[mateo1]

The reason Reddit can't really do this (and they tried) is because people notice and react. If they turn reddit into Facebook they'll lose their "clients", particularly the "productive" ones. I'm not going to use Reddit if old.reddit.com breaks or if I can't sort by new/top. I'm sure there's hundreds of thousands if not millions of users like me. People using the new layouts might "interact" more, but it's a shallow interaction. They don't write long form text, they don't post anything original etc. If they want a link farm they can have it but it'll gradually empty out and turn into a cheap tabloid-esque aggregator that copies twitter's trending. Maybe Reddit can't be very profitable after all and they should scale down their expenses and keep it as it is.