New Reddit is for ads. If you turn off adblock and compare old and new, you'll probably notice that there's more prime screen space for "recommended" content with media support.
There's still the sidebar carried over from old that can be used for basic media ads and the banner for sponsored posts.
In-feed sponsored posts are also a carry over, but the new feed has fully expanded thumbnails instead of mostly text which allows for autoplaying media ads (which is one of the most profitable ad formats). Old in-feed ads are primarily text.
New homepage has the trending thumbnails up top which works well with the same ad format as the sidebar.
New comments section truncates comments and has more fully expanded thumbnail recommended content below, which is another placement for in-feed ads.
Awards are much more prominently displayed everywhere, which is another monetization feature since they can be bought or earned from advertising.
The technical currently unrealized benefit with all the constant rerenders is the ability to bypass adblock rules by dynamically changing the underlying layout until the ad renders successfully.
Of course the web version being bad to funnel people into first party Reddit apps also helps their advertising angle because you can't easily adblock in app and 3rd party Reddit apps don't render ads.
The design is driven by engagement, growth, and ad sales.
Old Reddit wouldn't have cared if you left the site to read an interesting linked article. The new one does everything it can do get you to stay on the site, or better, install and never leave the app.
Judge this through the lens of the bigger picture. See their endgame and how it may not be in line with your expectations.
The redesign was quite obviously introduced for the express purpose of monetization. In the old UI, ads can only take up so much space. The 3rd link down from the list (which is typically the link where promoted content is placed) in old.reddit takes up perhaps 7% of total available screen space. In the new UI, users are forced to look at full screen advertisements, which advertisers are willing to pay a lot more $$ for.
Its not just advertisements its getting a useable site at all. The new style reddit is terrible. It takes forever to load. When you read comments they start to crop so narrow that it not only puts in dozens of line breaks it will put the break in the characters of words. Old.reddit.com in comparison loads pages in a tenth the time and shows all the comments as you’d expect. Luckily that still works or I’d fully abandon the site.
I actually like New Reddit, except for the advertising.
Design is much more responsive now, I'll give it that. Lots and lots of huge photographic headers. Hamburger menus? I'm guessing that is the name for the 3-line icon? They were pretty new in 2013 on mobile sites on my iPhone 5. And the 3-dot thing for "extra" options ... I don't remember that existing back then.
There is a reduction in information density.. some of it is warranted by an increase in white space which is good. A lot of sites now have super-intrusive advertising posted all the way through the copy, which wasn't common in 2013.
The sheer amount of data I burn through just browsing the Web.. that's a huge change. Even my mobile plan with 100GB of data gets burned in no time just browsing around. Sites are so, so heavy now. I saw that post yesterday about Discord having an enormous favicon file and so I can see that people just gave up trying to trim their code. I look at some HTML source now and I lose my shit because it is literally megabytes of bullshit. People were more careful with their code in my time.
One weird thing is that my brain doesn't know it is 2021 yet. I saw a show the other day where a woman said her son was born in 2011 and I did the maths and my brain said her son was two years old. This happens to me constantly. It's like my brain stopped counting time as soon as I entered the jail.
I felt puzzled by Reddit's redesign until I started using the mobile app. Then as I was just scrolling and scrolling infinitely, just seeing what it would offer me next -- THAT is when I think I understood what the new Reddit interface was likely optimizing for.
To be honest, I actually don't mind that so much. The thing that annoys me about Reddit is the whole ads-that-look-like-posts thing.
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.
In old Reddit you open the link, see the content, and close the tab. New Reddit is heavier, slower, more aggressive towards requiring an account, specially on mobile.
Reddit wants lots of growth (they are taking new money now I think) and that means lots of new users that don't know the old UI. The new one is designed with those users in mind, not ones that know the site inside and out already.
Better off for the user but no doubt worse off for corporate profits. The redesign seems to be clearly better at inserting adverts and tracking the user. They also seem to be making a big effort to remove 3rd party links. These days most reddit posts are links to reddit hosted content or are news articles where no one reads the article.
Given how aggressively reddit push their terrible no good very bad interface, I figure there has to be some advantage to them to my using it? I don't know what that could be, maybe users struggling to use the new interface looks like engagement to ads?
The Reddit iOS app and mobile redesign are improvements from past UX. In app media seems to also be better than the past link outs. And the ads have overall gotten better and less intrusive feeling.
There's still the sidebar carried over from old that can be used for basic media ads and the banner for sponsored posts.
In-feed sponsored posts are also a carry over, but the new feed has fully expanded thumbnails instead of mostly text which allows for autoplaying media ads (which is one of the most profitable ad formats). Old in-feed ads are primarily text.
New homepage has the trending thumbnails up top which works well with the same ad format as the sidebar.
New comments section truncates comments and has more fully expanded thumbnail recommended content below, which is another placement for in-feed ads.
Awards are much more prominently displayed everywhere, which is another monetization feature since they can be bought or earned from advertising.
The technical currently unrealized benefit with all the constant rerenders is the ability to bypass adblock rules by dynamically changing the underlying layout until the ad renders successfully.
Of course the web version being bad to funnel people into first party Reddit apps also helps their advertising angle because you can't easily adblock in app and 3rd party Reddit apps don't render ads.
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