They don't care about their users, they trapped people in and people aren't migrating to alternatives in droves.

More importantly they serve ads and capture all of the revenue from them

Time for a reverse Digg exodus.

I thank them for that, because forcing me back to their horrid app broke me of my habit of hanging out there.

I’ve got six digits of karma, and I’d rather walk away than suffer through its awful UI.

As a none user; what is a karma? Fantasy points?

Yes. It’s profile points. You earn one per upvote on your content. Just like here on HN

Excuse you, it's nothing like that. These fake internet points mean something real and tangible. Those fake internet points are just made up nonsense. (Heavy sarcasm)

Same. Only thing that ever managed to break me of my reddit habit. No 3rd party apps? Reddit may as well no longer exist as far as I'm concerned.

Welcome back to reddit! There is a third party app called Red Reader, it's free.

https://www.reddit.com/r/RedReader/

Lol, not only do I not want to jump back into that pit after having already climbed out, the site is entirely infested with AI bots now. So thanks but no thanks. It's a pretty worthless site now.

Nah. I’m not going to kick that habit twice.

They are doing everything they can to increase number of users before IPO.

Redit from a text based place, became a place driven by pictures (Can we call that "instagrami-zation"?).

The thing, is that discussion is what made reddit good. Now it's mostly low quality pictures, bots and comments written by marketers.

Then AI models and google search are trained on this garbage.

I wonder if someone will finally disrupt reddit

They’ve already IPOed.

I disagree, I think the new layout and the app are bad for Reddit power users. But for someone brand new to Reddit today they work fine.

And that’s the point. They care about boosting their user base, not satisfying power users.

Sigh, power user doesn't mean the individual is an alien with some quirky taste. Oh, the contrary. It means someone who has a wider spectrum and those who are not power users are still on the spectrum, but theirs is shorter, but overlap with the PU's. So if it is good for the power users it is almost always good for the rest of the world. Let that sink in.

Let's take an example: if there are several images, you click on the "next" button (keys do not work!) several times, and if you are not careful, the last click gets you a full-screen image, because the button has disappeared and clicking in the same place now magnifies the image.

How is that "fine".

In the mobile app, even swiping from the left edge to go back doesn't work reliably.

Not all third-party readers, the for-profit ones.

Red Reader still exists.

https://www.reddit.com/r/RedReader/

I believe they're full aware of all of these things, & they simply don't care because they know that millions of people will continue to use Reddit in spite of all this.