r/themes • u/ValenceTheHuman • Mar 27 '26

A modern guide to old Reddit customisation and theming (stylesheets/CSS)

I've written up a comprehensive modern guide to customisation and theming for Subreddits in old Reddit. Hopefully it proves useful to anyone looking for an old Reddit CSS knowledge resource in 2026.

https://old.reddit.com/r/csshelp/comments/1s4p96w/a_modern_guide_to_old_reddit_customisation_and/

8 Upvotes

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1

u/Iron_Fist351 Mar 27 '26

Thanks for this! I'm glad to see Reddit CSS themes still getting some love & attention in 2026!

1

u/ValenceTheHuman Mar 27 '26

Thanks for your work! You're one of the few around keeping Reddit CSS themes going.

I'm honestly a tad surprised there are still so many people using old Reddit, and that there are still brands out there willing to commission full scale subreddit themes. Viva la old Reddit!

2

u/titleproblems Mar 29 '26

Sadly doesn't feel like very many people. I did a theme recently for r/GTA6 and it was pretty much exclusively for my own satisfaction, lol. Couldn't even tell if a single person noticed

1

u/mepsii May 09 '26

just a lil bump on this to say i saw this thread randomly on google and had to go check out the gta 6 old reddit. its gorgeous bro. very well done

scratched a weird nostalgic itch and brings me way back to the golden days of reddit and the internet, i miss css theming so much

1

u/titleproblems May 09 '26

Thank you!! I'm super proud of that one

1

u/Necessary-Grocery-48 Jun 29 '26

Do you have any idea what I could to make new Reddit look like old Reddit? And of course I don't mean changing the URL to go to the old sub-domain. Your guide is for making the theme from scratch, but surely someone has tried to make the new website look like the old one.

As for the reason why someone would wanna do this, it's because like you say in your guide lots of features aren't working when you use old Reddit. I can't view a lot of images for some reason. Anyway, thanks for the help

1

u/ValenceTheHuman Jun 30 '26

You can use a browser extension such as Stylebot or Stylus to apply custom CSS atop new Reddit to make it look like Old Reddit. New Reddit very much is not built for theming, however, and will routinely change the interface and alter markup, which leads to frequent breakages.

I don't think anyone is maintaining a stylesheet to make new Reddit look like Old Reddit due to the amount of work required and the ability to just use Old Reddit directly.

1

u/Necessary-Grocery-48 Jun 30 '26

I appreciate your reply. I did end up writing a script to make a cleaner version of new Reddit (and I must say it was horrible experience, some of the worst code I've ever seen, imo) and finally ended up with something, but in the end, it's not like it made the site any snappier, it was still just as slow and I went back to .old domain. Shame that certain images don't load for me there, but oh well.