It’s the one thing that all (or most of us, I guess) have in common; we’re all here because of what’s going on there. It’s natural to want to talk about it.
It’ll pass; I’m already seeing a lot of non-reddit content on my home feed now, whereas day 1 it was probably 95% posts of the sort you’re talking about.
Visually, I actually quite like the look of the redesign (on desktop at least; mobile’s a whole other story). But it’s so bloated that on my old laptop I could get maybe 10-15 minutes of browsing time before it used up all my ram and dragged my whole computer to a crawl. And it has a whole mess of bugs that make it almost unusable - it feels like someone’s CS project rather than the front end of one of the largest sites on the web.
It went about as expected, IMO. 90% of redditors just don’t care that much - even if they agreed with the blackout in principle, most of them were likely just waiting patiently for their favourite subs to reopen so they could go back to browsing as usual. A quick browse through some of my subscribed (and still open) subs revealed a lot of commenters weren’t even clear about what was going on.
But it has had the effect of essentially kickstarting a community here which seems to be taking shape nicely and there’s finally a (small but growing fast) alternative to reddit - which didn’t really exist before. I can see the following months and years seeing a gradual shift in user base from reddit to here.
Reddit’s not going to die overnight; that was never going to happen. But it’s possible it’s the beginning of the end of their empire and the slow decline to the ranks of the remember-that-website-whatever-happened-to-that club. Time will tell I guess.
I got rid of my icon ages ago - one of the great strengths to me is the ability to customise the taskbar as you see fit, you can remove literally any icon you don’t want there. Even the URL/search box if you want.
About the only time I see anything pocket related is when FF updates and there’s some blurb about it in the ‘new features’ page. Otherwise I pretty much forget it exists.