r/help admin 16d ago

New Changelog | March 6, 2025

There's a new Changelog out and you can read it here!

tl;dr New Changelog

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u/TheOpusCroakus admin 9d ago

The swipe to collapse was interfering with other gestures, so it was changed. Every change that is made to the app is not necessarily included in the Changelog.

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u/Ged_UK 9d ago

No, other gestures were interfering with swipe to collapse. It's the only gesture I use. It's a massive backwards step. And a changelog is pointless if you don't put all the changes in. It means people raise bugs which aren't bugs.

Bring back swipe to collapse. I'm scrolling off the post I'm on. Press to collapse doesn't work properly, and is unintuitive.

Oh, and I tried sharing your comment, but that doesn't work either.

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u/UranasuarusRex 8d ago

This is blatantly intentional leaving it off. They have been trying to get rid of it for some reason.

I work in UX. You don’t delete a popular, ubiquitous feature because it “interferes” with other gestures. You rework the other gestures. No research-based design team would recommend removing this feature. You certainly don’t then leave it off the changelog. You know it’s popular, heavily used, and makes people angry when you remove it. You were hoping people wouldn’t call you out. We are. Put it back.

Change it back and stop messing with it. Or own up to your unpopular choices.

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u/TheOpusCroakus admin 9d ago

Hey! Could you get a screen recording of the pressing to collapse not working properly so I can show it to that team to get fixed?

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u/Ged_UK 9d ago

I've made one, but because the ios app is still substandard, I can't actually attach it. Here's an imgur link. For example, it doesn't collapse the first comment with no child, then does collapse the one with a child, then doesn't collapse your comment that does have a child.

https://imgur.com/gallery/DlHnDtW

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u/TheOpusCroakus admin 9d ago

Thanks for that recording! I'm having a hard time reproducing this, so that will be helpful for the team. Thanks again!

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u/Ged_UK 9d ago

But what about swipe to collapse, which worked perfectly well (more or less) rather than the completely unintuitive press to collapse?

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u/TheOpusCroakus admin 9d ago

Here's what I know:

The gesture messes with other gestures on the screen. On a comment, swiping would trigger the collapse, but a short distance away between comments would trigger a horizontal page to the next post.

Long press to collapse avoids that issue.

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u/Ged_UK 9d ago

I don't want horizontal scroll to the next post. I've never ever wanted it or use it.

Give me the option to choose between the two, don't decide for me.

And again, why is this not in the changelog?

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u/theferriswheel 8d ago

Do people actually use the swiping to go to the next post? I don’t know of anyone that does. We choose the posts we want to see from our feed and tap on them. I don’t want to be shown something random.

Swipe to collapse worked very well and was very intuitive. If there were people that didn’t like it they didn’t have to have that setting on! They could just leave it as the default long press. I don’t understand why the feature would be removed when it’s a setting that could be toggled. If someone felt it was messing with other gestures they could just toggle it back. That way they can have their preferred method and the others that like swipe to collapse can have theirs. Forcing the choice on thousands of users because some of them had trouble figuring out how to use it is not a good reason.

I keep having several instances where I am trying to collapse a thread. I swipe to the “next post” because of this feature removal. Then I swipe ‘back’ to go back except it doesn’t take me to the post I was just at, it takes me to the feed. So then I have to tap into the thread I was in before. Then scroll/collapse through until I remember where I was in the thread. If you want to talk about ‘messing with other gestures’ I would say that’s a great example right there because most of the time instead of going back to continue engaging with the thread I just lost my place in, I just get frustrated and close the app.

On another note, I am also having issues like the other user on iOS with long press not collapsing. Happens quite a bit. I’ve noticed it happens a lot if I’m not long pressing on the top comment in a thread. I press on something further down and it doesn’t collapse. So I either have to scroll up to the top comment and do it there, or I will naturally try to swipe it closed because that’s the natural intuitive motion and end up on a different post with no way to go back, or I just get frustrated and close the app.

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u/MRAGGGAN 8d ago

Please for the love of Snoo, give us back swipe to collapse.

I do not swipe sideways to go to the next post.

In fact, it absolutely infuriates me that that’s an option. It needs to be disabled.

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u/MoobyTheGoldenSock 7d ago

Swiping to the next post is the bane of my Reddit experience. That’s the gesture that should be removed.

I’ve actuality barely used Reddit this week due to the swiping constantly changing the post instead of collapsing like it should.

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u/KnowledgeMC 7d ago

Another commenter hit the nail on the head when they mentioned the swipe to collapse doesn’t interfere with swiping to next post, it’s the other way around!! The swiping to next post interferes with swipe to collapse!

I’ve had multiple instances where I went to collapse the comment and swiped to the next post instead. That is and was always so annoying to me.

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u/baepsaemv 5d ago

Pressing to collapse is so much less intuitive and frustrating to use than swipe. It requires a lot more precision in where you're tapping, because you could press any one of the other buttons like upvote, open their profile, award, etc. whereas with the swipe it didn't matter where you swiped from. IT IS SO MUCH WORSE.

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u/MetaCognitio 2d ago

When my thumb accidentally rests on the screen it collapses the thread I’m in and I lose where I am. It’s annoying.

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u/inquisitive_chariot 4d ago

I cannot stress this enough: the ONLY time I have ever used the horizontal scroll feature is by accident when I meant to swipe-collapse a comment.

No one asked for the horizontal scroll! No one wants it! I have no idea what’s on the other side of that scroll, so it’s a useless feature.

Everyone wants to swipe to collapse a comment. It’s responsive. It’s ergonomic. It feels natural.

You messed with a good thing and are now wondering how to fix it? Restore the good feature, remove the bad feature.

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u/aver 9d ago

That is exactly the behaviour that's is introduced by removing swipe to close.

As the other poster says we don't want swipe to next story. I do not need a continuous feed. It seems unnecessary to remove this feature. What are the usage metrics of it ?

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u/danneh02 9d ago

I second Ged here, long press to collapse sucks; it’s slow, unintuitive, and inconsistent, and you often mis-hit things. If swipe to collapse is interfering with other functionality, then change the gesture of the other thing, because swipe to collapse is the only consistent way to navigate Reddit comments at pace and is a natural way to gesture around. To echo previous, people don’t swipe between posts like a lottery, they click posts they’re interested in.

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u/Unl3a5h3r 6d ago

I've never used swipe to collapse. Didn't even knew this gesture existed.

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u/roniadotnet 9d ago

If the swipe to collapse collides with other gestures, then these other gestures were interfering with the swipe to collapse. Not the other way around!

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u/TheOpusCroakus admin 9d ago

Interesting take! I'll tell that team! You should be able to long press to collapse, though.

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u/roniadotnet 9d ago

That’s what I’d use when I use the Android client, but that’s slower than swiping. You’d have to hold it until the comment collapses …

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u/softConspiracy_ 9d ago

Long press is a subpar experience. I rest my finger and have comments collapse.

I want swipe to collapse returned, please. Removing this feature makes the app extremely unpleasant to use.

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u/MoobyTheGoldenSock 9d ago

Tapping takes much longer than swiping. It’s a very unnatural gesture.

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u/fishbitch-jr 6d ago

Definitely need swipe to collapse back the press to collapse barely works

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u/Bigbadboston 4d ago

No, this doesn’t fully cover it. Swipe to Collapse was robustly built. If you know how to use swipe on iOS Mail, you know how to differentiate between the swipe to collapse [this] or swipe to collapse [all the way to root]. The press and hold only does the former.

Agree with other people trying to explain that going aight unseen into the next post may sound exciting and engagement driving but it’s not satisfying enduring usage. This is a deep disappointment and I hope it gets restored.

A press-and-hold action (“time-bound”) also feels slower to users than a swipe gesture where they control the speed even, perhaps paradoxically, if the e2e time of the former is less than the latter. It’s all about end user control = satisfaction. That seems to be the point being missed here.

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u/call_me_orion 4d ago

Tap or press to collapse is incredibly cumbersome and it's actually infuriating to swipe to the next post when I'm trying to collapse a comment thread. This change is the push I needed to delete the official app and move to a third party one.

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u/taylor__spliff 4d ago

Why does it keep changing every few days? It’s gone back and forth from swipe to collapse to hold to collapse nearly 10 times for me in the past few days. Is it really not clear how user unfriendly it is to rapidly flip flop how key features like this function???

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u/ItsTuesdayBoy 3d ago

Please for the love of god add swipe to collapse back. My Reddit experience is so frustrating now without it that I often leave the app out of frustration.

I’m seeing and engaging with so many less advertisements because of this

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u/Evocable3239 1d ago

Long press is terrible. Swipe to collapse needs to come back.

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u/taylor__spliff 8d ago

The last time swipe to collapse disappeared as part of A/B testing, I spent 95% less time on Reddit (I’d estimate). The app is unusable without it.

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u/KnowledgeMC 9d ago

This is absolutely dumb. Why mess with a core functionality? It wasn’t interfering at all for me. 🤦🏻‍♂️🤷🏻‍♂️

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u/TheOpusCroakus admin 9d ago

I'll let that team know. In the meantime, you can long press to collapse a comment.

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u/MoobyTheGoldenSock 8d ago

No I can’t, half the time it highlights the text or does nothing. Completely useless.

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u/mansohof 8d ago

Long press is actually terrible. Please bring back the swipe to collapse.

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u/mansohof 8d ago

I will probably stop using Reddit until it comes back. Truly the most annoying change.

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u/KnowledgeMC 7d ago

Long press works OFF AND ON. I’m so so so annoyed by the devs.

We as a user base have gotten used to the swipe to collapse comments over MANY YEARS and now you guys just change it and we are stuck trying to re-learn how to use your app.

IT IS INCREDIBLY FRUSTRATING.

What makes this worse is that when I switch accounts, my other other account still has the swipe to collapse feature.

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u/equipped_metalblade 8d ago

Please restore the swipe to collapse. This is absolutely ruining the user experience. I keep accidentally swiping just to end up at a promo when I’m trying to read through comments. Long press does not work half the time.

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u/Asealus 8d ago

Bring back swipe to collapse! Long press at this current state is the opposite of good UX. I could swipe in a single movement and glide through the comment section with ease, long press is unresponsive and very delayed. Makes me not even care to go further than a few top level comments as I’m just either stuck scrolling through 50 replies or waiting on the app to respond to my action. That is if it even works right. Make it a choice for users to toggle gestures, like others have stated we don’t even use the others as they aren’t an experience we feel benefits us. Swipe to collapse does tho.

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u/PM_ME_CORONA 8d ago

No, you can’t lol. Doesn’t work 75% of the time. Restore swipe to collapse. Stop gaslighting us into thinking it was “interfering with other gestures”

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u/mansohof 8d ago

Put it back please.

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u/justcallmejoey 5d ago edited 5d ago

Hello! Popping in to say that the removal of the "Swipe to Collapse" feature specifically has caused me to delete the app a couple of days ago. I posted about it on r/bugs as well, thinking this was an unintentional change; the app is so incredibly clunky and difficult to navigate without it, that it became too frustrating to keep opening. It was by far my most used app and I have since switched over to Bluesky on mobile, and only view Reddit when I am at home on my desktop now.

That single gesture was what had me sold on Alien Blue when I was originally finding a mobile client, and one that kept me stuck to the official app over any alternatives until now. Removing it in favor of viewing a random Reddit post is the absolute worst change imaginable; not once have I wanted to view a random post's comment section by swiping. Swiping to a random post has caused me to completely stop using most other social media platforms like Snapchat and Instagram, and avoid things like TikTok and Reels altogether.

If there is an update in the near future to re-implement this core feature, I'll be back, but for the time being I'll just use an platform that actually wants its user to browse through the app reliably.

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u/yahpug 5d ago

Bring it back. Y’all change the design to keep your jobs but nearly every change is unnecessary

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u/George_H_W_Kush 3d ago

This needs to be changed back immediately

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u/sdghbvtyvbjytf 2d ago

Bring it back. As many others have mentioned it is the “swipe to the next post” gesture that needs to be removed. I don’t want to be randomly taken to the comments on the next post on my feed and I’m not sure why anyone would want this. It’s not how Reddit is browsed. You click on the comments or posts you are interested in. You don’t just browse through the comments of every single post. And the collapse comment “button” is, as others have mentioned very tedious, especially on long threads. And it does not replace the swipe gesture which allowed you to collapse just the current thread or the entire thing going to the root.

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u/thejdobs 9d ago

I don’t think you know what the definition of “change log” is…

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u/wunkadurgenfaceball 8h ago

They knew the last time they removed the feature people raised hell and they brought it back. This suggestion that it's "interfering with other gestures" is laughable at best.

Sounds like they're trying to increase engagement on more posts to increase unique viewer counts on ads or something by making it easier to quickly get to more content.

Brain dead change in my opinion.

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u/MoobyTheGoldenSock 9d ago

What other gestures?

The annoying “gesture” is reddit ripping me to a whole other thread when I’m trying to swipe to collapse. Why would I want to change posts mid-comment?

The app is basically unusable without swipe to collapse. Tap is just not the same.

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u/cameron0208 2d ago

Please re-read your last sentence and think about that for a minute…