Show HN: Deck for Reddit – A Reddit client optimized for desktop (opens in new tab)

Its amazing how far backwards reddit went. In browser on desktop it's incredibly slow, even just clicking the comment box to write takes a few seconds and lags out for no reason. No doubt they're employing an uber amount of user tracking and all manner of inefficient code.

What was your intent behind adopting the "Tweetdeck" style of UI for this presentation? Tweetdeck's intent is supposedly that you'd need to be monitoring multiple feeds efficiently (e.g. you are a social media manager with multiple accounts, or you need live-updating search queries to react to).

For Reddit though, most of the time subreddits aren't really meant to be consumed "live", or many-posts-at-once, which means that for me, this ultimately just ends up shrinking my Reddit browsing experience into a thin column surrounded by content I don't care about at the current moment, which goes against the "efficiency" that I imagine this design is intended for.

For folks who like this style of UI, what do you get out of it?

I'm using a very similar design[1] for a reddit-esque clone I'm working on, but I'm actually about to move away from it. The column approach makes sense at first - it seems like a great way to view multiple streams of content. The reality though seems to be that it creates more UX problems than it solves. One example is that when you have multiple frames inside a UI it destroys the page navigation. Back buttons may not do what you expect them to - does it go back to the previous view for the column you last interacted with, or does it go back to the previous url? It's very easy to simply open up another browser tab or tile a window, which gives you most of the benefits of a column UI without any of the downsides.

[1] http://files.jjcm.org/columns.mp4

Great concept, but many buttons don't have any label or tooltip, please add at least one of the two. The "hot" button is very cryptic to me. On my computer, i don't have an easy way to scroll left and right, so the layout is suboptimal. Clicking on the link once to show the comments and a second time to follow the link is not ideal. It should at least be made clear what will happen when you click. Maybe make the title black when it's just a comment toggle, and then blue when it will link to the article

I literally need reddit client which looks/modelled after HN. I like that HN has lightweight content focussed website(frontend).

https://i.reddit.com is one good frontend.

Couple of things:

- It wasn't immediately obvious to me that modifying the UI on rddeck.com (by leaving subreddits) would actually modify my subscriptions on my account. There's a place for managing your subs in something like this, but it should be a lot more clear, and I think the main focus should be on the user customizing the UI without modifying their account

- The oblong pill loading bars at the top of each column look exactly like drag handles, and I was super confused why I couldn't rearrange the columns by dragging them. I think that making them drag handles would be useful, and reimplementing the loading bar as something else would be a good change.

- Dragging to rearrange the subreddit order is painfully janky in both safari and firefox for me on macOS. It's almost unusable.

- The subreddit sort order dropdown / active sort order implementation is strange. Simply having just the current sort order + a little chevron pointing down in a button would be much more intuitive.

If this was open source, I'd definitely be willing to contribute. Cool start, and a cool idea.

I'm also building, or trying to, a client for Reddit made with React. The thing I'm not achieving is properly rendering videos hosted on Reddit.

I've come to the conclusion that it's impossible. It's totally closed from being played outside of reddit.com by using CORS. I can't in any way play the DASH or HLS files from reddit.

I can load the mp4 fallback, but guess what? It's a video without audio. You can get the audio, but it's not documented anywhere (found on stackoverflow, I think). But of course, playing two files at once and syncing them is bound to break, specially on slow networks.

For a website dedicated to sharing stuff from all around the web (reddit didn't even have image hosting until a few years ago), it is really a dick move that you can't share stuff from reddit elsewhere.

It's a shame. Reddit is merely a shell of what it used to be, sadly.

Edit: You seem to have the same problem with video :(

It’s more accessible than Reddit is on mobile. Awesome job.

Side note: Whoever at Reddit came up with the idea to badger users on every other click to ‘open the Reddit app’ needs to be dealt with.

In Firefox middle click on title doesn't work (it should open link in new tab).

Interesting! But doesn't work on Firefox if you have Enhanced Tracking Protection enabled. Maybe this would work better as an extension? Similar to RES.

Feels clickbaity. The title made me expect there is a native desktop app built on a classic desktop widget toolkit. Nevertheless, I still like this one anyway - good job!

Is this opensource? If not, have you considered opensourcing it? This is pretty cool

As I scanned this headline (and before I got to the end), I assumed you had in fact designed a tool that would help you design a real deck that was safe to post on Reddit. Posting pictures of your homemade backyard deck build is one of the more brave things you can do on the site as it will generally get destroyed in the comments with everything you did wrong and how it's going to sink into the swamp, after catching on fire.

Nice idea! The "About" link doesn't seem to go anywhere at the moment. What's your privacy policy?

This looks excellent, I will be trying it out later today.

Reddit's redesign was an absolute catastrophy. Its sluggish and the mobile popups that direct users to app or Web is downright intrusive.

I use baconreader premium on mobile to keep my sanity.

Disclosure: I have no affiliation with baconreader app / team.

Does anyone remember .qwk and QWK readers from the BBS days?

I want that. Let me download the messages, sift through them how I want to and reply.

Oops - I forgot. Communication isn't the goal of forums these days; monetization is :(

On Android I use Infinity for Reddit, it's really lightweight, especially when compared to Reddit's own mess

Great work. Good way to not have to see distracting posts with bot driven upvotes.

What technology stack did you use in the front end?

Looks really cool, too bad reddit itself sucks ass and I stopped using reddit since the heavy censorship began.

Shoutout to rtv (reddit terminal viewer)

Yeesh, Reddit is not that good, huh.

Cool. Would be nice if it was PWA and could be "installed."

Just a heads up, nothing happens when you click about

This is great. Can you add /r/all?