I've really loved Reddit's new design. It's very clean and focused. I found their old design to be cluttered and give too much emphasis to clickbait titles over actual content. I frankly wasn't really interested in Reddit until the redesign.
Oh my god I hate the redesign. Not the concept of it, but the execution.
The stacked modals so that less than 1/3 of your screen is used for content. The laughably terrible performance and failure rate when loading comments that don't show on the main thread page. The fact that comments more than 3-4 layers deep can't be expanded on the same page and to see them you have to go to a different page. And when you do that, it saves your vertical scroll position so that they jump you past all the contents you were trying to look at, to where the 'related posts' are. Like honestly how hard is it to build a UI where the comment tree expands in-place?
I honestly think it's the worst engineered site on the internet that operates with that scale of users.
The whole component simply known as "the comments" is terrible, my only theory is that someone is paying them to destructively test mice through needless clicks.
My theory is that they are struggling to monetize a website that is extremely expensive to run and the engineering team is either too small or is forced to spend all of their time trying to develop monetization features.
Are there numbers about the money the make? I think gold brings quite a lot. But otherwise I think (and fear) reddit might be a great influencing tool if done correctly.
