Reddit had/has a plan to block mobile browsers in favor of their app

What the F Reddit, are you trying to speedrun the worst decisions a website can do??

They can serve you ads just fine on mobile web, that’s not it. It’s that the app let’s them track your behavior far better than the web browser.

Hey Reddit, There's a reason why there were a dozen alternatives to your official Reddit app.

Why would the owners of a website want to make it harder to browse their website

I honestly hope reddit keeps fucking up like this. It takes a lot of work and a long time to drive millions of casual users away from your site.

They can get fucked then. I'm tired of this closed internet, walled garden attitude from large social media companies. They've taken the tools that people built to make information free and available, and have locked them down for their own selfish purposes. I will not give them any more of my time.

I miss-cropped, OP for context:

Since Reddit removed the option to "stop asking to open in app" in mobile browseds it was clear this would be the next step.

Spoofing user agents go brrrrrr

Seriously, the data mining is going to put so much load on their servers, this is whole thing screams "management considered the technology teams assessment, but decided to go forward with [dumb project codename for fucking the platform over]"

I'm utterly shocked and appalled. /s

CEOs will happily restrict your freedoms for just a bit of profit, and destroy any competitors who threaten their monopoly. I don't get how anyone can defend this system in good faith.

They don't know that the primary use case for reddit on mobile is getting good answers from Google.

With how awful the interface is and how it spams me with DOWNLOAD THE APP TO SEE MORE, it kinda already "blocks" it for me. Browsing via Libreddit on mobile is so much better.

old.reddit will prolly be next

lmao, they can't be serious

Not surprising, since ad blockers are a thing even on mobile these days.

And this is where I stop using Reddit altogether. I don't want to use any app, let alone the piss poor official app. I can barely read the site in desktop on my phone. And I only access it from my phone. So there's no reason left to go there. Taking away the compact site was bad enough, taking away the entire mobile site is the last straw...

Doesn't surprise me a bit, before you know it they'll block the site completely when they detect an adblocker. (I already found an app that refuses to start when you block ads, so the techniques are out there)

Companies that do this absolutely annoy me. Even Facebook doesn’t do this??

I genuinely don't get it. I fully understand pushing users towards the app. But there is going to be a portion of users who will never install your app. So at some point, you are just pissing off those users by making your product worse and worse, and they're never going to install the app anyway. I'd rather the utterly atrocious experience of browsing the laggy desktop site on my phone.

If you want your app used so much, just make it snappy damn

Makes no difference to me.

I stopped using Reddit and I’m glad that I don’t have to worry about this kind of user hostile changes.

Reddit making dumb decisions?! Impossible.

Reddit is on that "Kill your own platform" speedrun any%

This is the Reddit. com front page on a mobile browser and has been for well over a year now

The writing has been on the wall for along time.

btw clear you cookies on exit, use a password manager, stay safe.

Too much salespeople see complaints like "your application is bad" and answer with "we're going to force it on you even more then".

Oh my, that is such a great idea, right on par with everything else they've been doing.

Worst dark pattern ever.

They've been planning this for a long time. I noticed a while ago that the "stop asking me about the app" preference went away, which was about the time I stopped going to reddit on mobile. My account is deleted now so I hope they got some good results to ignore and do what they wanted anyway.

This will assist me further in avoiding using Reddit on my phone.

Even now anytime you access Reddit mobile website and see an NSFW post, it would prompt you to install the app without an option to cancel. Literally the only way to continue without switching to the app was by using old.reddit.com

Reddit's fucked

This happened on my device and I just said fuck it back to Lemmy.

It already did since 2 years ago, random "unverified content" bullshit login walls on popular/valuable advice, tens of megabytes of Javascript that took long to load on intermittent/unstable connections and terrible UI in general.

I have been using the iOS browser extension called ‘sink it’.. blocks promoted posts, kills the popup to use the app

They have been doing this for a long time now.

My solution was to use libreddit as a proxy, but at this point I would just advocate for ditching Reddit altogether.

They have been doing a form of this for a long time. On the mobile browser, I can find individual posts, but if I try to click on the comments or anything, it just redirects me to the appstore to download the official garbage.

Honest question: why push people to use the app specifically? What is the advantage to reddit if everyone just magically dropped the browser and switched to the app?

that would be a final nail in their coffin

I only use reddit in 2 places. At work, where I am looking for an answer to something, I am not logged in and blocking ads. And the other is at home when I am winding down for the night. I use third party apps because the first party app sucks. I will just stop scrolling at home where I am logged in and they are gathering my data. And I will avoid reddit for answers when I am at work in favor of other forums.

More nails to the coffin

They are doingeverything exactly how elon did on Twitter

I tried reddit with revanced, but even without ads the app is still garbage. Scrolling is laggy, simple gestures are non existent, I can't even copy a text by pressing on it.

They've been making their mobile site hard to use and blocking most utility with a "you really need our fucking app" popup for years now. I can't imagine how they could make it worse.

good thing I have a plan to block reddit :-)

I deleted my app a few days ago and now I exclusively use reddit for r/Godot because sadly there just isn't an established community for godot elsewhere.

It's going from bad to worse on a daily basis.

Of course they do, in absence of the 3rd party apps that is how I would still be able to browse without ads on my phone. (If I didn‘t already switch fully to kbin and Lemmy)

I also expect one of these annoying "Disable your adblocker" pop ups for Desktop users.

I have been using the iOS browser extension called ‘sink it’.. blocks promoted posts, kills the popup to use the app

They've been doing this on Android for years already. I used sync. If I googled something and clicked on reddit, it would initially open in browser, then I'd get a pop up saying I needed to open the official app to continue reading on mobile.

This happened to me for years

Getting rid of .compact was the first step.

The official Reddit app doesn't work on older phones, guess I'm out of luck. I can afford a new phone, but I don't feel it's worth it to buy a new phone just for one app.

That app is POISON. On my poor low storage phone it quickly ballooned up to 1.3 gigabytes as it cached things. That itself would have outright driven me away from Reddit.

How horrible. I refuse to install apps at all if I can avoid it. I much prefer having a back button, bookmarks, being able to save images, control location access and all that. I already barely use reddit now but this would ensure that I never do.

Link to the full discussion.

Reddit can truly get fucked. Can't wait to delete all my Reddit accounts on July 1st. I'm holding out 1/100000th hope that they will come to their senses on June 30th.

Reddit has done a great job un-aliving itself.

This is a new low, even in light of everything they've done recently

This is old news.

Well, I guess that solves the problem of me browsing reddit on the toilet then. Just making it easier to stop using it.

Now they're conducting experiments on us without our consent? Is there no low they won't stoop to?

@orientalsniper

If Reddit wants to kill itself, who am I to change its mind? (I already tried and they didn't accept my feedback because the form was rigged against being completed)

For anyone wondering, you can still use it on mobile by changing the address to old.reddit.com in your mobile browser. So its still accessible on all mobile devices, just not on www.reddit.com.