It's better for them, not necessarily for you.

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.

It's sanding down a barrier to entry that was already fairly low, in my opinion. They haven't really made it much lower either.

Integrating RES into the main site would've been most of what they needed to get going...

imo the killer feature of RES is that it makes it extremely easy to manage arbitrarily many sockpuppet accounts. there are other nice features of course, but the ease of managing multiple accounts always stood out as one of the biggest perks to me.

in the current political climate, it's not hard to see why reddit might be cautious about implementing such features. of course, the real reason might just be that most reddit users don't even have one account to manage.

They aren't going to care about what anybody on HN has to say about it because we aren't the audience they are after.

They need hundreds of millions of new users and those have to come from Facebook and probably on mobile.

> and probably on mobile.

The site isn't mobile-friendly though, is it?

It's slow, bloated, and has repeated interstitials demanding you get their app if you deign to use mobile.

There is an old mobile interface which is very quick and also easy to use.

https://i.reddit.com/