I also have a very strong hunch that the day is coming where this gets deprecated. There will be some kind of big database migration or service refactor, and reddit devs will not want to be messing with that "gross, old legacy codebase" to make it continue working and so the entire thing will be taken offline.
The day they shut down "old" Reddit is probably the day a large number of people leave Reddit altogether because the main Reddit site is a dark patterns hell. I think they'll still do it though because most web sites only want the kind of users who don't know how to install ad blockers.
the vast vast VAST majority of people using reddit are using the official mobile apps. The number of people using the web, and even alternative clients is like a drop of rain in a monsoon.
> the vast vast VAST majority of people using reddit are using the official mobile apps. The number of people using the web, and even alternative clients is like a drop of rain in a monsoon.
Users aren't equivalent though. IIRC, "the vast vast VAST majority of people" don't comment or post, either.
large number? Reddit has seen by far the most growth after switching to the new UI. The old reddit has already not been maintained to support new features such as polls.
Subreddit moderators get per-platform (old/new reddit.com, official mobile app, third-party mobile app) stats and all that I've seen share those numbers indicate new reddit.com is minority, old.reddit.com is basically invisible, vast majority is mobile apps. Of course it will be highly subreddit dependent.
I highly doubt that. Every single time Reddit comes up here, people complain and complain, but also share old.reddit.com as a work-around instead of actually leaving Reddit. It's a perfect way of keeping the hardcore users addicted while having a modern, instant-gratification interface for the majority. They know what happened to Digg, so far I don't see any indication that they're going to repeat this mistake.
My guess is that a large number of younger people use the "new" reddit, and basically pay to keep everything running with the ads they view. Many older Reddit users just go to old.reddit.com, and would sooner leave the site than use the current design.
It's absolutely fascinating that they have both versions. To me it illustrates so perfectly what the Internet was vs. what is has become. There's probably more money to be made from the infinite scrolling and dark patterns, but it's also completely unusable and comments and discussions seems to be of less concern. Just keep scrolling.
I'd like to see some numbers on this, but from my gut feeling it's not a then vs now thing. Much rather, the old farts that practically live on that website are the ones providing the rest with free content.
Basically the 90% / 9% / 1% split between people reading, people interacting and people creating. I would be very surprised if the 1% contributing and creating on reddit wouldn't be using old reddit for the most part.
Yeah I guess the issue is that the share of users on old.reddit.com is diminishing to the point of being irrelevant. The number of users still on the old site is less than 5%.
It's also sad because even though the old reddit is available, it's not the same. Since all the users are using the new UI, you get a totally different type of user engagement than you used to get I feel. Nowadays it's rare to have any sense of community or long discussion and every subreddit has moved along the spectrum to shallower interactions, image posts, and less distinctive character.
> Yeah I guess the issue is that the share of users on old.reddit.com is diminishing to the point of being irrelevant. The number of users still on the old site is less than 5%.
They still run i.reddit.com, which probably only has a tiny fraction even old.reddit.coms users. Also, I'm pretty sure that quite a few power users still use the old site and they probably want to keep them in. Someone has to buy gold and repost all the content, after all ;-)
> Unfortunately it's not compatible with newer Firefox android .
I'm using it on Firefox Android... Mozilla just made it hard to use most addons. You have to create an addon collection, add the extensions that you want to it, and then use that collection on Firefox Android: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-use-collections-add...
Well, most extensions seem to work great already. But that requires using either Nightly Firefox (and some hacks) or using a fork (like Iceraven) that loads a different extension list.
So, it's easier to switch to browsers like Kiwi Browser (privacy concerns aside so be cautious!) if you want a better extension support experience. Bromite and Vivaldi also have great built-in adblockers but sadly no full extension support.
So, I dropped Firefox on all my devices and moved to Vivaldi + Kiwi Browser and that works like a charm.
PrivacyRedirect [1] is a nice multi-purpose addon for this in my opinion. Most of the redirects can be easily customized and all of them can individually be enabled/disabled. It also has multiple nitter/teddit proxies defined for the times they get overloaded.
Redirects Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, & Google Maps requests to privacy friendly alternatives - Nitter, Invidious, Bibliogram, & OpenStreetMap.
When the time comes that addons do not get around such things, then I would suggest BlockSite [2]
LibRedirect[1] is a currently maintained fork of PrivacyRedirect, with additional features (PrivacyRedirect is no longer maintained since late 2021) [2]
Yes, true, I was bummed when I saw that Privacy Redirect is unmaintained but then a few users on Github mentioned LibRedirect and now that I'm using it, I'm really happy, it works great