I disagree. I don't think I need to explain why here.
I also disagree here. The users that they want to capture are having a tough time discovering communities for a reason, and I don't have a nice way to describe why. As these users are guided into the sites, they are going to change the communities they inhabit and drive the lifeblood of those communities out.
It seems to me that they want to Facebook without Digging in the transition.
The funny part was where he implied Reddit does now or ever has given a fuck about users. They care about clickthrough and outbound links. It's the only thing they've ever cared about. The only reason they're doing a UI redesign now is that their ancient shitty Craigslist-looking UI is actively off-putting for a generation used to HTML5, and the only reason they've been given any money for a redesign is that they have metrics indicating that their landing-to-leaving time is in decimal seconds.