what browser/OS? rough idea of what hardware? is the connection actually consistently 24?

I'm out and about on a connection that tests at 16/6 mbps down/up, and the page loads muuuuuch faster than that, 2-5 seconds depending on how you measure, even with caching disabled. But I am on a relatively speedy linux laptop running firefox. So it's more likely the webapp using too much resources, or all the image loads clogging things up, than the pure speed of your connection.

It definitely could use work to run faster, but your experience is abnormal. Maybe try an alternative frontend? https://diethex.net/ was developed by an amazing comrade here, but there are other frontends and mobile apps you could potentially use that actually allow you to sign in and participate as well

The reasons it's slow are many. Reddit isn't just sitting on a computer somewhere in langley, it's an interconnected web of many many servers all doing different things, and other company's servers distributed into local datacenters all over the world caching their content so you can load it that much faster from the one nearest to you instead of going roundtrip to langley and back. Hexbear has none of that, though does appear to have multiple servers for things like cytube, etc. It's also running much less mature/optimized software frankly, and the javascript frontend/UI isn't particularly speedy because of some design decisions as well.