If you just reshape shape old.Reddit.com it wouldn’t be a horrible UI/UX. Maybe not great either.
Back button is effectively broken with constant reload of front page. 2 links you wanna read? You need to click around carefully especially on mobile if you don’t want the page to reload and show you a different set of stuff.
I can’t imagine people will tolerate this when they’re forced to use this UI and not their favourite app.
It's also the cards.
Old reddit was designed for a larger monitor (laptop/desktop) and mimics the best design practices on that device over the past couple decades of bulletin board/forum software; makes sense why people like it so much
Design decisions aside, the site performance is horrible. I don't understand why serving content is so difficult. I get they have large scale, but they've also had that for quite a while and employ enough people to solve it if they actually cared enough
In compact mode, they (new/old) have a similar number of posts on the screen (old: 11, new: 9). It has less because the "promoted" has a larger button, one could even argue this makes them stand out more than on old reddit.
I would agree that the lack of link colors make it slightly more annoying to read compact mode on the new one though, compared directly.
Old reddit has 25 posts per page and my screen can fit 14 vertically at once.
Around 2007-08 I read in a(physical) Brazilian web design magazine that you can have two types of design: - for short, ephemeral experience, your design should be striking - the user will just look at the thing once anyway, so you should capture the attention in spite of how ease of navigation. Eg. a website for a rock band tour. - for experiences that will need to be repeated lots of times (eg. using a corporate system, reading the news), you want the design to be boring and predictable.
I think that minimalism has been used to push interfaces that reduce information density - regardless of how the density would be useful in that context!
After the original Material Design video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrT6v5sOwJg the writing was on the wall: if you want to build a google-grade portfolio, create designs that resemble this. After some time users got used to that kind of look and now sites with high density of information look alien.
Layouts with heavy information density (as old.reddit.com) are more user friendly, as you they allow you to just scan the list and be done with it. But are bad for ads.