I'm thankful for their new design, actually. After many years of trying, I have now managed to successfully kick my Reddit habit completely and have gained precious hours in my day.
I've been trying to pin down _why_ I've had the same reaction as you, but I really can't put my finger on it.
Something about the new site just somehow puts me off. While I could mindlessly browse the old site endlessly, something about the new actively makes me want to close the tab.
The new design made me leave as well, it had been s long time coming though. Most discussions are dumb, I can’t remember the last time I had a conversation on reddit where I wasn’t the most knowledgeable person in the thread, and that’s just a waste of time.
It’s not that people are stupid, sometimes you’re simply talking to a teenager with no life experience. Often it is because people are kind of stupid. My national (r/Denmark) subreddit has devolved into a vile place for instance, I’d compare it to t_d, it’s the best “quick” comparison there is, but it’s obviously not as bad, at least not yet.
I think /r/space is the only major subreddit that I don’t dislike, and most of the smaller ones have been abandoned.
The new design being horrible was just what tipped the iceberg.
I agree, the redesign isn't great but that's not what killed it for me. The same discussions will keep happening there with no changes. I've had the same thoughts as you about discussing with teenagers.
/r/Australia isn't particularly racist or astroturfed but there is still a lot of times I'm amazed at what gets upvoted. /r/bjj is a good place for jiu jitsu content but the same stuff is posted across every network and the communities are so small we all know any news pretty quickly.
Maybe I just got older and care less about reading or discussing the same topics all the time. I've had the same trouble with Facebook recently where so many lies fill any comment section.
You would have seen that stat about Australians spending more time on Reddit than Facebook or Porn recently, right? That's why /r/Australia is bad now - it went and got popular.
This cycle of social networks starting lesser known but higher quality and ending popular but rubbish is inevitable because the bottom 25% of users have far more capability to drag a social network into the dirt than the top 25% could ever drag it back up.
r/worldnews is the best example of Reddit's degradation. Thousands upon thousands of comments with no real insight but the same memes and pop culture quotes.
I see your point, but I’m not sure how else to describe it.
Every time I visit HN I read something interesting. I can’t remember the last time I read something that interested me on Reddit, outside of /r/space.
I mean, I know it sounded arrogant to say I was the most knowledgeable, it simply happens to be true, but it only applies to Reddit. It’s extremely rare that I feel like that anywhere else, even Facebook is much better in that regard.
Maybe I’m just using Reddit wrong, but it hasn’t always been like this either.
I agree with you. Most discussions I see on reddit are dumb. Maybe it's because it's popularity means more uneducated people are going to the site, resulting in lower quality of discussion. Also anonymity means people aren't as afraid to sound dumb in their comments compared to facebook. I see better discussion on facebook probably because most of my friends have gone through higher education.
I think what it is is that we associate the old design with good times. We associate it with those deep, late night discussions about something esoteric from back when reddit was a smaller but more knowledgable community. Like any social site, as it grows the average quality decreases. Today reddit is the #10 most popular site worldwide, and largely the discussions are bandwagony / low effort. For me when I see the site under the new design, I don't see any of the nostalgia I have associated with it from a decade of use. I just see all the stuff I dislike about what the site has become.
This cannot be all of it. I've never been a Reddit user besides the occasional research e.g. in the wiki of /r/BuildAPC. But even I am put off by the new design. Possible explanations:
1. It looks like a mobile app. I hate most of the mobile ecosystem for its horrible information density and dark UI patterns.
2. You cannot find shit. The only way to open a subreddit's wiki in the new UI is to append "/wiki" to the URL, from what I can tell.
3. It looks like a social network (i.e. a waste of time) and less like a forum/message board (i.e. a productive community).
Im not 100% confident those stats are really getting everything on the page but it seems about right. Anyway, perhaps you are sensing that the junk/cruft to content ratio is rising.
Assuming 5 kWh per GB of data[1], and 14 billion reddit pageviews per month [2]
# i.reddit.com
5 kWh/GB x 1e-6 GB/KB x x 1e-9 TWh/kWh x 802 KB/view x 14e9 views/month x 12 months/year
= 0.67 TWh/year
# old.reddit.com
= 1.6 TWh/year
# www.reddit.com
= 3.6 TWh/year
So about 3 TWh extra electricity is being used each year. This is about the total used each year by Papua New Guinea, which is ranked 133/219 in electricity consumption by country.[3]
I think it's because in the new design, you do not get to choose which content to view or click on. All images are auto-expanded, leaving you with a fb-like feed rather than suggested content you can choose to dive into.
1. I can't log in on the new site. If I log out on the new one I get a weird error logging in.
2. Everything is clickable. On a crappy touch pad I misclick so much stuff.
3. Resource usage. I bought a lighter laptop. It sacred me actually because embedded YouTube was lagging on the new site. This was even worse because everything is ckickable problem.
4. It took a lot of clicks to see a content. There might be an expand / collapse but I had a hard time finding it consistently.
I've also been using a lot less of reddit.
All reddit and most sites for that matter need to do is be responsive to screen size. And do away with dedicated apps.
I've been wondering the same thing. For me, I think the new site feels slightly sluggish and the design and/or implementation feels clunky. I switched back to classic though so no productivity gains for me.
I actually switched to Hackernews and forced myself to read at least two paragraphs of any article before I read the comments. I’ve learned so much more from this website and wasted so much less time. I’ve went from several hours a day on reddit to about 30 minutes on HN on various times on the toilet everyday.
Yes- I recently realized I was wasting several hours of my life per week on Reddit. This new redesign helped me kick that habbit. Hurrah- time to get in shape and learn Polish!!
After having to click "visit old reddit" a few times, I just got sick of it.
> After many years of trying, I have now managed to successfully kick my Reddit habit completely and have gained precious hours in my day.
It stopped being fun. Reddit has turned into the infowars of the left. It's just spiteful and angry leftist politics 24/7. I suppose it was inevitable when reddit sold itself to a news media company, but still sad to see reddit die a slow and painful death. Was once a great site for open ideas, discussions and jokes.
Same here! After repeatedly getting redirected to an app and mobile version of their site, i began asking myself why i put up with this on Reddit and not elsewhere.
I don't know if you'll see this comment because the thread is off the front page, but I came back to thank you. Your comment set off a lightbulb in my head and really helped me make a positive change to my life. I'd been wallowing in a major (3+ hours a night) reddit addiction and my productivity was way, way down and I wasn't accomplishing stuff I wanted to do (learn another language, work out, clean the house...) because of it. I also HATE the redesign (so ugly, so spaced out, way less "sticky" to me as a user because what I really love about reddit is the discussion subreddits and the conversations. I'd always been turning the "new reddit" off and using old reddit view. When I saw your comment above, it was like an epiphany. A-ha! Just leave the ugly terrible redesign activated on all the time!!
I am so thankful I saw that- I changed all my reddits to the new design and successfully accomplished a ton of stuff I'd been procrastinating on over the last few weeks.
