On a serious note, it must really be a good strategy to utterly ruin the web experience, if you want to get more people on your app, because its been the hot new thing for a while. At least with Reddit, third party clients are well-supported, unlike say Twitter. I use Apollo on iOS.
I've been wondering, every time I click a twitter link in iOS from say slack, I get the stupid partial load and then the refresh message.
Aggressive stance by Safari and Firefox isn't helping online businesses reliant on extensive user-tracking.
Apple controls the AppStore so it is more likely that Apple devices would soon become the de-facto choice for people trying to evade surveillance.
I agree that the new UI is worse, I'm just baffled by the reasons why it's the case. Probably bad management / structure.
If their aim was to improve the discoverability of smaller subs, they've achieved it.
The website version is almost unusable without old.reddit.com and a reformatting/feature adding plug-in called RES. I have to assume there is a huge crossover between people who will seek out plugins and people who run ad blocks or VPNs. I'd love to see a breakdown of just how little Reddit make per user on ads on the web based site.
This is before we begin to discuss the major functional problems with Reddit...
- Any community over 5k-10k users dips in quality extremely quickly.
- Any unprepared sub which gets randomly hurled on to the top of /r/all will have issues for weeks if not months after.
- Geo related subs reflect the actual locations so poorly its an embarrassment to the city/country.
- The voting system which along with subscriber growth only helps speed up the hivemind effect.
- Finally powermods who seem to treat reddit as a second job, manipulating a large amount of the content based on their own personal feelings.
Take a look at /r/investing, its the same 4-5 companies and the same boring daily questions.
Specifically the community moderation and voting system?
I think a lot of the flaws I've listed are pretty fundamental to how the platform works, it was broken from the whiteboard stage.
Remember that there's an https://old.reddit.com, it still works great, I use only this version now. There are browser extensions that automatically redirect you to the old version (not on mobile, unfortunately).
I’m more annoyed of that than their mobile site.
The moment they decide to cripple 3rd party apps is probably when I'm quitting reddit. Don't even get me started on the new design which I opted out of.
By doing this I no longer see any Reddit ads.
If they hadnt pushed so hard to use their app and ruin the entire Reddit mobile experience, I would still probably just be browsing on their website (which would give them some ad eyes).
Now I'll never switch back - Apollo is just awesome for Reddit.
Pretty much the only reason I have a Reddit account is so I can filter the feed.
