Yeah, I find so many bugs in reddit that it's surprising to me that a more streamlined replacement hasn't arisen.
But I get shouted down if I say my experience with Elon's buggy Twitter 2.0 is about on par with how my reddit experience has been for years and yet reddit is still massively popular. Shrug.
I guess it's hard to believe that sometimes market conditions can overcome bad engineering and then you add all the politics around Twitter's layoffs and people get raw.
> But I get shouted down if I say my experience with Elon's buggy Twitter 2.0
What visible changes have been done since Elon took over Twitter + are buggy changes? I hardly notice anything different to be honest. There is a view counter and more people have the blue checkmark, otherwise things mostly seems to be the same. The ads panel (for publishing ads) is as broken as it has always been, so seems it has neither improved nor declined.
Well here's what the people who said reddit is great and Twitter sucks yelled at me:
- They went down in Australia for a day.
- The "For You" tab keeps selecting itself.
- The Twitter feed keeps injecting randos that aren't followed.
- Nothing is there when you click on a notification sometimes. There are phantom likes and retweets.
- For a while people were unable to change their display name or 2FA would break.
- The view counter doesn't match the analytics view counter.
- Latencies are high
Apparently nobody can agree if a website is bad. Depending on whatever you're arguing, one is great and the other is terrible.
As for reddit, I've been getting phantom notifications, incorrect comment counts on posts, and a 10-15 minute block of "Reddit is down" pages on a monthly basis for years. So as far as I'm concerned, they're both pretty bad.
Once Old.Reddit and third party apps like Apollo go away, I'm done with Reddit. I'm already interested in competitors if anything crops up that might be a suitable replacement.
Unfortunately they're already funneling rich media into their own broken solutions, so things like streaming video is unreliable if people upload it to Reddit directly.
For me, the worst thing is how few comments show up by default in the comments sections. As a moderator of a large subreddit, the new UI is unusable because I can't quickly glance over a massive thread, I'd have to click through to a hundred sub-pages. If they ever remove old.reddit.com, I don't know what I'd do. It's a shame, because the redesign has some actually useful tools that I'd like to be using, but the basic experience is so poor. Every other aspect of the redesign could be fixed in the client with CSS rules, and the slowness and bloat could at least be tolerated.
It's madness. Even old.reddit.com is littered with "load more comments" links that you have to keep clicking through to read. A comments section with 2000 comments should be easy to serve in a single static page. It's just text!
1. At a certain point, the dark patterns are just not worth rewarding.
2. Teddit rewrites all Reddit URLs to the Teddit host. Reading Reddit via old you'll still be redirected to the standard "new" site if "www.reddit.com" is hardcoded into a link, and it very, very, very frequently is.
3. Teddit's persistence works even if you're not logged in (which is to say: always, as you can't log in via a Teddit instance). Reddit's "just set your profile preference to "old" requires logging in and can lure you into visiting or posting "www.reddit.com" links rather than "old.reddit.com" links.
Cumulative dark patterns on Reddit spurred me to all but entirely abandon the site years ago. I no longer post updates to my own (several) subreddits, nor actively moderate (again several), though with some regrets on that last (a dark pattern itself).
I'll occasionally visit to research something, or post for support for tools which principally use Reddit for support (DuckDuckGo, Firefox, and Onyx, presently). That's ... down to a few times a year.
