
Ask HN: Why Reddit's New Website Is So Slow? - amirmasoudabdol
I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve ever seen such a bloated and sluggish website. I&#x27;m baffled by the fact that nothing gets any faster as time goes by. The website is being sluggish from early days of beta to this day! How is this ok for a site as popular as Reddit?<p>The app is not much better to be honest. Sure it works, but it doesn&#x27;t feel optimized at all either.
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blakesterz
This was asked about 8 months ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21738571](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21738571)

"The site lacks basic optimizations like virtual scrolling to keep the browser
from crashing after a few pages of content. There are also entire npm packages
being pulled in instead of any tree-shaking, or browser-specific polyfills."

~~~
mschuster91
> The site lacks basic optimizations like virtual scrolling to keep the
> browser from crashing after a few pages of content.

I fucking hate virtual scrolling. Twitter is particularly bad at this - it
breaks search. Twitter's built in search isn't the strongest, so I previously
just went with some generic hashtag I knew I used and then used ctrl+f to find
the Tweet from my archive. With the "redesign" this use case is totally shot.

For Reddit, I can go to "Saved posts", load as far as I reasonably need,
ctrl+f and find what I need.

~~~
est31
> I fucking hate virtual scrolling. Twitter is particularly bad at this - it
> breaks search.

Not just twitter! Discourse has this "feature" too, breaking search as well.
They "helpfully" provide overrides to the built-in search function, but it's
a) restricted and b) not what I want. It's not what I want because it does NOT
search inside the topic only but inside the whole website. It's restricted
because I can't search for some word/phrase _within_ a post. My browser also
allows me to highlight searched phrases, but that requires the browser search
to be triggered in the first place.

For a while you could circumvent it by pressing / which on Firefox triggers
search, but guess what, Discourse "helpfully" redirected it to their broken
search as well.

It's a disturbing trend that Discourse is being deployed so widely, replacing
older, better working, alternatives.

~~~
ubercow13
Yeah, it seems kind of crazy that a modern browser can't be trusted to just
render a few pages of text in boxes without such techniques

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tyingq
Maybe the weird incentives that web stats create?

If you have a property like Reddit, people will fight through a bad experience
to keep reading their stuff. So sluggish turns into "improved session
duration" and shitty nav turns into "more pageviews / engagement". Deceptive
content looking ads turn into "higher conversion".

------
bestouff
Well, launch your preferred browser, open the devtools (F12 in Firefox), make
a request on the homepage of Reddit and HN and look at the result in the
"debugger".

\- For HN you only have an optimized HTML page as well a short javascript
download.

\- For Reddit you have a truckload of files which then dynamically load
content piece by piece, and also loads ad content from elsewhere (c.amazon-
adsystem.com in my case).

Reddit's full content is bigger than HN's, but that isn't really a problem.
The real problem is that everything is loaded by tiny chuncks, which adds
loads of latencies for a total of a few seconds to load the page. If
everything was in one big file it would be (and feel) way faster.

------
awinder
Just to save a lot of time and cut through a lot of BS, apparently
organizational rot. If you’re on iOS give Apollo a try (I’m sure there’s an
equally good android app), it’s completely possible to build a fantastic
Reddit app with the existing apis (most of the downsides come into play from
user-hostile API administration). The team sizes and funding have to pale in
comparison, and on occasion I wonder why this isn’t seen internally at Reddit
as a mortal biz threat and dire signal to clean up the act. And then I
remember — organizational rot.

~~~
drivingmenuts
I have an app already. It’s called a browser. Requiring a specialized app just
to get performance that should already exist is the epitome of what’s wrong
with the mobile experience.

If Reddit had been envisioned from the begging as requiring a special app for
access, I would feel differently, but it’s a damn website that should be
cleanly and effectively accessed through a browser.

~~~
29083011397778
For your own sake, I hope you're using Firefox with the mobile reddit redirect
extension [1] - with that, your browser works very well for text sub-reddits.

[1] Should always take you to i.reddit.com

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pg_bot
It's been two years and the site redesign is still slow, buggy and ugly.
Continue this thread links don't work on comments. The inline video player UX
is inconsistent, and placement on the page is bizarre. I use old.reddit.com
but even that is broken. All self referential links redirect you the newer
broken version of reddit, so you find yourself switching between new and old
interfaces all the time.

I have so many questions for their engineering department.

~~~
agumonkey
I have mostly one: what did youtube do to you that you can't auto suggest
video titles anymore .ç.

------
seddin
I'm glad we still have access to
[https://old.reddit.com/](https://old.reddit.com/)

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
I wonder when they cut us off.

------
save_ferris
I was also really surprised at how much slower the new site performed when it
dropped 2 years ago or whenever it was. I'm sure using react caused some of
the performance hit, but I also suspect the flexibility of advertising on the
new platform also caused some of the issues.

Either way, I still access reddit via old.reddit.com and it's snappy as ever.

------
barbegal
If you want the blazing fast site which is optimized for mobile add ".compact"
onto any Reddit link such as
[https://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews/.compact](https://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews/.compact)

~~~
wcchandler
You can also use the subdomain i instead of adding .compact

[http://i.reddit.com/r/hackernews](http://i.reddit.com/r/hackernews)

------
TravHatesMe
Even the basics of the redesign have issues. To the point that I would
honestly quit reddit if they didn't have old.reddit.

Simple things like, not showing me the entire thread and forcing me to like
"View Entire Discussion" and then sometimes that will jump to a totally
different vertical position in the webpage resulting in confusion,
frustration, and anger. Unbelievable that things could be this horrid. How can
it be so difficult to consume content when the website's sole purpose is to
consume content?

Although I do wonder how new users view the new design. Is it as bad as I made
it out to be? I'd be curious to hear their thoughts. Am I simply an old,
raggety, grumpy user shaking their fist at the clouds?

------
1337biz
Just switch back to the old design in your setting.

But it is probably also time to look for something new - I am on that journey
too. I was once a super heavy Reddit user but the environment has become so
toxic and twitter. It followed a destiny similar to many conventional news
sites. Even generic subs like 'news' or 'today I have learned' are infeced by
personal agendas of a few monds.

Once a month I still check a few niche communities with mostly work based
discussions. For the rest it has become completely unusable. I think
astroturfing and political 'outreach-campaigns' have killed that site for me.

------
replyifuagree
The reddit team did a classic overrreach rewrite project with a due date. The
usual things skipped in projects like that are usability concerns and
performance fixes.

I'm sure there was a celebration when the project was "completed", however the
user feedback to date indicates the celebration was not warranted.

------
orangepanda
Same question asked 10 years ago:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/c821s/why_is_red...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/c821s/why_is_reddit_so_slow_seriously/)

~~~
golergka
It seems that 10 years ago the problem was on the server side, and now it's
sluggish javascript on the new redesigned client side.

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abhayhegde
The website is unbearably slow, mostly because of reasons already mentioned.
Also, the server frequently fails loading and after 3-4 seconds of waiting, it
says Reddit cannot be reached at the moment.

If you have Android, try Relay for Reddit.

------
HIP_HOP
simply switch to old reddit

~~~
portmanteaufu
For the uninitiated, you can do by changing the URL you're visiting from
reddit.com to old.reddit.com. If you have an account, you can also set this as
a preference.

~~~
jonatron
The preference automatically changes back, because they hate their users.

~~~
jonathanliu
Probably because new reddit is much more ad revenue-friendly. I've managed to
make the preference stick somehow.

