Why Reddit's New Website Is So Slow?

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."

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.

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

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

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...

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