[p49k]

People hate getting used to new things, even if they are objectively better. No newly-developed UI, no matter how good it is, will improve your experience if you know the old one like the back of your hand. This generally leads to extreme negative bias in terms of public comments.

I don’t like it either, but people working within Reddit have commented here before and said that they are optimizing for engagement and that it’s clearly working.

If you talk to people who have only been using Reddit since the new version launched, most typically have no interest in switching to the old one even though they have that option.

[mkr-hn]

Twitter "optimizes for engagement" too. The effect is it burns me out and I crash off it for weeks at a time, and the only way to stop the cycle is to use a plugin to kill the engagement by removing visible metrics and the algorithmic timeline. This, of course, makes the site incredibly boring because nobody's talking on tweets that don't slide into the engagement machine since they aren't as engaging even if they would make a good start for a deeper, worthwhile comment in a place like this.

This is also why I use old.reddit. The new design has the same effect as Twitter's optimizing for engagement. Reddit is headed down the same path where all the interesting long-tail communities and big well-moderated spaces will vanish, and all that will be left is clickbait. It's only objectively better if your objective is to juice people for ad views.

I wish sites would stop optimizing for an endless loop of quick, semi-random dopamine hits (Skinner box) and optimize for long-term mutual value. HN's community is annoying on an average day, but I come back because there's an occasional solid thread that nobody had to growth hack into existence.