HACKER Q&A
📣 behnamoh

Why are Reddit's webpage elements so slow to load?


I have tried several browsers and I keep getting the same subpar UX. Everything is slow. I click on the Chats icon and it takes several seconds to load. Switching between chats also takes a couple seconds. When I send a message, it takes 3-4 seconds to show up in the chat.

With each update to the website, they've just broken more and more things. The legacy chat UI was much better and it allowed for deleting chats as well. Now you can just "hide" them.

  👤 quadral Accepted Answer ✓
This is my nit pick with these SPA apps.

It's becoming a habit where it is _okay_ to split your UI into many components, and those many components are doing their own separate thing, but the problem occurs when those components are doing their own API calls.

Hard reloading Reddit and looking at the total ajax requests, I am getting between 132 and 140 ajax requests to load a relatively simple page; text and images.

It's absurd how they manage to get into this state and think it's _okay_.

👤 mikequinlan
old.reddit.com

Then in Preferences make sure "Use new Reddit as my default experience" is unchecked.

👤 supertrope
There's probably many more incentives to add revenue generating features than keep the page load time under a par value.
👤 pawelduda
They do it on purpose to frustrate you into downloading their app

The app is even worse tho so you're not missing out

👤 DANmode
Half of the available client bandwidth is loading piles of JS of questionable value....?
👤 ldjkfkdsjnv
Bad engineering