Reddit is among the largest repositories of authentic, human-generated content, making it everyone’sfavorite Google Search keywordwhen they seek real-world opinions and immediate answers to questions, without any precursory drama and fluff. The UI design for Reddit on the web and on Android plays an important role in making such vast information digestible and easy to read. However, Old Reddit made way for the current UI, but ahead of filing an IPO andoffering data for language model training, the company is experimenting with a newer UI design.
Old Reddit used a classic, forum discussion-style approach to topical conversations, featuring rectangular buttons and boxes everywhere, simple upvote/downvote buttons beside comments, and clear, nested replies. The old UI design stuck around for many years, until Reddit decided to modernize things with the current UI six years ago.
Much to users’ chagrin, the upvote/downvote buttons were moved, the home feed featured larger previews of posts with images and embedded videos, and buttons and dialog boxes used rounded corners all around. Notably, the site went from a text-first design to a visuals-first UI, messing with years of familiarity and muscle memory for old users. The sheer popularity of old Reddit spawned an ecosystem of browser extensions for the web andReddit clients on Androidoffering the best of old Reddit fused with the good bits of the new design.
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Unfortunately, the company slammed the brakes on many of those projects by monetizing its API aggressively late last year. More recently, Reddit has been planning to go public, and ahead of that, several users, myself and my colleagues at Android Police included, arewitnessing minor UI tweakswhich don’t seem to benefit users directly, but surely make the web UI resemble the Android app.
First off, we’re seeing curved lines linking the nested replies instead of the straight bars carried over from old Reddit. What’s more annoying is the inability to collapse a comment to a one-line preview if it doesn’t have replies. On the other hand, minimized comments disappear without a trace, leaving just the commenter’s username visible.
Reddit is testing a new UI ahead of its IPO
Unlike previous designs, the new one doesn’t utilize the full width of your desktop screen, instead relegating you to a Twitter-like UI with the content feed in the middle, flanked by sidebars on either side, even in the home feed. The drop-down menus to sort subreddit content are also smaller than before, and in a new location, making them hard to spot. However, the UI design is evolving every day, and we just spotted the sidebar on the right-hand side disappear entirely yesterday.
The latest design shows a sidebar on the right only when browsing a community
Besides looking more like the mobile app, we don’t see a good enough reason for Reddit to tweak the new UI into this Twitter-style abomination. However, it is suspiciously timed right before the company’s IPO expected this month. Heaping insult on injury, Reddit users suspect the company willaxe old Reddit completelyafter this change rolls out widely, because the corresponding option has disappeared from the settings page on the web.
