Craigslist is _the_ case study on how an ugly UI can survive over a long timeline. There are many techies and UI designers that are just disgusted at the UI of craigslist. For some, aesthetic is more important than usability. Luckily, for most, it's not.
Ebay removed substring search years ago, and this basically collapsed a whole bunch of industries that were using Ebay as their marketplace. Think hundreds of thousands of similar part numbers. This is why you see pages of part numbers blasted over the listing details.
Ebay's one job is to connect buyers and sellers and they fail miserably at that.
Not even a local minimum, a global minimum. Not a platform, a gated swamp.
I can sort by price on eBay. On Amazon, I have to jump through a bunch of hoops to finally be able to sort by price, and the results I get are far from exhaustive.
Amazon's interface is pretty bad, though, especially in the video and kindle areas. I know I'm constantly frustrated using the site, and as far as I can tell, they don't appear to be very interested in reducing user's pain.
Yes exactly. CL is probably my favorite website on the internet, for the sheer reason that they have virtually not changed at all since they first launched over 10 years ago. It's fairly incredible. I can't think of another website that has done that.
This still exists?! It's still being updated?!?! So much more content than when I last checked it, which would have been 2004 or so. My faith in the internet is restored.
Win7 certainly has some rough edges in retrospect, but I occasionally interact with old systems and so many things are so much snappier. I'm sure the modern frameworks in Win10 allow for "new experiences" but the plain old desktop experience was well served by Win7.
And those of us who do remember Windows 1.0 (not using it, though, but I do remember the ads), are probably mostly closer to retirement age than to the start of our careers... I feel old now.
I think craigslist survives _despite_ its ugly UI just because of market lock-in/inertia.
the ui is awful from a utility/ux, pov - it’s limited and hard to shop/browse with.
Definitely - there used to be a bunch of sites that scraped craigslist and put their listings into more browse-able formats (e.g. Padmapper), but once they got too popular, CL started sending C&Ds and filing lawsuits.
That’s the strange thing about reddit’s new design: It not only lacks functionality and performance, but also white space and clean aesthetics. It feels dated already.
It's also slow, unresponsive and breaks all the time. The dark mode toggles back to bright mode randomly, posts sometimes don't render... It takes multiple seconds to render the comments in a thread. It's a mess.
Reddit wants lots of growth (they are taking new money now I think) and that means lots of new users that don't know the old UI. The new one is designed with those users in mind, not ones that know the site inside and out already.
imo the killer feature of RES is that it makes it extremely easy to manage arbitrarily many sockpuppet accounts. there are other nice features of course, but the ease of managing multiple accounts always stood out as one of the biggest perks to me.
in the current political climate, it's not hard to see why reddit might be cautious about implementing such features. of course, the real reason might just be that most reddit users don't even have one account to manage.
It was (originally) for localization: ja.reddit.com would (for example) give you a Japanese interface. Eventually they realized what a horrible idea l10n is for a community-oriented site, and dropped the translations, but kept the `lang` that it would apply attributes. Eventually subreddit moderators figured out that you could use this to provide multiple variants of the per-subreddit CSS, such as dark modes, custom filters, and other silliness[0].
Testing it out I found something interesting. You can put in subreddit.reddit.com and it redirects to reddit.com/r/subreddit. But any 2 char prefix works sends to old.reddit.com (a.reddit.com -> reddit.com/r/a)
e.g. hackernews.reddit.com -> reddit.com/r/hackernews
Other than "np", as in "np.reddit.com", which is used for "no-participation mode", I think the other two-letter sub-domains are used for language codes. I think at one point in reddit's history doing things like de.reddit.com could give a german site, and so on. I'm not sure what "ud" would refer to, but I assume it's similar.
Given how aggressively reddit push their terrible no good very bad interface, I figure there has to be some advantage to them to my using it? I don't know what that could be, maybe users struggling to use the new interface looks like engagement to ads?
