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[dupe] Ask HN: Why Reddit's New Website Is So Slow?
40 points by amirmasoudabdol on Aug 25, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 37 comments
I don't think I've ever seen such a bloated and sluggish website. I'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?

The app is not much better to be honest. Sure it works, but it doesn't feel optimized at all either.




This was asked about 8 months ago:

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."


> 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.


> 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.


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


> 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

Well that is because each item is a mess of a dozen or more of div's with a boatload of event listeners, shadow items, leaking handles and other inefficiencies in the JS part...


This seems to come up somewhat often as a frontend engineer system design interview question.


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".


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.


Apollo is amazing. It's the best experience I've ever had in an iOS app. The navigation is fluid and the app is very responsive. I never cease to be impressed by Apollo.


I use Reddit is Fun on android. Never had problems I am using paid version so not sure about quality of free version.


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.


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


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.


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.


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


I'm glad we still have access to https://old.reddit.com/


I wonder when they cut us off.


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.


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


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

http://i.reddit.com/r/hackernews


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?


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.


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.


Same question asked 10 years ago:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/c821s/why_is_red...


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.


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.


simply switch to old reddit


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.


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


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


They don't hate their users, but they love their customers. Their users are not their customers.


> because they hate their users

I see stuff like this a lot and it bugs me.

Reddit doesn't hate their users, there's simply a financial incentive to convert them over to the new site, either because it's easier to serve ads, or they need to justify to management that millions of dollars of work was worth it. I'd be willing to bet most unpopular UX/redesign decisions can be traced back to some financial incentive.


There are browser extensions to do this automatically as well.


I only regret that I have but one upvote to give to this answer.

Use

old.reddit.com


I've been using this Old Reddit Redirect extension for Chrome that does what it says on the tin. Works great for this. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...


https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...


old.reddit.com




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