If you are going to re-design a site like reddit, your best bet is to keep the old version in place, but allow people to also view all of the same content in the "new" design.
For example, release the new design on new.reddit.com and let viewers migrate over to it at their own pace.
Once you have a lot of people using the new reddit instead of the old design, you can migrate the old reddit to old.reddit.com and put the new design up as the default.
WHATEVER YOU DO, DON'T GET RID OF THE CURRENT DESIGN, until you have adoption for the new design. Period. If you simply replace the old with the new, reddit is as good as dead.
They still do this with the old mobile interface (which I greatly prefer to the current one). If you just append .compact to a URL you get the old interface.
Exactly right. People like different interface styles; a big chunk of the current audience likes the current style. OK, they want to expand to people like me who prefer different styles, good call; but they shouldn't hang people who like what they have out to dry! Yeah, it's more work to come up wiht an interface that's flexible enough to support the different styles ... but they just raised $200M so can presumably afford it.
I hope they keep the old design and prioritize on fixing the implementation from a resource-usage perspective.
Reddit pages use a ton of RAM and CPU compared to sites like HN. Some of that is understandable considering the features they strive to support, but some of it is honestly just something that can be better engineered.
I understand your point, but wouldn't doing what you suggest lead to the problem of maintaining two different code bases? This doesn't seem like a good idea at all.
I think a better approach would be to commit to their new design, and do some sort of A/B testing to hone down the new UI until it replaces the old one.
I don't think reddit will die because of the changes they propose. This is just silly. For starters, there are Google Chrome plugins to make reddit more Facebook feed-like.
I myself like the way reddit works right now and would not like it to change much. That said, Reddit the company has to move towards what will make them money. I don't have this data, but their user base might have changed in the past years. People that really enjoy infinite feeds, for example.
Is the current user-base an asset or a liability? I guess I am asking is it a kind of technical debt?
I'm not sure, and Digg is obviously the cautionary tail here on the "don't tick off the user-base" side, but I'd wager that to continue to grow, they need a little more mass appeal.
Reddit as an anonymous FaceBook Feed might have some real value, as both a value prop for people, and as retargeting for Marketers. Reddit knows that you browse, say, /r/atheism as a Mormon, or /r/gonewildasian as a single guy, and those are not things FaceBook may know. There is a lot of value in anonymous, on both sides.
For example, release the new design on new.reddit.com and let viewers migrate over to it at their own pace.
Once you have a lot of people using the new reddit instead of the old design, you can migrate the old reddit to old.reddit.com and put the new design up as the default.
WHATEVER YOU DO, DON'T GET RID OF THE CURRENT DESIGN, until you have adoption for the new design. Period. If you simply replace the old with the new, reddit is as good as dead.