Designers from San Francisco, that's who. Current design trends favor "negative space", so text has to be spaced widely, with huge margins and hairsbreadth-thin fonts.

Negative space is always useful. Simply spacing shit out to create low information density isn't the same thing. Adding a bunch of unnecessary dividers (cards and shadows) are definitely not the same thing as negative space.

Negative space would be allowing the space between items to create a division instead of the borders and shadows.

You forgot to mention the very low cost, especially for font because we gotta hide that pesky content that we have to show after all.

Images (even small, low-quality ones) are far more costly than text, no?

The saying "Form follows function." is well ingrained among industrial designers, UI designers ought consider it as well.

Although my assumption here is front end designers are often subjected to death by a thousand revisions from 'the suits'.

Yeah but the action of maneuvering through the content is fleeting. Rather than squinting and parsing a whole bunch of stuff - you're just filtering as you move down the page. I do the same exact thing on HN. It's just that I can be lazy with the affordance of a large screen.

Also, reddit is different as a consumption medium, rather than news aggregator. With reddit, you consume. With HN, you peruse.

And yet they already have just what you want, why are they wasting time re-inventing it!

http://reddit.com/.compact

Http://i.reddit.com is the same as adding ".compact" to a link.

I also don't understand the redesign. The old version is way better then the new version, but I guess it just does not look flat and material enough.

As a major point in their favour, at least they kept the old version. They could have just redesigned the webpage and put it on i.reddit.com. Instead I can keep using the same good old layout while those who want can use the new m.reddit.com.

That's more than I can say for many, many other things, where whether I like it or not I'm forced to have the latest design fad (flat, pastel colours, long and inefficient animations and huge, unnecessary padding nowadays) shoved down my throat.

I know nothing about this, but there's a flag on https://m.reddit.com that says "Beta", and on https://i.reddit.com there's a link to "try the beta", so I think it remains to be seen whether the old version is still available when m gets out of beta.

I don't like the new http://m.reddit.com/

Try this my redesign reddit. http://reddit.premii.com/ I hope reddit does something like this, and let user configure layout for each subreddit.

I like the design, but why is there a nav bar? I browse reddit a lot in horizontal view and the navbar just takes very important space away.

I am assuming you are on Android.

iPhone doesn't have a hardware back button, and most people don't know you can navigate back by swiping.

I will add tracking in http://hn.premii.com/ to see how many user uses in landscape mode vs portrait.

Hiding navbar in the landscape mode is an option.

I love i.reddit. When they take that away (and I expect they eventually will), I will probably use reddit a lot less.