The moral here is don't change anything. Ever.
I read an interview with the PlentyOfFish founder and he alluded to this.
People would ask him why his site looked so bad compared to other dating sites. He said he he was afraid trying to make it better would make it worse. In reality he didn't know why people liked his site so much but it was working.
So he ended up working a couple hours each morning checking for spam and paying bills and took the rest of the day off instead of trying to constantly "improve" the site.
They really fucked it up. Ads were being shoved left and right without knowing what really was an ad and what wasn’t. It’s the same fuckery reddit started doing and scaled a bit back. I still hate current reddit (all the pop ups are really annoying)
Moral of the story: don’t do massive redesigns. Listen to your customers (not your VCs). Change one small thing at a time, A/B test it, UX interview it with customers, then roll it more % of customers. if no red flags, increase % over time to 100%.
Seriously a bummer, as you know the old design is gonna be phased out at one point or another.
eBay's background used to be a (very) bright yellow, which looked pretty bad even for the web in 2009. When they initially changed it to the current white, the designers received enough complaints to change it back for fear of loosing parts of their userbase. They still wanted to change the background to pave the way for other websites, so slowly, over several months, they lightened the shade of yellow until it became white. [a]
This concept has been applied by many other "big" websites - Amazon, Dell, Google, and Yahoo come up as examples. [b]
The Digg v4 thing was a very big deal back when it happened. In a matter of a month or two, Digg lost the majority of its traffic to Reddit. I personally remember switching pretty much overnight after v4 when beforehand I always thought Reddit was inferior to Digg.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg#Sale_and_relaunch
Edit:
Found an old graph of the traffic dropoff when v4 launched [2]
You obviously have more context, but from my experience developing product, there are almost always ways to change direction incrementally and in a manner that allows you to get your toe wet to test the temperature, and not dive in unshielded.
Although I realize now you may be saying that change was inevitable, but catastrophe wasn't.
He risks 0 of his own funds to have a shot at getting rich and never having to work again; he gets the excitement of growing a company to grapple with giants and take over markets; and even if he fails, the name recognition he obtained during the journey ensures he'll have his pick of lucrative future gigs.
THAT's why so few tech lifestyle businesses stay that size, and it's all very logical really.
One specific example of this is The Other Side of the Wind, by Orson Welles, in which Welles noted the existence of this magic phenomenon and deliberately sought to make a film centrally driven by happenstance and unscripted ad-libs. In other words: trying to catch lightning in a bottle.
It often happens in music too, when artists with different sensibilities somehow “clash” and the material they produce together (which they’ll inevitably think of as “full of compromises” etc etc) is superior to anything they would produce individually, before or after.
Didn't really need it in my life anyway.
Unfortunately, if you use the old version, you will also not have access to the newest mod tools, including a lot of sub settings. But the old version works fine for reading and commenting.
I for one don't have an account, so I would get nagged by their popups constantly.
It was a perfectly fine website, they ruined it completely for me.
I'm constantly directed to www.
That's obvious as I've disabled JS for the domain, and so get an empty page with a spinner.
It's a clusterfsck.
I would have left reddit a long time ago if I were forced to use the terrible new UI. The fact that they still keep it around, years later, is a telling sign. When you are so scared of your own decisions, you know you messed up.
Going to www, with the setting as specified, does not behave as you describe.
Reddit: Stop it. I'm aware there's a mobile app. If I wanted to use it then I would. I don't need to see an advertisement for it on every damn page.
Also how's the user acquisition and retention rate as compared to traffic?
* 30% increase in monthly active users
* 37% increase in comments
* 53% increase in views
https://redditblog.com/2019/12/04/reddits-2019-year-in-revie...
Also, reddit was doing pretty well before the introduction of subreddits, but that change really was a very successful one.
You can see this for successful small family restaurants, they usually don't have a lot of choices and usually do little things very well and stick with them and can last for generations.
Heroes is a great example. The first seasons was amazing, the 2nd season was hot garbage. They had no idea what made the first season so great.