[reciprocity]

New reddit makes it easier to push ads; any other motivation for its implementation is an afterthought. There's plenty of valid criticism that can be levied against the claim that the redesign is "superior" by default. And I think often we confuse amount of information with quality of information exchange. Due (mostly) to the ever increasing amounts of new users that it desires, you could easily make the point that the quality of content on reddit has nosedived. Optimizing for time on site is not the same thing as optimizing for time well spent.

Reddit as a company obviously wants more users; a design that lets people scroll on through images ad nauseam is certainly better than a design that is more information dense, so if that's something you'd cite as an example of "better in certain use cases" then I agree, otherwise there's plenty of reasons to use old.reddit.com from an end user's perspective.

The concept of Eternal September applies.