Hey - criticism will be harsh because your decisions are polarizing. Something to remember is that things that are easy to do happen more frequently. So your decision to promote subreddit listings as the "first clas citizen" of your app is detrimental to peoples primary motivation.
Consider your users. When they go to reddit what do they want to do? Look at content mostly it seems. Let them do that first, and perhaps your subreddit discovery mode could slot into that.
In all seriousness, you ruined the best thing Reddit had going for it.
The vast majority of the time I'm using Reddit I just want to be entertained. With what? I don't know, with all the stuff I like and have subscribed to. I want to go to Reddit.com and see a bunch of stuff I like without having to think. That's 99% of the use case.
Way to take a crack at it and try to see things differently, but the fact that I have to make a decision of what I want to see first completely kills the experience for me.
I'll tell you why I love it - it just feels intuitive. I don't even think about where I want to click, it is almost as if the section appears before me before my brain even realizes it. All the fluff / stuff I don't click on or use regularly is hidden, and easily acceptable. A little narrow on my super widescreen desktop monitor but other than that 9/10
1. doesnt work without javascript
2. lots of space wasted
3. pulling others content vs linking to other websites... reddit is about the comments, not about consuming content on the same page.
What currently happens on reddit: the user (1) opens reddit (2) reads a page of titles without minimal scrolling, and (3) opens links that interest them. What happens with your design: the user (1) opens reddit and has to click through a directory, (2) has to scroll aggressively to go through content, and (3) is forced to look at everything. I'm not sure this is an improvement.
Also, two of the best things about reddit are its content density and assumed intelligence of the user. Where sites like Facebook spend hours picking the right icon at the right size for the laziest of users, reddit shows the relevant links and info about each post as a small row of text. These seem like (good) intentional design choices to me.
I get it's fun to design these "alternate interfaces" and I'll state emphatically that there's nothing wrong at all with doing so. reddit just isn't broken in any ways this fixes.
First off, the default landing page should not include NSFW, and when I changed to the SFW tab, because having "cumsluts" in red lettering on my screen isn't considered part of my job, I got NSFW subs in the SFW list, for example /r/WTF.
And everything everyone else said. I hope this is a joke as the name suggests. Reddit actually has good UX, especially with RES added, as it provided content first and is easy to read.
ONe of the biggest mistakes imo is to show the number of subs to a subreddit, this should be hidden within a filter, as most subbed subreddits are not worth much, whereas smaller subs, like linux4noobs, are worth a lot. This design maintains the flotsam and jetsam at the top while keeping hidden the coral reef below, which is the one problem reddit actually needs to fix.
No. Stop thinking about fancy modern UX. Forget it. Criaglist is still profitable with a horrible minimalist layout. Reddit is a million times better... so stick with the old version man.
Many "profitable" websites have the newsfeed style and works wonders for them. I believe it's a valid attempt to make reddit's UI a little better, obviously not everybody will like but it definitely has a public.
I think most people in the comments don't realize that this seems to be a joke hinting at the deep repulsion of 9gag on reddit (as it's accused of stealing reddit's content). The page looks like 9gag but with the content of reddit --> 9reddit.
Therefore I guess design choices were not made on best usability or with the goal of improving the current reddit layout.
That said I probably won't use it in the future, but it's nicely done :)
I assume you are visiting https://www.reddit.com/r/funny then add 9 to this link, you will see new things happen. This is the reason why I created 9reddit.
The reason why this doesn't work is because the front page of reddit chooses based on the community what the most interesting posts are at that moment in time.
There is nothing like this here. I have to click on a subreddit, of which I know nothing about, and then the content may or may not be relevant or entertaining.
another note (not criticism) - its sad to say, but when you get a company like reddit that is YC backed and hard pressed to find new streams of revenue, UX really isn't the front runner when it comes to new design changes.
take 9reddit.com for instance, one thing I just noticed was the lack of "share" button on the front page (under each post.) while this may seem like a minor setting to most, and probably an under-used feature it probably accounts for a very large percentage of traffic over the course of any given day.
so while this newer version may be super intuitive (I think so anyway) easy to use and most of all CLEAN, getting Reddit to actually adopt it is a huge hurdle.
side question: anyone have any good examples of apps or web apps such as this that have taken off to the point where it became more popular than the parent app?
Consider your users. When they go to reddit what do they want to do? Look at content mostly it seems. Let them do that first, and perhaps your subreddit discovery mode could slot into that.
Good luck and please keep building things. :)