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Reddit updates look after rough 6 months and ahead of reported IPO
(arstechnica.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Anyone who didn't leave when old.reddit.com stopped being the default isn't going to leave over any other redesigns. They couldn't possibly be worse.
The fall of Digg didn't happen in one single wave.
Lots of people just want to stay with what they're familiar with, and it takes loss of critical mass of content/interaction before they'll look at the door.
It took an annoying girl in Uni, who was like 6 years younger than me, pestering me why I would still used Digg when reddit existed. I finally checked it out and never looked back. Then a couple years later everyone else I knew was on here.
I mean it really was a single wave. V4 or whatever version it was fundamentally changed the way Digg worked in a big way overnight. It wasn't even the same thing anymore. Sure there were some holdovers but it's tough to compare the two like this.
With the exception of third party apps, Reddit still more or less works the same for the average user as it has forever.
Yeah, Digg v4 hit like a shockwave and site traffic plummeted as users immediately flocked to Reddit by the millions. Reddit spent the next week crashing like crazy from the influx of new users and had to temporarily suspend and then limit new user creation and new sub creation for weeks after to handle the strain. It was kind of similar to what happened when everyone rushed over to Lemmy for the first time, but that happened a bit more slowly, over a longer period of time. 
I think there might be another wave when old.reddit.com stops working, a number of people still access it that way, despite it not being well known by the modern reddit audience.
I'm kind of looking forward to that. I don't have an account there anymore, but I still check old.reddit.com because it's quick enough scan the homepage on my phone when I'm waiting on something. Dropping old would help me break that habit very easily.
Agreed, that band-aid needs to be ripped off, because the site is really dead anyway. (It only appears alive because of bots trolling for engagement.)
It really is bad. I ask myself why I even bother every time I look at it. Looking at r/popular now feels more like what looking at r/popular/rising/ used to be, mostly reposted garbage with only the occasional interesting topic, but even those I've usually already seen somewhere else.
Responding to like three of your comments at once. But I used RES since like 2010. Until June I, and I imagine many others, had zero idea what "vanilla" reddit even looked like.
But yes, I only do r/NFL because I haven't found that in fediverse yet. When I'm there and the muscle. Memory kicks in and I click the logo and go to the home it's... Bad....
I've popped in once or twice in the niche communities I used to do. There's activity, but it's stuff I would have called filler posts two years ago. Not bad just... Not good.
Honestly, dark theme is how they got me with that one. Haven't used the site aside from search results since the API changes went live but I like to think I'd leave if a new redesign was worse.