ITA Matrix is still supported as a separate interface with different capabilities than Google Flights.
I tried to find something like a free API for flight details and prices to query. It surprised me that I didn't find something easy, complete, and free. Shouldn't the airlines want to make it easy for people to access their flight schedules and sell tickets? Maybe they do and I just didn't find it.
I generally use Kayak. Used to use Skiplagged for hidden city ticketing as well. It certainly feels like price discovery has gotten a lot easier...and I tend to book with the airline anyway in case I have to deal with customer service.
I'm using the team at flightfox. Not search but if you do long haul it's a major time saver and it pays for itself. During the early lockdown they also managed to get every single flight we had refunded, making me a fan for life.
Assuming Tencent matched funding to keep their equity for Reddit’s most recent $6B valuation funding in 2021, Tencent owns 10% of Reddit. I don’t think that’s a big deal but /shrug
You think there is a moral equivalence to the CCP and Nazis? This is China you are talking about... the country that has shown no military aggression outside its borders.
It is alleged that Tencent was formed with funding from the Ministry of State Security[0](Chinese equivalent of KGB). They make propaganda games for the CCP as well[1].
Wait what? Single digit ownership of a billion dollar company gives you a lot of access and control. Especially if it's something that the other 90% don't care about, but you do (eg. chinese politics).
No. It doesn’t. Unless they got a board seat as well.
I love the idea of a group of uniformed Chinese generals showing up at the annual shareholder meeting to demand Reddit do... wait what does the CCP want Reddit to do?
Seemingly "small" investments were enough to strong-arm the NBA and Blizzard into punishing people speaking out for Hong Kong, so it appears it gives them enough.
It has nothing to do with their investment. It was because nbas market share in China is huge. I think you are upset with the NBA here, they chose profits over geopolitics.
Naively I would assume that the worst would be that when such a small investor sells his shares then everybody else has an opportunity to make a cheap offer.
