Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access? (2024)

I was part of this test - I've refused to install the app for years (I prefer websites and the option to open tabs for later browsing).

It was extremely annoying for a site I've used for 12+ years to treat me like that. It did massively cut my usage of Reddit (which I would consider to be quite high), I primarily access it from my phone and I all but stopped using it for the week or so I was in the "experiment".

> I prefer websites and the option to open tabs for later browsing

The number of times I lost a post because when I switched app or didn’t use my phone for a while reddit would just reset to the home page… I think they really didn’t realize how much the sh*tty UX would enrage people against them.

They need to shut that down. Even better, they should make a desktop app and force users to use that instead of the website.

If they really believe in their forced-app strategy, they should bet the farm on it, not just on mobile, but everywhere.

That's basically why I'm advocating what I posted, that and also because I think it'd be a great chapter in tech history, showing how doubling down on a stupid user-hostile decision can destroy a company (assuming it does). Then, 30 years from now, people will still talk about how Reddit self-destructed when they decided they needed to control the user experience and forced everyone to use their app.

Rationally, your approach is of course better, but the current narcissistic execs aren't going to do anything like that, whereas I can certainly see them doing something as stupid and out-of-touch as forcing everyone to use their app on both mobile and desktop.

> Then, 30 years from now, people will still talk about how Reddit self-destructed when they decided they needed to control the user experience and forced everyone to use their app.

No. What they'll be talking about is how Reddit had too many holes in its fence, and all its cows escaped. They'll then discuss all the advancement in cattle fencing and barn construction that happened in the 30 years since.

Why do people assume Reddit C-suite and investors are being stupid or narcissistic here? That would make sense if the relationship between them and the users was a friendly one. It isn't. It's adversarial. For Reddit (as well as Meta and other social media platforms), the users are cattle. Even worse than that - they're stochastic cattle. Nobody at the top cares if you or me are having a nice experience with the site/app. They care about the value extracted from us in aggregate. To them, it's an optimization problem, and it's been apparent for a long time now that the optimum point is usually "the most sh*tty and abusive possible version that still clears the 'fit for purpose' bar" (the end point is more obvious when you look at goods and services that have been around for a couple decades or more, and thus subject to decades of "value engineering").

It doesn't feel as bad when they're optimizing for future value extraction, but that time is past, and Reddit is currently squeezing value out of its cattle-base.

Is it sustainable? Since when did that question mattered to the captains of the industry? "Reddit" as a brand and company matters to the users; for its leaders and investors, it's just a money making instrument that takes time to mature, but exists to be squeezed, discarded and replaced by something else.

For all this UX design, responsiveness, mobile-friendly talk and SAAS products for conversion funnels and what not, does no one in management ever use their own app or website on mobile? Seriously, open practically any random website on a stock chrome or Firefox on mobile and just see how horrible it is. Scrolling loses position, you randomly click stuff and sh*t happens, half the page is filled with a sign-up newsletter popup or a privacy banner. And wow if you have to input anything and all the nonsense you have to put up with dealing with the page or app responding to the keyboard. Or you have to scroll in an input field.

Like seriously. What is wrong with these people that designed this sh*t and how do we not have an alternative.

I was on reddit before they tried updating their designs, the only reason I'm still there is because they still have the old.reddit.com frontend available. I even use it on mobile where it's not exactly practical. It's not because I have some sort of aversion to change, well, I guess I'm really uninterested in downloading apps considering I didn't even bother to try things like Apolle to see what the fuzz was about, but their various attempts at redesigns have been so bad that I would rather use old.reddit.com than them on mobile, even though it's impractical.

On a computer I see no benefits from any of the redesigns compared to old.reddit.com. I work a lot with Typescript and also React myself, and I love the language, so it's not because I dislike that sort of thing, but I think a list of links with comments just works better without being put into a virtual DOM or even just JS. HN is the perfect example of that, there has been a lot of hobby JS frontends from people, but they all work worse than the real deal and somewhat hilariously they work better than reddit's professional attempts. Now I get why reddit wants to move away from the page-reload. They want a lot of the SoMe interactivity, like their silly chat and so on, but I'm not sure who would ever want a Facebook with total strangers instead of people you actually talk with. I sure don't.

It's built by the idiots sons and daughters of rich people as their "my first job" project. Lots of sectors apparently function like this. Children of the elite can have play jobs, money is distributed to friends and family and everyone suffers.

There were posts on reddit about the most toxic work culture there i remember with drugs and bizarre politics straight out of some san fran sitcom.

And some quite funny posts on just how grotesquely "my first react project" the whole code base was, and still is. These people are absolutely clueless. They nuked the whole "new reddit feedback" forum with posts pointing out just how bad the whole thing was, like pulling tens megabytes of starter boilerplate in production and loops with script loads inside of them that could grind a powerful computer to a halt.

I’ve already been ignoring the extremely annoying spammy pop ups telling me to download the app for years.

I’m not downloading the app. I am just not doing it. Period.

if you happen to be using safari on ios, someone just created an extension for cleaning up the mobile web version: https://apps.apple.com/ro/app/sink-it-for-reddit/id644987363...

People refusing to use their app etc. are likely a minority. Most people are completely used to being bullied into submission by tech companies, and will happily follow along.

I'd assume their goal with this isn't to convert the stragglers, it's to just close the gates to them so that they disappear from ad-view related statistics.

Edit: Further to this point, the Apollo app which everyone was talking about the other day has 50000 (fifty thousand!) paid users. Reddit has hundreds of millions of monthly users. They don't care about this minority of users, they just want the sh*tstorm to pass so they can move on. They also don't care that there's likely a small minority of users creating most actual good content, but it doesn't matter because the site can be floated entirely by meme spam bots and p*rn posts and still be massively profitable.

I'm personally not confident if the signal to noise ratio took a turn for the worse (re: spam and p*rn posts), the site would be as a profitable/popular anymore

What I'm curious about is why didn't (and maybe they did as I'm not particularly well read in this situation) reddit just buy the apollo app for like $1M/$5M/etc. and then just modify it so it injects whatever tracking they want instead of creating this giant far more costly sh*tstorm?

Further, maybe the 50k paid users but perhaps there were many unpaid users using it less intensely?

Worse than the conversion rate, Google will most certainly deindex the Reddit pages if they are not available as webpages.

But surely Reddit has already calculated that “[search query] + Reddit” is traffic they don’t care about?

Used to.

Nowadays Google is equally user-hostile and is happy to accommodate its peers.

If you are tired of patching the APKs yourself, you can just use pre-built APKs for less work: https://github.com/revanced-apks/build-apps/releases

Revanced is the only way to stay sane while using Youtube and Twitch on mobile. The adverts and other spam are more obnoxious than cable TV.

I just hope it flies under the radar enough that Google don't start banning accounts for using it. I don't log in to the Youtube app for this reason, but I'm sure there is a line in a EULA somewhere that means they could if they wanted to.

Which reminds me, i need to backup all my email...

It's funny because I also sing the praises of old.reddit.com but would describe it/my preferences in a totally different manner. My preference would be for reddit to be as close to HN in UI format as possible, perhaps with some minor thumbnails for visual content.

What I like about the old UI is that I find it emphasizes the post titles instead of content. I *don't* feel inundated with images & videos, besides the little thumbnail. I usually just want to skim titles, not look at visual content, and I find that impossible in the new UI. And I find that it's easier to get at/see the comments than in the new UI.

There is only one appropriate, effective response to disrespect, and that is to not reward the offending party.

I made it a matter of principle to not use the Reddit app. Even if they removed all ads and made it an acceptable user experience, I'll never use the app as long as they are harassing me about it.

It's simple. Don't reward bad behavior.

Sometimes, denying obnoxious people something they want means denying yourself something you want.

I think you're right, partly. But I also think that a lot of the people who put up with it are the passive ones who don't really contribute much to communities anyway; they're just there.

The people who do the real contributing—posting, modding, defining the culture and building the communities that Reddit benefits from—are, as far as I can tell, more likely to get a lot angrier about abusive corporate nonsense, simply because they're more invested.

The more invested you are, the more screwed you feel. That's something that a person like Huffman is incapable of grasping, to his company's detriment.

I don't think the blackout alone will end Reddit. I don't think any one thing will end Reddit. I think, similar to Twitter, that it'll be a series of things: indignities large and small that successively alienate the people who matter most to these companies whether the C-level/marketer types realize it or not.

And at some point, similar to what I expect will happen to Twitter, Reddit will simply no longer be relevant in the way it once was. Whether they understand why is another question, but to me, it's always been clear.

tl;dr: Reddit the company is just a dumb pipe. Reddit as we think of it is a culture and community. That culture and community is defined by a relatively small collection of people who are on there because they care. When enough of them get disgusted enough to go elsewhere, Reddit—both the company and the community—will cease to exist in any meaningful capacity.

Reddit once faked tons of users making posts. I have a feeling they'll look for ways to do it again.

I wonder how hard it would be to have a series of bots that harvest posts from other social media sites, add a little 'human' LLM magic to it, and make it look like actual people are posting lots of content?

> The people who do the real contributing—posting, modding, defining the culture and building the communities that Reddit benefits from—are, as far as I can tell, more likely to get a lot angrier about abusive corporate nonsense, simply because they're more invested.

I suspect strongly that these people have been purged already over the past 2-3 years. You simply don't hear much about it, because de-platforming them muzzles most of them, and if anyone does complain elsewhere it's easy to smear them as Nazis or whatnot. I mean, they can't effectively defend themselves against that sort of lie when reddit has scrubbed their comment history from anyone else's view.

OP didn't claim that. You're giving a very uncharitable reading of the argument.

Fact is, the best people on Reddit have been leaving for many years. There have been many purges, of many scales. The fact you didn't hear about them helps demonstrate OPs point (their actual point, not the one you put in their mouth).

And those purges are just one thread in a long tapestry of disrespect towards moderators and users of the site. Spez in particular has been caught lying, editing people's comments, making false accusations, etc on many occasions.

They claimed that "The people who do the real contributing—posting, modding, defining the culture and building the communities that Reddit benefits" were driven off ("these people have been purged already over the past 2-3 years.")

Only some small groups were actually driven off.

>Only some small groups were actually driven off.

Small groups and individuals can be extremely important. It's less about the raw numbers of 'how many <X> did we gain/lose' and more about 'what kind of tone are we setting'.

When Reddit allowed /r/the_donald to flourish, what sort of message did that send? When there was a purge in/of leftist communities, what sort of message did that send? Politically, what Reddit allows is actually quite narrow, and it's trending toward mainstream sanitized neoliberal center-right (aka 'advertiser-friendly').

When Reddit started to corral everyone into one sh*tty app by breaking the mobile web experience, what message did that send? And now, what message is being sent with this API cash-grab?

Reddit's positioning is constantly chafing against Reddit's core demographic. The people who operate Reddit don't understand what they want (aside from $$$), don't understand their customers/content providers, and now seem unwilling to even listen to their customers/content providers.

Many messages stacked up over the years eventually form a story. What's the story of Reddit?

Those people aren't common on the default subreddits, which might make it feel like there is not much community. But in the places that count, the more niche communities that actually have real community, those people are still around.

Besides, its a question of scale. There are loads of people like myself who make effort-post/comments sporadically on a few different platforms. There is enough such people that there can be (and is!) several viable twitter-like platforms at the moment. There's no reason the same can't be true for reddit.

I never wanted to use the reddit app. Must have caved and installed it one day. I use it now, and it doesnt feel different from the site.

Say what you want about HN, but at least the contrarians bring out opposing views. The bigger reddit subs have a mob mentality that use to annoy me, and now scares me. People are itching for a chance to hate, and pile on from every angle. It's childish, naive, and most of all vindictive and bitter.

> The bigger reddit subs have a mob mentality that use to annoy me, and now scares me.

It has gotten way worse right? Or is it me getting older? Many subs are like sects with a razor thin point of view allowed that is shifting constantly. It feels like insane people are pushing every BS problem as a do or die proposition and that those are dominating.

The Reddit app is a worse experience than users currently have on mobile with 3rd parties. Reddit let this go on for years and has now decided, without warning, to make the product worse for a lot of users including myself.

I use Apollo to aimlessly scroll through Reddit (probably too much) and now I'll use that time to learn something and find other communities that are less disruptive.

There's a million ways Reddit could've gone that would've been less user hostile.

> I for one will try to undo my past contributions to accelerate its decline.

This is a great idea. I'm going to bulk edit then delete my old comments (I recall reading somewhere that editing them overwrites the original field in the database whereas deleting just sets a deleted flag).

Destroys the value that I've created for free for that sh*theap, plus it's helpful to make doxxing me harder.

Look into Shreddit [1] which does that for you. It needs API access though, so make sure to do it before June 30th...

[1]: https://github.com/andrewbanchich/shreddit

Your own comment doesn’t include any specific examples of these communities, which I think reflects the big problem: discovery. As big as HN is, I rarely see it mentioned anywhere that’s not HN-adjacent. I’d love to hear about some of these other communities, but I do suspect they’ll each have varying features, cultural norms, and suboptimal onboarding guides for newbies. Especially if they’re decades old.

I think if you’re “in-the-know” and have grown with some of these high quality forums/communities for years, you’ll lose touch with understanding what new users need to join as the quality and depth of discussion become higher and deeper.

It's not just creating an account.

The forum software itself may be unfamiliar. Does it have better features than Reddit? Some do; others don't. Does the forum have really bizarre rules or conventions? Subreddits can too, but it seems to be less common. Will my first ten posts get held for moderation? They probably won't on my 17 year old Reddit account.

It would be nice to see a federated identity/reputation system take off though. I'm thinking of OpenID plus [some other technology that probably exists, but isn't popular] where any of many service providers or my own website can confirm my identity, then offer vouches from other forums along the lines of "Zak has been a member of [community] for 2 years, posted 473 times, and has not been banned as of [date]".

I don't know about this argument. "Everyone else is doing it so there are no alternatives." I believe less in this argument every year.

* There are alternatives. Like for me it's Mastodon, IRC, SDF and the Tildes. Now there's this thing Lemmy bouncing around out there which is a straight up federated clone of Reddit. Are they all kind of different from Reddit yeah, are they smaller yeah, so what? The alternative is you can go help make them better. You can help create.

* None of this stuff is essential for life, work etc. Reddit is not an essential service. So why would it be such a big deal if you totally changed your media consumption habits to basically anything, like let's say just start reading one newsletter from one publisher you think is ethical, and that's it. Seems fine to me. Your world will keep on turning. You'll get more fresh air.

* I just don't feel that what the masses are doing is such a huge issue. f*ck em. I read stuff on and participate in a bunch of little communities now, still use Reddit too but will never use their app, I would absolutely survive if Reddit disappeared tomorrow.

Not trying to pick on you btw, just trying to address the mindset of "<insert dickhe*d Internet site here> has all the users and therefore is the only option." I just feel like this is all much ado about nothing. Reddit's not a big deal. Let it burn, let it shine, let it do whatever, life's gonna go on and as humans we're creative so if they suck we'll find better things to do.

There's a second response: to not reward AND punish the offending party.

I've been recommending people to replace their content in Reddit with literal gibberish (from random generators), and then delete their accounts. Each person doing this makes Reddit data less valuable for LLMs, and eventually it means that not even Google, Amazon, Microsoft etc. would ever bother paying for API access.

I sunk 15 years of myself into reddit. I am there in all my teenage angst, and you get to see me mature before your eyes.

I can't just delete. I've helped people there, and been helped. If my data is part of a corpus that betters humanity, than so be it. Hopefully one day that corpus will be released under a FOSS license.

I can relate to your intentions, but keep in mind that, when you leave your data there, you're effectively encouraging people to keep using a user-hostile platform that will likely wall those people's content in. In the long run, you aren't making humanity better - you're worsening it.

Instead a better approach is to migrate whatever you deem useful in your Reddit history to another platform. And then remove it from Reddit, either by deletion or replacing it with gibberish.

You might also be interested in this text, as food for thought:

https://karl-voit.at/2020/10/23/avoid-web-forums/

It has been shared a few times here in HN, so I believe that plenty users here know about it.

The thing is that there's a lot of valuable information that I don't think we should just delete like that.

When you search about a Neovim issue for example, often the solution is in an old Reddit thread. When you delete that, it will be gone forever.

Even more valuable info will be generated, and I don't think that we should just cram it there like that. We would be exposing this new info to information loss.

And someone might say "I won't post it there", but once the person leaves some info in that site, they're encouraging others to interact with it, and generate more info there, in that walled garden, instead of somewhere else.

Note that the potential of information loss in Reddit does not come just from users deleting their stuff. It's also mods (including automod) and Reddit Inc. itself. One day Reddit will decide "we're going to flush out old content!", and here goes your info anyway, no matter if you deleted it or not. Or Reddit itself will go off, and the info in it will be lost, just like the info from the forums that Reddit itself killed. That's the main reasoning in the link that I've provided, and you know what, I think that the author is 100% right.

Also note that there are ways to reduce the information loss. People can - and IMHO they should - migrate that info, before removing it from Reddit.

I think that you're looking at the info present there _now_ in a short-sighted way, without realising the consequences elsewhere.

EDIT: and as another commenter highlighted everything has been archived already. The info loss will be way, way lower than you think.

>The thing is that there's a lot of valuable information that I don't think we should just delete like that.

Agreed. In the past 2 days I've been overly annoyed as both days I've had multiple google queries dump me to seemingly useful threads that I can not see because of this foolish nonsense of shuttering communities in "protest".

It already is, and everything through March 2023 was archived by pushshift and there are torrents floating about.

It's about 2TB in zstd compression, so finding the needles will be interesting - but it'll probably be much easier years from now.

Wow. Just... wow.

Thank you for this info, it's f*cking great. This means that the info loss for whatever came before March/2023 will be exactly ZERO.

I’ve once held a similar view, but then realised that kind of data really isn’t worth holding on to. I deleted my 15 years worth of posts and account, and felt a massive weight had been lifted. Reddit had a negative effect on me, and freeing myself of that was well worth it.

I should also mention that Reddit archives exist, so those post will live on somewhere.

man I did this with facebook and it obliterated my social connections. it doesn’t make sense from a micro perspective, game theory sucks man

i installed instagram in december and it’s so much easier to make friends. I feel in touch with what’s going on in the community

That's how Meta pulls you in, but reddit has always felt less user-focused than subreddit and comment-focused. Read a link, make some smalltalk about it asynchronously for a few hours, move on.

Reddit is probably among the least sticky social media sites because of it.

It may be less sticky from a social perspective, but its comprehensiveness is (was?) its strength to me. I often search Reddit for very specific questions about a range of subjects. That's what I come back to it for.

(Although it's been a while now; the user hostility is just too much).

>I did this with facebook and it obliterated my social connections.

Huh... I did this with Facebook and it basically changed nothing. I was forced to text my friends life updates, that was it.

Out of every social media site I've quit, Facebook seemed to have the lowest impact on my life(as long as I or my wife checked it every 1-3 weeks for Events).

It seems Facebook has an ability to make you feel popular without actually making you friends. I'd be skeptical of the 'friends' you make on Instagram. I've made a few over the last 6 years, but since quitting, I really only talk to 1-2 of them rarely.

whoa, you’ve really opened my eyes! i’ve now realized my lived personal experience is invalid

gonna take your advice and cut off the people i’ve met because hospitalJail is skeptical!

Appreciate you providing insight into my life

It’s been 1 year plus of deleting IG and unfortunately I feel the same

Considering making it back let’s see

making new friends!

i don’t in my hometown and didn’t go to school near my home state.

old friends get harder to see every passing year. it’s just incrementally harder to stay in touch given the geographical distance. i do text and visit when i can

There’s nothing wrong with having acquaintances that aren’t close friends though. I always see this argument and don’t get it.

Yea, my “true” friends will contact me anywhere, but it’s nice to have a small network of people I know that I can invite to stuff or even better yet invite me to events and activities. They may also become close friends at some point.

>I always see this argument and don’t get it.

Internet misanthropes contributing to the trend for people to lose friends and acquaintances as they age.

Yes. Putting people through hoops and then going "were we really friends if you didn't do it for me, huh, HUUUUH?" is a "I'm the main character" mindset.

A friend recently deleted all his apps and he asks me I just email him if I want to talk. I'm just not gonna do that. I barely remember to email my work people.

> Yes. Putting people through hoops and then going "were we really friends if you didn't do it for me, huh, HUUUUH?" is a "I'm the main character" mindset.

Interesting point.

> A friend recently deleted all his apps and he asks me I just email him if I want to talk. I'm just not gonna do that. I barely remember to email my work people.

Oh. You have zero self-awareness. Got it.

Since you can't figure it out yourself -- you are doing that first thing in that second thing. Your poor friend.

>You have zero self-awareness.

Not wanting to jump through hoops for someone you don't necessarily care that much about ain't 'zero self awareness'

It helps me trim down 'friends' who might not be real friends.

I tend not to be the person who tends to bother other people constantly even after getting signals that they don't want to interact with you. Are you?

I have other friends whom I interact with just fine. I'm not going to go through hoops just for one person I don't care much about, sorry.

That's something this strategy helps to trim out. Who I want to talk to and jump through hoops for, and whom I don't.

> A friend recently deleted all his apps and he asks me I just email him if I want to talk. I'm just not gonna do that. I barely remember to email my work people.

If you put them below “work people”, they’re not a friend. Or rather, you’re not a friend.

Ah yeah man totally wanting to jump through hoops (email was just an example), installing sh*t like wechat, kik, tiktok etc is the same thing) totally makes me the 'main character.'

That's something this strategy helps to trim out. Who I want to talk to and jump through hoops for, and whom I don't.

---

> It's simple. Don't reward bad behavior.

This is mathematically backed.

In the game of prisoners dilemma if someone chooses to defect (bad behavior) rather than cooperate, and you choose to cooperate (reward bad behavior), bad behavior becomes a winning strategy, so you can expect even more bad behavior in the future.

Prisoner's Dilemma is a good example but probably has a lot of bias due to its naming convention. I think I prefer the Stag's Game for this situation. And honestly, the Stag's game is probably more applicable to this situation.

-----------

Both players have the choice of picking "Rabbit" or "Stag". "Rabbit" is the independent choice, you score 1 point for picking the Rabbit.

"Stag" is the cooperation choice. You get 10 points if both players pick stag, but 0 points if the opponent picks Rabbit.

Its not so much that the current situation is a betrayal (ie: Prisoner's Dilemma), as much as the current Reddit situation is picking a short-sighted, still profitable, choice. (Rabbit). But by picking Rabbit, they're screwing the community (who has gotten used to picking Stag / scoring 10 points instead).

----------

Unlike the Prisoner's Dilemma, the Stag's game is bimodal. If both players are picking "Stag", the Nash Equalibrium is to continue picking stag forever more.

But if for some reason, a player ever makes a mistake and picks "Rabbit", the game switches to Rabbit-meta and neither player ever has a reason to go back to pick "Stag".

That's assuming that everyone has a good grasp on what's going on, and considers this funny-picture-App to be their top priority.

That's the issue with operating on principle:

We HN users might be aware of this particular issue, but there's thousands of products that we use, because we're unaware or don't have the energy to fight.

So with all the exploitation, abuse and pollution that you indirectly support, why do you expect most users to draw the line at a weird website?

Not simple at all.

I can't believe they would do this AND kill off third party apps. I'm with you on not rewarding reddit, they have become very user hostile all the sudden.

I was going to ban personal reddit use this week but I already broke that to read this topic and respond to the one dev that replied to it.

Fwiw, you can remove the nagging with a free Safari extension for iOS called Sink It: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6449873635

Exactly, don't take it personally just vote with your feet. Reddit doesn't owe you anything. The flip side is that you don't owe it anything either. If they do something you disagree with, that is their good right. But you are of course under no obligation to stick around.

In any case, it looks like Reddit is going to join the ranks of long forgotten startups on a slide towards basically being empty shells of their former selves. More interesting to ask is where the users, content, and attention will go.

I never really cared for Reddit. The signal to noise ratio just feels wrong to me. Lots of people yapping about whatever and just not a lot of stuff that interests me. I lurk in a few sub-reddits but as communities they are pretty weak.

Might be a nice one for Elon Musk to buy. But I'd recommend he does that at a big discount. This company needs the same kind of shock therapy that Twitter received to have a realistic shot at surviving. Including a big layoff round probably. I get that people are still upset about what happened at Twitter, but they too were on a long slide towards irrelevance. It's debatable whether Musk's intervention is going to be good enough of course.

I find it funny people have been going on this anti Reddit turning profit crusade, but ignore the fact Reddit is pretty similar to Facebook groups, just has much better ui and indexability

And everyone I know in real life who uses Reddit on a daily basis is also in at least 2-3 FB groups. Be it a local mom/dad group, Costco group, the car they own, or something more niche

They’re not big Zuckerberg fans but they’re much more accepting of him making billions than the Reddit shareholders

FB groups also utilize mods who work lots of hours for free. So those who say Reddit cannot IPO because of the free labor are wrong

Just because every single comment complaining (rightly) about Reddit’s current behavior does not include a comparison to Facebook does not mean it’s ignored.

People can dislike two things at once, and it doesn’t need to necessarily be said. Three, even, if they’re feeling frisky.

Unless there’s a post specifically about Reddit and Facebook, then you shouldn’t expect people to even bring up Facebook. It’s at best barely relevant.

FB is highly profitable, Reddit loses money.

The outrage from users that Reddit is trying to do what everyone in the tech industry does makes no sense

And furthermore, if they give up the IPO focus, let’s say they don’t do the obvious and sell to Meta

What do they do? Layoff 80% of employees? Cut down the servers? Obviously if they are going to screw over the investors, no one will give a penny to another funding round

If, theoretically, the investors really don’t have a majority of votes, like someone here mentioned, the 2021 funding round was the last one, Reddit just burns it’s cash until it shuts down

> FB is highly profitable, Reddit loses money.

Okay, and? Bytedance is also profitable. Apple is also profitable. Netflix is also profitable. They all do vastly different things to achieve profitability. What works for one company won’t necessarily work for others.

Just because another company is profitable does not mean it needs to be mentioned every time Reddit is, and that was my entire point.

People don’t even necessarily have a problem with Reddit trying to become profitable, but with the extreme disregard for their users they’ve shown in the last few weeks. Is that common between all the companies above? No. And certainly not to the extent Reddit has shown. And that’s what all these topics have boiled down to.

I’m sure if an article comes up which talks about Reddit and Facebook, then Facebook will come up in conversation. Unless that happens, there should be no real expectation for it to come up organically.

There's something that I don't get about forcing mobile browser users into mobile apps - how does it make sense for the company? They're forcing themselves into a walled garden, where the gardener takes a hefty "app store tax" on your revenues and has countless levers to force you to style the app how it suits their interests, not yours. For some apps, this might still be the best way to gain traction. But if have already attracted users who are obviously happy with the web experience, why on earth not keep them there? I would be expecting developers, if anything, to be nudging people in the other direction. But that's not what's happening, not just with reddit, so what am I missing here?

I get that there are some marketing benefits from having your logo on of the user's home screens (likely not the main one), and that very few users even know you can do the same thing with websites, and that in the early days there was a big feature gap between native and mobile apps. But for apps like Reddit, it seems to me like you should be able to achieve everything you could want with modern web standards, and users who use their browser a lot will probably see your logo on the "New Tabs" page anyway. So what am I missing?

The web puts the user in control; apps (on all significant platforms currently existing) put the company in control.

Yes, Google and (especially) Apple may force Reddit to comply with this or that, but Google and (especially) Apple also prevent the user from doing all sorts of things they can do with an open platform like the web.

Users can't block ads in an app. Users can't block telemetry. Users can't prevent tracking, at least without help from the platform vendor. Users can't easily save their favorite content from your app if the company doesn't want them to. Etc.

The web is fundamentally user-centric, and apps are roughly the opposite of that.

There are also legitimate user-benefiting advantages of apps, such as ability to use the accelerometer or other non-web features, but I can't really think of any that convincingly apply to Reddit's app. Maybe somewhat better push notifications, and "sign in with Apple" but... still seems like another own-goal from team Reddit if they are, in fact, doing this.

Worth pointing out that not all in-app browsers are created equal, however. A huge number of apps, probably the majority, on iOS use SFSafariViewController for theirs, which is basically an isolated Safari tab that runs out of process and app developers have no access to. Furthermore, SFSafariViewController instances are unique per-app, each with their own separate set of cookies so apps can’t trick you into visiting a link to gain access to full Safari’s cookies.

IIRC Android has something similar that opens an isolated Chrome tab within apps but I have no idea how common usage of that is in Android apps.

This, this and exactly this.

Their finance team probably made a projection that if they can get X% of current mobile web users onto the app, they’ll be able to extract Y% more total revenue. They have no idea that they should split users into contributors and lurkers and even if they had, they have absolutely no idea how to model their value, so they don’t, the board sees the numbers and tells them ‘ASAP’ and that’s how you kill social networks, because the financial model is based on false assumptions.

> They have no idea that they should split users into contributors and lurkers

Comments like this amaze me. People really think these giant corps are out here not doing things like this.

Big (and small) companies routinely make "data-driven decisions" based on obviously-faulty data collection, bad models, or misapplication of statistics. It rarely takes some crack scientific mind to spot it, either. But they want a decision now and doing it right might take a lot longer or cost more, or the correct model might be a lot fuzzier and that makes them uncomfortable, or they've got some notion in their heads already and they'll be damned if mere numbers are going to get in the way of that, so everyone in the room's just supposed to nod along when the blatantly-biased graphs come up on the Power Point suggesting (erroneously) that we do X.

The business world runs at least as much on bullsh*t as the most cynical among us might think, I'd say. It's not half as clever or competently-run as one might hope, certainly.

It's a cliche that front-line workers have a better understanding of customers and products than the c-suite and that this leads to predictable blunders, because that's often true.

(I'm also not sure I'd call Reddit a "giant corp", but that's beside the point [EDIT] and anyway, to be fair, this particular discussion isn't just concerned with Reddit)

I think the problem is that people read the analyses that companies share publicly (e.g., in a press release or earnings call), and they assume that that's all they did.

You should assume that any numbers shared publicly are just the tip of a giant-ass iceberg and that there were probably 10x more analyses going on internally that weren't shared.

The thing that ultimately gets shared publicly is whatever avoids using advanced stats or internal jargon; They want a single soundbite, not a scientific paper with a full methods section.

Story time: Worked at a large multinational, and 6-7 years ago they decided they had to ape into the whole “data science” gold rush. They spent millions of dollars on hardware, software, salaries, and consulting.

After a year with not much to show for it, the VP for the silo starts to put out kudos for the team for break-even revenue impact. However, behind the scenes, the insight they were taking credit for was a common sense idea that had already been in the e-commerce team’s backlog.

Nothing surprises me when a company says that they’ve run the numbers.

i think that many business get lured into doing data-science because they think that math/stats powers grant borderline-mystical powers and that they can be used to peer into a data warehouse and create ideas/business strategies that no mere mortal (i.e., people with domain expertise in business) could have dreamt up.

But... most businesses aren't that complex, and people can usually come up with really good common sense ideas for how to make improvements.

Data-science is often most effective when it serves less as a visionary idea-maker and more as translator that helps common-sense ideas become real (optimizing values, figuring out the best roll-out strategies, building forecasts).

Me too. Reddit almost certainly ran those numbers.

They might have chosen to ignore them. They might have fed biased assumptions into their calculations. Project management might have messed up and deprioritized the features meant to placate that section of the userbase. Institutional churn might have resulted in the corporation forgetting that they ever did run those numbers or why they are now heading down this path.

People really think a giant corp acts a monolithic entity with perfect distribution of knowledge and ability and the stupid actions of dumb individuals will always be stamped out rather than amplified.

And yes comments like this amaze me too.

The IPO capital you can raise is a function of your revenue prospectus.

If you have NNN million users, and you have full location tracking, purchase history, device ID, contacts, search history, list of other apps installed, usage data, Wifi SSIDs, Bluetooth beacons, etc. etc. etc. that's going to look like a huge payday compared to those same users running a mobile adblocker.

And if you're not currently collecting location tracking data, and you've got half a decade of meteoric growth, well, turn it on. Forecast that graph up and to the right, and just flip the switch to the "get money" position.

Due to the winner's curse, you only have to convince a few investors. Even if a significant fraction don't trust your prospectus and imagine that some users might be turned off by a post-IPO monetization scheme, you merely have to convince a small group that your numbers are accurate and you're TikTok 2.0.

> They have no idea that they should split users into contributors and lurkers […]

They probably did do the maths and conclude that the contributors who'll stick around are driving a significant part of the desired engagement. Dumb memes and culture war potshots and disinformation sure, but engagement.

> Users can't block ads in an app.

Yeah, they can. By which I mean, they can do it right away, for the official Reddit app:

– https://revanced.app/patches?pkg=com.reddit.frontpage

– https://revanced.app/download

Or, for even less work, you can just use a pre-patched APK with the ads removed: https://github.com/revanced-apks/build-apps/releases

No need for root access nor flimsy DNS solutions.

"YouTube Vanced" was meant an "Advanced" YouTube client, minus the "Ad"s.

They offered a version of the YouTube client which they patched to remove display ads and video ads, plus add background play, SponsorBlock support, and more.

They became fairly popular before Google shut them down for distributing modified versions of their proprietary code.

ReVanced was one of the teams that popped up in the aftermath, a spiritual successor. They reasoned that they could achieve the same basic functionality legally if they only distributed patches (instructions) rather than a pre-patched binary.

So they wrote an app (ReVanced Manager) that takes a stock copy of the YouTube app, unpacks it, applies patches, then repacks & re-signs it. (They don't have Google's signing keys, so typically users need to install the new version under a new name. Users with root can choose to override the built-in version instead.)

Once ReVanced Manager could do that, they expanded into patching other apps as well.

So ReVanced is a team that maintains:

 * A list of useful patches * An engine to apply them * A Java CLI frontend to the patcher * An Android app frontend to the patcher

(I've skipped over a lot of the history details but this should give the basic idea.)

It's a community-driven collection of patches[0] for popular Android apps, supported by a patching framework which includes patch management software (ReVanced Manager[1]).

The documentation[2] is very sparse right now.

[0] https://github.com/revanced/revanced-patches

[1] https://github.com/revanced/revanced-manager

[2] https://github.com/revanced/revanced-documentation

> apps are roughly the opposite of that

Although I broadly agree with this assessment, I'd just like to add a slight nuance that, at least in my view, it's specifically _app store apps_ that are roughly the opposite. You can still, for example, install random APKs (on Android, I doubt Apple has anything similar) if you're so inclined, so they can be as user-centric as you want. It's just that the major manufacturers optimize for the roughly-anti-user-centric flow.

I would still say that even FOSS apps off F-Droid are less user-centric than the web. They're more likely to respect the user, for sure, than even most web apps. And a user who is comfortable with code can always fork them and customize them. But the barrier to entry for a custom experience is much higher on an app than it is on the web. Browser extensions are highly accessible to many people and can allow tweaking the experience beyond what the developer natively enabled.

As a simple example: Dark Reader has 5 million installs on Chrome. That's 5 million people who can view a web app in dark mode even if the developers didn't think to provide a native way to do so.

My thoughts exactly. I do lots of "tinkering" with my web experience and have a few open source apps that I build and install, and the barrier of entry on apps is way higher than for websites. Even for an app that is open and friendly, it's still a major undertaking to get a dev env setup and debug/tinker. And once you do, auditing the app to see what it does is further difficult. With the web you don't even need a dev env, and an extension like uMatrix makes it pretty easy to audit the site and see what it's doing/loading.

I'm to the point where I boycott apps. I will only use an app if there's a real benefit to me for doing so, such as podcasts and music and offline functionality or those that use hardware features.

That depends on the implementation, but its just a fundamental technology difference. On the web, the default way to do things is to use a bunch of HTML elements and whatnot, which are user-agent-introspectable, even if they are modified using a blob of code.

With apps, you kind of by definition only have a blob of code. As an user and with a sufficiently advanced operating system, you can block some outside-world interactions like internet connections, but the app only has to give you a render target whose pixels can be drawn to arbitrarily. Some apps even use integrity verification features from the OS vendor to check if they haven't been tampered with, that is much harder to do on the web.

Which is incidentally why there is so much interest in high performance web programming and being able to draw arbitrary pixels to a render target (hello canvas/webgl/webgpu). Expect content blockers to become way less effective in the coming years (even ignoring the big obvious attacks like Chrome's Manifest v3).

> Expect content blockers to become way less effective in the coming years

That's s very sad and probably very accurate analysis!

Wonder if the arms-race will give rise to other kinds of add blockers that use image recognition to identify ads.But that still requires rendering the ads (even if only in the background), removing much of the benefit of ad-blockers.

I suspect some might be able to rise up by injecting themselves at framework level, since it's very likely that the programs will still keep some sort of in-memory representation. Though I don't think that injecting code into other WebAssembly blobs is possible with the security models we have today.

The surefire way would be an external application that uses OS APIs to fiddle with memory directly (bye bye mobile content blockers).

But whatever form it takes, it would have to be programmed to operate on every framework available, so it's way less universal than writing a CSS selector or URL regex.

> Users can't block ads in an app. Users can't block telemetry. Users can't prevent tracking, at least without help from the platform vendor.

Adguard does a pretty good job of blocking these things inside of apps.

Awareness is certainly an issue, but I've enabled adguard's DNS on my mobile device and it does indeed block almost all ads and doesn't cost me any money.

Admittedly, I'd prefer not to depend on third party DNS as a solution, but it's trading one entity having access to my requests for another. I used to be able to do this with a simple hosts file/blacklist solution, but I finally succumbed to the various user-hostile policies of "ability to elevate to superuser is OK on a laptop, but not on a phone" and have not enabled su on my current device (needed to manage hosts file).

Settings -> Network & Internet -> Private DNS -> dns.adguard.com

Now you've blocked a large percentage of ads on android.

Surely there is a way of checking api calls made by an app and blocking those?

I have never looked into this mind

HTTPS means the network connections between the app and the backend are opaque to third parties including the user.

Certificate pinning means you cannot insert yourself as the backend and/or MITM the requests. The app will only communicate directly with the owner of the private key it was pinned to.

Depending on the app and OS, it may be more or less easy to change the app to remove/crack the pinning. In general, if you are not in full control of the device (root), it's not possible.

> HTTPS means the network connections between the app and the backend are opaque to third parties including the user.

It means the payload is. HTTPS alone doesn't have any special considerations for hiding the domain, which I think is visible so the request can be routed correctly. And since a lot of ad-blocking is based on domain, that ought to work.

for android you pull down the apk using adb, patch maybe 1 byte in it and push it back

very very easy, no root required

> I wouldn't call patching a binary very easy

it's even easier than that as all apps (except native ones) will be using the java TrustManager interface

> Also, it takes more than one byte if the binary is obfuscated

but they can't hide the calls into TrustManager

a small utility could automatically take in the APK, patch out the calls and return the fixed APK for you

(would probably work for 99% of apps out of the box)

> it's even easier than that as all apps (except native ones) will be using the java TrustManager interface

Is this required? i.e. do all apps have to use the TrustManager interface to accomplish cert pinning, or is that merely the official way?

> Is this required?

well, Java is Turing complete, so you could completely re-implement TLS yourself instead of using the API that comes with the platform

in practice no-one is going to do that

Shout this from the rooftops.

Phone apps delenda est

You’re assuming there is some cohesive strategy here. It’s better to look at what often happens in practice at a more practical level.

Some exec will be constantly getting pressure to make his mobile app growth chart keeping going up. So instead of doing customer research finding out what people want, having a product vision, market research (“why do people like Apollo?”), making the app so good that Redditors tell other Redditors how much better it is, etc they just say “why not just force existing web users to use it?”

It’s just lazy belligerent tactics so [x] chart goes up. The mobile app team probably has a ton of political pull so they get to stomp on others to get their metrics.

This argument is at the intersection of “Wet streets cause rain” and “Depressingly likely to be accurate”.

“All these other companies are successful and had experienced large mobile growth along that success. Maybe we can force that same success by boosting our own mobile numbers.”

See also Goodhart’s Law.

I think people are usually over-inclined to assume that these companies know what they're doing; that there is, somewhere, some well-thought-out master plan. Often, there isn't.

Even with Twitter, which has just been a cavalcade of obviously nonsense moves for months and months, there are still believers in The Plan. I'm actually a little curious why this is; despite presumably having had interactions with poorly-run companies in the course of their daily lives, some people _really_ seem to struggle with the idea that a company might be poorly-run, and seek any other explanation.

Because a reasonable person will have a plan. Maybe not the best plan, maybe not a master plan, but a plan. To your specific point:

'person knows what they are doing' does not equal have a 'well-thought-out master plan'

Problem in big companies is that its is filled with people that , especially the higher you go, have their own plans and agendas. Sometimes they align with each other and oftentimes some part of company is actively trying to sabotage some other part of company.

Individuals also have their own personal goals such as high bonuses or maybe high IPO, where you will sell out and become rich.

And as CEO you have to not only have a plan, but also set up initiatives for people to follow it, which is often harder than it seems. That is why it sometimes seems a company is sabotaging itself. Sometimes there is something deeper going on but sometimes they are sabotaging themselves.

Probably sopping up more money from all the privacy intrusions possible with an app. Better ad revenue. Probably spent money on the app and need validation of the expense. Board might even have threatened whole team terminations without better app take up.

How many times is improvement UX in desired there?

I’m not necessarily pointing a finger at the pressure or motivation to want mobile app growth. Pre-IPO is a stressful time. It’s mostly about how the team goes about attempting to accomplishing those goals and a management/product culture and talent thing that was likely in place well beforehand. Based on the last redesign and https://new.reddit.com there are plenty of signals of doing things for the sake of doing them or for UI trends, not because it makes it fundamentally better.

It’s easy to miss these failures internally and assume the teams/management are functional and effective when your app keeps growing… via Reddit’s content and existing market dominance.

I work at a company trying to get more people into our app. The logic is completely flawed: "we want more engagement, app users show more engagement than web users, so if we get more users from web into the apps we'll get more engagement". It's obviously completely flawed but the product people and analytics department don't seem to get it.

At least we aren't doing hostile stuff to get people into the apps, yet.

It doesn't work for me.

All icons on mobile look the same to me: I mean, Android's Material Design icons really look the same to me and even the icons from iOS never really stick in my head. That "settings" icon for instance with all the gears looks like a movie poster for The Golden Compass and not a settings dialog. The App store and Adobe Acrobat and many applications have meaningless logos based around a generic triangle...

Once something gets a mobile icon I will struggle to find it, but if I want to find something on the web it is a quick search, often autocompleted when I type a few letters, or easy to find in the bookmarks or maybe my history.

One way or another there are a bunch of Google-app icons that all look the same to me. Third party apps on iOS or Android generally have nondistinct icons: I have many icons that are basically a letter like "H" with no indication that one of those icons controls my stereo and another one does something else. I use Microsoft' RDP on my iPad all the time and I struggle to find the icon not least because the colors blend into the background but it is just some arrows without stems like the logo of some british railway from the 1970s.

I find myself deleting apps aggressively because the junk apps make it hard to find the few apps I really use, most of all I use the web as much as I can because it is so easy to find anything on the web.

I've gone the other way and just don't use very many apps. I'll only use an app instead of the site if I find the app provides actual added value *to me*. And that is not often the case.

And for cases that force you to the app instead of the webpage, I don't use that site on my phone. Which tends to start a cycle where I stop or at least greatly reduce using that that site.

If the user follows a link to an article or video, there's a high chance it'll be the end of their reddit session, due to distraction or back button capture. There's also a high chance the browser will unload the reddit page causing a flash of no content and potentially losing the user's scroll position. After a few rounds of this the user will leave in frustration.

Now they could use the tabs feature, but this is again a lost opportunity to have them browse some comments etc. Plus, if they need to browse for another purpose, you'll just be one or ten of a hundred open tabs instead of one of the couple of recent apps.

> There's also a high chance the browser will unload the reddit page causing a flash of no content and potentially losing the user's scroll position.

The funny thing about this is that this misbehavior is mostly exclusive to badly written SPAs and other heavily-JS’d sites. Plain old rendered HTML sites like old Reddit don’t flash blank and restore scroll position fine.

>If the user follows a link to an article or video, there's a high chance it'll be the end of their reddit session, due to distraction or back button capture.

Ironically this is made worse by apps teaching users not to multitask. You can't open a tab to read later.

On mobile?

Apart from a few geeks using firefox on android, mobile browsers generally dont hinder ads

For Amazon, I prefer the web-app since it's able to open tabs for products I'm comparing. With the app, you're forced into a forward/back/forward navigation pattern that I think is sub-optimal when comparing products.

Is there something I'm missing here? It seems that the app is the less usable experience to me.

"Install the app" walls might be super effective at destroying reengagement, though.

I gave in and installed the Reddit app, but it simply doesn't work well enough or transition well enough from a Google search into the app. Would definitely engage a lot more with Reddit if only the app pushing nonsense were gone, and that's as a user who does have the app installed.

Same for me but with RIF.

RIF is reddit to me, if they stick to it and block API access I'll log on one last time to delete my account.

It’s the same reason as the third-party app API changes: prevailing forces within the company want to know that for every X API requests made, Y targeted ads were put in front of eyeballs. Most mobile browsers can block ads at this point. Plus, native apps offer more ways of gathering user data opaquely, which is worth lots of money in the eyes of finance people even if they haven’t started doing it, or if they expect it to be limited in various ways by mobile OSes and/or laws. The profits vs losses just point them this way, at least according to certain financially-minded people. This isn’t really a new phenomenon.

If Reddit execs thought they could take the same approach on desktop (forcing us all into desktop apps with unblockable ads and more system access), they absolutely would. They see that Slack and Discord did accomplish this effectively, and probably want to catch up.

They could have changed their API or keys to require an adserve API included and given the app makers time to adapt to the new setup.

Premium users would only see the ads from Reddit, where non-premium would also have seen ads from the app maker.

It would have increased the ads shown to users, added more money into reddit's pocket, and increased the liklihood of users paying cash for the platform while pissing off fewer people.

99% sure the reason is push notifications.

Putting on my PM hat, I bet:

- On web, the biggest top of funnel entrypoint for Reddit is Google search

- On mobile, it’s push notifications

The latter is probably the single biggest retention lever Reddit has. The former is an acquisition lever, but probably doesn’t do much for retention.

Easier targeting, especially third-party means higher CPM, means more advertising driven revenue. Also, you’re worth more if you can be tracked across different devices (that became more important after the so called cookie-geddon.)

Speaking as someone who worked in publishing, ad tech and built primarily for mobile (PWA or native).

So I actually worked at Reddit a few years ago and our “cohort” got to chat with Steve as a part of onboarding. I was super nervous and I guess I wanted to appear sharper than I actually was, so I asked Steve directly “why do you push users from mobile web to the app? That’s a pretty bad experience.”

Apparently there are metrics showing that mobile app users are “stickier” than web users, meaning they come back to the app more.

That was a long time ago though and my perspective on this probably isn’t relevant anymore.

> I have for example uninstalled the FB app and only user their website.

Well, that is why Facebook and others are pushing to "allow alternative app stores" on iphone. Getting past the app-review process means the dark patterns and data mining can get way more noxious, and at that point they just do like reddit and kill the mobile experience. No, no phones allowed on the website, we have a native app for that.

Couple of reasons:- Push notifications to reengage the user- Collect more data - you can spy way more on a user using the app than on the web- Bypass adblockers

All this makes losing customers who are not willing to make the transition to the app worth it.

> So what am I missing?

AdBlock