It's too damn small. Firefox automatically scales it up to 12px (as does Chrome I think), and even then I zoom in to 130% to get the font to 15.6px.
On the home page the text that tells you who the poster is, how many upvotes and comments, etc, is gray text on a gray background, at 7pt font. Again, Firefox and Chrome scale this up to 9.33pt, which again, is too small for me to read comfortably on a 24 inch desktop monitor without zoom.
(I accept that 120% would be fine; that brings up the main font size to 14.4pt. Wikipedia seems to use 14pt and that's totally fine for me. But still, neither me nor the browser should have to scale up the website.)
Even at 130% zoom, on the home page I can see 20 posts at once. I understand complaints that reddit went too far in the other direction, but that doesn't mean they should throw accessibility out the window for this site.
> Firefox automatically scales it up to 12px...
Only if you've told it to. My Firefox settings have "Minimum Font Size" set to "None". Perhaps scaling up to 12px is a default? (Edit: Also, are you sure you're not thinking of 12pt? IIRC, points are DPI-independent units and (AIUI) the traditional way of specifying font sizes in computerized typography.)
Despite my age, I still have eyes that are good enough to easily read the font sizes you're complaining about. A hugely important part of a User Agent is that it provide overrides for site design choices that the Agent's user has decided will benefit them. It's a good thing that UAs let folks like you choose a minimum-possible font size. It's an equally good thing that UAs let folks like me choose to see the choices that designer made that others criticize.
Pixels are in fact DPI-independent too, the CSS spec makes them exactly 0.75 of a point, which comes out to 96 DPI regardless of the device. Devices are then free to scale that up or down as they like: phones typically scale it down a touch because they’re held closer to the eyes.
What a bloody confusing way to define a unit of measure called a "pixel". 1px should be one device pixel, and 1pt should be 1/72 of an inch on the device!
Sheesh.
Eh, logical pixels have been a thing since at least X11, which is where we got that 96DPI thing to begin with. It certainly is confusing that they’re named the same thing though.
> ...points are DPI-independent units...
To be clear, this is a confusingly- (and perhaps incorrectly-) worded way to say "At a given point size, a particular glyph from a particular font is supposed to be the same size on the output device, regardless of its physical size or number of pixels.".