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.
Well they certainly are driving more people to it by removing /r/all except on the old subdomain.
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.
You think there are still redditors around?
I think it's just troll farms and bots. Every once in a while someone stumbles into the site and says something. THEN there is a whirlwind of answers/speculations/theories/lies.
A.I is running the show. If I use a certain word or phrase I get filtered. If I say the exact same thing without those "catch phrases" then I see a few votes.
I treat the site as a test site for trying language that gets PAST the trolls.
Honestly I find the website borderline unreadable.
On mobile website you haven’t been able to view and replies for a long time. On desktop it’s just so fucking stupid.
Well, there it is. I don't have a phone.
Clearly my experience is NOT the norm.
(I do have a device at my house that uses VOIP to "act" like a phone)
There's no objective data to confirm or dispel your suspicion that there are ~~zero~~ few human Redditors (your hyperbole aside).
There's definitely tons of bots posting and voting (and likely always has been), but I really doubt a large percentage of commenters are bots.
- A non-bot redditor
You are correct. I have been paying attention to this for a few YEARS now. It is just MY observation of events I have seen. It is NOT my opinion, it is MY direct observation.
Clearly more study is needed. By THIS administration? NEVERMIND!
Why do you think you're able to detect a bot by their Reddit comments? I strongly suspect you're assuming low-effort, poorly-written comments are bots, when in reality they're probably just dumb people.
Idk the nish communities are really helpful, 3d printing, Photoshop help, all that kind of stuff. Hell I even was able to have my Dad's memorial pic photoshopped by somebody. It turned out good too
It really depends on the subreddits I think. It was starting to really go downhill before I was booted, but most of the issues floated around political, news and general subreddits from what I could tell.
Get into interests, like football or music and there seemed to be less rubbish and bot accounts so to speak. I guess this makes sense but that’s what I noticed going out the ban door as I was.
I just left last month, I'd say 30% users and rest bots
One thing I've noticed lurking on AITA is that there's suddenly more people casually talking about being religious. Not like overtly preaching like you'd see in the past, but more people referencing going to church or doing things for religious reasons.
It just seemed out of place and weird. Like the tone of that part of the internet suddenly changed. It's still more liberal than conservative, though that conflict seems to be mostly just not present, perhaps in part because of their rule against political topics, though even when some slip through, it does seem to lean more liberal or even progressive than conservative. Like plenty of abortion support, no broad support for tribal or hierarchical judgements. But it suddenly seems more religious. Christian, specifically.
While church attendance is NOW declining rapidly?
I suspect a Christian troll farm at work here. They NEED to indoctrinate at an early age to survive.
They can't use FACTS, their bible doesn't have any good ones.
I guess it depends on where you look. All the subs I've been visiting where people actually hang out, rather than just a handful of karma farmers spamming, are still flourishing*, so I never fully switched to Lemmy, but use both 🤷 Reddit subs have a magnitude or two more people, so imho they're better for news, memes and technical advice, while for the past couple years Lemmy feels better for insightful conversations.
* my main subs are for specific games and apps, a few countries/regions, and r/BestofRedditorUpdates, so ymmv
I think the bot percentage is proportional to how big a subreddit is and how profitable influencing people browsing it is.
Niche community about how to proplift (stealing small cuttings to grow your own plants)? Zero or close to zero bots.
Crypto community with thousands of comments a day, where it's all speculation that can't be objectively proven so bots stick out like a sore thumb and tons of money flying around? You better believe the bots are all over that.
It's mostly the most frequented subreddits that are being brigaded and farmed.
I can guarantee you the Argentina subreddit is heavily brigaded by the extreme right. That's the case I know, but it's easy to imagine it happening in a lot of not so popular subreddits
Of course there are redditors around; I'm another one of them. We frequent the cool subs like the very human /r/FreeGameFindings and ignore the rest of the noise. Milk Reddit for the best of what it has to offer and dismiss the rest. I see nothing wrong with this approach for as long as Lemmy is still budding, relatively speaking.
I haven't checked how big the ones that I still frequent there (like /r/manybaggers and /r/onebag) but they do still have organic real people posts. Anything news, tech, or politics, anything of that size, I just abandon any hope they're not troll infested and LLM bots. Not to mention meme subs and themed artwork subs. Just full of vote farming bots. I need the art source, you dinguses!
On the bright side, /r/sbcgaming have a comms here and can also tie into retrogaming
As well as flashlights.
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.
I would like to agree that most of the original contributions on Reddit today come from people who use old Reddit.
I know this because while I have not had an account there for a while; when I was there, I networked with others to know trends of how they connected
I don’t think this preference has changed , and probably even more use old now
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!
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.
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.
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).
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.