I've been using reddit for almost a decade. I've found many people on reddit saying that if it wasn't for the redesign (and the mobile apps) they would not be using reddit. It surprises me to see that some people like it; it made me realise this will mark a very, very big demographic shift in the website. Many old users will leave, and many new users will come. Whether that's for good or bad remains to be seen. I think the original spirit of Reddit may end up disappearing, but I don't think that's something that is worth saving, as redditors and their culture are crap.

You compare it to having added thumbnails and whitespace, but this is a complete site rewrite, both in the backend and the frontend. Nothing to do with what you mention.

Personally I will also quit once they force us to use the redesign because I find it to be slow and, let's say, not "productive" enough.

> however these changes did not hurt reddit

Maybe not in numbers, but the user base changes. Users who value in depth conversations may feel alienated by the changes of reddit, pushed away by such a redesign.

I also feel very much alienated by the pushy (almost dark pattern) "use our mobile app" popups on mobile. AMP made that even worse, before that my phone asked me if I wanted to open my reddit app (not the official one), now I get the mobile AMP page with a big "Continue" button, which does not continue to the mobile page, but to the official apps store page.

Reddit moved its focus away from discussions, towards beeing an advertisement platform. I've quit it because of that

This I think, is the truth of it. Reddit is becoming a lower and lower quality platform, providing less value to users. However each of these moves reduce the barrier to entry (thus increasing user base) or provide value to those who pay them. Often both.

Reddit as a business does not want to be a discussion platform.

In my opinion it will succeed, but it does so whilst providing mixed value to me, it has destroyed many small communities by amalgamation and then normalising them.

Subreddits related to my core interests are useless. Overrun by an endless stream of amateurs and the lack of a consistent user base makes it draining to use and fails to reward involvement at a high skill level (where you need to make repeated connections with others at a high skill level and break the norm).

However subreddits related to passing interests are brilliant, the provision of novice level instruction is very common and normally of high quality (due to catering to a constant stream of newcomers and a tendency towards the norm).

Reddit is group think.

Users aren't going to bounce if there's a CSS change. They are when a page takes more than 5 seconds to load though.

I don't think it's quite the same - this redesign takes so damn long to load. I'd be okay with it if it was snappy, but I takes over 5 seconds! Each page has mostly text!

I guess they learned from Digg to not do a massive rollout.

That way the new mild users who don't know the old design start invading the site and the day they delete old.reddit they'll only lose a minority of users.

IMHO the real bad change the last few years (leaving closing subreddits aside) was the removal of the number of upvote/downvote.

I think the problem is that people always, without exception, hate UI/UX change, and companies know this and have learned to just ignore the objections of their users. Every single change to the Facebook UI/UX, every single change to Windows UI/UX, is met with an enormous backlash from users--"I just want it to look and work like it used to!" Then the next redesign comes around, and lo and behold, now people are attached to the current design that they previously hated, and now hate the new design. Tale as old as time.

I've never been like this. I've actually really liked virtually all of the widely panned UI redesigns over the years: iOS 7, every version of Windows, every evolution of Facebook.

However, there have been 2 redesigns that even I didn't like: the Digg redesign, and this Reddit redesign. Both are objectively bad. We know what happened because of the former. It remains to be seen what will happen due to the latter.

> 10 years later, I still feel all of those concerns were valid and correct, however these changes did not hurt reddit, and in fact the company grew by leaps and bounds.

I didn't care much for the thumbnails and changed my preferences to disable them. Even though I agree that image macros/memes diminished reddit's quality I must confess to being a party to consuming (and upvoting) these posts. HN fills this gap well, IMO.

IMO this new redesign is different from that one. That one was much more cosmetic. Impact-wise, this is somewhere between when they added support for comments and that thumbnails change. The pace of the page rendering / reaction is significantly different from the baseline and it changes how we consume reddit.