I do mind them promoting their app, it’s a horrible app and they’ve continually ruined their website. The only way I can stand to use reddit anymore is through Narwhal, at least until they kill their 3rd party apps API.
It’s funny, the web app used to be really good. Much better than the native app. Since then they have been making the web app increasingly worse over time, actively degrading its functionality and pleasantness to use.
The degradation seems to directly correlate with the modern-feel of the page. I'm not sure if that's intentional. It seems that modern front end fashion is a huge step backwards from earlier fashions in web development.
It's completely possible to have a "modern" page that is also nice to use; it's just that with Reddit modernness and horribleness have been conflated together and it seems like they go together.
I don't know what exactly "modern" means here, but I think FastMail, Inoreader, and GitHub should count. All three have been fast and responsive. In particular, switching from Gmail to FastMail was a revelation.
Random aside: I've long been very down on web tech, but those 3 have sort of reinvigorated my interest in web stuff.
Do you have any examples of this? Every 'modern' webapp I can think of has been an exercise in making it slower and more confusing than its old-fashioned predecessor. Especially slower. They're _so_ slow.
You can just permanently set your account to use the old layout/view. I've noticed little to no changes other than user profiles, which are the "old new" ones.
On my phone I use reddit is fun. I have no issues at all with reddit atm in terms of them fucking with my experience.
"permenantly", except for the bug where about 1 pageview in 10 it still redirects you to new reddit. I think it's something related to improperly configured (server-side) caching or something.
And that's fine. I absolutely can't stand the new layout, so if that happens I'll stop using it. Probably not good for their metrics for a 13 year user of the service to stop using it I'd guess. I don't even block ads on it. And I sometimes click them if they're relevant (which, lets face it, they are these days).
11 for me and what used to be 30-60 minutes a day (I like certain subreddits /r/programming /r/chess /r/<proglang> Etc.) is maybe 15 and not at all for days now.
I miss old reddit, nothing else really fills the niche in a unified way.
Reddit and Facebook both have some hold for me because of niche communities that they both let me aggregate/monitor/interact with easily, without going to a myriad of websites. I really don’t want to have to do that - in some cases, I’m not even sure I can find comparable replacements.
I agree, but it’s jarring going between devices (phone, iPad and computer) and the multiple interfaces. Then the repeated niggling to use the app. If I haven’t after several years, the chances are I don’t want to.
There are many situations where you are presented with the mobile or new desktop designs, such as being logged out. I have to sign in at least twice every time to use the old desktop version.
But for how long is the question. Once they remove that, my use will go way down or maybe stop entirely. I despise the new layout and it isn’t just a “doesn’t want to try something new” phase.
I actually gave up and switched to desktop on my phone - which is barely usable at all - and yet still somehow less infuriating than the shitty mobile site...
The most promising general reddit equivalent I've seen so far is tildes.net. It's the first time I've seen a fork of the reddit model with some actually fresh ideas. However, like all of the hundreds of alternatived, this site is far below the critical mass required to make browsing it regularly worthwhile.
I expect people would mostly just use the mobile web site. And there would be a lot of noise. But I can't ever see myself going to somewhere like voat.
Yeah, Voat's not an appealing alternative. There's an ActivityPub-powered, federated link aggregator in the works[1], that could work out really well as each community could have their own rules and if you don't want to federate with a particular one, just block them.
There is an alternative made by a previous reddit dev called tildes.net its invite only and quite enjoyable to use. Classic lightweight website and no trolls
I refuse to use the new design with the same contempt as I refuse to pay for picking my seat on an aeroplane (P.S. Ryanair: my girlfriend is not happy about this... but at least I get some peace and quiet right? /s).
I use Boost for Reddit (Android) and the old reddit style, and RES in my browser. I see why they are going towards the Instagram style route - people generally like what they are accustomed to; and I guess more people use Instagram than Reddit.
Yeah, I use their app on android and it's pretty bad. There's currently a bug that seems to get fixed and then reappear where if someone responds to your comment, you get an alert and when you click on the alert it takes you to the comment, but if the comment is too nested, it just takes you to the top of the thread. This makes responding to a comment in any thread with over 100 comments near impossible. Because of that, I'm using the web app currently and it's really annoying to be constantly pushed back toward a broken app.
I use a third party mobile client and am very happy with it, but I know it's only a matter of time (despite what they've said in the past) before they kill/rate limit/price the API in such a way to kill off all the third party clients.
