Terrible news for people who love bad opinions but hate change: the Reddit desktop site is getting a brand new look for the first time since over a decade ago.
Yes, the hugely popular website that plays host to insane My Little Pony pedants and extremely vocal 16-year-olds who are convinced that Donald Trump is the only solution to all of politics is finally headed for a design overhaul, with a trial of the redesign being rolled out to a small number of users as of Monday.
The redesign has been in the works for a fair while, which would not be hugely surprising to anyone who has ever looked at the website before. Speaking about the need for a redesign last year, CEO Steve Huffman described the site’s current layout as a “dystopian Craigslist“, which is a very apt way of describing the text-and-hyperlink-heavy screen that greets users.
In their announcement, Reddit says they will roll it out randomly at first, eventually letting users opt-in to the new design:
Today, we’re beginning to give a small group of users access to the desktop redesign at random. We’re starting with a small group to test the load on our servers and plan to make the opt-in available to everyone in the coming weeks. On behalf of the team, thank you for all of your comments, posts, bug tests, conversations with our designers, creative ideas, and other feedback over the past year. We are very proud of what we have accomplished together and we are excited for you to get your hands on it.
As it stands, three different designs will be rolled out: card, classic, and compact – all of which do more or less what they say on the tin. ‘Card’ is a Facebook-y, Twitter-y ‘card’-style layout, ‘Classic’ is basically the old design but just a little spiffed up, and ‘Compact’ is a super dense layout that just shows the headlines.
The preview screenshot of the ‘Card’ layout shows a little bit more breathing room in the usually very dense headline area of a Reddit post:
The design team stressed that, regardless, the old site will remain available to those who aren’t too jazzed about the site changing:
All that said, we know that many of you love Reddit just the way it is. If you are one of the lucky few chosen to test out the redesign and prefer the existing Reddit experience, you can switch back and forth via a banner across the top or visit old.reddit.com. Furthermore, we do not have plans to do away with the current site.
It’s all happening.
