i.reddit.com (aka .compact) appears to be gone
As an old, I prefer the old reddit. Which, lets be honest, has been going away for a while.
But so long as I could browse on my phone via i.reddit.com, I was happily entertained by time there.
No longer. And I'm saddened by it. It was an imperfect community, but its good parts are replicated nowhere else as far as I can tell, Tildes notwithstanding. Although, if Tildes were maybe 2-3x as busy and had more para-reality* fans, it'd be really darn close. I am still sad, and sad that we can't keep awesome things that generate a lot of community benefit but low income (see also, usenet). Probably, it's a good dead cow.**
*As a true believer (tm), I hesitate to use the word conspiracy, because it has gained so many negative associations with far right absurdity and violence. Among the more serious members of the community, we have yet to come up with an easy to use term. Another thing in the world I am sad about. For the record, I don't believe the election was stolen, but I also don't believe Kennedy was assassinated by Oswald, or at least not him alone.
**if anyone is interested, I relay the story of the Wise Man, the Poor Family, and Their Cow.
It was mentioned late last week in the announcement for the new frontend.
https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/11zso11/an_improved_web_experience/jdeicso/?context=1
"streamlined web experience" har har.
Well at least they are getting rid of AMP too.
Reddit's implementation of AMP was famously bad. Instead of stripping out the distractions like most AMP pages do, they stripped out the comments. That's the bread and butter of the entire site, and the reason I'm visiting reddit in the first place.
It seems they were thinking more about metrics than building something useful for readers. So yes, I'll be glad to see that one dead too.
I'm so glad AMP seems to be dying.
It is really sad to see it go away.
For me, i.reddit.com provided just enough friction to keep me from endlessly consuming content compared to Reddit is Fun or AlienBlue, while also not confining me to the ad-riddled, sluggish "experience" of the native website.
I guess I will just stick to visiting some dear communities like /r/factorio, /r/arduino or /r/python via old.reddit.com and rarely visit the frontpage. That's probably a better use of my time anyway.
Unfortunate. I don’t use reddit anymore, but I frequently end up there from web searches and the like. I’ll miss being able to use the i.reddit.com interface to avoid the annoying “Download our app!” banner that prevents you from viewing the rest of the page.
There are many good things on Reddit that will not and cannot be replicated on Tildes as a virtue of the way groups are created and organized here.
Tildes groups are not user created or managed, and are by necessity very general. Something like the absolutely excellent /r/hobbydrama cannot exist here.
That said, on Android I just use Baconreader, and old.reddit on the desktop. I wouldn't use Reddit without them.
There are so many good third party apps for Reddit that I'm sure the users of this now gone compact version can adapt to it.
I will say though, that if old.reddit.com ever disappears... I am going to have a very hard time adapting to the new design
Absolutely, we have many options. However, some issues are starting to surface. For instance, sometimes new Reddit break links in a way that makes them unusable outside of it.
It is possible that eventually new Reddit will become incompatible in other ways.
I've never found a satisfactory app substitute to .compact. A big part of the problem there is links. Either the in-app browser stinks (and doesn't offer history/bookmarking benefits) or the back and forth is cumbersome.
Reddit does have a public api (that's what all the apps are using!). I'd be shocked if old.reddit.com is deprecated that someone wouldn't just make a simple webapp that recreates the interface with said API.
Unfortunately there are some features that aren't on the API like the chat function. If old.reddit.com disappears, then the chat function would only work on the official app and on the new design reddit.
I feel like this would not be a huge concern for a user who is okay with, or specifically prefers older Reddit functionality.
I've only used chat once, but have had people reach out to me unsolicited with it for various things, so it's probably not that big a loss anyway.
There are some newer communities that have built themselves up around the chat function, especially some of the more underground art ones. If you prefer the old reddit interface, the browser site old.reddit.com is the only way to interface with those groups. Without it, there is no way. It will be a full, artificial gating away of what has become a core reddit feature. This may not be a big group of people but it is, nonetheless, a group of rather specific users.
The result of closing down old.reddit.com would be there is now basically situation of either the old interface or being able to interface with some communities. It's just kind of a crappy situation for users that wanted both and were already limited in how to go about it.
Like the feature or not, locking core features away from traditional interfaces and the API isn't a good step forward.
Does chat work on old.reddit.com? I'm a user of old reddit and I frequently get surprised when I accidentally go on normal reddit and see that someone sent a chat to me like months ago.
For the features that only work on the browser, you can just go with what the apps do, open an iframe to the normal reddit website so you can answer a poll or whatever.
Char works fine for me. Might be part of RES though I don't know for sure.
Are we talking about person-to-person chatting or chat threads? Chat threads do act pretty wonky on old.reddit. I'm not sure if they're realtime on new, but on old they're indistinguishable from normal threads except that any comment you leave there won't show up in your profile.
I guess I'm talking about person-to-person chatting then? I have no idea what chat threads are sorry
https://teddit.net
I will say, the new mobile web version of Reddit they just rolled out is far superior to the desktop web version of reddit. Loads quickly, has a nice layout, and is actually useable. They need to just expand the mobile version as the default for desktop since it actually seems to work.
I am not sharing that experience. How do I even search inside a subreddit? Buttons and and extras take up so much extra space. I can see half or fewer of the posts or comments per screen as on .compact.
I should have made it more clear, it's better than the current desktop version, not as good functionally as .compact.