People complaining about Reddit remind me of that quote from Bjarne Stroustrup about computer languages: “There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.” A lot of people use Reddit. I've been on since nearly the beginning and seen it go through various phases. They started getting serious about moderation after Gamergate and they're still serious about it since they wa…
They've done a FUCKLOAD of dumb stuff. A truly phenomenal amount. Some of the issues stem from just growing and having your crowd change and EVERY marketing company out there working to control your content, but they have very impressively managed to make a baffling number of stupid decisions.
But, you can opt out. It's dumb that you need to, it's dumb that they don't understand what they have, and that they're making what's currently failing (yet another facebook), and yet there's still a large variety of ways to make it not totally fucking awful.
You can still just go to the subreddits you tolerate and ignore the rest, you can still browse in old mode, and you can block most of the ads and nonsense pretty trivially. It was very very smart of them to leave in that option, which while the most obvious fucking thing in the world to a person, is a near miracle for a company.
Not forcing the new design (and a couple of other anti user practices) is one of the best decisions they ever made, and if you've EVER worked in a company rolling out a redesign that's supposed to up engagement and revenue, you have got to understand just how fucking rare anything like that is.
I do wonder when it'll all go to shit finally, and I wonder what will take it's place (i've looked for the reddit of digg for reddit, and haven't seen much potential), but right now every day they don't force the redesign is a damn near miracle in a company of that size.