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Comment by Raidion | Hacker News Reader

That number seems to indicate why they've started to use all the dark patterns for people to create an account. You can no longer see comments other than at the top level. Some subreddits require registration to view. All these things are artifacts of the new design that do not exist on old.reddit.com.

I'm thankful HN is not designing for 'engagement' or MAUs at the UI level.

View on HN

They have been auto-creating an account if you go to reddit.com on an android phone logged into a google account. Not sure if this is intentional or not.

That can’t be accidental, can it ?

Even imagining a bug in the registration code, you would at least go to a confirmation page before creation is commited.

Isn’t that technically impossible?

It seems very much intentional and it happens on the desktop as well. It isnt entirely consistent when it happens but it can take as little as a few minutes until it triggers the notification of account creation.

It sees Google credentials and then auto creates an account that you can change the name on. I keep deleting them but reddit keeps making them. I just gave up and kept u/redditisastupidhead as my minor protest.

It was the final straw, I now just avoid the place altogether. It is like having a preappreoved credit card turn up in the mail, it is trying to suck you in. No thanks!

If they ever remove old Reddit they're done. So many communities use it exclusively and will just walk if forced into the new shite.

Are there any communities where the new site is preferred?

I wonder if offering different experiences for what is the same site is actually working out better in practice than we'd expect. That contradicts what we seem to know about site design and would be considered uneconomical, but might it help Reddit keep a broader set of communities? I'm not sure how we'd know this externally, but perhaps someone here has some insights.

Someone mentioned in a previous post that it works well for /r/watches and I agree with them. It seems to be beneficial for image based subreddits where you're interested in seeing the majority of the images and only occasionally dive into the comments.

Great for mindlessly scrolling images, but less so for content that you pick and choose what to view, text based content, and commenting. I think it'll come back to hurt them in the long run.

Every day that goes by, new users join the site and have never seen the old UI. Eventually the scales will tip so the vast majority of users use the new UI and the old one will be cut off.

I follow one of these communities, and the hard part is that the old Reddit is broken in it’s own way, and we’re guaranteed it will never be fixed. It’s basically a lose lose situation all around.

What problems do you have with the old interface? Are they still there with RES [0]?

[0] https://redditenhancementsuite.com/

Where do you figure these denizen will end up? Discord? It's harder to maintain a discord server than it is a subreddit.

Old reddit users are last I checked in the Reddit traffic stats I had access to around 1-2% of active posters, and mobile overall is thumping desktop reddit several times over.

By the time New Reddit was launched old reddit wasn't even the primary way to view the site anymore. Nowadays new reddit crushes old reddit. Reddit doesn't need it's old users, it doesn't need you, and it doesn't need me. It could kill off old reddit today and it would be fine.

I don't see new site users posting on hn about it.

I doubt they tell their friends about it either.

> I don't see new site users posting on hn about it.

They are too busy posting on Reddit.

> I'm thankful HN is not designing for 'engagement' or MAUs at the UI level.

HN has an entirely different business model. Regardless of heady ideas by the creators, from a business perspective this site is little more than an advertisement for ycombinator's actual services. I'm not sure what model reddit could go with at this point in their growth outside of their ad platform (and their odd cult-like "token" awards).

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