2 upvotes, 0 direct replies (showing 0)
View submission: Out with 2016, in with 2017
To me it feels like they're acknowledging that a large enough portion of the community engages with the site significantly less when RES is broken. It may come off a though they're blaming RES to say it, but I'm not sure that's the intention. Either way, it'd be disingenuous to say they're not thinking about RES when they update the site. I know I would be.
It's one of the things I hated most when I used to work on popular user-driven websites. If an 3rd party tool gets too popular you start seeing the effects breaking that tool has on your traffic. You push through a change, and suddenly traffic takes a noticeable dip for a few hours/days. So you try and bundle the changes together so it happens less often; sometimes it helps, other times it leads to longer traffic dips. Either way it still hurts.
In the end, you're forced to acknowledge that a 3rd party tool is important enough that you have to work around it's existence and your user's dependence on it. Which may be why Reddit is trying to bring the important features into the site itself, to reduce the dependence and reduce the impact changes will have because of the tool.
It's just a bad situation to be in. If the Reddit devs are like me, they'll view it as a failure of theirs. The features and functionality *they* are missing is hurting the site, and someone else is saving them from that pain.
IDK, just my two cents. I'd take it as compliment and an acknowledgement that they're thinking about the RES devs.
There's nothing here!