They're just trying to manufacture a reason to kill off old reddit. Someone internally clearly hates the fact that its still quite popular, despite all the efforts to make it unusable so far
The day they kill off old.reddit.com is the last time I'll visit Reddit (after >15 years, >7,000 comments & >70,000 karma). Old.reddit, the Reddit Enhancement Suite (RES), custom userstyle CSS and uBlock make Reddit tolerable.
Admittedly, Reddit might be fine with losing me because I only ever see the small niche subs I'm subscribed to, most have less than 100K subs and none have more than a million. I haven't seen the Reddit default home page or any content from the big reddit subs in over a decade.
This is the mistake so many platforms and software packages make.
They look at the big groups, but don't really pay much attention to the smaller groupings. They also don't pay much mind to who is on those smaller groupings.
I'm willing to bet that all those little groups, are what attracted people to Reddit to start with. The local city forums, or the niche group of people interested in... tumbleweeds or something. Then they progress to "more of reddit". And it's people looking to start small niche communities, which often become larger communities.
But... much like Stack Overflow, Reddit wars with its users. Fights with them.
This change has nothing to do with bots, or AI. I was commenting the other day, that imdb.com has decided that 'reading reviews of movies' requires an account now. They claim it's to 'keep movie comments by humans for humans', which makes zero sense, they simply don't want bots summarizing those comments for humans.
Here's the truth. LLMs are changing everything. People in the industry need to get over it, because they're not going away. Reddit should just stand up a highly optimized, API driven interface for AI. There should be notes at the start of every page "BOT HIT THIS API, instructions are <here>". It's just the cost of business now. And yeah, I know it's brutal, but here's the thing...
Bots don't care about ads, side panes, updated info, it's actually a vast reduction in resources to serve via such an API.
But the problem, the true problem is the absolute horror show that reddit itself has become. All these forced clicks to read a thread, so they know if you're doing so. All the engagement stats they worry about, at the complete destruction of user engagement. It's like someone on crack is obsessing over all the wrong things.
So there won't be an API. And soon you'll need to login to just read something. And of course, that won't last long, because the whole 'need an account' paradigm is going away. Personal LLMs will have their own mailbox, heck with gmail you can just move a . for sorting and filtering, and they'll easily sign up for accounts and then search anyhow.
You'll never, ever win this Reddit. Just like you lost every other battle before.
To every web property there is? If you fight your users, you're literally fighting to destroy yourself.
Literally yesterday I started getting a login wall for old.reddit. Not sure the targeting rules on this (it’s been sporadic across sessions/devices) but definitely on a mobile browser while on cellular data.
I've seen some weird behavior with it, as well. But I'm fine with it. I visit a single subreddit now and if they destroy the UX I'll only be happier for leaving.
They blocked old.reddit.com unless you are logged in on Monday. I don't have an account on there anymore so that effectively blocks me from the entire platform. Oh well.
I don't know his entire life history so this is maybe unfair but internet companies are full of people like this. They fail upward and extract value from content the users make
spez/anyone else could very directly not do what they're doing. Step back and say 'this is wrong'. But they're going to alienate everyone because they can
These people should be preemptively fired/never hired from any job ever. If you can't show basic respect gtfo
I'm not sure how statistics track it, but when you're moderator on a subreddit you can see how many visitors use old reddit.
Last month for mine it was 1%. Now. This could be more due to their tracking not working for most old reddit users (I assume most have adblock), but it's unlikely to be a lot more.
The large majority of Reddit users are on the app. I'm honestly surprised they haven't killed old reddit off yet, and yes, I've used it myself for the longest time until I started missing some features.
I used Old Reddit for a long time, but I could tell the vast majority of users were on the app now, just because the comment culture had changed completely.
For example, posts now draw most of their comments within 30-60 minutes of posting, and then almost no comments thereafter. This is surely due to the app emphasizing continual novelty for the sake of engagement, and anything old is no longer shown. A big difference from before, when posts would draw discussion all day long.
The use of a phone app as a default interface also means comments have become reduced to 140-character quips. If you post a solid paragraph or two on many hobby subreddits, you'll just come across as a weirdo.
As far as I'm aware the big problem they have is that while most of the visitors use new reddit, a very significant chunk of commenters and mods still use old reddit which they can't really afford to lose
I see similar stats too, it really seems like old reddit has died off, I remember when the redesign was newer looking at these stats and old was dominating, so I'm inclined to trust them relatively.
I use a patched version of the last released version of redditisfun. Basically, you grab the AppID from when you install RedReader, authenticate it with your account (they send it to you in an email) and then patch redditisfun using that AppID with ReVanced or Morphe. I've been using redditisfun for like 15 years, not really interested in moving to their official app. All of the legacy features work fine.
Only weird thing is that since RedReader censors all NSFW posts and your RiF is now tied to that API token, you need to make yourself a mod of a subreddit to be able to view anything NSFW. RedReader is the only allowed 3rd party app because it's meant for screen readers. In the past few months, Reddit turned off the ability to make API tokens for that would enable RiF to keep working but they've since changed the policy so they have to approve your request and a 3rd party app is not a good enough reason. Although I see a ridiculous amount of bot spam so clearly their war on API access is not really working that well.
The challenge lies with whether the things you go to reddit (or any other service/product) for are concentrated or exclusively there, such as discussion or information on a particular topic. There's a lot of communities where they've concentrated their resources on a free site and are at the mercy of the whims of the owner, discord is another. Very often there's no simple switch to an alternative without losing a lot, or hoping on the charity of others to spend effort migrating.
You don’t seem to understand. It isn’t about me. Or even people like me. Slowly they kill themselves. It might not even be obvious to people, but they’ll slowly turn away at this or the next thing or the next one after that.
I’ll be here long after Reddit at this rate.
MySpace seemed like the shit until you put Facebook next to it. Does anyone think Reddit is the shit in 2026? And that is without anything put next to it.
Now Facebook is worse than MySpace ever was. A tech company dying has little to do with the quality of the product. Remember, enshittification brings in more money, not less.
The word "the" is doing a lot of work in your last paragraph. I initially missed seeing the word "the", and that changed the meaning entirely for me. Observe:
> MySpace seemed like shit until you put Facebook next to it.
This sentence would be claiming that MySpace was a lousy experience, but Facebook was even worse. Which would make it hard to explain why people jumped ship.
> MySpace seemed like the shit until you put Facebook next to it.
What you actually wrote claimed that MySpace seemed great, but then Facebook was even better. Which makes it easy to explain why people jumped ship.
I don't have an actual point to make about MySpace or Facebook. (I never used MySpace, and only used Facebook once, two decades ago, because the social group I was in at the time was using Facebook as their only means of announcing events — once I moved to a different town I dropped Facebook and closed my account). I just wanted to comment about the grammatical structure of that sentence, because I thought it was fascinating. The word "the" is so often mere filler, which could be omitted and the sentence would still be perfectly understandable. (Hence why many languages, such as Russian, don't have the word "the" at all). But here's a counterexample to that general rule, a sentence where omitting one since instance of the word "the" inverted the meaning.
Yes! You're gonna love Ismo (the Finnish standup who pokes fun at quirks of the English language). This bit^1 on the word "shit" was the first I saw of him online. I've since seen him live and, I guess if you know, you know. Genius.
> This sentence would be claiming that MySpace was a lousy experience, but Facebook was even worse. Which would make it hard to explain why people jumped ship.
I think original[1] Facebook UX was probably fine and clear enough for anyone but I would say that most people didn't jump ship: their first social media use started with facebook. And that was because FB grew bigger and faster, not because people were migrating from Myspace. Myspace has only been mostly limited to teenagers and a small fraction of music artists. Growth just slowed earlier because it never attracted many adults. It grew when people didn't have a smartphone and were not terminally online yet. It was a niche.
The main difference was the paradigm/mental imagery. Myspace was about opening the door to your teenager bedroom with all the posters on the wall and stickers on the workbooks. Facebook was about publishing and reading personal diaries.
[1]no idea how is the current one as I have been without account for 5 years now
Management wanting a thing to be the core value and what the core value is are different. Tumblr didn't hold its shape long enough to hit the ground physically when its new owner did what seemed perfectly reasonable to them.
I won't even go there for search results, as new reddit is unusable to me. Too many clicks to get anywhere. It's quite surprising that so many people seem to have no issue with it.
For years, reddit admins would lie to the faces of users saying those app redirects weren't supposed to prevent browsing the site in a mobile browser. They'd say "weird! looking into it, that shouldn't happen!".
The owners of the site are hostile to the userbase. The new reddit where it doesn't let you read more than 3 comments before redirecting you to other posts is a cancer. Not to mention the ads that are somehow even more finely woven into posts than the old reddit.
It only works if you are authenticated, and if you are authenticated there's a heavy rate limit on it. The unauthenticated one that scrapers used is gone. They also detect if you are using a headless browser vs a regular one in many cases.
They officially started blocking json access awhile ago, it broke all the apps for viewing reddit without an account (RDX, Stealth, Geddit). I'm not sure on the exact details of what is and isn't still accessible, I just know it broke a lot.