I’ll bet cash that it’s only a short matter of time before old.reddit is shutdown and within 6 months of that happening Reddit access will be locked behind account login.
I guarantee you the C-suite at reddit regularly kick themselves for giving into public backlash and keeping old.reddit. People weren’t happy with the redesign, but they would have definitely gotten used to it fairly quickly. Now, removing it will be another nail in the coffin they’re so desperate to build.
I suspect you’re correct, although I doubt removing old.reddit will cause much of a stir.
Notice how Reddit is releasing 1 shitty update every few weeks rather than all at once? By the time one shit update is released the vast majority of users have forgotten the previous one. Remember the API change? I reckon most of Reddits existing users don’t anymore. I suspect old.reddit will go the same way.
The only thing keeping the main community that I still visit reddit for (not nearly often enough, since I only look at it on old Reddit) on Reddit is discoverability. People search Google and the Reddit community is in the results, so I don’t think they’ll make it log in to view
That same community will probably leave the platform when old.reddit (with Reddit Enhancement Suite) is closed, unless Reddit actually adds comparable mod tools
A lot of sites show up in Google results and then force you to log in to actually see the content. I think most of them just get away with hiding the content a second after loading it in, that way the crawler bot still is able to see all the page but the user isn’t
Similar to twitter.
If I go to twitter mainpage I can’t see anything without logging in.
If I go direct to a profile I see can’t see anything without logging and;
If I go to a specific post, I can read the initial post but nothing else.
That’s what I expect will happen to Reddit