this post was submitted on 11 May 2026
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My theory is that they realize that a significant number of power users on the site are still using old.reddit.com, so they are keeping it going because getting rid of it would turn the website into a ghost town. They will continue to push their app and new website because they can push more advertising through it to the people that are just there to consume.
I think you are vastly underestimating the amount of people that only interact with social media through apps in this day and age. Even on Reddit I would be surprised if the old design is more than a few percent of the user base.
It honestly does raise the question of why they are still maintaining the old UI. It seems like it would be an annoying legacy product to keep alive for a tiny part of the user-base. Perhaps it’s used as an API stability canary or something though.
Not at all. I'm comparing the vast majority that only consume to a small minority that actually interact and provide the content that others consume. Without that minority all that would be left is bot comments.
Reddit pushes an ad and tracking infested app to make money off the consumers while doing the minimum to keep the content submitters on the site even if they make no money off them. I wouldn't be surprised if old reddit was a couple percent of users but 25% of the comments that aren't bots.
Old reddit still has screens and moderation tools that haven't been rebuilt. It's kept on life support for mods right now.
old.reddit.com on mobile is a bit rough but otherwise yeah
Use the Slide fork!
I have the same thought. I still use Reddit, 100% on Old Reddit and I think objectively you could say I contribute a lot in terms of comments and participation. If old Reddit goes away, I'm done.
from what I heard and saw from some mods (who can see the statistics on the old.reddit usage), it's less than 10%, sadly.
the vast majority is using the shitty new design
Or the app exclusively, and probably aren't aware of the web interface at all.
Reddit went full Facebook by making it more accessible to the general public, with the predictable Eternal September results.
Wonder how they feel about people like me, who use a third party Reddit app on Android? They get no ad revenue from me, and I don't contribute either.
how are you still doing that, I thought they all shut down like three years ago with the whole API debacle
Reddit blocked third party apps but they didn't block personal-use API access. With the help of some apk-editing tools that I won't mention here, you could import your own API key into a third party apps and continue using it fully (including posting and commenting). I'm using Reddit Sync still.
My API key still works, but my understanding is Reddit recently blocked the generation of new keys. So at some point my key will probably die too. At that point, that's the end of Reddit for me.
wait recently blocked? did they end up reverting the change they did back when the API thing was done? that was one of the things they did then was restrict API key generation
Hydra works really well on iOS. It's not read only, full usage.
And it behaves and looks really similar to the Lemmy client I use (Voyager). Unsure if they share some of the codebase or if they both just try to imitate Apollo.
On android you can using redreader for free. I'm still using it for anonim read only reddit
The main change was them charging for the API so you can simply make a developer API key for free and patch it into apps. I'm using Boost and it still works well.
I think there are still "read-only" clients. I haven't looked in awhile, but I know there were some available via F-Droid (alternative app store) long after the API was cut off. I assume they use standard web scraping for grabbing content.
Also, I'm not sure if it still works, but I think you can still use open source clients that rely on the API, you just have to compile/build them yourself using your account's own personal API key.
I haven't looked into either of these in a while and definitely not an expert on the topic, but I'm sure if you're interested there's enough info out there to find a solution that works for you.
AFAIK there are a few, “read only” apps. iOS has RDX, not sure about Android.
I've answered to a sibling comment, but I'll duplicate here. Hydra is not read-only and works really well on iOS.
I use stealth on android. It's limited. Gifs show as links. No where near as good as sync used to be. But still better than the website if I end up there via a google search.