Fair enough, based on this and sibling comments, Reddit was a poor example for me to have chosen. I didn't start using that site until after the redesign, and

Fair enough, based on this and sibling comments, Reddit was a poor example for me to have chosen. I didn't start using that site until after the redesign, and am not a heavy user now -- possibly I was misinformed, but I had the impression that the "new" design was launched with a lot missing and took a while to get back to feature parity. Personally for aesthetics and usability I greatly prefer the new design -- the old one looks unreadably cramped to me --but the one test I was able to run before they throttled me as a suspected bot showed the new design weighing about nine times as many kb as the old for a given page. That's objectively not good.