Reddit is what you make of it. The “front page of the internet” is really a collection of different subreddits, each with its own communities, rules, and cultures. The main idea is to subscribe to the subreddits that match your interests, so that your internet’s “front page” is tailored to you, not other users.
Still, it can be fun to browse the posts from subreddits that are blowing up across Reddit, even when you don’t personally subscribe to them. This is the purpose of r/popular and r/all: The former offers popular posts from a variety of subreddits, while the latter does the same, albeit with fewer filters. You might not want to browse r/all while you’re at work, for example, though Reddit says it doesn’t include sexually explicit content. Still, there may be other types of NSFW posts that appear here, that wouldn’t otherwise appear in r/popular.
Now, that’s changing. As reported by The Verge, Reddit is officially doing away with r/all. This decision didn’t come out of the blue, though. The company had announced its plans to remove r/all in December, before doing so in January (though it called this an “experiment”). It also removed r/all from users accessing the site on desktop, though this, too, was part of the experiment. Then, in February, Reddit said the experiment was over, and that they had decided to get rid of r/all after all.
Reddit confirmed the news in its latest changelog, saying that, in order to “simplify Reddit and improve Home feed personalization, the final steps to deprecate r/all are being implemented.” Going forward, links to r/all now go to your Home feed instead. If you want to check out trending posts, you’ll need to visit r/popular instead. At least, that’s the case for most users.
What do you think so far?
“Old” Reddit users can still see r/all
If you’re a relatively new Reddit user, you might not even know about “old” Reddit, the version of the site that matches its original, basic theme. Reddit started rolling out its current theme back in 2018, but those of us that preferred a simple, text-based experience have always had the option to do so—either by accessing the site from old.reddit.com, or if you have the “Default to old Reddit” toggle enabled in the “Preferences” tab in Settings.
Users accessing old Reddit will still see r/all in the top menu bar, and will be able to access r/all directly as well. It’s not clear why exactly Reddit is keeping this an option only for old users, but I’m not questioning it. The less attention old Reddit gets, the less likely Reddit will do away with it, too.
