Reddit is removing its Custom Community Styles, which allow moderators to design subreddits with a little bit of flair. In a blog post released on Friday, reddit CEO Steve Huffman, aka spez, announced that Reddit will get rid of the tool when the site goes under a full redesign sometime in the near future. The tool allows admins and moderators to add a sense of personality to their pages, a bit of creativity that helps the subreddit foster a community.
Spez wrote in the blog that CSS is getting removed because it doesn’t work on mobile and that “it’s difficult to learn; it’s error-prone; and it’s time consuming.” As a replacement, they are giving mods the ability to add certain features like header images and flair colors, but those are just a tiny bit of what CSS can actually do. There are hundreds of ways this tool has been used: from simple things like added search filters to r/ Overwatch, to little perks like the quotes that appear every time a post in upvoted on r/StarWars.
Moderators are pissed that all of their hard work, along with the unique features of their subreddit, will be going away. Different moderators on the site have written posts about how it’s a bad idea. R/trees moderator GryphonEDM says that the change will make reddit “homogenous” and that “without CSS, subreddits will all look the same.” Some of the weirder subreddits, like r/ooer, which might be the ugliest page on the site (which is part of it’s charm), couldn’t exist without CSS.
It makes sense that reddit is going through with these changes, but it still sucks. Mobile will continue to dominate the market and the fact that CSS just doesn’t show up on your Android makes the feature seem more irrelevant as time goes by. If reddit does turn into a generic social media platform with little identity tied to its community, the site will die off. Users come to reddit to be around like-minded people, for better or worse, and to enjoy cool features.
Scrub reddit of all its Easter eggs, live stream, server status lists and random interesting bars to stare at, and you just end up with a dead site like Digg.
