I haven't accessed the desktop site in years, because it defaults to the new reddit.
It smacks of when /. changed their layout; there was a huge to-do and users lost their mind. I haven't been back there in, what, 9 years?
I guess, the moral of this story is, what is the reddit replacement? Because so far I have found nothing that compares.
I keep looking and monitoring promising replacements but haven't found one yet. I do think the ultimate way forward is going to be some kind of federated system where each "subreddit" is hosted individually and there are aggregators which glue them together, either as a hosted portal or as individual apps.
One of the things that has been killing me is that small interesting subreddits keep getting either killed for not being actively moderated enough or invaded by people who have their own goals. It's very frustrating and it really hurts the longterm knowledge that gets generated in these subreddits.
If anyone is working in this space, please drop me a line.
https://gurlic.com/programming
That being said, your e-mail field doesn't generate an e-mail to sign up, from what I can tell.
It's like when a favorite local family owned burger joint shuts down and is replaced by a McDonalds. It serves many more people but the core community and values are gone.
Pipedot was another. I think there was a third attempt, but I can't remember its name (or even be sure it existed).
If you're logged in you can set it to always default to the old design. I do that, and disable all custom stylesheets, which is basically a necessity to make the site useable again.