r/help • u/zabunkovz • Aug 29 '24
New UI, time to say bye bye desktop
The hell is this forcing of new UI??? So you are saying you can keep old reddit alive but cant keep up new old design and force this... what ever in my face?
Man does any company know what they are doing as we go further in time?
HAHAH even as I write this this stupid website breaks on me, so much about new GUI: https://i.imgur.com/4KG4KEd.png
Reddit, I want old perfect UI back, not this wanna be on phone type of ugly all in my face GUI, I just open Reddit and instantly close it when I see new GUI, that is how much its not functional, it repels you away even before using it since its all in my face.
How do I get old UI back?
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u/ChrisCage78 Aug 29 '24
It's slow, it's buggy, it looks bad on desktop, and you can either chose a light mode that burns your eyes or a dark mode that tires your eyes...
This version has been live for 6 months... and they can't fix simple bugs or bad UI choices...
Seriously, fire whoever is in charge of making these design decisions and whoever approves the push to production because paying these guys is a huge waste of money.
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u/CatMorganSaysHi Aug 29 '24
Here to voice my displeasure with the change. I've read the threads for the past couple days and want to comment before yet another thread gets locked because developers are tired of hearing the criticism. The interface looks good on a mobile device, but on desktop? It's frustrating. ... And I've tried to like it, but I don't.
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u/tomba_be Helper Aug 29 '24
I'm just here to add to the comment count before this gets locked. Because in a short while, reddit will go "there were barely any complaints!".
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u/Lopiano Aug 29 '24
The only thing left to do is to start complaining directly to the site's advertisers. Tell them you wonât buy their products until they either pull their ads or reddit backs down.
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u/aleqqqs Aug 29 '24
Yes, please revert to new.reddit.com, and delete the current ugly mess while you're at it.
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u/Middle_Layer_4860 Aug 29 '24
it also changed in new.reddit.com, everything gets curved. I can't see the old new reddit. how do I get it back
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u/aleqqqs Aug 29 '24
I know, it's not available any more. We used to be able to use new.reddit.com to avoid the fugly theme, but that doesn't work any more, the shut it down, so new.reddit.com looks the same as www.reddit.com.
That's why everyone is complaining.
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u/The_Critical_Cynic Helper Aug 29 '24
New Reddit is still available to moderators. Just not everyone else.
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u/XarcaneTN Aug 29 '24
Its so bad.
WE DON'T NEED 2 SIDE BARS AT ALL TIMES. There is nothing relevant there when you are in a post The only button anyone will ever use in a post is the home button. Which already existed. You just click the reddit logo, located AN INCH ABOVE HOME (assuming you have not accidentally scrolled the side bar, which is easy to do.)
Now, because of these two sidebars there is no way to click back to the feed from anywhere in the post. You must scroll back up (there is no more back to top button. Genius move) and click on a tiny arrow next to the post. Why. This doesn't make sense. It can't boost engagement. It literally makes it harder to view the next post. That is the opposite of engagement. You cant even "asshole design" correctly. Just give us a giant obnoxious arrow that goes to the next or previous post on both sides. Boom, instant engagement.
Its been 6 months. The users have told you repeatedly exactly the issues they have. This is objectively a terrible design. It is clearly designed to appeal to dumb users, but it sucks at even that. If they couldn't figure out that clicking the logo took them to home, then I don't think putting it on a bar that moves is helping the issue.
Forcing your users onto this UI is a terrible decision which will absolutely lead to lower site engagement. It is objectively more difficult to navigate the site. I'd be willing to wait for improvements, but clearly reddit thinks it knows what is best for its users if it has not changed any of these things in the last 6 months.
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u/jimwinno43 Aug 29 '24
Need a hero to fix this, it's so bad on desktop. I have to turn off and on dark mode just to make it work constantly
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u/OceanDagger Aug 29 '24
They are still catering to the users that prefer old.reddit.com, a UI that I never vibed with but good for them, so no reason to force us to make the switch.
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u/NLCmanure Aug 29 '24 edited Aug 29 '24
absolutely horrible. on the previous UI, the Close button was stationary. It didn't matter how much you scrolled the button was always there. Now the close button is an arrow that moves with the content. When you want to close you have to scroll back to the beginning to get to the button. real dumb.
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u/cryptic-fox Helper Aug 29 '24
The people who worked on this new UI are so bad at their job.
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u/ToastyCrumb Aug 29 '24
With respect (and in agreement that the new new UI is anti-user), having worked on enterprise websites this smells so much like management decisions not designer incompetence.
I assume that the new new UI somehow includes all of the execs' "great ideas" as well as increases ad feed and impression (at least in terms of some metric they can sell).
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u/Kawaii_Spider_OwO Aug 29 '24
Yeah the new UI is garbage. I'm still on new.reddit for now, but I'm probably going to use addons to change the CSS when I do get stuck on the new UI.
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u/Square_Pride1877 Aug 29 '24
Everything looks green now, half of the screens is overused with nonsense it just hurts my eyes
I hate it who came up with this?
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u/duckgirl1997 Aug 29 '24
for me it doesnt work all my subs i am subscribed to keep getting sorted to "hot" over what my preferences are at being "new"
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u/NLCmanure Aug 29 '24
you can fix it to default to New by adding "/new" at the end of the web address.
Example: https://new.reddit.com/r/yoursub/new
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u/avanorne Aug 29 '24
Hopefully we're in the "deliberately release a bad product" phase of new coke Reddit and soon they'll bring back the old favourite.
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u/skibik1964 Aug 29 '24
I see we have an expert helper here that must own stock in Reddit by the way he is plugging this new interface. If they actually fixed a few things to make it a little more user friendly like second version was then make we could use it since it was forced on us.
There is no reason why user preferences can't be changed to what we need but a lot of the changes don't make a difference. There have been many reports on r/bugs of not being able to sort subreddits by NEW instead of the HOT, including me 3 times in 6 months. I assume r/bugs subreddit is just like my recycle bin on my desktop and nobody at Reddit even see them or cares about it.
The left column is now a crap show, why not have the ability to customize. A few reported we don't need recents and I am one. I was able to get rid if it using uBlock Origin on Chrome but sounds like Google might be dumping that extension.
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u/zabunkovz Aug 29 '24
You know the world, less you can customize the better... I guess for them somehow Idk, I miss old internet where you could basically customize your whole pages (exmp: YouTube).
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u/jgoja Expert Helper Aug 29 '24
I am just reasonable in my approach to things. I agree and have said that there are still some big issues on things that are missing or not working.
The thing with not following the sort preferences is probably hundreds of times between here and bugs and is just about a year, not 6 months. In fact that was an issue since the first testing version was forced upon users.
The left column allows for faster navigation when you get used to using it. Also, how much could you customize the pulldown menu or anything in the previous UI?
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u/letruf Aug 29 '24
Thank you, reddit, for forcing this terrible UI on me. Now that I'm stuck with this unusable, ugly thing, my time spent on reddit will naturally shrink; I think I should use it for exercising or maybe take up a new hobby.
This is the first time I see a big portal like this prioritizing its users' health and well-being over gains. Well done!
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u/ByGollie Helper Aug 29 '24
old.reddit.com is essential for moderators and moderator tools.
Without it, moderating a subreddit becomes infinitely more difficult, and reddit descents into an anarchistic mess.
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u/adrilorca93 Aug 29 '24
Force to use old.reddit because new new UI suck...shameful
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u/zabunkovz Aug 29 '24
And lacks functionality. Gotta love opening posts in new tab rather then in a pop up windows and continue browsing where I stopped.
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Aug 29 '24
[deleted]
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u/mohitmayank Aug 29 '24
This is the OG Reddit experience, combined with RES. It might look ugly at first but once you get used to it, you wonât go back as Iâve never since I started using Reddit more than a decade ago.
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u/Old_One_I Expert Helper Aug 29 '24
Try switching to compact view. I hear that's close to old reddit
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u/slurpycow112 Aug 29 '24
Honestly I have to say Iâve been using this UI for ages and I really donât get what all the fuss is about
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u/jgoja Expert Helper Aug 29 '24
You donât get the ui you want back. It is gone. Try giving the current UI a chance. It is missing some pretty big things still, but it has advantages as well. After a bit of time, you adapt to it
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u/zabunkovz Aug 29 '24
Give this UI mess a chance? 3 scrollbars on one page? Opening posts in new pages instead of pop up window? Posts take 3 hours to load? Site crashing non stop while put in production? The ugly color x text combo that hurts my eyes? The 2 sidebars that I cant hide and put me in panic mode since too much text on screen?
No thanks, nice try reddit fed.
Its just all sensory overload and I am not new generation to suck it all up, sorry.
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u/contyk Aug 29 '24
I actually did spend a couple of weeks with it and I agree, you can get used to it. But it's still objectively worse and more mentally straining to use, which was always immediately noticeable whenever I switched to "new"... which I often had to do because the new design just keeps having issues.
It's just so ridiculously unstable. Every day one has to keep refreshing over and over to load a feed, the comments, to deal with an "oops", the red bar always popping up, sometimes votes not registering with more "oops"... all that while both new (RIP) and old worked fine, so these issues are clearly not on the backend.
And yeah, that fact that basic features like that sorting or new comment highlighting still haven't been implemented even after months of complaints is beyond belief.
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u/jgoja Expert Helper Aug 29 '24
Maybe I have just been lucky, but I have not had long load times or having to keep refreshing that I see mentioned. I do regularly get the red bar but it does not do anything and I just ignore it unless I need something behind it. I have seen talk of it crashing but have not experienced that unless Reddit was having issues.
I am not saying it is perfect by any means, and the fact some things have been identified as missing for almost a year and still are is ridiculous. There is so much hate by people who wonât give it a chance. The only ones that are affected by their ridiculousness is themselves. âRawr me hateâ will lead to nothing. Last yearâs protests taught that lesson.
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u/Flyingsheep___ Aug 29 '24
It's getting a chance from me looking at it. It's not food, it's not a pair of shoes, it's a visual change. I can tell it's bad because it looks bad, like right now my browser isn't even properly loading the left sidebar.
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u/jgoja Expert Helper Aug 29 '24
No, you can tell you prefer the previous one that you were used to. Without talking the time with this one, and coming in with the attitude it is bad, you will always find fault with it.
I have never had any of these loading issues that people are claiming to have, and I have a very old desktop.
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u/jgoja Expert Helper Aug 29 '24
I just want to add
If you use it you will find ways around some of the missing features that should have been fixed or added by now. Yes it is annoying having to change the subreddit sort to new but it takes like 2 seconds. Having to use the subreddit list to see followed is inefficient but it works. Same with old Reddit and all the subreddits in a custom feed.
If you use it with a mindset of trying to make it work, you will be surprised what you can actually do with it. If you approach it with the mindset to hate it, well then you will no matter what and it will frustrate you when it does not have to
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Aug 29 '24 edited Oct 03 '24
[deleted]
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u/rafikiphoto Aug 29 '24
...and not expect users to have to "work at it" to merely get used to it!
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u/jgoja Expert Helper Aug 29 '24
You can fully use it as it is. But yes, you will have to get used to it and how it functions.
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u/jgoja Expert Helper Aug 29 '24
You see though, it is easy to use. The left side bar as it is makes it even easier. People being attracted in will only know what it is. It also attracts people. When they switched the logged out UI to the current one that this logged in one is designed from, people were disappointed that new.reddit UI was different and worse.
I wish more worked and they would move faster on the missing and broken parts, but this is what we have now. Be constructive in your feedback. Rawr me hate, doesnât do anything to help improve what we have.
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Aug 29 '24 edited Oct 03 '24
[deleted]
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u/jgoja Expert Helper Aug 29 '24
You may need to get your devices checked because my 12 year old pc and iPhone 6s donât have any of those issues except slow loading on mobile web and I do get a red banner that actually does nothing on desktop. Try clearing cache and cookies.
You donât like the look personally, fair. Does not mean nobody likes it.
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u/LetsDoTheCongna Aug 29 '24
Itâs kind of hard to not hate the new UI when itâs a downgrade in basically every quantifiable aspect.
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u/jgoja Expert Helper Aug 29 '24
You see though. It actually is not. It has flaws. I have never said it is perfect. I have been trying to get things fixed for months with little to show for it. But that attitude in your comment will lead to what you are saying being completely ignored. Be constructive in your criticism, be rational.
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u/tomba_be Helper Aug 29 '24
If they wanted a new UI, the first obvious step would be: make sure every existing feature still works. A basic feature, like "selecting text and hitting reply gives you the selected text as a quote", isn't there anymore. Now you need to manually copy and paste text to quote it.
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u/jgoja Expert Helper Aug 29 '24
Not if you donât intend to keep every feature. Old Reddit has things new.reddit doesnât.
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u/Old_Bug4395 Helper Aug 29 '24 edited Aug 29 '24
Yes what you're describing is 'enshittification,' there's no reason to remove useful features from the platform just so that you can push an unfinished, buggy mess out the door. It's a website almost entirely based around discussion, why in the hell would they remove a feature that is essential for discussion? Obfuscate text formatting tools? Force algorithmically sorted content on you?
ETA, there has been and will continue to be plenty of constructive criticism, however, you're going to have to deal with people getting frustrated when that constructive criticism is ignored or when they attempt to siphon it off into a google sheet somewhere to be ignored forever (as they evidently have), the dude who writes the "weekly updates" here can be personally told about a bug multiple times and still say "wow i've never seen that before, can you give me some more information so I can get it to the right team?" for the third time before not actually ever "getting it to the right team."
They can't even attempt to push an update out to the new UI without breaking it so badly that they actually have to use their status page, something they actively avoid doing so that it's easier to manipulate their uptime SLA, because they want investors to be more interested in the platform. It's an objective downgrade, every single other UI version is a better, more feature complete version of reddit and that's why they had to disable the most popular one instead of allowing people to naturally move to the new one. If it was actually better, they wouldn't have to do that.
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u/jgoja Expert Helper Aug 29 '24 edited Aug 29 '24
âEnshitificationâ though is just opinion. Most of the comments in here are of the âI donât like itâ variety from users who have not actually put time into using it. When you get used to it, it is not as bad as it is made out to be. The T in comments is on my list of annoyances. There are legitimate issues that need to be addressed. I have a list I have provided to Reddit multiple times in multiple places of 6 major issues and 10-15 annoyances over the last 6 months ago and was told they would be given to the proper teams. Which does not mean anything.
I have been fighting this fight for almost a year now and you better believe I am frustrated as well. Every chance I get I try to bring some of the legitimate issues up with nothing to show for it. Even here in both the weekly recap and in the pinned post announcing the shutdown of new.reddit. It does frustrate me when I get those kinds of replies to my weekly recap comment. Also when new UI issues I brought up are ignored in their reply. But, they have to be one of the best admins I have seen because they actually interact with us users and there are times we have been able to get things fixed. They respond to some negative comments as well unlike most admin interaction which is just on the overly positive comments. This is their job though and have rules they need to follow.
I also agree it is frustrating when they push out updates that were not properly tested and break other things. I am here helping over 40 hours a week and see the issues and get some of the hate because of my flair. I would like to think that may be changing though. They had said they were pushing out an app update last week. Well we still donât have it and I would like to think they are getting it right before pushing it out. I also concur that they manipulate down time on the status page. No disagreement there.
Saying that the other 2 are better is a matter of opinion. They all have things I like and donât like, but because of the way I use Reddit, the newest UI is better than the previous for one thing. It preserves formatting when pasting. That saves me a ton of time cumulatively. If they would fix the issue with r/ links disappearing when pasted unless clicked on, it would be even better.
If they didnât shut down the previous some would never move to the new one. For a user new.reddit is definitively better than old Reddit, but look at how many people use it to this day
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u/Old_Bug4395 Helper Aug 29 '24
It's not though, it's a quantifiable thing. It sounds silly, sure, but it's a term coined to refer to specific behavior, behavior reddit is engaging in. Your whole argument is that you like the new UI better in some cases, this is subjective. What's objective is that features are missing from the new UI. They've fixed some of the dumbest things, like pictures opening in a new tab and the general lack of any polishing when it comes to displaying media, but glaring issues like the quote feature missing and text formatting tools being obfuscated are deliberate design choices. If I'm being charitable, I would say they're doing this to make it easier to maintain a mobile app and a web app on a tight budget, however even then there's no actual material benefit to forcing users onto the new UI other than analytics to prove that all of this work wasn't completely useless and wasted, which since I'm not actually being charitable, I would say is probably the case.
Saying that the other 2 are better is a matter of opinion
It's not. There are less clicks required for me to write this same comment on old reddit than there would be on the new design. I have to move my hand from my keyboard to my mouse more often, which is worse user experience, which means the design is objectively worse. Again, this is a forum. This isn't tiktok or instagram or twitter, it's a forum meant for long form content and discussions.
If they didnât shut down the previous some would never move to the new one. For a user new.reddit is definitively better than old Reddit, but look at how many people use it to this day
Of course. Some people would still be using Windows XP today if they could, but that group of users is very small compared to the rest of the people who use the platform and the new users of the platform. If the new UI was actually good, willing users would switch to it over time and new users wouldn't ever even consider going to an older version of the platform. There's virtually no maintenance cost here, it can almost entirely be automated.
This is my job, by the way. I spend my time maintaining infrastructure and automating menial tasks that nobody wants to do so that users can have a good experience when they use the product I develop. There are standardized processes for all of the missteps reddit consistently takes at this point. The only excuse for this from reddit is poor communication (or rather, poor reception, the illusion of communication is strong here) and poor organization internally. Nobody would have an issue with a new UI if it was a natural continuation of the old one with the same features and functionality, without the giant performance hit that this tab takes in my browser when I'm using the new UI.
It doesn't matter how you slice it, this initiative is horribly executed and that's why people are upset with it. It would be one thing if they actually tried to work with the users of the platform to develop an attractive, functional UI that people want to use, but they won't. Instead we get forced into an objectively worse experience because internally, reddit needs to prove that this entire initiative wasn't a horrible investment.
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u/GhostColorMagic Aug 29 '24
People are being constructive in their criticism; however, the people in charge have decided to ignore user feedback. This new UI is a downgrade in every way without a single positive. Stop being a meat rider.
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u/Unusual_Fork Aug 29 '24
I truly hate it.
It's exhausting for my eyes and I don't want to see the recently visited communities on the forced column. And even though I opted out (on old reddit) on the recent posts I've clicked on, it still shows them.
I tried to give it a chance when they first introduced it a while back and swiftly changed back to new reddit.