[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.