Some of the issues I have had with the new design is pretty amazing. For example, when you open a specific submission it's opened in a "lightbox" which basically contains all the comment. If you click outside of the lightbox it's automatically closed which I guess is OK. So some time ago they made a new release and broke it so that if you clicked on the scrollbar to scroll down in the lightbox to see what people had commented then the lightbox with all the comments closed.
I submitted some complaint in their redesign subreddit but immediately random people replied to say that this was as designed and I should use keyboard to scroll, and not the scrollbar. But then the issue was that when the lightbox was shown it wasn't focused so I first had to use mouse to click in the lightbox to focus it and then use keyboard arrows to scroll.
It really is a good example of everything that is wrong with the SPA approach today. Browser history abuse, skeleton/placeholder text rendering instead of actual content, never-ending loading spinner on the browser tab, problems with authentication between sessions. Just open up your network panel and try clicking around and watch your console light up like a christmas tree. Then switch to the old layout and compare the two.
To put a cherry on top of it, the new layout now intersperses ads into the post lists and styles them to look like posts.
Additionally, ever since reddit decided to host it's own media, it no longer possible to directly link to a video or image. I don't want to send a link to my friend of comments about a gif. I want to just send him the damn gif. For this reason alone I'll continue to use imgur.
I'll be really bummed out the day I can't click "switch to the old layout", but I'm sure the time when they're removing that is coming.
It looks like we're finally seeing a series of decisions being made that caters stockholders instead of users of the site. They managed to hold out for this long, but I guess the day has come where it has finally happened. The big difference between reddit and all the other sites that have done this, is reddit used to be the hip place people went to get away from these kinds of user hostile moves.
The only question left now: is reddit so entrenched in it's position that it won't lose ground to a newcomer from the fallout of these decisions? Probably, but I know I'll definitely be keeping my eye out for competition that is gaining steam.
I submitted some complaint in their redesign subreddit but immediately random people replied to say that this was as designed and I should use keyboard to scroll, and not the scrollbar. But then the issue was that when the lightbox was shown it wasn't focused so I first had to use mouse to click in the lightbox to focus it and then use keyboard arrows to scroll.
Such a joke. Amateurs.