14 DAY TRIAL // Reddit's motto is "the front page of the Internet." Despite such a large audience, the site is quite hard to decipher for first-time users, and its ugly and messy default design has a big part to play in it.
I am not the first and neither the only person to ever notice this. There are countless of developers and designers that have encountered the same usability problems with Reddit's basic design, and have, across time, created a slew of Greasemonkey userscripts, Firefox add-ons, and Chrome extensions, meant to give Reddit a facelift.
Most of them are in the "meh" category, a few of them are "acceptable," but only a rare few are actually "any good."
To the latest category you can now add SHINE, a Chrome extension that reimagines Reddit using Google's famous Material Design recommendations.
SHINE gives Reddit the redesign it needed 5 years ago
The extension is available through Google's Chrome Web Store, so you can safely download it without fearing any adware or sypware. Once installed on your browser, just navigate to the Reddit website, no settings needed.
On Reddit, you'll be amazed how clean the site looks, and how easy it is to get informed about the hottest topics on the Internet without needing to squint your eyes and trying to decipher that jumble of text Reddit's owner calls a "front page."
Everything is neatly arranged in its own row and can even be expanded into a larger container to be viewed inline, without navigating to a new page.
An alternative grid view is also available, as far as I can see, the row display makes Reddit much more useful and easy to read in haste, if time is pressing you.
For a one-time fee of $1.99 / €1.78, users can get SHINE BRIGHT, a premium version of the extension, which comes with the ability to customize display options using a special settings panel.
