What happened
On April 2, 2018, Reddit began rolling out the new design it had been building since 2017 — its first major visual overhaul and biggest update since subreddits debuted in 2008. The redesign started reaching about one percent of users and expanded over the following weeks. It offered three viewing modes: 'Card' view, which expanded media inline in a feed reminiscent of Facebook and Twitter; 'Classic' view, closest to the old layout; and 'Compact' view for fast scrolling. The update also introduced a unified post editor combining text, links, and images, plus infinite scrolling with pop-up previews that preserved a reader's place.
Reddit positioned the redesign as a way to make the famously utilitarian site more welcoming to newcomers while easing engineering maintenance. To avoid alienating its base, the company kept the legacy 'old Reddit' available rather than forcing the change, and many long-time users continued to prefer it. The redesign marked Reddit's clearest step toward a mainstream, media-rich social platform and remained a point of ongoing tension between modernization and the community's attachment to the original interface.