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Comment by mcbutterbunz | Hacker News Reader

It'll eventually be removed with the reasoning that its hardly used and most traffic uses the new Reddit and now they can focus on improvements without having to support this legacy code.

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Yeah, it's really infuriating.. Reddit consumed most of the cool niche forums on the internet, and now it's slowly mashing them all up into a bland Facebook clone

Embrace, extand, extinguish.

Never, ever trust an incorporated company.

Does that include the Mozilla Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation?

A lot of those niche forums were already being killed by VerticalScope and InternetBrands.

It’s a lot of what lead to Reddit’s popularity in the first place.

I don't think I've hear of heard of VerticalScope but I aware of Internet Brands. What niche forums did they kill?

VS bought out a lot of the automotive forums. Also now owners of RedFlagDeals if you're a Canadian.

Surprisingly difficult to find a complete list.

There's 100% an opportunity for someone to bring on a bunch of subreddit admins into starting a new automotive forum network. Reddit and Facebook don't work well for car stuff.

https://old.reddit.com/r/4x4/comments/hw1p3a/vertical_scope_...

Also a bunch of tech and gun forums. Supposedly over 1000 properties, but it's not like I'm going to recognize that they own "mothering.com"

And then something else will replace it. They'll digg themselves their own grave.

Maybe Ycombinator will incubate a rival that uses the HN model.

I thought they already did, this little company called Reddit that went on to benefit from the banality of digg.

"digg themselves their own grave" ;)

Ha, thanks for picking up on that! I was hoping that someone would notice. :-)

I wonder what their relative market share is. Lots of the people that have been on Reddit for years may user old.reddit. I certainly do.

I really can't stand their hostility to no using their app on mobile though. The UX seems purposely difficult to drive users towards the app, for the obvious reason of greater access to user data most likely.

One of their biggest hurdles to overcome is, I gather, that a lot of the super large subreddits' moderator teams are exclusively on old.reddit.com for moderation. If they break old.reddit.com completely right now, a lot of the biggest subs would implode with bots, spam, and angry human word-vomit.

If they fix the moderation story for new reddit, I'd imagine they have a pretty quick path towards obsoleting old reddit by just not caring about anyone else still on old reddit.

They've already 'fixed' modmail for new reddit. So I think they're actively working on that problem.

> They've already 'fixed' modmail for new reddit. So I think they're actively working on that problem.

Though that has had some funny issues. One thing I noticed was the enrollment for the new modmail. It is on the settings page on old reddit for a sub, but I couldn't find it anywhere for the new reddit UI. Wacky.

For sure, it's not a perfect solution. Hence 'fixed' instead of fixed haha.

For Android at least, there are multiple free-as-in-freedom reddit client apps available. Two I know of are Infinity and Slide. Both are way better than the mobile website, and I'm sure better than the official app.

And then I will stop using Reddit for the most part (although it's still the best resource for finding authentic reviews of things / services.. I Google "<thoughts on something> reddit" more often than not these days). Which is probably for the best for my productivity / sanity tbh

The redesign is still a slower, worse experience, especially on mobile.

If they do (and it wouldn't surprise me), people will start making third party desktop clients (or rather, they'll start getting popular).

If they ban those, then we'll see some major migrations methinks.

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