Their efforts this year to make the desktop site look and work more like 9gag unless you plug "old.reddit.com" into the url bar was pretty fun too.
It's been for the best though. It's helped me cut my time on that site down to almost nothing, which has improved my overall mood quite a bit.
Annoying AF & pretty sure it's not accidental
I've used reddit for almost a decade at this point. What makes the new changes similar to 9gag?
I disliked the redesign for 5 minutes, after getting used to the modal behavior I would not want to go back to the old reddit site.
Hallmark of something designed to be additive is generating short term euphoria and a depressed baseline mood.
I used to have the Reddit is Fun app installed, which works really well. The problem was that I spent way too much on time on reddit. When I realized this shortly after the new mobile page was released, I uninstalled the app and now use reddit from the browser. The experience is much worse, but this means that I don't open reddit all the time, and thus my time spent on it was reduced to a moderate amount.
When they rolled out their "new" interface they provided a link to "old reddit.com", but clicking this took you back to the reddit home page, not the page you are on.
They fixed this for subreddits but it still happens for posts, so if you are at a post and click "old reddit" you don't get the same post in old reddit, you just lose the post. (which is available, just replacing www.reddit with old.reddit gets you there, and it did at one point work that way).
No doubt they have some metric to reduce people viewing in old.reddit.com but it's very hostile the way they have done this.
Another change toward the dark: On their sign up page they used to advertise that you could sign up without an email address so you could remain anonymous. I can no longer work out how to sign up without providing an email address. (Although they don't validate, I would rather not provide false information).
If you're not logged in and open up reddit.com on mobile, the first thing you will notice is a footer asking for you to open in their app, and your choices are "No", or a prominent "Continue" [1].
So if you click no, you're still not done, not even halfway on their dark pattern for getting you to install their app. When you now try to open a post it will stop the page, darken it and ask you to again open it in the app [2]. Now "Continue" means continuing to seeing the post so you click that.
Okay after twice as many clicks as necessary and 2 prompts you're finally looking at a Reddit post, but you're still not done! When you load in the post you will see a huge bottom footer _again_ asking you to open it up in the app [3]. And now you have the two choices and the worst dark pattern of all. You see a huge "Continue" button, which now means continue to open it in the app, or a really small link that says "or go to the mobile site". The thing is, is that you are already on the mobile site, and clicking that link just removes the footer, you won't actually "go" anywhere... So here they are tricking people to thinking that clicking continue will let you keep looking at the post as normal (as they taught you on the previous prompt), and by clicking the the small tiny link that is easy to miss, you will be brought to somewhere else. But the case is actually the opposite.
Reddits mobile page is just the worst collection of dark patterns I know of, in line with the fake download buttons littering shady sites. It's almost unusable now, and I'm sure that is their intention. Make the mobile website experience so horrible that you are forced to download their app so you don't have to spend half your time clicking away prompts.
1: https://i.imgur.com/fYqabnx.png
2: https://i.imgur.com/DuuzSvD.png
3: https://i.imgur.com/qQ4lAIM.png