[pasabagi]

The thing I find weird is that they essentially paid money to degrade the user experience to the extent that large parts of previously OK functionality don't work anymore, and subreddit mods typically advise people to use the 'old' UI.

I mean, the new UI is not to my taste, but it is also just really buggy, slow, and full of things that straightforwardly don't work (videos, search, etc).

Now, I'm not an MBA, but I don't really get how you make money by paying developers to degrade your service.

[koheripbal]

Reddit is actively trying to reduce the average age of their userbase. The mobile app, and forcing kids to install the mobile app, is a big part of that effort.

Getting teenagers in high school addicted to Reddit is a huge part of their strategy, and it's very evident in the way the front page content has shifted in the last decade.

The bigger issue is that while a lot of older users remain in the niche subs, I find that there aren't great alternatives to Reddit for threaded sub-specific commentary.

[uDontKnowMe]

There are actually a fair number if you go looking, in my opinion Lemmy seems to be the best alternative these days and seems to get at least a bit of traffic.

[ValentinPearce]

My guess would be that newer users that decide to stay move to the app on mobile where they can't have an ad blocker

[soylentcola]

My system-wide adblocker works fine on the mobile app. I just hate having a dedicated app with related permissions/notifications to manage just to access a website.

[ValentinPearce]

A bit late but what do you use as an adblocker and does it require rooting your device ?

That's the trouble I've encountered when trying to install one.

[Black101]

But when they add a new feature to the new Reddit, they don't backport it to old/ns.reddit.com (surveys being one example and there was at least another one other that I can't think of right now).