
Reddit's redesign increases power usage of user's devices - lucb1e
https://www.reddit.com/r/redesign/comments/8jzddx/reddits_redesign_increases_power_usage_of_our/
======
frfl
Anyone from reddit's dev team reading this? Or youtube's dev team, because my
question applies to both.

The previous design was great. The new version of both sites is slow, sluggish
and provides me with no benefit. Why was the change implemented? The previous
design wasn't broken!

How's the user feedback? A/B testing really indicated to you this was a good
choice?!

If you have any insight -- I'm sure this was a decision made much higher up
than dev -- please do share.

~~~
TaylorAlexander
I have definitely noticed that YouTube is one of the few sites that causes my
desktop to struggle when loading the page. Gmail is oddly heavy in this regard
too. I worry that google might not be paying enough attention to load times or
resource utilization.

~~~
tgb
So this is veering off-topic: I remember but cannot for the life of me find a
blog post from Google about either the number of bytes in their front page or
the number of words on the front page. Apparently there was some guy who would
email them just a number "23" or whatever it was that gave the number of
bytes/words on google.com every time they updated it. After being puzzled by
these emails for a while they figured out what he was hinting at when he sent
one that was like "58, getting a bit heavy aren't we?". And that was a lesson
about keeping front pages simple - something that was and largely still is
unique about Google.

Ironic.

But why can't I find this blog post? I just spent much longer than I ought to
have searching for it and can't find a trace of it. You have to wade through a
lot of SEO stuff that comes up with the search results, but restricting to
older content helps (I think this happened at latest 2010 probably several
years before that). The old google blog I think was google.blogspot.com or
googleblog.blogspot.com but you need to search it on the wayback machine and I
can't see a way to do that except by hand.

~~~
just_observing
Here you go :)

[https://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/what-comes-next-
in...](https://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/what-comes-next-in-this-
series-13-33-53.html)

~~~
tgb
Thanks but how did you find this? I guess the fact that it was co.uk meant my
site-restricted searches failed.

------
yongjik
My favorite comment from TFA:

> None of your math makes sense. All your measurements have only the
> consumption at one exact instant, not over time, the total energy used is
> the integral of the energy flow over time. You'd need to measure the
> consumption over time, or total discharge of the battery, to actually have
> the energy used to load a page (in J, not W, you can't measure the energy
> required to load a page in W).

> You just multiplied a banana times Pi. And showed the results in meters of
> strawberries.

~~~
lucb1e
Everyone's dodging the point of the post (versus the exact numbers and
terminology). As I said on reddit as well:

> The issue is that the redesign uses more power across millions of devices,
> and that has an impact.

> I might have gotten the exact number wrong, but the exact number doesn't
> matter that much. It's about it being a significant difference.

~~~
jimrandomh
Simply put, you don't have the expertise required to measure this. It's not
just that you didn't get the exact number, it's that you haven't got a usable
measurement _at all_. For all we know from your tests, the new site uses less
power than the old one.

------
nilkn
Between...

* feeling completely overrun with sensationalized politics;

* the new design feeling sluggish and painful even on my maxed out late-2016 MBP;

* the general community feeling more hostile and downvote-heavy than ever before;

* and the content being increasingly image-, video-, and meme-focused...

reddit has really lost a lot of its magic and appeal to me. I do still use it,
but I find it almost intolerable if I'm not logged in with my very carefully
curated set of subreddit subscriptions.

I don't really know what the solution is. I don't think reddit is dying, but I
do think it's becoming something different, and there increasingly feels like
there's space for something more like the old reddit to coexist. HN is a
considerably higher quality site IMHO, but also considerably more focused and
with much stronger moderation.

~~~
darkstar999
Most of your criticisms are solved by unsubscribing from those bad subreddits
like politics, funny, and all the picture/meme ones.

~~~
nilkn
I don't disagree -- I wrote as much in my own post. The site is okay once I've
unsubscribed from virtually everything it throws at you by default and instead
subscribed to a heavily curated selection of subreddits that I found over the
years.

Even then, though, subreddits that used to be great have often degraded
significantly -- in many cases simply by getting too big. Perhaps that's the
primary difficulty. Even some "niche" subreddits often now have 100k+ users.
The site is just so much bigger and more active than it was when I first
started using it that it's very difficult to capture what it used to feel
like, even with extensive subreddit curation and filtering.

------
rland
I do not understand what extra functionality is gained by making the site so
much slower. I go on Reddit primarily for text content. Threaded comments and
HTML <a> tags.

WHY does it NEED to be so SLOW?

For this degree of sluggishness, it feels like you could build a site that
fulfills all of reddit's functionality—and have a crypto miner running in the
background.

~~~
kowdermeister
Do you REALLY think they engineered it intentionally slow?

~~~
stephengillie
To switch from black/white hat hacker to tinfoil hat... who would make money
from Reddit's site being slower and using more electricity?

------
cool_shit
I deleted my Reddit account which kept the old design on it. Now when I
occasionally browse Reddit as a non-user, it looks like an awful
implementation of material design with tons of wasted space. For example, I
see about 1.5 cards per page on my 13" laptop. Who designed this? It is horrid
and nearly unusable. Not that I'll be using Reddit that much anymore, but it's
like they deprecated the desktop version for mobile-everywhere. There's a
reason the form factors are different!

~~~
robbomacrae
We left up the old design on old.reddit.com if you really want it :p

~~~
bornonline1
Stfu , how may weeks before you remove it...

------
bitL
Do something for the environment:

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-
re...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-redirect/)

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-
redirec...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-
redirect/dneaehbmnbhcippjikoajpoabadpodje)

------
jumpman500
What are the best Reddit clones these days? I've seen voat but heard it's
overrun by the alt right. Hubski seemed interesting but basically seems dead
now. Anything else out there? Reddit is really losing its appeal to me with
their desktop/mobile site changes. That and I feel the contents been getting
less interesting. Like it's just memes or sensational politics everywhere.
Maybe I'm just getting old.

~~~
md224
The key is subscribing to subreddits that match your interests. /r/all is like
the sun: it can brighten your day, but if you stare at it you might just go
blind.

Also, if you find The Next Reddit, let me know so I can build a new AskOuija
there. :P

~~~
dingaling
For me, just casually dropping in to subreddits from a web search, I recoil at
the suggestion of signing-up and slogging through curating and filtering until
I achieve Reddit Nirvana. Life is too short.

Particularly when other topic-focused communities already exist i.e. what
problem are subreddits solving?

And to invert that to the whole set, what problem is Reddit solving? I think
they've asked themselves that and the response is this new UX which has the
non-answer 'don't know, but let's keep eyeballs on our site and away from
Facebook'.

~~~
md224
> Particularly when other topic-focused communities already exist i.e. what
> problem are subreddits solving?

Subreddits don’t necessarily solve a problem... they’re just a well-made
framework for content sharing and conversation, combining ideas from previous
message board systems to provide a good user experience. But it’s the way
Reddit combines them that makes them useful, which means I can’t answer this
question without answering the following one:

> And to invert that to the whole set, what problem is Reddit solving?

Maybe I’m misunderstanding you, but the answer seems blatantly obvious to me:
it allows you to have all of your communities on a single platform. It creates
a kind of meta-community... a user you interact with in one subreddit may show
up later in another. Why would you create multiple independent accounts at
multiple message boards across the web when you can have one account and one
simple feed of relevant posts from all of your communities?

> I recoil at the suggestion of signing-up and slogging through curating and
> filtering until I achieve Reddit Nirvana. Life is too short.

I’m honestly perplexed as to why you think setting up a Reddit account is this
gargantuan task. You find a few communities based on your interests and you
subscribe to them. That’s it. And you don’t have to do it all at once. You can
join as many or as few subreddits as you like, whenever you feel like it.

I must be missing something here. What topic-focused communities do you
prefer? Are you talking about Facebook Groups?

------
kethinov
This is just a symptom of the webdev world's over-reliance on JavaScript to
draw interfaces nowadays. The web stack has HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for
reason. Quit doing everything in the third layer. Make your stuff with
progressive enhancement. Knock off the do-it-all-in-JS stuff and your web apps
will perform better.

------
SteveNuts
Their redesign looks like something you would have seen in the early 2000s.
It's (barely) one step above a Geocities site.

------
smaili
Given the old site was built off of older libraries/frameworks and the newer
site is presumably built using more modern ones, wouldn't this be an indicator
of latest tools being heavier and/or more bloated?

~~~
nostrademons
The old site also did mostly server-side rendering while the new site is
largely client-side rendering of structured data.

One of those isn't necessarily heavier-weight than the other, but it does
shift the energy usage from the company's data-center to the user's computer
or mobile device. Server-side rendering also opens up more opportunities for
cross-user caching, which AIUI Reddit used extensively.

~~~
majos
Is shifting costs from servers to clients such a massive savings that it could
outweigh annoyed users? I genuinely have no feel for the relevant amounts
here.

~~~
nostrademons
I would bet that both directions were a minor consideration in their plans. A
bigger concern is probably development time (much easier to find React
developers than Pylons or whatever Reddit used to use now) and the ability to
integrate new features like r/thebutton or r/place.

------
blutfink
Headline is wrong. 68GJ per month, not GW, which is roughly 26kW.

~~~
lucb1e
Yes. I was not sure how familiar people are with joules, so as I said in the
post:

> (In the headline I used GW because people are more familiar with that, and
> it's kind of the same.)

Saying "kind of the same" won't please engineers who know what they're talking
about and are used to correct units, but for the general public who won't read
beyond the headline and (if I'm lucky) the conclusion, I think it's close
enough. I am just hoping to get people's attention to the fact that an
inefficiently coded redesign of the 6th largest website on the planet has
impact.

~~~
ggg9990
Rather than just being flat out wrong, why not use gigawatt-hours which is a
well known unit.

~~~
lucb1e
Because I find Wh (or kWh or MWh or...) a very weird unit. The Watt is already
a "per second" unit, and the appended hour makes it have a double time
component in the definition. While a Wh has a simple joule value (3600 if I'm
not mistaken) and so it's directly convertible, I still find it more difficult
to wrap my mind around. Joules seem like a better unit, but they're not known
to people... but maybe you're right and I should have picked that.

~~~
ggg9990
All over the world, the watt-hour is the unit of electrical power consumption
among the general public.

~~~
lucb1e
I suppose you're right at that: by trying to dig deeper to understand it, I
confused myself and stopped using what is the generally accepted standard... I
guess I should indeed have used kWh.

~~~
ggg9990
Hey I don’t mean to pile on you. This is cool work that you did that
highlights an important issue.

------
Scoundreller
Reddit's Digg moment!

~~~
meesterdude
I was hesitant to think/say this, because it is a different beast.... but the
more i read about what other people think, as well as my own usage of it - it
might be. Although to be fair, reddit has had it's fair share of past dramas
too.

I think it's time we move beyond reddit and build something bigger and better.
It was nice while it lasted.

~~~
softrock
Reddit getting bigger is the whole reason started going bad.

~~~
wil421
I created my HN accout 7 years ago after lurking for a couple years. People
have been saying the same thing about HN the whole time I’ve been around.

~~~
atwebb
It's a bit different though with the moderation and lack of revenue focus.

~~~
wil421
Well I think the self moderation the HN crowd does can’t be scaled. Reddit
also didn’t moderate enough at fist. I also don’t like being at the mercy of
bad subreddit mods.

------
jacobparker
Shameless plug:

Here's a minimal UI for browsing r/politics/rising specifically:

* [https://www.f6oclock.com](https://www.f6oclock.com)

* [https://www.f6oclock.com/#ninja](https://www.f6oclock.com/#ninja) if you want something more discrete

It updates live and throttles way back when the page doesn't have focus.) The
default links go through [https://outline.com](https://outline.com) which is a
reader-mode like service (sadly it requires JS - I've got a prototype of a
non-JS/server-side rendered version here:
[https://www.f6oclock.com/readability-
demo/test.out.html](https://www.f6oclock.com/readability-demo/test.out.html) )

(viewing the stories from r/politics is a guilty pleasure of mine that I'm a
little bit ashamed of.)

\---

The reddit feed-reading APIs are very easy to use. Just add .json in front of
a URL and make sure to send a User-Agent. You can whip up bespoke UIs to suit
your particular needs--e.g. I have some things that I send through IRC.

~~~
Whitestrake
Hey, that seems pretty cool. What'd you build it with? Any chance there's a
repo I could check out? I'd love to try replicate something similar.

Edit: Nevermind, found it - seems like I wasn't looking very hard!
[https://github.com/j3parker/f6oclock](https://github.com/j3parker/f6oclock)

------
sverige
I've been using the old format, only partly because of this. Mostly I just
prefer the old look -- simpler, cleaner, easier.

~~~
bnolsen
Also fewer clicks and no drags required for me in the old interface. They
pretty much hid all the useful navigation stuff.

------
egfx
Oh wonderful. Domain search. Missing.
[https://www.reddit.com/domain/news.ycombinator.com/](https://www.reddit.com/domain/news.ycombinator.com/)

------
CuntyMcCuntface
It's decreased the power usage of mine, because now I won't spend time on
reddit anymore.

------
trelliscoded
No it doesn’t, people don’t leave their devices refreshing reddit 24/7\. Also,
watts aren’t joules.

~~~
lucb1e
> people don’t leave their devices refreshing reddit 24/7

But if the new website takes more power, and we know that there are roughly X
million pageloads a month, then we know it will use a lot more, right?

> watts aren’t joules

The very definition of a Watt is one joule per second. Not the same,
definitely, but it's close and in specific cases 1:1 convertible.

------
vit05
For me it's not a matter of taste or choice, I just could not use the new
model. It's slow and it looked like my laptop had turned into a toaster. The
same goes for facebook. And that's why I use it in the mobile version, even
when on the laptop.

------
trumped
I use the Redirector Firefox addon to make sure that I always visit
[https://ns.reddit.com](https://ns.reddit.com) because I hate the new design.

------
kup0
The new design fundamentally feels worse to use. It feels slower for sure. I
don't mind the cleaner aesthetics, but the animations, layout, and general
feel of using the site makes me feel like I'm one one of those blogs that has
the "dickbars" and other UI elements that feel more annoying than useful. The
mobile site is frustrating as well (but using apps gets around this easily).

I've gone back to using the old.reddit.com for now, but who knows how long
that will remain

------
alistproducer2
After a bunch of back tracking on his much I hate site redesigns I try to give
them a chance but this one really takes away from the experience of using
reddit.

------
chomp
The redesign is a single page app, so refreshing it is not a normal workload.
I can understand a large amount of pageviews on the old site since each person
has to constantly reload everything, but in the redesign a user should only
have to load everything just once (or a couple times depending on how many
tabs they want to open). Or did they address this and I just missed it?

------
ddingus
I hate it.

And I also hate to say that a little bit of spit and polish on old-school
Reddit, probably would have done a lot more good, been a lot more lean, and
more useful.

I would trade all this crap for a little bit better markup language for a few
more options in posts and comments.

------
learnstats2
Yep, this page set my fan running.

------
hokkos
You are just browsing the new reddit wrong, stop spawning new tabs from the
front page, just click on a thread, it is so mush faster than old reddit
because it only load the content, not the whole markup.

------
sengork
It is time for green web design and green application design (eg. lite
versions of applications which are otherwise bloated like Skype with large
emoticon animations).

------
rajacombinator
Great example of why you should not keep designers on staff.

~~~
dingle_thunk
And here are a hundred great examples of why you should:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMHUKij1yUE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMHUKij1yUE)

------
gremlinsinc
I never use Reddit outside of Relay ...the app just works perfectly and has
everything I need and not all the bloat/ugliness.

------
hyperpallium
protip: [https://i.reddit.com](https://i.reddit.com)

------
microwavecamera
Well I could have told you reddit was a waste of energy.

~~~
drharby
Bazinga

------
myf01d
Reddit new design is amazing, SPA websites are clearly the future, you guys
will complain about anything more than just 100% static html pages that can
run on lynx

~~~
robbomacrae
Thank you!!

