Why do they care so much?
I really don’t want to use their app. I just wish they’d give up and let me use the browser in peace.
I'm never going to install it, and I have all but stopped reading it because these prompts are so obnoxious. That's probably +$ for Reddit though.
I don't understand why companies constantly do stuff that serves only _themselves_, and then expect users to engage with it because it exists. Users are able to identify when something is valuable to them. If you make it valuable they will use it. Consider the difference on an ecommerce site between a comment section vs a few company-picked "testimonials" above the fold. _Everyone_ knows the testimonials are garbage. Maybe your conversion goes up a tick the first time you put them on the site, but when a repeat viewer sees the same ones again they're going to roll their eyes and register you as untrustworthy. Whereas a (reasonably-managed, honest) comment section provides loads of information that's actually valuable to the consumer.
Links from any 3rd party service show up in the phone as the content i want to share.
Reddit? You try to send someone a Reddit video link and they get affronted by a pop up banner to download the mobile app when they click through. WTF!
I sent a reddit link to a video to my dad, once. He replied 'cant open it.' So f* off reddit. Allow rehosting or change your content policies. Stop making the internet worse.
There are other sites with similar features and layout to Reddit (Voat, Ruqqus, Saidit, Raddle, communities.win, etc.) but none are really in competition to be "the front page of the Internet". This is because Reddit has a huge community with varied interests which provides self-perpetuating advantages. For example: the activity level is generally higher; if you start a subreddit for a niche topic you have a chance at finding an audience; great comments/submissions will garner thousands of upvotes rather than a few dozen (smaller sites have a proportionately tinier vote ceiling, making it hard to differentiate between "good" and "amazing").
I can see increased retention/monetization maybe leading to a larger user-base in the short term, but if it makes good content less likely to crop up, or leads to less discerning users (ingenious effortposts lose out to low-effort pandering memes), or even if it just narrows the interests/hobbies represented on there, then over time it will destroy Reddit's main source of value.
Which of course leaves me wondering how long it is before reddit pulls the plug on their API and forces people to use the busted mobile site or their app.
This is indeed a troubling trend, so many annoying popups, banners, and notifications only seem to serve to forcefully try and push a small percentage of users towards some feature. If adoption is poor, it's probably because it's not wanted. Of course, in some SaaS contexts, it makes a lot of sense to keep users informed of features that might be of benefit to them and they may have otherwise not discovered, but that's a completely different game from just shoving stuff down their throats.
What's worse is that once it opens, that post is now permanently in your account's history. Reddit provides NO WAY to remove things from your account history.
For a site like reddit there is literally nothing they can't do with pure HTML/CSS/JavaScript.
Also, I like Firefox on mobile because you can block ads and install other extensions.
It's free and opensource, available on f-droid or if you are so inclined google playstore.
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.quantumbadger.redreader/
Anything that helps you escape garbage companies run by garbage employees is good!
Kinda like saying something must be done because it is "company policy"; passing the buck in the hope you don't question it, and realise company policy is also decided by the company.
It exists, because they decided it does.
I strongly disagree with this. Users are just responding to dopamine sensors that have triggers that they don't understand. "Value" extracted can be detrimental to a person's well-being, even if they chose it for themselves. Gambling addicts at casinos, obese people at fast food restaurants, pay-to-win whales and the newest version of Candy Crush. Reddit is just a casino where you gamble with your time and win addicting emotions like novelty and outrage.
There are third-party apps. I have been using Sync (Android) for years, and it's bloody fantastic.
I wonder when they will cut third-party apps off.
Probably because most users don’t really care and those that do make excuses like “what else am I going to use?” or “I can’t stop using reddit, how will I stay in the loop?” or any one of many other excuses. If you want reddit to change, stop using them. Entirely.
There’s almost always a bit of political drama behind the decision too: Marketing gets to say that they’re acquiring new users in short term (thereby increasing their budget and clout in the Org) while destroying customer value in the long run
With the app, you can not only send notifications, but you also have the app icon which reminds people of the apps existence. Even little things like "badging" (when the app icon shows a dot or number to indicate new notifications) and even that can have a noticeable impact on retention (we're all programmed to click into anything with a notification).
Also, they can recommend better content for you. I don't know if this is still possible and whether reddit does it, but an app used to be able to get the list of other apps installed on the phone, and many companies used that as an input into their recommendation systems (along with your location, etc).
Your attention, retention and engagement is a lot easier to manage and increase through an app than it is through website.
What we are starting to see is web push notifications becoming fully supported by browsers, and I think it's only a matter of time before iOS and Android start allowing app-like websites to notify users without them having to download a full-fledged app.
It would be interesting to see what this does for the iOS and Android development landscape. They're in a golden age now where every major property needs both a mobile site and a dedicated app on both platforms. But if the mobile site can handle more features that were previously the sole provenance of native apps, that seems likely to shift the landscape.
This was pre-redesign and it became clear what they were doing and their roadmap of features all were to grow the ad business. Mobile makes sense as it's how their key audiences consume content and it enables stronger profiling, richer engagement and better ad-targeting due to persistance.
The mobile app allows reddit to mine user behavior (every outbound link click is tracked, even on the desktop website) and then they're able to link your device profile, to content you consume and engage with. This can be used for ad-targeting or sold to other data brokers to build a richer profile about ABC user with this device, across XY IPs, typically based in ZZZ location.
A guy I know worked for a PC manufacturer years ago. The offered a windows version of a machine, and folks asked why they didn't offer a linux version.
A linux version would cost more money, because they made a non-trivial amount of money by loading up the PC with shovelware.
I've seen this countless times at companies. The decision makers do not want to greenlight projects that do not make money, or worse that cost them money.
So I think if you follow the money you'll find a mobile app makes them more money.
Users who have the app are anyways likely to be the ones who use Reddit more so naturally it has much higher engagement than on a browser.
So that needs to get fixed, and then this problem might go away naturally
I’m not pissed off about this: It’s like dropping in on a bar I used to enjoy a decade ago, to find out it has been redesigned a few times and everyone’s a new face.
Sometimes, that’s a really cool experience: “Say, this is neat.” Sometimes, not. But times must change, and we either change with them, or get left behind.
I am not going to change and become an engagement addict, clicking on shiny baubles out of boredom. So in reddit’s case, I am a part of its past, not its present, and I must accept being left behind in its wake.
That is honestly the best analogy I have heard to describe my feelings towards the site. It's still reddit... sort of, but its not my reddit. I joined during the digg exodus and I don't know if it's because I was younger or what, but for a while reddit seemed like that go-to bar: always warm, inviting, and socially enriching.
I'm just waiting for the day that Reddit decides to lock down their API enough to hurt all third party apps and force people onto theirs.
Free version https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.laurenceda...
One time payment version to remove ads https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.laurenceda...
As a web designer/developer, this approach offends me. At the risk of sounding like I'm taking this more seriously than I should, I believe that good design is founded on respecting ones' users. Reddit throwing what's essentially an ad in my face every time I try to use their site is bad design because it is disrespectful to me, the user.
Maybe their app is a better experience; there are more respectful ways of highlighting it. As immature as this sounds, not using the app is almost a matter of principle for me at this point, because I don't believe in rewarding disrespectful design.
Edit: And the only way to sway those nagging boxes away is to have a code of conduct, which is how appstores can impose a no-nagging experience.
Here are some readers.
0] https://github.com/GetStream/Winds
1] https://github.com/FreshRSS/FreshRSS
2] https://github.com/feedbin/feedbin
3] https://github.com/yang991178/fluent-reader
If you like something closed source, try feedly.
Reddit provides rss for now. For sources that don't, you can use rss.app or similar.
https://www.reddit.com/wiki/rss
One more useful thing some readers provide is an email address that you can use for subscribing to newsletters.
Notable features: * Links to the content rather than the comments * Embeds a summary of the content * Supports images, gifs and videos * Extra query params (nsfw block, up vote limits) * Open source https://github.com/trashhalo/reddit-rss
https://www.reddit.com/r/rss/comments/fvg3ed/i_built_a_bette...
https://www.reddit.com/r/rss/comments/galitc/my_improved_red...
Self plug - you can try my app Plenary on Android (no ads/trackers) - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.spians.ple... that has Reddit as one of the RSS Assistant option. It basically creates RSS feed for subreddits, users, search terms etc for you.
Been using it daily since Google googled its Reader.
We have to assume that smart people are working at Reddit, that they have tested the living crap out of this model, and have found it to be optimal.
I believe this is why cookie warnings have suddenly skyrocketed, and why Google Recaptcha treats us all as robots suddenly. It means that the form of 'intermittent' tracking you describe will only work for everyday Reddit visitors, not for those sufficiently occasional to see their cookies purged.
Yes there are always ways to improve, but some people working there are expert on this specific topic, if the topic is important for the company they probably already do what is the best
> Reddit may go public by 2020, said CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman during a keynote conversation at the Internet Association’s Virtuous Circle Summit on Monday. “The time frame is pretty far out,” he admitted. However, he also argued that going public was inevitable for Reddit to both reward employees and investors, calling it “the only responsible choice” for the company.
[1] https://variety.com/2017/digital/news/reddit-ipo-1202613811/
They're barely a link aggregator anymore, they try to self-host as much content as possible. Images, videos, they even attempted to make user-pages à la Facebook (no idea if this caught on). They're competing with Facebook and Instagram, not Hacker News.
On paper that's not necessarily bad, but they don't hesitate to make the user experience worse to achieve this. If you want to link a video hosted on reddit, there's no straightforward way to only link the video and not the full reddit thread. Here's a random example from the frontpage:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Whatcouldgowrong/comments/ici161/wc...
No way to share just the video, you have to share the garbage comments as well. Of course many video sharing sites are the same, but Reddit was supposed to be a link aggregator at first, not Youtube-but-worse. They've added a photo gallery feature lately with the same limitation: you can't just link the gallery, you have to link the full comment page. I suspect that they did that specifically because they couldn't really prevent people to share the URL to the image directly since that's a standard feature of the web, so by adding galleries they can "lock in" the content. At least they don't do referrer checks, I suppose... Well, not yet.
And yeah, as you point out, the mobile experience on a browser is atrocious. Especially if like me you're only a lurker: if you're not logged in you can't even browse a subreddit, it forces you to install the app (or alternatively, you can go to i.reddit.com that still works and is much faster to boot).
Vanilla Reddit is effectively becoming less pleasant to use that those shady streaming websites that change their domain names every month to evade copyright enforcement. At least those website usually manage to stream SD video reliably.
Basically Reddit tries to become Instagram for people who think they're too cool for Instagram, and it shows.
I usually don't like to rag on bad but highlight good, but in reddit's video player they are obviously doing too much tracking in it or it was rushed because it is not responsive many times even on a fast connection on a massive desktop machine. It is hard to seek, hard to play/stop/pause, half the time half way through it goes to down version that is compression glitched and blurry, on and on.
If so much of the site is video, why not make that the slickest player of all time? Youtube has always known how to do this. Streaming services do as well. Open source tools are better than this. What is going on reddit with the video player? It probably has lots to do with tracking, cost savings and more but it is unwieldy right now.
Or a different client (Reddit hasn't gone full Twitter yet), or enable Request Desktop Site.
Honestly, I thank them for that and I hope they don't remove it.
Simply uninstalling the app did the trick. In the beginning I would open the mobile browser out of compulsion, but the UI was so revolting that it’s essentially cured my addiction.
It's easily circumvented by replacing "www" with "old" in the URL, however, quite irritating nonetheless.
Either way, it’s turned me off as well, and I thank them for it because I got a lot of free time back.
I knew what problems my tomatoes were having the moment it started. I learned about blueberries needing something stronger than coffee.(and more)
I learned what microcontrollers are popular in the enterprise world by lurking.
I got some extremely useful information in a table form which was impossible to find in a Google search.
I suppose I just need to stop browsing the popular feed and it would always be useful.
Perhaps it is because I autopay $5/month to Reddit? It could also be the newer version of Safari in the beta iOS and beta iPadOS?
But the real reason is tracking and spamming you with notifications to get "engagement".
So maybe that’s why they want you in the app? They know their website is terrible?
My two go-to solutions are: 1. Use old.reddit.com/ 2. Stop using reddit
I will never download the app just because they do this.
They're not forcing you to use the app. Did you try logging in?
Noticed Twitter switching to the same pattern too, show 1-4 replies then just some random unrelated algorithm posts from elsewhere.
This includes stuff like hiding comment threads and only showing one or two comments by people you follow on LinkedIn, or features like "canned comments" ("Congratulations, John Doe!"). I don't know why websites stopped respecting their users' agency, but my pet hypothesis is that some product team is being measured on some sort of superficial "user engagement" KPI and ended up optimizing for meaningless reactions instead of actual discussions....
HN is a great example of how playing to the strengths of web results in a great user experience (possibly the best of any forum type site). Unfortunately it might also be damn near the only example.
Marketing is extremely pleased with the accuracy of the new metrics and analytics, even if the numbers are going down. Large ad-driven companies seem to prefer accuracy of tracking to user comfort
Don't get me wrong, I love simplicity like hacker news does. But reddit's old theme just rubs me the wrong way.
The "top" comment always seemed to be referencing some discussion or context I didn't have, and I thought there was always an inside joke I simply didn't understand...
Honestly, I hate how in 2020, every single social media service tries this hard to manipulate its users into spending more time with them. It's nothing but pathetic at this point.
When does it ever make sense to hide thread comments?
They show that algorithmic stuff to increase engagement. Of course, if they show related content so close by, people are going to check it out more often. You can’t really argue against that.
What they could do is have a paid tier. Instead of paying with engagement, you’d pay money to have the better UI. But they don’t want to provide that option at all.
It’s admittedly a little clunky on mobile, but still preferable to “install app!”
By visiting the website, you're the one pulling, wanting to visit and viewing the content or messages on your time. By installing the app, any message or update is pushed to you instantly, pulling you to the website, making it less your decision to visit, but being pulled in. A Medusa-like call that's hard for many to resist.
Reddit are not unique in this. Even updated 'XXX sent you a new DM' from Twitter via email for example.
Anyway, I'm shot of Reddit. Their recent purge shut down a lot of subs that for many were mutual support groups caught in the cross-fire of admins vs. sophisticated trolls using them as flare-scatter to escape themselves.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rubenmayay...
Webpage[1] and AppStore[2] link to save you guys time, since AppStore search is horribly broken.
[1] https://apolloapp.io/ [2] https://apps.apple.com/app/id979274575
Maybe I should root for it, for all the time I'd get back not using Reddit though.
For years they’ve had an extremely hostile user experience on their mobile site — you scroll half way through a long answer, and get interrupted with a modal prompting you to finish reading it in the app.
But the modal cannot be dismissed — there is no way to close it. You can’t scroll the page, it persists on reload... rendering the site utterly unusable.
But despite having similar goals and a willingness to experiment with behavioural patterns, they ended up with incredibly different experiences.
There's probably a core group of users there, but I can only imagine it's a stagnant pool now.
- Make more money than last quarter
- Having more user engaged than last quarter
Having user engaged is much easier when you have the app installed, as they can send you push notification. As a result of that, the number of users on the mobile web version is probably very low, so they don't put a lot of effort on the product and would probably love to deprecate it.
They also probably don't make the effort to optimize the monetization of those users, as they are so few, so they push them to use the app.
And above all HN users are probably not the ones who click the most on ads, so they don't care if you use reddit or not as you will not bring them any revenue.
I use
2) https://github.com/Docile-Alligator/Infinity-For-Reddit
I don't use neither the official bloated site nor official Android app. They are way much animated, bloated,slow.
I think that current focus of reddit is to become social media. Earlier days,reddit was focused on creating better forum,discussion platform. There is gradual change in focus ,i guess.
Theres a few people talking about the "unbundling of reddit" that's going on at the moment. I forget where I read it but basically some larger communities are starting to break off again into their own platforms.
First their website redesign makes the whole thing slow and unusable, then they start making the app get invasive and abusive.
All in the name of "engagement".
Dear Reddit, (and the likes),
You are a service company. You provide me a service. You are not an authority, or a thought leader, or anyone who's opinion I for some reason automatically respect or am interested in. You simply make it easier for me and users like me, to aggregate information and to share data, in a format that we like. You did not create that format out of thin air and you do not own it. It is we, the users that told you that this is the format we wanted to use, by going to your website and not competitors. You A/B-tested it from us. This does not give you any authority or right to pretend like you know what is better for us. You are simply a utility provider. Start acting like one. I do not care about your opinion about anything, let alone how I should use your site, what I should read, what I should buy or not. I just want a service, the aggregation of information. The utility of it. I don't care about how you make money (none of the users really do, let's be honest). If you stop giving the utility, I will go somewhere else. If you can try to provide this utility and also making money in the process - good for you. If you ask me to pay for your service, a fair (!) price, I will gladly do, like I do for any utility like electricity, clean streets etc.
The more shenanigans like this you pull, the faster the decentralized versions of those utilities (a useful forum for quick information, in your case) will come up and eat up into your revenue.
It's absolutely garbage for comment-heavy subs, but the vast majority of reddit users doesn't visit those.
They care so much because as you browse links out to other content, they can keep you in the app using the embedded browser. And when you read that content and share it, you share reddit links, not the source links.
I'm sure time in app blows away time on site for mobile users.
Seeing how popular the old interface is, they provided an option in the settings to keep using the old interface. A few months ago they decided to not honor that setting on mobile. So now many links on the site are broken and I have to go to old.reddit.com to get around it. Took me a while but now Safari autoprompts and fills it, so not an issue. However I can see a day where they will fully abandon the old interface and that is when I stop using reddit.
rif is fun is pretty good imo.
Free version (ads): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andrewshu....
Paid version (no ads): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andrewshu....
you can still use the old ui via old.reddit.com
i have no use for anything they introduced in the current ui
Meaning collecting data even if the app is not opened? I would suspect so.
Reddit, quora, yelp, facebook on the other hand are Plagued with dark patterns that give a middle finger to the user.
It makes me wonder the kind of shit we build in the name of “user experience”. What is wrong with our industry?
Capital providers that want a return (or at least not a loss) on their investment. More engagement + more users = decent source of ad revenue.
If at all you wish to have a smoother experience and no notifications though, I suggest Relay for Reddit on Android.
Long term: to turn it into a chat app and somehow cash out.
You think they're making big money off of Reddit Gold?
Twitter's (great) PWA is a notable exception.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.laurenceda...
It's a lot nicer than mobile sites or offical app.
There are annoying quirks like some links in comments and wiki/sidebar can take you to new reddit site and it is harder to solve this on FF mobile. But I strongly prefer that over whatever abomination their new design is.
Even leaving aside the UI aspects, the annoying thing about their new site is, it progressively keeps turning bad, earlier it was just that ugly banner for app install or the collapsed comments, or the new page redirection. But now for some reason a lot of communities fail to open in the new design. I don't know why Reddit hates the web so much, they can very well show the ads there as well.
As an added bonus, it should be easy to teach the engine to "see" all the monkeyboxes and eliminate them while at the same time giving no clue to the upstream server that AI was involved in improving the human user's experience.
As a test, I switched to Bing. Problem went away. I'm assuming there's some way to disable Amp on Google as well for my account, but I haven't gone any further in researching this.
[1] https://hermit.chimbori.com/ [2] https://hermit.chimbori.com/early-access
A lot of it is that they want to violate your privacy, particularly track where your body is. There are some legit uses: McDonald's can put your burger on the grill when you approach the 'restaurant', if you want to snipe an Uber driver you'll need to have somebody be bait for the trap unless you can figure out how to spoof your location...
It's like removing a giant time sink that was not adding any value to my life.
I can speculate a bit but let's look at the product from a VC POV. The key metric for all I know they are tracking is "engagement - a.k.a amount of time spent on site which is a proxy for number of ads viewed/clicked etc". This has a few implications :
1. A mobile site (e.g. on mobile Safari) can't entice a user to view articles when Reddit wants them to. In other words, "I" open reddit when "I" want to.
2. I haven't accessed mobile site in a while but (hopefully) it won't have infinite scrolling which means I tire quickly of clicking "Next" and leave the site. An app removes this possibility
3. As alluded in #1, an app can have all sorts of notifications which entice me to access reddit a lot more and can possibly track a lot more than a browser will allow. This is valuable for Reddit in terms of "targeting ads" and hopefully makes the mobile users more valuable than us plebes.
Thank you reddit for pushing the app so much. I hate it and will not install it.
I really don't want to have to install a separate app for every website that I visit. These sites should just cut it out. You can ask me once, or maybe once a year or something, but don't keep bugging me every day.
Ads is a good reason too. In my past workspace, we spent a crazy amount of money on facebook ads and got 80% of traffic from their mobile app.
Reddit is trying to follow the same too.
I think people make too many definitive statements and bad assumptions based on what they can measure. Leaving off understanding gaps where data doesn’t exist or never will.
The difference is high enough that converting one user will more than cover the CLV losses of all the other users who are driven away by the popup.
The reddit marketing team will be trying to maximise CLV and A/B testing tonnes of different ways to do this.
For reddit CLV is based on ads and premium subscriptions/reddit gold, and these figures for mobile app users will be based on a number of factors including data mining, ability to send push notifications to device, control over the ad experience, avoidance of ad blockers, likelihood of returning to reddit, posting frequency etc. Using the website, especially on mobile, will make a lot of those metrics fall off a cliff when looking at CLV, and I wouldn't be surprised if an app user has a 20x or 30x CLV than a mobile web user.
Businesses that rely on advertising revenue will always seek optimal channels for peoples attention. The mobile app gives them two very import things:
1. Push notifications. Push notifications give companies the ability to advertise to you without you even visiting their website. Also, it allows them to piggyback on the Pavlovian response that has been conditioned in your brain by smart phone companies. Essentially this allows them to "mainline" their product into your brain. Just woke up? McDonalds breakfast PN. End of a long day of work? PN from reddit to remind you to binge their content for your entire evening.
2. People can't run adblock on mobile applications. Even if that only accounts for 10% of it's users, it's still a huge increase in ad revenue.
They turned Time Inc into a spammy content factory - did huge deals with Taboola/Outbrain, along with creating stuff like a short FB video show about brunch foods. Came over to Reddit and keeps spouting off these huge proclamations about billions of users. They came over right after the huge raise so it's clear that the clear mandate is to commercialize at every possibly touchpoint.
As part of this they have also other things that they do that I think are downright dishonest, for example, when you land on a subreddit and are asked to log in or use the app, the top bar logo link no longer leads to homepage but to /register. For me that's why shady and made me immediately leave the site but it's still there which suggests that it works on a significant part of the userbase. Again, I'd really be interested in seeing their data.
Randomly locking subreddits for mobile users saying: "Sorry mobile browser user, but, /r/xyz is only available on your device through the mobile app." is just infuriating.
Tangential annoyance: the youtube app attempting to have me sign up for some premium service _every time_ i use the app is frustrating.
It's probably not that they "care so much", it's that they simply don't care. The random people who occasionally navigate to a Reddit thread from a web search, but otherwise don't engage with Reddit in any consistent way, are basically just white noise to them. It's a demographic that represents such as small and unreliable source of revenue that it's just not worth thinking much about from a business perspective.
One certainly wouldn't want to risk reducing the conversion rate among people whose attention is easier to capture, just to mildly appease the never-downloaders.
But Reddit is one of the worst. I wouldn't ever visit the site if it didn't rank so high on search results. I've noticed the frontend has gotten worse and worse every time I look at it. Ever since they changed to a React type frontend, at least 5% of the time the comments won't even load. It just doesn't work. Reddit really is a cautionary tale of attacking your users. I expect it to follow in Mozilla's footsteps as another company that makes no money but pretends it's a unicorn.
But whenever I find myself filling my time by scrolling through popular subs, I end up feeling like shit. They're teeming with misanthropes and the low-IQ'd. For example "Ask Reddit: What's one thing you wish guys knew?" or whatever. Or r/WatchPeopleDieInside (you mean watch someone have a disappointed look on their face... why is this entertaining?).
Reddit is like any popular entertainment (music, film, Nascar...), with a typical bell curve of un-intellectual stimulation.
There are a lot of good subs, but the big ones ain't it.
Abandon the site and perhaps they'll learn it was a bad idea.
Reddit deserves their Digg moment so much. I shall cherish the day it arrives.
Perhaps someone wanted to increase app install numbers (and/or user engagement), this sounded like it would work, and they did it. Simple as that. They did not ponder whether it might have negative effects. They just did it and moved on to something else.
Of course I have no concrete evidence of this, but with the state of product management in our industry, I can't dismiss the possibility.
I guess at some level, their data costs too go down with an app, when compared to a site.
Also, with constant notifications, apps have a better chance to become addictive. At some point, someone saw data of the time spent by users on their site, to that on app and thought, wow !
It allows for better gamification and better avenues for making users buy awards for posts.
I have seen more 'gold' posts than ever after the app became popular.
Here is the link if you want to check it out: https://rdddeck.com
[1] https://www.producthunt.com/posts/deck-for-reddit#comment-11...
Identity: add or remove accounts; find accounts on the device
Contacts: find accounts on the device
Other: use accounts on the device; toggle sync on and off; run at startup; read Google service configuration; draw over other apps
(I deleted a lot of stuff but left the things that Reddit might find more useful). Compare that to the information about the user Reddit would have via a web login.
Just write the redesign off as a failed experiment and build a new design off of the old one. Seriously, even at Reddit what proportion of employees and developers use the new design when given the option?
I was on Android until a few months ago. If I was sent a Reddit link it would open in the Reddit app I liked, no need to ever even look at the mobile site. I was shocked that that seemingly basic feature ISN'T available on iOS. Instead my options are view the Reddit link in browser or on the official Reddit app.
Most of the time I just choose not to click the link because of that.
i hate the UI/UX for reddit, it's atrocious.
Try the legacy mobile website https://i.reddit.com/ there’s no thumbnail view but otherwise it’s much faster and less annoying.
I'm not sure how effective it is. But it's dogmatic for this generation of product designers.
Building an app and still tolerating web usage (on the same device) requires a level of self-confidence, few seem to have. Obviously not reddit.
Because there are multiple third party apps that are actually good, and at least one that is fully free under the GPL (search for Slide on F-droid).
I loved reddit's original UI, similar to HN, you can quickly scan the headlines, not stare at empty space into the oblivion.
Bad UX all over reddit...
I don't think Reddit cares about how you feel about the platform, just as long as you continue to spend half your day on it.
This has switched off all of those reminders and popups and crap for me on mobile.
Last time I went looking for the setting though, it had gone.
Properties that were app only at one point, such as nextdoor, robinhood, instagram and tinder, now have mobile and desktop interfaces that are almost nearly all there.
It's a very 2013 era move
- on desktop adblockers are prevelant. On mobile not.
- on desktop you can't send push notifications thus keeping engagement up.
- Getting into the habit of using mobile apps gets engagement up.
You can use their classic mobile site by going to i.reddit.com
Hamburger menu > settings > ask to open app
I used to be regular surfer of reddit's nsfw subreddit and also lurked around randnsfw for quite a bit of time.
The simple idea that being able to open incognito and browse indulge in porn and erase all (I mean most, uhh ahem) traces of your browsing activity is quite soul destroying in my opinion.
The upside of this limitation even though it is extremely annoying is it stops (to an extent) this mindless indulgence.
It actually made me be less addicted to reddit and the dark and wild usage pattern.
Apollo is an excellent Reddit client for iOS.
other than that the reddit app wants you to use it because there is no ad blocker and they can keep pulling you back in with push notifications.
It’s hassle free.
There's also i.reddit.com, which works really well.
Some product manager at Reddit has his perfomance measured by app adoption, and not by the reputation of the company and future of it's service.
Large companies which have a diverse user base in the hundreds of millions make decisions based on how a particular change affects the entire user population. The larger their user population, the more diverse their user base is and the harder it gets to cater to the needs of each type of user. The folks commenting here are a vocal minority, an important one given many people here are probably early adopters and also have the skills needed to build a Reddit competitor, but it's hard to see the reactions of this minority on a dashboard. A problem worth solving IMO but non trivial.
Typically initiatives like this come from a team within the company who's objective is to improve a key metric, in this case let's say user engagement. Some individual in the team probably spotted the trend that users on the app are more engaged than users on mobile web browsers. They then launched an experiment to test getting users over to the mobile app. Many users who end up on reddit via SEO probably don't know that reddit has an app and on seeing this end up downloading the app which makes them more engaged with reddit. Overall on the dashboard this shows up as a win where user engagement in the enabled group is up compared to the control and given that they give users an option to continue using the web app there is not a significant user drop. At this point, a decision needs to be made on whether to ship this change or not to ship. Folks making this decision do understand that it might be annoying to some people but the data in this case overwhelmingly supports a ship decision. They talk about it, mention their reservations, but eventually make a decision given the data and don't think about it anymore. They also don't have to feel the pain as most employees have the reddit app installed and don't see this again and again.
The key thing to know here is that there are lots of incentives in the company to make this decision a ship decision vs a no-ship decision - the data, the success of the team, the success of the individual who pioneered this change but there is not enough evidence or visible push from users to not make this change. Let's say there are some customer reports for this but unless they reach a very high volume no one is going to notice it.
Posts and discussions like this are actually a great way to get your word known to companies. This will probably stir a conversation in the team that made this change and hopefully bring out some change in the experience. Don't expect it to go away but maybe they will remember your preference of not wanting to use the app.
1. Go to the website on mobile
2. go to Settings
3. Uncheck “ask to open in app”
A little bit cleaner.
On the content side: moderators are becoming more and more authoritarian: they hand out bans if you don't toe "their" line. Diversity of opinion is frowned upon.
It's a dumpster fire.
1. Amateur porn aggregators. 2. Financial noobs with Robinhood accounts.
Fight me.
I have used this app for like 7 years, it is fast, simple, and keeps the old style format. If you want to use reddit but don't want to use the garbage that their interface has become, check it out.
https://geomarketing.com/reddits-safe-play-in-the-game-of-ge...
