I don't think this is true. The redesign was not bad and the reaction is the classic one that happens for all redesigns, good or bad. After a while people acclimatize to the new design and feel that's the original one. If you revert the redesign after that people will shout "bring back the old design!" even if that's exactly what you did.
As a longtime Reddit user, I immediately disliked the redesign but since I've been on the other side I decided it give it a month. I now deliberately dislike the redesign. I get most of my value out of reddit in the text subreddits and the conversation view in the redesign is awful. Things are highly collapsed and following a conversation requires repeated expansions. The comment count without loading more is extremely limited and when you scroll down there's an interstitial callout about the subreddit's all time popular posts. The redesign is fine for top level content in the picture/video/meme subreddits. Content emphasis aside, it feels incredibly slow. Waterfall loading and 2-300ms response times. I've spent quite a bit of time reflecting on design decisions and I think the design brief/product vision is simply opposed to my interests. I feel bad about complaining about another team's work but my complaints aren't the knee-jerk reaction you're complaining about.
- It inserts "ads" for other Reddit posts in the middle of a comment section. If you're not paying very close attention, it's easy to miss that you're literally not seeing all the comments on a post, because you have to scroll down past the "recommended reading" or whatever they call it and expand the comments below the fold.
- it often makes it impossible to see NSFW content on mobile websites without using the app, which is annoying if you click through from a Google search result on your phone. This applies to text posts too, which is all the more annoying because despite the name, the NSFW tag is used to tag more than just porn (hide spoilers for TV shows, punchlines of jokes, etc.)
I personally think reddit is an example of an actual bad redesign, so I'm not saying this is true for all redesigns. I do however think it was true for Fark, at least from how I remember it.
With that said, I don't think old.reddit is that good either unless you only want to read text-only posts, and it's pretty much unusable on mobile.
> With that said, I don't think old.reddit is that good either unless you only want to read text-only posts, and it's pretty much unusable on mobile.
Old Reddit is nearly unusable on mobile, but it's still better than the new Reddit on mobile, which is... actually quite impressive (and not in a good way).
