Reddit, the American social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website, is removing its Custom Community Styles (CSS).
The feature that allows admins and moderators to design subreddits with customized appearance is meant to add a sense of personality to their pages. The thing that helps subredditd to stand out in the community, is now no more.
In a blog post on April 21st, 2017, CEO Steve Huffman said that Reddit is getting rid of the tool when the site goes under a full redesign. He said that CSS is getting removed because it doesn't work well on mobile, and that "it's difficult to learn; it's error-prone; and it's time consuming."
As a replacement to the feature, Reddit is giving admins and moderators the ability to add certain features such as header images and colors. Or to be precise, just a small thing what Custom Community Styles could do. And this doesn't appeal users.
Admins and moderators are not pleased that all of their work in designing their subreddit won't be available anymore. One one survey that received more than 250 responses, 83.9 percent said that the removal of CSS was "unacceptable."
Many moderators that are responsible for their subreddits have written posts about the change, saying how it's a bad idea. They say that the change will make reddit "homogenous" and "without CSS, subreddits will all look the same."
Reddit's move to eliminate CSS makes sense. As more websites are having visitors from mobile, Reddit is also experiencing the same. As mobile continues to dominate the market, it's a fact that CSS won't show well on various devices with ease, making CSS irrelevant for the current trend.
So Huffman has a point here. The most beautiful and customized subreddit will be lost because it's not visible on mobile. While it would be sad to see some of those animated subreddits go away, but it's understandable that Reddit wants to make things a little easier on everyone, and not just to appeal pro CSS coders.
"We'd love for you to be able to bring your spice to phones as well," said Huffman on r/modnews. He insisted the rollout would be slow, as doing otherwise would be "suicide."
But the thing is, Reddit thrives from its community. Since it's platform has already being tied to its people, making them angry can certainly make Reddit's appeal to diminish. Users come to Reddit for information, and also to be around like-minded people, for better or worse, to enjoy cool features.
Since one of its cool feature is now gone, it's up to users if they can make themselves a home to the new home.