Plus the constant nag to install the app on mobile, and sometimes even downright blocking access and "see in the app". (For now there's still "old." subdomain which works if you enable desktop emulation on mobile, but it can shut down any day).

The fact that "old." still works is a pretty strong indication that the new redesign is to ensure new users will tolerate manipulation while retaining a large portion of the old users. Looking at the ratio of old/new site users is probably a very powerful analytics tool for predicting ad revenue for a given subreddit.

In my occasional interactions on Reddit it seems a very large proportion of users are on the "new" Reddit, the mobile site, or an app. I'm sure it varies by community though (especially ones that heavily use custom CSS and things that don't work on the new site).

Just as one example I can recall, you can do things that are kind of like "quote retweets" with the cross-post feature that don't really make sense on the old site (on "new Reddit" when you crosspost the original post/title are displayed in a little window so you'll see people make titles that are actually commenting on the original post and not on whatever the link actually is). On old Reddit these just show up as links to whatever the original post linked to, but with the "meta-commentary" title. More than once I've encountered one of these with confusion until a comment explained, or I thought to check the tab that shows where else the same link has been posted.

> In my occasional interactions on Reddit it seems a very large proportion of users are on the "new" Reddit, the mobile site, or an app.

Same. And many of them message me directly via chat when they have a question about a subreddit I moderate. Chat which I check about every two months, which is for some reason fully distinct from both the regular messaging functionality (which to be fair, is very well hidden) and the two methods of contacting the moderators.

i.reddit.com is mobile-optimized while still having the old.reddit.com sensibilities.

TIL!

I don't think a SPA is the problem, in fact a well-made (end to end) SPA should be faster after an initial, cacheable load. It's the fact that it isn't well-made and it's bloated with god knows what.

I agree.

old.reddit.com + RES is still the best Reddit experience.

by FAR

The entire field of front-end engineering needs to take a step back and think about the user instead of overengineering every problem and constantly changing things just to justify their job existing.

As a front-end engineer I don't feel any pressure to justify my job. The issue of "constantly changing things" tends to be completely out of our hands, so work is pretty abundant.

That said, I agree with you in principal. In this field I feel like I'm constantly fighting to keep the code simple and lean, while others think it's okay to import an entire bloated library just to make a button shine a certain way.

If you look at the past 30 years of frontend, I don't think you'd find a place where you would want to pause the change. The IE 6 era? The Flash era? The jQuery era?

fwiw, I use a third party app, and can't really imagine using the web-based interface or their official app.