A more 'friendly' UI attracts people who don't have much of note to say, will consume what they're given, and respond to ads more.
That's a weird sort of elitism. Friendly UIs attract everyone, isn't that what a friendly UI means?
One of the issues with reddit's redesign is that they made it more 'friendly' by introducing more media inline. If you have a site that allows for discussion of any topic like reddit, but optimizes for gigantic pictures and animations and by default your feed is filled with content that is more suited for that (eg, things like cat pictures), then you're absolutely going to attract a different audience than a utilitarian pure text site. People who just want to scroll through a feed of cat pictures are going to spend their time on a site optimized for it.
Of course, there is overlap in interests and you'll find a lot of people who'd prefer a utilitarian site to also occasionally like scrolling through cat pictures, but it seems clear to me that the shape of the ui will cause a divergence and overall different culture on a given site. A better example for this than reddit is probably imgur -- you're almost certainly not going there for intellectual discussion, right?
I think the contention here is the word friendly being a proxy for less information density and for a larger number of images / video.
Some people would rather eat at an expensive restaurant where the host with a fake french accent turns away underdressed plebs.
I'd characterize it as "text-dense" vs "spacy and image/video oriented".
The second is more immediate, it takes less concentration, so it attracts more people and more information that's not very meaningful.
By keeping things text-only, you keep the information more meaningful.
They bought AlienBlue - a 3rd party app, that they now claim shouldn't now exist, and should never have existed.
It's seemed like that for years. They've had strong reasons to develop the site for years. The two main things they've done are build an app for phones and spend a relatively long time creating a "new" UI that changes the look of the site and provides more advertising space but has no major changes to the way the site works.
It's like they don't have any idea how to actually develop the site, and they're limited to doing window dressing.