Seems self-explanatory. They're fighting for profitability, prioritizing mass-appeal, prioritizing ads, and maintaining two UIs in an advertising business sounds like a huge hassle. I'm too lazy to edit the URL so I don't even know - does old.reddit.com even support the giant image ads?
Also, old reddit has to remain mostly unchanged for it to fulfill its purpose, which means marketing can't incessantly twiddle things with A/B tests and push crap like NFT avatars.
This whole Adblock thing is gonna come to a head with the modern “economic headwinds” I think. Like, how did people think it was gonna work out…? YouTube and Reddit would just keep going forever with some sizable percentage of their user base earning them 0 money?
we either need to start paying for stuff instead of the bullshit invasive Display Ads model (half measure), accept the death of Adblock (I imagine I’ll get HN hate mail for even suggesting such a thing), or nationalize/otherwise remove the profit motive from these companies. I don’t see “the two main online forums for public discourse randomly decided to a) lurch towards far-right Russian propaganda and b) change everything in their push to get their VC investors some ridiculous return on investment, respectively” as an acceptable thing. Sadly my preferences aren’t exactly big news, and I assume the reaction from society at large will continue to be “oh no! Anyway…”
You could have written this comment about tape decks, CD ripping or Napster. In the end, what's technically possible always wins. As long as adblockers are technically feasible they will continue.
Napster didn't win though? It got crushed by giant media conglomerates. They were able to stifle easy piracy. With legal warfare, and actual decent products, they pretty effectively funneled people into legally consuming digital content, limiting piracy, and replaced physical ownership (CDs) with ephemeral subscriptions.
Napster the company didn't win, but file sharing and distributed sharing is the reason Spotify doesn't cost $1,000/month and we are no longer buying tracks for $1 on the iTunes store.
Because what most people wanted was listening to music, not owning music. And a lot of them are ok paying a fee periodically to do so. It could have been the same for movies, but siloes and prices are making this frustrating.
If they shut out third party apps from official APIs, that isn't game over. Those apps can still scrape HTML and while the new reddit frontend is modern and can easily combat this, old.reddit is an unmaintained static target.
They presumably know this or if they don't, they soon will. To avoid allowing app devs to run around the API changes they have to either continue maintaining the front end or cut the dead weight. Given their decision making lately, I'm going for the latter.
