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.
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]"
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.