> The capital will be used to redesign Reddit’s famously cluttered homepage, co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman tells Recode. The company also plans to pour more resources into user-uploaded video.

Wow, time has not been kind to this paragraph. The redesign is still hated by a large portion of the userbase and the Reddit video player is infamously unreliable.

I'm curious what happened behind the scenes here.

I doubt the redesign matters to the vast majority of users, despite the vocal nature of the minority who dislike it.

Are they going to compete with YouTube?

Can anyone compete with YouTube? Facebook is probably closest to it in scale but it is not a video sharing platform.

* keep the old.Reddit.com design for everyone

* spend 9 figures for a redesign

The choice was obvious

I don't think a lot Gen Z don't like the old.reddit.com because it looks kind of old fashioned vs say react "modern" pages and they're afraid of lookign old-fashioned. However, that is what keeps me coming back along with relative anonymity and content on topics that I like.

information density is too low. Why would I spend 2.5x time scrolling through www.reddit.com/r/fantasyfootball when I can read all the important headlines faster at old.reddit.com ... the redesign also loads fewer posts at a time so you constantly wait for a spinner to fetch new content

Mobile apps solved that problem. The redesign made desktop problems.

I only use my phone when I have to. If I'm within 20 feet of a computer w/ a monitor I'll go use that. I know it's old fashioned but it is what it is.

Do you see yourself ever using a phone docked?

Late Zoomers I think you're correct, however my early Zoomer friends and I all use old reddit - we grew up with it after all.