Unfortunately, this doesn't appear to be the case. They haven't been hiding that they're gearing up for a major redesign.
From what I've seen so far, I'm not at all excited for it. They launched user profiles recently, and it's an uninspired blocky design with way too much unnecessary whitespace for a desktop site. Also, even on desktop there is noticeable Javascript induced lag and content pop in. Although the rest of the profile page tries to look like a standard reddit page, it's actually entirely done with react and the subreddit/notification bar at the top has the same lag and content pop in. They're also hiring mainly for React frontend/Node.js backend, so I'm worried the entire redesign is going to be low density and slow.
If so, there are a number of other intentionally lightweight virtual dom frontend frameworks. Mithril, Riot, Preact, virtual-dom all come to mind, and there are a probably a few more.
tl;dr Don't blame tools but their usage
That has been shown to not hold in actual benchmarks. The real DOM is plenty fast if you do it right.
Here's Facebook's Dan Abramov (of Redux fame): "Myth: React is “faster than DOM”. Reality: it helps create maintainable applications, and is fast enough for most use cases."
https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/842329893044146176?la...
https://objectpartners.com/2015/11/19/comparing-react-js-per...
I understand the point of frontend frameworks for SPA, not so much for Reddit profile pages which are literally single, static, pages.
Even today I prefer to use the desktop version of Reddit on my phone, because I can just go through content threads a lot faster than compared to their mobile site.
https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/66q4is/the_web_red...
Situations like this are extremely difficult to predict accurately. It could become a big problem. But it has a decent chance of blowing over.
The main issue is to harness the energy that the moderators currently put into their subreddit. They're not sad that CSS is going away. They're sad their toys are being taken away from them. That's not to trivialize it, not at all -- people like to tinker, and playing with your subreddit and putting your markings on it is a toy for adults. It's a game. It's necessary to replace that with something that feels equally deep and immersive.
Or, you know, just don't mess with the status quo. But if you're going to do it, I think that's why people are rebelling. Not because the functionality is gone, but because they're losing a creative outlet.
Availability hueristic and personal bias. There are others.
CSS is a tool. Often, but not always misused.
Reddit has a setting to disable custom CSS on subreddits, so it doesn't make sense why you'd force the subreddits not to have it.
What's worse is that their new mobile site and their profile pages use more whitespace. A sign of things to come probably.
Making it beautiful with nice animations should come second and the mobile version still crash a few times a day for me.
Recently they added a useless interstitial.
It's interesting to me they say the app is faster; presumably they're artificially slowing the mobile site just to push app installs.
Kuro5hin did achieve some of the most amazing content, however.
It still hasn't been added.
The first x minutes of a post are _heavily_ influential in the success of the post, editing after allows you to hijack successful titles for gain (spam)
For large subs, posts only hit the top of /new for x minutes (for small x), editing after is basically useless if it's not successful in that time
Mods patrol the /new queue as posts come in, allowing editing will complicate moderation which is already a difficult job
Yes it could be misused, but go on any forum where you can edit titles or post content and look at how often such a feature actually does get abused.
It pretty much never happens. Most people (like 99.99% of them) either use the functionality how it was intended or don't bother editing at all.
I don't see the point of limiting a feature because about 0.1% of the userbase might theoretically abuse it in a certain situation. It's basically the social media/forum equivalent of the trolley problem and automated cars. Something that's going to happen very rarely at the most but draws a lot of discussion about 'what ifs'.
Its quite possible many features simply would raise their costs by .X% and therefore were impossible for that reason.
This starts approaching a blogging or CMS system, but then, Reddit is already damned close to that, though with a larger community than most same.
Under this model:
* An item would be submitted.
* If approvals / edit / drafting is set, it goes to a submission or edit queue.
* A set of mods/editors would provide feedback and/or make edits (which of these apply depending on the sub).
* The item is then submitted.
This would allow for adjusting titles, self-text, formatting, etc. I'm not claiming this is something all subs would want, but some would (and I've a few specific ones in mind).
For now, the fix is to delete the submission entirely and submit it anew. I've certainly done that within my own sub(s).
I'm hoping that, like some of Reddit's other weird ideas, it kind of just gets abandoned and left to die.