
Show HN: Deck for Reddit – A Reddit client optimized for desktop - snwfog
https://rdddeck.com
======
devwastaken
Its amazing how far backwards reddit went. In browser on desktop it's
incredibly slow, even just clicking the comment box to write takes a few
seconds and lags out for no reason. No doubt they're employing an uber amount
of user tracking and all manner of inefficient code.

~~~
Lazare
It's really inexplicable. Old Reddit was fine, not great, just fine. The new
Reddit UI is _hideously_ bad. It was terrible when it launched, it was
terrible months later, and it's still terrible now.

I'm honestly at a loss. Is this some galaxy brain "let's make the web
experience terrible to force people to native apps" strategy?

~~~
fossuser
I think Reddit could throw away all of the new stuff and be better off.

Everything they’ve done after maybe 2010 could just be thrown away.

An enormous waste of programmer effort and time for something that is a lot
worse than what they started with.

~~~
rndgermandude
The developers and designers had to justify getting paid, and they do that by
producing features and a new "user experience". And if it's slow and rough,
even better, job security for the foreseeable future until you fix the stuff.

Throw in the second-system effect they fell for in my humble opinion, and you
got your explanation of what's going on.

Next up: Rinse and repeat.

~~~
lopis
I mean, we're talking about a website frontend that was what, 10 years old? At
this point all frontend code was probably legacy and noone in the company knew
how to maintain it properly, so they started over.

~~~
rndgermandude
They could have spent the time they used to produce the current mess to learn
about the old code and improve on it, or document it and then use it as a
starting point for their new stuff and then improve on it.

10 years isn't necessarily bad either. Just look at HN. Functional with
minimum of JS, 2.0kB transferred to load this reply page, tho it will not win
any fancy design awards anytime soon. But all in all, great user experience.
If you wanted to inline the reply form into the comments pages, that can be
done easily in under 1KB of unminified js.

Loading the reddit frontpage (not signed in, adblocker): 21.8MB transferred
(11.7 without media and fonts), 501 requests (183), 20+ seconds to load, 11667
ms of scripting. What the actual fuck.

old.reddit.com: 2.7MB transferred (2.1MB), 100 requests (24), <2seconds to
load, <300ms of scripting.

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y2bd
What was your intent behind adopting the "Tweetdeck" style of UI for this
presentation? Tweetdeck's intent is supposedly that you'd need to be
monitoring multiple feeds efficiently (e.g. you are a social media manager
with multiple accounts, or you need live-updating search queries to react to).

For Reddit though, most of the time subreddits aren't really meant to be
consumed "live", or many-posts-at-once, which means that for me, this
ultimately just ends up shrinking my Reddit browsing experience into a thin
column surrounded by content I don't care about at the current moment, which
goes against the "efficiency" that I imagine this design is intended for.

For folks who like this style of UI, what do you get out of it?

~~~
birksherty
I like it because I can see multiple feeds in a single page without clicking
and loading more pages.

I really hate mobile first whitespace trend of modern designs (not talking
about reddit here).

~~~
gimmemahlulz
You can do that with multireddits IE:
[https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit+funny+pics/](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit+funny+pics/)

~~~
chomp
They're intermingled though. I get whiplash browsing my feed because one post
will be about 3d printers, and the next one will be about my local baseball
team, and then the next will be a political cartoon, etc.

This project is an interesting take because I can browse all of them
simultaneously without having to context switch so much.

------
jjcm
I'm using a very similar design[1] for a reddit-esque clone I'm working on,
but I'm actually about to move away from it. The column approach makes sense
at first - it seems like a great way to view multiple streams of content. The
reality though seems to be that it creates more UX problems than it solves.
One example is that when you have multiple frames inside a UI it destroys the
page navigation. Back buttons may not do what you expect them to - does it go
back to the previous view for the column you last interacted with, or does it
go back to the previous url? It's very easy to simply open up another browser
tab or tile a window, which gives you most of the benefits of a column UI
without any of the downsides.

[1] [http://files.jjcm.org/columns.mp4](http://files.jjcm.org/columns.mp4)

------
lecarore
Great concept, but many buttons don't have any label or tooltip, please add at
least one of the two. The "hot" button is very cryptic to me. On my computer,
i don't have an easy way to scroll left and right, so the layout is
suboptimal. Clicking on the link once to show the comments and a second time
to follow the link is not ideal. It should at least be made clear what will
happen when you click. Maybe make the title black when it's just a comment
toggle, and then blue when it will link to the article

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varbhat
I literally need reddit client which looks/modelled after HN. I like that HN
has lightweight content focussed website(frontend).

[https://i.reddit.com](https://i.reddit.com) is one good frontend.

~~~
shultays
That looks horrible on desktop. Images on far right while the title on far
left.

~~~
varbhat
Well, i.reddit.com is for mobiles.

For desktops, use [https://old.reddit.com](https://old.reddit.com)

~~~
millzlane
There are a couple of extensions that still force this url for everything. I
used this one [https://github.com/tom-james-watson/old-reddit-
redirect](https://github.com/tom-james-watson/old-reddit-redirect)

------
rayrag
In Firefox middle click on title doesn't work (it should open link in new
tab).

~~~
kevincox
Yeah, annoyingly on the web you need to be very careful what click events you
prevent. The best practice is to only prevent clicks with no modifiers and
check that the mouse button was the one that you intend. (Also avoid handling
anything but a left click anyways). Of course the "default" is to block all
clicks so it is inevitable that this happens :(

------
runawaybottle
It’s more accessible than Reddit is on mobile. Awesome job.

Side note: Whoever at Reddit came up with the idea to badger users on every
other click to ‘open the Reddit app’ needs to be dealt with.

------
beshrkayali
Interesting! But doesn't work on Firefox if you have Enhanced Tracking
Protection enabled. Maybe this would work better as an extension? Similar to
RES.

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qwerty456127
Feels clickbaity. The title made me expect there is a native desktop app built
on a classic desktop widget toolkit. Nevertheless, I still like this one
anyway - good job!

------
9935c101ab17a66
Couple of things:

\- It wasn't immediately obvious to me that modifying the UI on rddeck.com (by
leaving subreddits) would actually modify my subscriptions on my account.
There's a place for managing your subs in something like this, but it should
be a lot more clear, and I think the main focus should be on the user
customizing the UI without modifying their account

\- The oblong pill loading bars at the top of each column look exactly like
drag handles, and I was super confused why I couldn't rearrange the columns by
dragging them. I think that making them drag handles would be useful, and
reimplementing the loading bar as something else would be a good change.

\- Dragging to rearrange the subreddit order is painfully janky in both safari
and firefox for me on macOS. It's almost unusable.

\- The subreddit sort order dropdown / active sort order implementation is
strange. Simply having just the current sort order + a little chevron pointing
down in a button would be much more intuitive.

If this was open source, I'd definitely be willing to contribute. Cool start,
and a cool idea.

------
pedrogpimenta
I'm also building, or trying to, a client for Reddit made with React. The
thing I'm not achieving is properly rendering videos hosted on Reddit.

I've come to the conclusion that it's impossible. It's totally closed from
being played outside of reddit.com by using CORS. I can't in any way play the
DASH or HLS files from reddit.

I can load the mp4 fallback, but guess what? It's a video without audio. You
can get the audio, but it's not documented anywhere (found on stackoverflow, I
think). But of course, playing two files at once and syncing them is bound to
break, specially on slow networks.

For a website dedicated to sharing stuff from all around the web (reddit
didn't even have image hosting until a few years ago), it is really a dick
move that you can't share stuff from reddit elsewhere.

It's a shame. Reddit is merely a shell of what it used to be, sadly.

Edit: You seem to have the same problem with video :(

~~~
easton
You may want to try to track down u/iamthatis, he wrote the Apollo app for iOS
and has been able to get reddit video/galleries/etc working natively. He
regularly rants against the api not being well supported, maybe he can share
how he got around it?

~~~
kevincox
A native app and a web app are completely different. Native apps don't need to
respect CORS ([https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/HTTP/CORS](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/HTTP/CORS)).

------
zer0-c00l
Is this opensource? If not, have you considered opensourcing it? This is
pretty cool

------
fred_is_fred
As I scanned this headline (and before I got to the end), I assumed you had in
fact designed a tool that would help you design a real deck that was safe to
post on Reddit. Posting pictures of your homemade backyard deck build is one
of the more brave things you can do on the site as it will generally get
destroyed in the comments with everything you did wrong and how it's going to
sink into the swamp, after catching on fire.

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zestyping
Nice idea! The "About" link doesn't seem to go anywhere at the moment. What's
your privacy policy?

------
treebornfrog
This looks excellent, I will be trying it out later today.

Reddit's redesign was an absolute catastrophy. Its sluggish and the mobile
popups that direct users to app or Web is downright intrusive.

I use baconreader premium on mobile to keep my sanity.

Disclosure: I have no affiliation with baconreader app / team.

------
EricE
Does anyone remember .qwk and QWK readers from the BBS days?

I want that. Let me download the messages, sift through them how I want to and
reply.

Oops - I forgot. Communication isn't the goal of forums these days;
monetization is :(

------
francobatta
On Android I use Infinity for Reddit, it's really lightweight, especially when
compared to Reddit's own mess

------
atomi
This is great. Can you add /r/all?

~~~
NoPicklez
Definitely needs /r/all, then I can see the overview, then have my specific
subreddits next to it.

------
ecmascript
Looks really cool, too bad reddit itself sucks ass and I stopped using reddit
since the heavy censorship began.

------
RspecMAuthortah
Great work. Good way to not have to see distracting posts with bot driven
upvotes.

What technology stack did you use in the front end?

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WmyEE0UsWAwC2i
Shoutout to rtv (reddit terminal viewer)

~~~
rkangel
I didn't know about it, and now I do I discover that it's not maintained. Do
you have a recommended alternative?

~~~
Zhyl
I believe TUIR is the de facto spiritual successor.

[https://gitlab.com/ajak/tuir](https://gitlab.com/ajak/tuir)

~~~
imglorp
Emacs has one also.
[https://github.com/ahungry/md4rd](https://github.com/ahungry/md4rd)

------
emoprincejack
Yeesh, Reddit is not that good, huh.

------
shanselman
Cool. Would be nice if it was PWA and could be "installed."

~~~
rayrag
Try
[https://github.com/jiahaog/nativefier](https://github.com/jiahaog/nativefier),
it's not perfect but it works.

------
pletsch
Just a heads up, nothing happens when you click about

