Most likely a bug. Even if they decide to decommission old.reddit.com at some point, they will at least redirect to reddit.com if only to avoid SEO penalty.
One thing I've learned about bay area companies: You can never be too cynical; they'll almost always be way ahead of you.
The typical easy way is to have many "unfortunate mistaken outages". This is how Google via Maps and Mail handled Opera 6+ times (iirc), how Facebook handled Opera Mini 8+ times with the login javascript doing more and more esoteric things, etc etc.
I believe Firefox has witnessed something similar in the past few years couple of years with popular properties.
I wouldn't put it past the Reddit team to try to do something similar to push away people from their old, less monetizable interface.
Teddit (https://teddit.net/) is a reasonable alternative to old.reddit.com provided you don't care about being logged in. I'm not affiliated with them, but I have used their Reddit front-end quite a bit and like the style.
For those wondering, this is highly unlikely to be intentional. The "you broke reddit" only comes up when there is a major software error. It's one step above a python stack trace.
An actual decommissioning would be coupled with a redirect or a note or something.
I don't use Reddit often, but wow the "new" Reddit design is incredibly jarring and difficult to navigate. Are the majority of users really liking this experience?
All the new users get that interface by default, and when they first launched it you had to specifically opt out, which not everyone knows how to do.
I don't think they have any experiments where they give a new user the old interface to do a proper A/B test, so I don't think you can conclusively say that people like the new interface better than the old, or vice versa.
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 60.1 ms ] threadI didn't see anyone claiming that all of reddit was down.
The typical easy way is to have many "unfortunate mistaken outages". This is how Google via Maps and Mail handled Opera 6+ times (iirc), how Facebook handled Opera Mini 8+ times with the login javascript doing more and more esoteric things, etc etc.
I believe Firefox has witnessed something similar in the past few years couple of years with popular properties.
I wouldn't put it past the Reddit team to try to do something similar to push away people from their old, less monetizable interface.
Teddit (https://teddit.net/) is a reasonable alternative to old.reddit.com provided you don't care about being logged in. I'm not affiliated with them, but I have used their Reddit front-end quite a bit and like the style.
An actual decommissioning would be coupled with a redirect or a note or something.
I don't think they have any experiments where they give a new user the old interface to do a proper A/B test, so I don't think you can conclusively say that people like the new interface better than the old, or vice versa.