Old Reddit wouldn't have cared if you left the site to read an interesting linked article. The new one does everything it can do get you to stay on the site, or better, install and never leave the app.
Judge this through the lens of the bigger picture. See their endgame and how it may not be in line with your expectations.
- being an SPA prevents the browser from remembering the scrollheight of a page so if I click on the margin (why does the entire margin act as a back button closing the comments?) I lose my place in comments. How hard would it be to stick a "scrollheight = localstorage[url].scrollheight || 0" in the 6 megabyte javascript bundle?
- clicking "view more comments" does keep my scrollheight since its not a page reload, but since there's like 5 comments instead of 5000, I'm suddenly at the bottom of the page and have to scroll to the top
- it loads the top level comments before the subthreads, so while I start reading the 2nd or 3rd comment, everything gets pushed down to make room for more comments -- or even better I just get a "something went wrong" for like a half second and then the replies come in. I actually see this pattern a lot - SPA thinks that everyone has a megabit connection and if content.length = 0 then something must have gone wrong !
Or how about when it says "18 more replies" and I click on it and there's only one reply? Can't javascript count?
This one is actually a reddit quirk. The API reports the number of comments, however doesn't take into account removed comments, or users that have been shadow-banned.
However users notice and complain about this constantly, so it still needs to be improved
So it's querying an API to ask how many comments there are, and getting a different result when it actually fetches the comments. So there's two different SQL queries somewhere I get that, but how can they diverge so much, is there a team assigned to "Queries that count comments before showing them" and a different team assigned to "queries that show comments" ?
It's just so frustrating as a developer to see the same broken behavior all over the largest web properties.