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Comment by nickysielicki | Hacker News Reader

No company even comes close to the transition that Reddit did that took them from a {clean,simple,dense,power-user friendly} interface to a horrible user-hostile shit show that it is now. The average Reddit user has to reach for a custom third party app on their phone or a browser plug-in that hacks a redirect to the old or third party interface. Quora doesn’t hold a candle.

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Reddit is on a complete different level of abhorrent filth. The mobile experience is so obnoxious that it's fair to call it "evil".

And I'm only describing the technical aspect of it. The culture it encourages of people screaming divisive hate at each other, makes it possibly the worst corporation to have ever existed.

Notice that it's almost impossible to find people on HackerNews admitting they work there.

What I dont understand is why these companies are debasing their products integrity to scrape in more users.

What Reddit doesn’t seem to realise is that right now there is a primed opportunity for a competitor to take its market share.

If reddit ever dropped the old.reddit option, that would be the last time I ever use the site. They must know the new (several years old now, I suppose) layout is awful. I can't understand the rational. Maybe it cost a fortune to build and it's sunk-cost fallacy thing.

My theory is that it's easy to hand-wave away those complaints as just coming from Luddites. You don't get the new layout, and are only complaining because you like the old layout and don't want to learn anything new.

Administratively, it feels good to know that I'm doing the right thing, and to know that you will eventually come around to the new layout design. You have to, because I'm right.

That's my theory. Smugness, maybe? Is that it? Overconfidence?

Advertising. It's the root cause of it all. Reddit is actually an advertising company. Their business model consists of attracting people to the site with open forums and then spamming ads. They want people to switch to the app because that way they can collect more data and users can't block ads.

They already have the data and the name recognition. While each is powerful on its own, they are far more powerful (and sticky) together.

That data comes without e-mail addresses, phone numbers, or any real-world identity. They want to become more like Twitter, where people post with their IRL identity. That way your Reddit upvotes can translate into a salesman physically knocking at your door if that's what marketers decide would make the sale.

To be fair, one company did: Digg. And that's why no one uses or remembers Digg anymore.

I remember the Digg exodus. In my mind, it was a mass protest after the AACS key leaked. The redesign of Digg wasn’t the death knell. I could be misremembering with Rose colored glasses, though. Pun intended.

Digg 4 remains a remarkable example of how you truly can kill a popular site and its entire community with a botched redesign.

I never liked the site, but plenty of people did, and they just accidentally destroyed it. A lesson that you should be able and willing to quickly revert major changes, at the very least.

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