I am not so sure that I agree here. What's interesting about reddit is that it is one site with very different UIs. The official reddit app has a focus on video/images and looks to be in competition with TikTok. old.reddit.com and Apollo are very much text centric apps. From my understand, reddit has a traffic breakdown of 50/50 on the text centric vs. visual centric UIs. With the UIs like Apollo being killed, and old.reddit.com eventually going away as well[0], I think users will genuinely leave as they have killed the text based UIs.

[0] Despite any promises, the writing is on the wall.

Is desktop new Reddit counting as text centric? From what others have said, 3rd party apps and old reddit have relatively low usage.

On the sub I mod, old and new reddit are basically neck and neck with ~10% of traffic. The bulk of traffic comes from apps, but I don't think there's a breakdown in the modtools of 1p vs 3p apps

They killed compact a few months ago, in light of recent events probably to drive people to the "official" apps

Compact was perfect for me and its death really has curtailed my usage of Reddit

Glad you liked it. 13 years ago reddit had an absolutely atrocious mobile experience, and was unusable on my (then new) Motorola Droid (milestone). So it was mostly a labor of "what do I need to browse reddit".

KeyserSosa, reddit's GM at the time and now their CTO, was rather supportive of my development efforts; let me make the crappy little thing I was building an official part of reddit after a conversation on IRC

Some of Twitter's best content creators have given up on it. That combined with blue tick prioritisation and lack of moderation has seen it turn into a cesspit. I don't see why that doesn't happen on Reddit. Sure the people who go to discuss player trades in international sport and doom scroll dank memes will stick around, but a lot of the quality content could evaporate.

How many people have stuck to Mastodon?