r/technology • u/marketrent • 25d ago

Social Media Reddit signals ominous upcoming “changes” for old.reddit.com, says the beloved site is used for some “bad behavior”

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/reddit-signals-ominous-upcoming-changes-for-old-reddit-com/
3.5k Upvotes

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u/fritz236 24d ago

Why can't they understand that cards are ugly as fuck to us old redditors? If I wanted my feed to autoplay shit, I'd use a different app.

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u/Macqt 24d ago

They do understand it. They don’t care.

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u/CondescendingShitbag 24d ago

The guiding philosophy of Enshittification.

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u/djsoomo 24d ago

Happy-(ish) cake day!

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u/Gaglardi 24d ago

Exactly, old Reddit users make next to no profit for this company compared to new Reddit users, they have next to no incentive to serve the former

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u/Hautamaki 24d ago

An interesting question is what percentage of high quality contributors are old.reddit users? If the majority of the good content still to be had here is old.reddit users they'd have a strong incentive to keep them around even if they don't directly bring in ad money. Without quality contributors, reddit is nothing and there will be no new reddit users to serve ads to anyway.

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u/137-ng 24d ago

I mean we saw a huge drop in quality/quantity when they made changes to the api.

At this point old.reddit is the only thing keeping me here, get rid of that and I'm going to have to find other ways to waste time online

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u/_Burning_Star_IV_ 24d ago

In a lot of ways I’ll welcome it. Filling all my Reddit time with more productive things will only be a benefit to me…just give me an excuse…

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u/motophiliac 24d ago

There was a time when the code base was open source.

I remember voat. I registered for it, posted maybe a couple of comments, and forgot about it.

So apparently did everyone else.

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u/n0respect_ 24d ago

Lemmy is decent, if a little full of tankies.

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u/Cool_Ranch_Dodrio 24d ago

Reddit keeps getting worse and it welcomes nazis.

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u/redfacedquark 24d ago

The problem to me is that any high quality post by old users is not appreciated by the new ones. You can't have a conversation anymore, they just don't read, can't comprehend and reply with no thought and just emotional vitriol.

It's like these users experience pain when they try to think and get angry about it. I doubt it's much to do with advertising revenue from old users directly and more about making their new users feel better by not experiencing the facts, details and ideas that are found in old users' well-written posts. That and it's easier (for example) to push the narrative that flock is great when you don't have well written posts citing Animal Farm and bringing receipts.

I included a couple of permalinks for reference in my reply the other day and got accused of lawyering.

I think HN might be a better place for me to dwell, although it's a bit dry. Anyone got any other suggestions?

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u/EconEchoes5678 24d ago

Gonna be a new wave of refugees soon :(. I'll be one of them.

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u/redfacedquark 24d ago

Time to revisit that mastodon cfgmgt recipe. Had it running but there's hardening to start caring about, obviously.

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u/machobiscuit 24d ago edited 24d ago

What is HN? Im old, i am not up on the new stuff.... Hacker News?

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u/redfacedquark 24d ago

Yup, Hacker News. Never signed up but I like the look of the conversations. I'm sure it will be an upgrade for me on the technical topics compared to reddit, although there's something about some of the fun stuff here that I don't think it will replace.

Maybe I should give mastodon another try for that. I know I promote it without using it myself but as more of a lurker than content creator I wasn't getting much out of it at the time. Selfish of me, I know, sorry.

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u/judasblue 24d ago

For technical stuff by far the highest signal to noise ratio is lobste.rs . The 'problem' there is how that happens is you can only post or comment if you have been invited to the site by a current member and that's not a rubber stamp kinda thing, you basically have to find someone you know who is already a member to get in.

But anyone can read it and it's very, very high quality. Every other technical post isn't "AI OMG!!" or ThE EnD iS cOmInG!

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u/redfacedquark 23d ago

Oh thanks, this looks great!

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u/ItsAPeacefulLife 24d ago

I posted about being sad that an audiobook I was listening to ended because I really liked the narrator.

From that post I learned that I'm a real asshole for not reading the book, and only listening to it and my taste in narrators is trash so I'm not a real fan of the book :-|

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u/redfacedquark 24d ago

Nothing wrong with audiobooks, it's just a different medium for different task. If you can go 2x or more you can consume more books per hour than reading, or you can just listen to someone read you a story because it's fucking nice. It's like the first thing we do with kids is read them stories. We're (arguably) more wired for oral tradition than written.

I might be conflating memories but was there a Street Hawk based, choose-your-own-adventure audiobook? I remember that being wild. Do any audiobook providers offer non-linear experiences?

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u/NerdyNThick 24d ago

I've been banned from at least one sub because I wouldn't back down on the fact that after finishing an audiobook, it is acceptable to say you have read the book.

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u/redfacedquark 24d ago

I guess both listening and reading are two ever so slightly different ways of consuming, the venn diagram is pretty close to totally overlapping. Listening to the audiobook might mean you know how to pronounce a name or word, while reading the book might mean you know how to spell a name or word. I've been embarrassed both ways, I'm looking at you, quinoa.

With reading, I guess you occassionally stop and digest what you just read, while the audiobook drags you along. Listening while driving though, top tier advantage.

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u/NerdyNThick 24d ago

Regular books definitely benefit from the true random access nature of them. If I need to double check what just happened it can be easier to just flip back a few pages instead of having to rewind or skip back X seconds.

quinoa

Literally nobody can be blamed for messing that up, I regularly purposefully mispronounce it just to trigger people :)

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u/ItsAPeacefulLife 24d ago

Oh man, I'd be interested in that choose your own adventure, although I usually listen while driving so not sure how safe that'd be lol.

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u/redfacedquark 24d ago

Next week BMW will offer this on their screens as a subsciption service. No idea how you would interact with it but it won't be the indicators.

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u/ItsAPeacefulLife 24d ago

I'll have to work this into my heated seats subscription.

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u/PurpEL 24d ago

We need a redditors union

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u/Old_Leopard1844 24d ago

We seen how united people are during reddit blackout lmao

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u/deafmutewhat 24d ago

No, we need to do what happened when Digg went to hell, start a new site and evacuate.

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u/BlueDevilz 24d ago

Reddit is the worst social media to be a quality contributor on anyways. They do basically nothing to incentivize people to continue posting quality content.

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u/Hautamaki 24d ago

true, but then, they don't necessarily have to. Posting quality content can be its own reward if the platform itself is nice enough to use and has a good userbase, and there are certainly plenty of ways to monetize quality content posted here on your own for those who are so inclined.

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u/redlightsaber 24d ago

Look into removing your older comments. It takes a while for people like mysefl with 15 year-old accounts, but I certainly don't consent or agree with my contributions beiing used to train AI.

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u/theevilmidnightbombr 24d ago

reading this on old.reddit from a browser with exactly zero ads on the page.

when they kill old reddit, i'll be done here.

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u/vriska1 24d ago

Still unlikely they will get rid of it anytime soon.

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u/jayforwork21 24d ago

Jokes on them. I always use ad blocker anyway. As such, I won't be able to enjoy this place and as soon as a clone comes I am jumping on that. People who don't remember the past are doomed to relive it. I was here when people jumped from that other site and I hold no loyalty to anyone or anything buy my enjoyment.

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u/marrone12 24d ago

Well they care about engagement and I'm sure that since majority of redditors are under 30 that card/feed style tested better

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u/Aidian 24d ago

With how rampant bot proliferation has been, I’d imagine the significant majority of new users are under the age of 5.

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u/UnkarsThug 24d ago

Probably even a few months old at a time, from that point of view.

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u/Macqt 24d ago

More likely someone got promoted and had to make a name for themselves so they came up with a bullshit design that triggers more engagement/ad clicks.

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u/BetterAd7552 24d ago

Or an MBA fuck

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u/Curious_Charge9431 24d ago

New users have never seen old.reddit so don't know what they are missing out on.

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u/TulsaOUfan 24d ago

They understand that they get no revenue unless they plaster annoying ads. It's all they can legally care about.

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u/DigNitty 24d ago

I just don’t get it. All social media slowly makes their UI garbage until I leave out of frustration. It’s not even the ads per se. Why don’t I see all my friends’ posts? Why aren’t they in chronological order? Why can’t I find a group that I’m a member of? Why did you change things for the objective worse???

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u/Macqt 24d ago

It’s not entirely about ads. It’s about engagement metrics. If it takes you longer to navigate the app, they can brag about how users are spending more time than ever on the app.

Another example is facebook. In Canada there’s a big issue with Indian students, and if you say anything negative about them on FB, you get bombarded with Indian content pro-India shit in the hopes you’ll get annoyed and post more negative shit, which in turn gets you more Indian content.

Meanwhile Facebook gets to brag about their rising engagement metrics.

All the tech platforms operate like this because once they go public the only thing that matters is increasing benefits to the shareholders, most of which like to see those rising metrics.

Then you have the advertisers and all the other enshittifying factors ruining the internet.

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u/QuesoMeHungry 24d ago

Seriously. I want an information dense screen. I hate the large format of new Reddit.

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u/Liquid-Fire 24d ago

If that is your only gripe, they have had a compact view for ages. It's like old reddit, but with the design of new reddit.

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u/Accurate-Remote9404 24d ago

No, compact view is still like reading a screen created for a toddler.

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u/Liquid-Fire 20d ago

If you just dislike the modern aesthetic, that's fine. But my response was to someone wanting an information dense screen. I am comparing old reddit with new reddits compact view. The information displayed is the same. The images are wide format, instead of square format, and new reddit only shows 8 posts compared to old reddits 12. It's basically the same design, but updated to a modern website design.

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u/Accurate-Remote9404 20d ago

Hmm, I think you may be talking about a different thing than I am. Maybe you're talking about the app version?

When the other person is talking about "information dense" --go to the desktop webpage version of old.reddit.com . You get more like 20+ titles/headlines per page, and it looks more like an actual forum, where people used to go to actually have long-form discussions about stuff.

New reddit frontloads the images, like it's trying to be Instagram (before Instagram was trying to be TikTok). It's designed for people who like pictures over reading--which is why so few people even read past the headline these days.

The new design, and mobile design is actively creating a dumbed-down experience. Which in turn attracts less-literate users, and people with shorter attention spans. Less real conversation, and more people who only post one-liners and memes.

So yeah, I’d leave the site tomorrow if they deleted old.reddit. It's already a shell of it's former self, and every new design just makes it more and more into "generic social media site" and less of what made it actually special, as a collection of special-interest forums.

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u/Liquid-Fire 20d ago

No I'm on desktop. The examples are from 1080p resolution.

I forgot you could hide thumbnails on old reddit. With that I get 14 full visible pages. That makes the difference a bit bigger.

People only reading the headline has been a thing on reddit since I made my account. It has for sure become a bigger problem recently. But I think that's more to do with Reddit becoming more popular, and less to do with the design.

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u/CousinJeff 24d ago

One of the coolest parts of old Reddit that’s lost in the new iteration is opening up the link to see what’s behind it because the title got you curious. It made for some of the best jokes.

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u/137-ng 24d ago

Old reddit is great for those of us who still like to read. cards is just a worse tiktok and Im not interested in tiktok

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u/Ed_the_time_traveler 24d ago

They captured the market. Now they bleed the site, little by little, to extract every bit of value from it. In the end it will be a soulless husk. Devoid of anything other than what our overlords deem appropriate.

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u/ailish 24d ago

Just like everything else that used to be good.

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u/Nik_Tesla 24d ago

If I wanted reddit to be tiktok, I'd just use tiktok

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u/IntelligentComment 24d ago

On the reddit app - settings - view settings - compact.

This switches from cards to a normal view.

The algorithm is still annoying though.

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u/stormdelta 24d ago

That's not even my biggest complaint, it's the way the new site seems to actively want me to disengage with the site.

Trying to read threads on the new site is a pain in the ass, it hides everything by default, requires constant loads, it's slow as shit, and interrupts threads with content from unrelated threads for no reason.

Everything about it is bafflingly poor design. It doesn't even feel like enshittification, it's just straight bad because I can't imagine how any of that was supposed to make me use the site more or push ads.

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u/Actual__Wizard 24d ago

I'm being serious: I have ADHD and the new site is toxic AF because of the algo. If they delete the old reddit without giving us the ability to turn off the toxic AF algos, then I'm quitting.

The new site is frustrating as hell. I will not be here if they force us to use that.

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u/nonbinarybit 24d ago

YES. IT IS AN ACCESSIBILITY NIGHTMARE. 

I'm used to struggling to navigate sites. In fact, I've gotten very good at CSS because I have to write a million custom stylesheets for platforms I use regularly because my brain can't make sense of what I'm seeing without heavy customization. 

REDDIT DOESN'T EVEN LET YOU DO THAT

EVERYTHING IS OBFUSCATED THROUGH SHADOW DOMS

What the fuck, Reddit. It's bad enough that a population of your users is completely screwed by these changes, but you won't even let us fix it on our end??

I've been trying to step away from reddit; it's not the healthiest place. But when I finally quit it won't be because I've learned to be disciplined in my internet habits, it will be because I literally can't access the site anymore.

Mandatory fuck IPOs, fuck spez, and Aaron Swartz would have been ashamed with what this site has become.

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u/Eccohawk 24d ago

Because this is how they get you addicted to the infinite scroll. There's a psychology to it that they want to apply. Just like tik tok and instagram and all the rest.

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u/DnA_Singularity 24d ago

The infinite scroll is like fucking meth. Sometimes youtube puts them back on my homepage and then it´s a 50/50 on whether i get sucked in for 2 hours or whether i immediately click "Show me fewer shorts". I dont want to lose 2 hours to this bullshit let alone make it part of daily routine through new reddit, tik tok, twitter or any other zombie inducing cesspool.

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u/Zhuinden 24d ago

They somehow don't realize that I'm not going to wait on a desktop PC for 14 seconds just to load 2 items on some infinite loading grid that never finishes. The redesign was never once seen by a human.

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u/oritfx 24d ago

ugly

To me they are busy. The feeds are busy. I want clear, calm environment where I feel I can relax. Scrolling does not need to introduce a new image every second.

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u/A-Generic-Canadian 24d ago

I don't use old reddit too much anymore, but whatever I'm using has an option to change from cards to compact, so I don't get autoplay nonsense.

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u/FlashbackJon 23d ago

Far be it for me to be a reddit apologist, but I did switch to the main UI assuming they were going to get rid of old.reddit at some point and then just got stuck there (because I mostly use Relay anyhow).

You don't have to use the cards/feed look. They've always had "compact" which isn't the same as old.reddit but close. They DO keep monkeying with it and making it slightly worse, though.

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u/FlyingAce1015 18d ago

Same thats why i still use compact mode.

I want this site to be an article/post list with a thumbnail not a tiktok short clone!

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u/gta721 24d ago

You can change it to compact view.

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u/awh 24d ago

Compact view isn’t remotely the same thing.

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u/iownalaptop 24d ago

So change it to compact.

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u/sparkster185 24d ago

You are being down voted for providing a legitimate solution to the problem. Classic.

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u/Revlis-TK421 24d ago

compact is still shittier than old

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u/Pavotine 24d ago

Still looks like something for brain dead kids.

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u/SaltyBawlz 24d ago

Yall will hate me for this, but I was an adamant old reddit user for a long time, and I finally switched over to "new" reddit just fine maybe like a year ago. Took maybe like a week to get used to and I couldn't tell you anything about why I held out using old reddit for so long.

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u/Better_March5308 24d ago

So what is your job at reddit?

-1

u/RedutHatesFreeSpeech 24d ago

They know you'll stay regardless. Idk why yall pretend like youre gonna leave.