I had no idea either. And then I clicked on "What do you like about Reddit?" and it said it ended in August 2012 which had me even more confused.

But after clicking around I worked it out. It was an elitist (and far less useful) version of Quora. Or was it simply a polished discussion board. Then I clicked the About Branch button and realised it was more about the Twitter integration than anything.

IMHO: Try and clarify what this is on the home page. "A new way to talk to each other." is contrived, meaningless and simply not true. It's not new, it's better.