Lots of folks prefer "Old Reddit".
I'm continually reminded of how 4chan is still a thing.
We admire bare bones web design, spartan blogs, and archeological finds from the 90's web that are still around.
You don't need a design team to build something useful that people will consume.
I'm presently grocery-shopping in another tab, and I am continually amazed at what a terrible UX I put up with. Compare any grocery website to McMaster-Carr and it's not even 10x, it's like 100x worse. But I give them my business because the competition is actually even worse.
"enabling a filter for meat shows recommended items from other categories above the meat products"
"clicking on page 2 of results resets all filters"
"searching for item X returns a list of results that does not contain it, but navigation shows it clearly exists"
etc.
How can it be so bad??
My favorite is when you add a filter when you're on page 2 and now you're on page 2 of the filtered results.
Want me to on board? Probably 70 percent of every grocery trip is the same essentials, so just let me scan my recipes and offer the opportunity to quick select from that list of items next time.
If you want to feel real pain, try using the grocery apps or similar on slow cell signal; it's death. No! I do NOT need a 12 MB image of the bottle of milk I buy each week, I just want to see if it's back in stock!
When I knew about the old version, I tried. And wow, almost every bugs I had with the new one went away. Faster load too.
FWIW I haven't bought any gear from them since that happened, and they used to be my first stop for used equipment.
I think when you are selling to a buyer that knows what they want, its best to stick to a simpler information dense interface (Digikey, McMaster-Carr, etc.). I think a lot of websites try to "chase the trend" and look like Amazon, or whatever, without realizing that it is much harder to get that right than it is to get an ugly page right.
Old Reddit is of course so much better. I guess “new” Reddit is shitty either due to the requirements of monetization, or maybe second-system syndrome.
I think the Craigslist test is good, but it is interesting to note that the first, thrown together interface could possibly provide a “false positive,” in the sense that the first implementation could have the advantages of not expecting to be monetized yet, and not having been infected too much by current design fads.
Moderators can see the traffic breakdown and old reddit traffic hovers around 5-10% of total traffic depending on community.
I think the "loud minority" is a concept that is very very applicable here.
... and also clearly none of the reddit development team is using it either. How else would they miss a breaking bug for five years?! It's not like inputting text is a niche feature.
I think it speaks volumes that Old Reddit hasn't been removed. Even the maintenance burden of continually supporting it is outweighed by its value.
But what do I know? TikTok is a thing, apparently.
Old man proceeds outside to yell at the Cloud