The new profile pages and the reddit mobile site also load/behave very slowly. It's really annoying when I land on a reddit link through mobile and have to watch their splash animation while their crap pile loads.

Twice! One animated logo for the subreddit banner, one for the posts underneath.

Seriously. Though that means the Reddit killer is lurking in the waiting.

I vote for some type of legit upvotw downvote system backed by a legitimate crypto currency. It would stop lots of the spam, though leave it more open for financial manipulation.

Would be interesting though to see people actually making a living by being active members of the community.

Steem is almost exactly this: https://steemit.com/trending

As you could imagine it has a rather heavy bent towards cryptocurrency-related posts at the moment, and the pushy salesman vibe I get from nearly all the popular posts there is extremely off-putting (the monetary incentive will inevitably attract these types of people), but I think the idea has potential.

I know a pretty heavy user of that site and when it first emerged, some were making thousands USD (in the Steem currency) when others upvoted their posts (though there's a slightly convoluted method/timeline for accessing all earnings).

Anyway, the amounts have since slowed, but it's still a pretty active community. There are, however, quite a few schemes around some version of paying people to upvote posts, which is surprisingly allowed. Overall, it's an interesting concept but seems unsustainable over the long-term.

It's the constant pressure from VC's for better monetization. One of the features being discussed on the thread over on Reddit that is planned to be introduced is a location-based front page. This will make targeted ads by location an easier product for Reddit to sell and mine data from.

And many many users will leave, as they did with Digg. It's too large and lowest common denominator already, and a major redesign will be the impetus for a brain drain as all users will have a shared gripe. HN is a very likely spillover target, and already is for a lot of the programmer focused discussion that used to be Reddits core user base. I've watched so many communities die from monetization, the cycle really writes itself.

Eventually even HN will get too bloated and need to fracture.

I used to use 99% reddit, now it's 50% HN, 50% reddit. Reddit is too full of crap, except for specific subreddits.

I definitely think there is a risk. However, reddit is much larger now than Digg was then. And reddit existed as a clear alternative to Digg at the time of the redesign.

I think there's a very real risk of a redesign going wrong, but it may be large enough and better enough than alternatives to weather the storm.

"Better enough" is a funny thing when it comes to redesigns, because all the previous routes to value that are ingrained into your brain are now gone, or look funny/different. Thats why I predict a brain drain as people pick up and realize it really doesn't do much for them anymore.

Ugh. I've become the product.

Necessary or not squeezing more profit out of the site is going to drive many people away I saw it we all saw it with digg and slashdot.

I can even hear "Let's try for 5% growth next year!"

Then if there is no growth the cuts begin from the bottom up to protect the executives. Be warned! First they will come for the lunchroom coffee creamers...