There has been a similar situation with Ubuntu and Unity: A vocal minority kept on complaining that Unity be a step back from gnome. Now that Ubuntu has dropped it, many users state to actually have liked Unity and are sad about that change.
True, but it doesn’t mean that the majority does like it.
Complaints do not necessarily represent the majority. But they may. And during a beta, it’s more likely as people are encouraged to submit feedback. So if there are lots of “hate it” comments and few “love it” comments that is useful.
They could release before and after usage data (in whole) that may give a better picture. Comparing the same user’s historical activity on the old and new to see changes in time spent, number of taps, taps per article, etc.
A new UX should increase usability. There should be clear usability data. And a community driven site should share this data.
I suspect that the ad revenue from the redesign is higher. And that’s why they are not sharing real data, and are squashing feedback that doesn’t like the revenue driving changes.
Still, though, for platforms that might lack a good reddit app, a good mobile site is kind of important.
The app and mobile site quickly run out of memory after a page or two of gifs.
The app does not allow you to open content in other tabs. This is problematic if I want to follow a trail of links and resume where I left off in the feed or comments; I have to mash the back button repeatedly. Additionally, I can't open a new tab to look into comments or a link later.
The mobile site and app have issues with sorting by top / newest every now and then, and often will fail to load content altogether - leaving the user with a white screen. (I've reproduced this in firefox & chrome on Android, and safari and firefox on iOS)
The mobile site and app take longer to load comments and additional content - and sometimes fail to load all together. Whereas the desktop version of the site loads almost instantaneously and almost never fails.
The app does funky things with copy pasting of text.
The mobile site sometimes crops half the images, making it a pain to click through.
Downloading images / saving getting an images source URL can be a pain on the mobile site / app.
And of course, the mobile site spams you constantly to download their app.
I can't use an adblocker, privacy related plugins or browse incognito in the app.
Maybe that is because the people who complained back then dropped Unity and/or dropped Ubuntu entirely. At least I did so and I would not have known that Ubuntu dropped Unity if I didn't read your comment.
There's no reason it can't just be 2 vocal minorities - 1 who liked Unity and 1 who didn't, while the majority of users was indifferent, or at least indifferent enough not to make a comment.
:posted happily from MATE desktop: