Do people actually like all of the overdesigned clutter to the point where it makes them not want to switch sites?
To me, the stripped down clarity on Lemmy is a feature. I remember back in the day when people flocked to Facebook from MySpace, in large part because they were sick of eye gouging customized pages and just wanted a simple, consistent interface. The content, not the buttons to click on it are the draw right?
I got a bit confused: is that about the reddit app or themes of particular subreddits or something? When I first saw your post I thought you meant Lemmy was the one with overdesigned clutter. I was using old.reddit.com for web browsing and Redreader as a mobile client, and had subreddit CSS turned off so it always used the plain default theme.
I noticed after a few minutes with a mobile browser on my ultra cheap (limited bandwidth) data plan, that Lemmy uses at least 10x more data transfer than Reddit does. I figure that is a combo of being more pic heavy and having a bunch of javascript bloat. I hope to switch to some kind of plain text client soon. Lemmy is great in many ways but uses way too much dysfunctional web 2.0 tech for my tastes.
If we could get a vim version of lemmy in some way that would be awesome!