Reddit has started showing a redesigned version of its site to users, marking its first interface changes in a decade.
The social media site, which bills itself as ‘the front page of the internet’, has looked more or less the same since 2008. The new interface is currently being rolled out to a small subset of users, reports Wired, but will slowly become the default site design over the next few months.
The biggest change is a new menu bar that runs along the left-hand side of the screen, which will display all the Subreddits you’re subscribed to. Currently, this menu has a very simple and dense text design, and can be accessed by clicking on the ‘My Subreddits’ hyperlink on the top left of the screen.
However, with the 2018 redesign you’ll access it through a smartphone-esque ‘hamburger menu’, and it will have a much more modern look, with priority given to your favourite areas of the site.
Reddit’s current design is beloved by its users for its information density as well as being very load-efficient thanks, in part, to how outdated it is. However, a common joke amongst Redditors concerns how the browser extension ‘Reddit Enhancement Suite’ has become almost essential for using the site because of the lack of functionality built into Reddit itself.
The redesign will hopefully mean that users will one day not be reliant on a browser extension to efficiently use the site.
Don’t Digg it
Users will have a choice of three different designs. ‘Classic’ is probably the closest to the current Reddit that its users know and love, while ‘Compact’ removes preview images to fit more posts on a single screen. However ‘Card’ (shown above) looks like the biggest change, and adopts a more sprawling design that separates individual posts with plenty of space − like Facebook has been doing for years.
Typical of website redesigns, there appear to be some users who dislike the new changes and would prefer to keep things exactly the way they were, however we were surprised to see that many of the top-voted comments on the redesign’s announcement were people complimenting the new direction.
Users who prefer the old design can continue to access it at old.reddit.com, but it’s not clear how long this version of the site will continue to be supported.
Reddit will be keen to make this redesign a success. An early competitor to the site, Digg, went through a big overhaul in 2010 in an attempt to make itself more accessible and to add new functionality. However, Digg’s redesign is widely considered to have been a huge failure that resulted in it losing its market dominance and many of its users leaving to join the young upstart Reddit.
What do you think of the new redesign? Let us know @TrustedReviews.
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
