[rando444]

This same sentiment was echoed just as strongly after the last major redesign (when they went from straight text to adding thumbnails and more whitespace).

The majority hated it, rebelled against it, said that the change in the way content consumption was focused on images more than text would push out quality content in favor of image macros that can be voted on quickly, that the quality of the people using the site would drop, etc, etc.

10 years later, I still feel all of those concerns were valid and correct, however these changes did not hurt reddit, and in fact the company grew by leaps and bounds.

And even now, I still share the same sentiment as you and others, but I think whether or not these changes are actually detrimental to reddit as an entity are yet to be determined.

[wycy]

I think the problem is that people always, without exception, hate UI/UX change, and companies know this and have learned to just ignore the objections of their users. Every single change to the Facebook UI/UX, every single change to Windows UI/UX, is met with an enormous backlash from users--"I just want it to look and work like it used to!" Then the next redesign comes around, and lo and behold, now people are attached to the current design that they previously hated, and now hate the new design. Tale as old as time.

I've never been like this. I've actually really liked virtually all of the widely panned UI redesigns over the years: iOS 7, every version of Windows, every evolution of Facebook.

However, there have been 2 redesigns that even I didn't like: the Digg redesign, and this Reddit redesign. Both are objectively bad. We know what happened because of the former. It remains to be seen what will happen due to the latter.

[nickjj]

> I think the problem is that people always, without exception, hate UI/UX change, and companies know this and have learned to just ignore the objections of their users.

I think this is only partly true.

Most of the time new designs come with a few side effects like being really slow or buggy, but then over time those things get ironed out.

For example, the new gmail UI is a nice improvement but it's buggy. Clicking into an email won't flag it as read if you leave the email quickly so you end up with a bunch of unread emails that you actually read which in turn makes me hate the new UI due to a bug. I'm concerned because this was around way back when they announced the opt in beta and it's still not fixed after forcing it on users.

[mattkevan]

A redesign of a system you use regularly and have some sort of personal attachment to is like someone sneaking into your house at night and rearranging the furniture.

I work for a major UK community site and we get a furious backlash against even the slightest of changes. And sometimes against things that users think have changed but actually haven't.

(Very) generally we as humans hate having to think. Figuring out a change to something we use regularly means all our automatic shortcuts no longer work and we have to start paying attention.

It's like how annoying it is when they keep moving stuff round in the supermarket but *100 worse.

[emodendroket]

Yes, but nobody would want to go back to Windows 3.1 now, and new users get put off by old-looking pages. There can be real advantages to those redesigns.

[tabs_masterrace]

There are good and bad redesigns and there's hyperbole. Most of Windows/Facebook/iOS outcries are hyperbole. Reddit's new design is just bad. For a good example of a slick modern redesign look at new Gmail.

[wycy]

Right, agreed, the Reddit redesign is just bad. But the fact that probably 99+% of any UI/UX changes result in an uproarious outcry from users, even when it's not bad, probably results in these outcries simply being ignored.

[matkins]

>I've never been like this. I've actually really liked virtually all of the widely panned UI redesigns over the years: iOS 7, every version of Windows, every evolution of Facebook.

Same. And I still hate the new Reddit. Not because of the new design but because of how slow it is and because they have shifted CPU usage from their servers to my computer.

[wycy]

Yeah, the new reddit is just objectively bad. It frequently fails to load content for me at all. Terrible user experience.

[Normal_gaussian]

This I think, is the truth of it. Reddit is becoming a lower and lower quality platform, providing less value to users. However each of these moves reduce the barrier to entry (thus increasing user base) or provide value to those who pay them. Often both.

Reddit as a business does not want to be a discussion platform.

In my opinion it will succeed, but it does so whilst providing mixed value to me, it has destroyed many small communities by amalgamation and then normalising them.

Subreddits related to my core interests are useless. Overrun by an endless stream of amateurs and the lack of a consistent user base makes it draining to use and fails to reward involvement at a high skill level (where you need to make repeated connections with others at a high skill level and break the norm).

However subreddits related to passing interests are brilliant, the provision of novice level instruction is very common and normally of high quality (due to catering to a constant stream of newcomers and a tendency towards the norm).

Reddit is group think.

[gldalmaso]

I can see your point. However how much of that is because of Reddit's decisions in contrast to how the internet itself changed from geek niche to mainstream?

Over the years I feel like the entire experience got worse and I might even go so far as to put in question if it isn't a net negative for society. The flood of shallow and biased information has pretty much killed quality in every platform. The signal to noise ratio is abysmal. Hate mongering is rampant world wide fueled by social media.

I don't think society is mature enough and ready for this much level of interconnected discourse. Yet here it is. It will be a while until we adapt I believe.

[thecatspaw]

> however these changes did not hurt reddit

Maybe not in numbers, but the user base changes. Users who value in depth conversations may feel alienated by the changes of reddit, pushed away by such a redesign.

I also feel very much alienated by the pushy (almost dark pattern) "use our mobile app" popups on mobile. AMP made that even worse, before that my phone asked me if I wanted to open my reddit app (not the official one), now I get the mobile AMP page with a big "Continue" button, which does not continue to the mobile page, but to the official apps store page.

Reddit moved its focus away from discussions, towards beeing an advertisement platform. I've quit it because of that

[simias]

>Maybe not in numbers, but the user base changes. Users who value in depth conversations may feel alienated by the changes of reddit, pushed away by such a redesign.

If the end game for reddit is making advertisers happy it probably doesn't matter much.

>Reddit moved its focus away from discussions, towards beeing an advertisement platform.

It was always an advertisement platform. It's the entire business model. They just needed to be more subtle about it when they were in the bootstraping phase not to drive people away. Now that they managed to reach the critical size where the network effects effectively means that a large portion of their user is captive they can move to monetizing more aggressively.

[conradfr]

I guess they learned from Digg to not do a massive rollout.

That way the new mild users who don't know the old design start invading the site and the day they delete old.reddit they'll only lose a minority of users.

IMHO the real bad change the last few years (leaving closing subreddits aside) was the removal of the number of upvote/downvote.

[wyldfire]

> 10 years later, I still feel all of those concerns were valid and correct, however these changes did not hurt reddit, and in fact the company grew by leaps and bounds.

I didn't care much for the thumbnails and changed my preferences to disable them. Even though I agree that image macros/memes diminished reddit's quality I must confess to being a party to consuming (and upvoting) these posts. HN fills this gap well, IMO.

IMO this new redesign is different from that one. That one was much more cosmetic. Impact-wise, this is somewhere between when they added support for comments and that thumbnails change. The pace of the page rendering / reaction is significantly different from the baseline and it changes how we consume reddit.

[hazz99]

I don't think it's quite the same - this redesign takes so damn long to load. I'd be okay with it if it was snappy, but I takes over 5 seconds! Each page has mostly text!

[swebs]

Users aren't going to bounce if there's a CSS change. They are when a page takes more than 5 seconds to load though.

[matkins]

I've been using reddit for almost a decade. I've found many people on reddit saying that if it wasn't for the redesign (and the mobile apps) they would not be using reddit. It surprises me to see that some people like it; it made me realise this will mark a very, very big demographic shift in the website. Many old users will leave, and many new users will come. Whether that's for good or bad remains to be seen. I think the original spirit of Reddit may end up disappearing, but I don't think that's something that is worth saving, as redditors and their culture are crap.

You compare it to having added thumbnails and whitespace, but this is a complete site rewrite, both in the backend and the frontend. Nothing to do with what you mention.

Personally I will also quit once they force us to use the redesign because I find it to be slow and, let's say, not "productive" enough.

[emodendroket]

I question whether there is actually a "spirit of Reddit;" it seems like a clearinghouse of wildly different communities with different values and tastes.