In January’s assessment of the year to come, /u/spez rolled out a number of goals for the coming year in regards to the direction Reddit will be moving. Much of it was built around building a more welcoming community for all users, building more integration of mod tools, and enhancements to their perceived outdated design tools. Of note, he wrote the following:
One project I would like to preview is a rewrite of the desktop website. It is a long time coming. The desktop website has not meaningfully changed in many years; it is not particularly welcoming to new users (or old for that matter); and still runs code from the earliest days of Reddit over ten years ago. We know there are implications for community styles and various browser extensions.
One of the concerns from this announcement was that CSS customization might go away, and now we are learning that this will become reality, as announced Friday.
We’re designing a new set of tools to address the challenges with CSS but continue to allow communities to express their identities. These tools will allow moderators to select customization options for key areas of their subreddit across platforms. For example, header images and flair colors will be rendered correctly on desktop and mobile.
What is not at all clear in the post, and what has not been made clear in replies is what is truly meant when they said they will, “continue to allow communities to express their identities.”
However, what has been made abundantly clear is that this change is being driven because reddit users are increasingly coming into the site on a mobile platform. And on all mobile platforms (especially app-driven experiences, as opposed to browser-driven experiences), CSS is not seen as being important to the user experience. The app and mobile experience delivers all of the thread and comment content of reddit, yet it does not allow for for the individual enhancements that not only give subreddits their identity but also a more robust functionality.
For those of us who still come to reddit on our laptops or desktops, the CSS of many subreddits is not only important, but vital to their design and functionality.
Think of the subreddits you browse on a daily basis. Look at the small bits and pieces of each that you like and use, like the post filters or the menu of helpful links. From small touches to /r/baseball like the nightmode sun or the mods with custom flair, to fully rendered sidebars for each team sub that updates scores, ranking and statistics on the fly.
All of that is done right now with CSS. All of it.
Granted our CSS is not as a complex as some subs you may browse but we here at recipes take a great deal of pride in the work that our team has put into the look and feel of this sub. The moderation team here at r/recipes know that this change is going to come. The driving factors for this change are too important to the Reddit admins to be stopped. The reasoning behind the changes—faster performance, scalability, security, etc.—are all good and valid reasons to want to redesign the site.
Across reddit, all we ask is that when that change comes, we are allowed to keep the identities and individuality that essentially define the Reddit communities you know and love. We want to avoid a homogenization of reddit that offers only colored headers and a sidebar full of pre-made widgets that tested well with mobile app users.
We also want to make it clear that, in general, we try as best as we can to make sure that the drama that sometimes engulfs reddit as a whole does not impair the user experience in r/recipes. We are, and always have been, a subreddit that focuses on the military prior service and still serving.
If you want to join with other Redditors who want their communities to speak to their individualism, please join us in respectfully speaking out. Please help us in telling the admins that when they redesign the site, we don’t want a uniform and lockstep assortment of message boards. We don’t want a cookie cuter template that solely caters to the mobile user base. Tell them you want a site where your subreddits are as expressive and as interesting as the people who take part in them.
bon appetit
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