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Comment by s_dev | Hacker News Reader

As long as redditors can choose between the designs I don't see a problem. Once this choice is removed though they've veered in to Digg territory. All the power users and influencers will use the old design because they're used to it. I can see why reddit wants a redesign -- reddit is ugly but people are used to it that way and grew to like it. The redesign is for new users.

Reddit has already been down this path with Pao. If they don't like how the site is being run they will depart or revolt.

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> The redesign is for new users

And I suspect bigger, more visible ads/paid content

The paid content is definitely way worse (more insidious) in the new design): it blends in far more, and equally as bad is that a lot of it seems to be just using those trash fb-esque style clickbait titles.

Reddit's not perfect, but trash-tier clickbait titles is not something I'm accustomed to seeing on there, nor do I want to.

They could have made the ads more visible without adding a million frameworks.

> As long as redditors can choose between the designs I don't see a problem.

Even if they intend to keep the old design available forever (very unlikely), it means that they now have the same number of developers supporting twice as much UI. So obviously that means they will not be able to deliver bug fixes as rapidly, etc.

Any good tl;dr on what happened between Ellen Pao and reddit? I didn't follow the story when it was playing out.

She closed some long running hatefests like fatpeoplehate and took the fall for the very controversial firing of an employee, which later turned out to be Ohanian's decision.

She basically opened the floodgates for banning subreddits Reddit doesn't like. Up until the ban of fatpeoplehate, the only subreddits that would get banned were CP related or based around doxing.

Now pretty much anything is on the table.

>Now pretty much anything is on the table.

Not really. The_Donald hasn't been banned even though Reddit doesn't like it. They have kind of hidden it though.

They shut down a huge number of firearm/alchohol/tobacco related subreddits in the last month, many of which were very mature and welcoming communities, without any warning they they were going to do this to the moderators.

Places like r/beerswap and r/pipetobaccomarket, which allowed users to swap product unavailable in their local areas.

Now the moderators of big subreddits like r/pipetobacco are organizing alternative websites for their users to go to, before the inevitably get banned without warning for not aligning with Reddit's new image.

The current events are most likely motivated by legal concerns, and have nothing to do with the decision to shut down hate subs, and happened a long time after Pao left.

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