Old.reddit UI fills the entire width of the screen, and default view is compact. You see more of the feed at a glance without having to scroll as often. When it comes to comments more of it is displayed when it comes to nested comments before clicking.

New reddit takes up a lot of space. And clutters up the side with stuff like related posts when you check the comment section.

Another big one is reddit enhancement suite which lets you tag and block things only works on old.reddit.

Before phones and mobile apps became the norm, people browsed reddit on a desktop browser, and old.reddit is formatted to work with that type of view. No-frills, more efficient use of screen real estate, and everything is easy to reach. It’s the people who used reddit when it was like that who are loyal to it.

Nowadays, most reddit users probably don’t even know that it’s a website, and they only know it as an app on their phone. And the new reddit interface is optimized for mobile, which is terrible and inefficient when browsing on a desktop.

It was the dumber, non Web 2.0 version of the site. It didn’t have any of the new UI’s user activity data harvesting apparatus or progressive loading features or fake posts (ads) or Adblock mitigation and so forth. It looked like a 2000s website but anyone who used Reddit in that era wasn’t going to care. Redlib is better if you need to check something on Reddit.

Easily blocked ads, no account required. No profile pictures. No "modern" UI that's slow and takes up huge chunks of whitespace for no reason. No stupid features like chat taking up space. No related posts taking up space in the comments. Also old.reddit supports custom CSS so every subreddit can have their own custom theme. Remove everything unwanted from the new site and app and you're basically left with old.reddi5

For me, it does not hide comments by default.

It's the only way to actually use the website in a reasonable manner.

I like to read all the comments in one page load. No clicking tens of times to load all the nested comments

Because new reddit is ten times worse lmao

If you primarily read it on a desktop or laptop, which I think a lot of old.reddit users do, it's just better. Same reason I use old.lemmy: improved readability, more compact, less wasted/whitespace, less scrolling, it's just easier to consume.

I don't get it either. I exclusively used Reddit via third party apps. Never once had any desire to use old.reddit.

It worked for me. Comments never came back even years later and checking old comment links with gdpr files.

I think reddit has a limit on the amount of comments that can be viewed through your profile. So you won't be able to delete everything in one go if you have thousands of comments.

You'll have to do one run rewriting and then after deleting the comments it can. Then wait and do it a few days or a week later when the profiles repopulates it with the older batch of comments that weren't available before.

Doesn’t matter. They’ve been replacing the content people with repost bots and AI bots for years and most people won’t notice if half those power posters leave as a result. Many of the power posters would stay on Reddit anyways short of being charged $10/post simply for the feeling of being important which they derive from being influential.

Thats not even getting into how the US Air Force has been astroturfing Reddit for over a decade with most active city Eglin Air Force base and would therefore put paid effort in to keep it afloat and their psyops reaching minds. Heck tons of organic posters leaving gives them a chance to seize mod positions and make trustworthy names for accounts under their control.

I was banned for saying that Elon Musk did a nazi salute, in the comments of a video of Elon Musk doing said nazi salute.

So many people with similar stories. They didn't even give me a reason, my account was old.

Ditto.

End of an era. Guess it's Lemmy time for real now.

I deleted my account and 13 years of posts manually over a time and still have the Login cookie for the old account in the browser. You can still view old reddit with it. That said the content is so bad there it's generally not worth it.