The Evolution of Reddit’s Architecture (2017)
The Reddit redesign must be the worst redesign in the history of redesigns.<p>It's super slow to load.<p>It's slow to use (Scroll is sluggish. It loads giant images and puts huge autoplaying videos in your face. Comment function now starts an ugly html wysiwyg editor).<p>It misses features (outgoing links in the sidebars are gone).<p>It takes away screen estate by having a fixed element on top of the screen that stays there when you scroll down.<p>It's buggy (often weird overlaps between elements happen when you resize the screen).<p>It's confusing. When I click on a post I get a view that shows the post in an overlay of the page I was looking at. When I reload the page I suddenly get a completely different view with only the post.<p>It's almost unusable on my iPad (where I have to beg for the desktop version every time I open it because the mobile version is even worse).<p>It seems like they are still A/B testing it. Because sometimes I get the redesign and sometimes the original design.<p>Funny enough, I <i>can</i> see how the redesign might increase user engagement. The endless scroll with content right in your face <i>is</i> kind of addicting. It pulls you in a state of "I hate this. And I hate myself for using it. But I can't stop. I will just scroll down one post further.". So the experience is <i>worse</i> but the KPIs might be better. I bet this is how booking.com became the hell that it is.<p>I would <i>love</i> to see how the numbers of those tests look like.