Do people actually prefer the new interface [on its merits], or do they just use it because it's the default?
New UI sucks. Forgets settings, frequent load errors (which blank out an already loaded content) and hit-boxes for clickable items are small/overlap which increases page hits (cause you nav to the wrong page). It smacks of a hasty rewrite in $HOTFRAMEWORK.
I use reddit less because of it. And a result of that is I've also reduced spending to reddit.
Edit: reduced advertising spend, not award spend (which was already zero)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...
There's also "Use new Reddit as my default experience" if your looking at the setting in old reddit, and you want to turn that off.
Reddit user for 10+ years here, coder and designer for 20+. I know the site pretty well. If I can't figure it out, it's pretty fucked.
And if you're not, greasemonkey scripts that do that aren't hard to write. If you know how to code in any language and have a little knowledge of HTML, you can probably bash one together in an hour, even if you don't know Javascript.
The main drawback is that it's really too heavy for what it does.
I don't understand the complains about the new design being image-heavy, or in general so much different from the old one. Once you set it (once) in "classic view", it's basically the same.
If I load an old/new reddit tab and go to 'about:performance', here's the comparison:
Old - Low impact - 22 MB memory usage - 4s to fully load on gigabit
New - Med impact - 70 MB memory usage - 10s to fully load on gigabit
But a lot of other critics feel like the person haven't tried setting the view to "classic" or "compact".
There is an add-on called "Reddit comment collapser" [0] that adds this to old reddit.
[0]: https://github.com/tom-james-watson/reddit-comment-collapser
Old reddit is more like BBS or old school message boards. People who grew up on this are a dying breed... probably also worth less to advertisers as we use adblock.
What reddit should have done is to ship the RES UI with the old reddit interface.
The things which drive me nuts about the redesign are mostly things that drive me nuts because I comment far more than I post, and participate in a lot of discussion-heavy subs. Navigating comment trees is more difficult, lots more is hidden by default. Far fewer topics fit on a screen with the card-style layout that has huge previews. The old layout is information-dense, readable with minimal clicking to expand things, and fast.
But those are exactly the kind of changes that someone just browsing would be indifferent to, or even appreciate. The images/videos they're scrolling through are now big, front, and center. Many probably don't ever venture into the comments to begin with, of if they do, they're just seeing if the top comment is a good joke or not.
Wildly different use cases.
It really depends on the type of consumer. I don't post to reddit anymore, but I'm not looking to consume memes and videos. When I go there I'm almost always looking to consume a comment thread about something (say some weird feature of some motherboard), and the new UI is atrocious for that. I either switch to old or I don't bother with it.
I definitely don’t think people preferring this layout are a dying breed, but I do agree that it’s easier for them to monetize the new layout.
Yes. My wife started browsing reddit only after the redesign. She had no interest the in the old interface. The new design really has a familiar look/feel for new users accustom to most common mainstream social media designs.
The old interface is a lot better for discussion.
Unfortunately, any subreddit that does not ban memes/low-effort media gets flooded in memes/low-effort media, so scrolling through images is how most people use reddit.
Facebook, for instance, has some similar design patterns, but generally the interface seems really well built. New reddit just breaks in all kinds of odd ways which kills the UX.
>Reddit Inc. said it averaged 52 million daily active users in October, up 44% from the same month a year earlier
The redesign launched in 2018, so I'd say yes, the general public greatly prefers the redesign if they had almost 50% growth last year. Could there be other factors? Sure. But Occam's razor is a solid argument in this context imo.
Doing nothing may be for the reason that they prefer the redesign, but also numerous other reasons apply (including that they don't dislike it enough, or some key new feature, etc).