Before phones and mobile apps became the norm, people browsed reddit on a desktop browser, and old.reddit is formatted to work with that type of view. No-frills, more efficient use of screen real estate, and everything is easy to reach. It’s the people who used reddit when it was like that who are loyal to it.

Nowadays, most reddit users probably don’t even know that it’s a website, and they only know it as an app on their phone. And the new reddit interface is optimized for mobile, which is terrible and inefficient when browsing on a desktop.