Social network Reddit recently began blocking mobile visitors to its website while pushing them to download the official Reddit app, and it's fair to say that the move is not going down well with users. If you visit reddit.com on your iPhone today, you may see a new popup that can't be dismissed, asking you to "get the app to keep using Reddit".
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.
Sadly this is (very popular, according to comments here and on Reddit) copium. old.reddit.com visits are a rounding error, per the traffic stats of the normie subreddit I moderate:
Most people simply do not have the technical acumen and tenure on Reddit to know to type in that subdomain. As always, relevant XKCD (posted today on Lemmy, funnily enough):
I said it in another response, it isn’t visits I’m talking about, it’s about who generates content on the website and what percentage of those users use old.reddit.
It isn’t copium either, we are speculating why Reddit keeps up the old version at all, after all this time they must have some analytics that it would significantly harm the site to disable it.
I don’t have any evidence either way as far as who uses old.reddit to submit versus who doesn’t, and I don’t think there is any.
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.