Some other browsers (I use Kiwi because Firefox is buggy on my phone) also let you use ublock, and sometimes I wish I couldn't use it because I hate ads so much I probably wouldn't waste as much time browsing the net if I couldn't block them :)
Kiwi in particular has full extension support, so I can run unhook for Youtube and some other stuff like dark reader. I'm sure someone will come up with some other extension that just tricks Reddit into working in a mobile browser if there is enough demand.
Guys, sign up for and use NextDNS. Sometimes you have to disable it for asshole companies like ticketmaster, but for the most part you won't see any ads anymore. Unfortunately it doesn't work for ads served from as content from the website, like Facebook does, and possibly the Reddit app. I have never and will never install the Reddit app, so I can't comment on that one.
I run a DNS based ad and tracking blocker on my home network (similar to Pihole) through my router, and it's amazing what apps are totally incapable of running with those restrictions in place. Amazon's app doesn't work, neither does Wells Fargo. Apps that do this are absolutely predatory and need to be regulated. They harvest my data in shady, insecure, annoying, obtrusive ways, and if they or their customer's mishandle it, I have essentially no recourse, except for maybe a $0.32 payout as part of a class action lawsuit.
Would I have given my data to Cambridge Analytica? No. Did Facebook? Yes. Was it mishandled? Totally. What recompense will I get from it? Nothing! Will it happen again? Absolutely.
every god damn company has an app. "Get a bonus if you shop using the app", etc etc etc.
it's all about tracking us, snatching data and of course that little app icon is "easy" to click to spend more money, right?
I hate it so much
with reddit gone i'll only have my bloonsTD app and my 2 factor auth for a couple of services (net banking and a few other things)
im nearing the point where i dont really see the use for a smartphone
I legit have floated the idea of ditching my smartphone several times. I hardly do anything on my phone anymore because of how awful and predator basically every app is now, even paid apps. I might as well just get a feature/dumb phone that has LTE and just set up a hotspot for my laptop.
You know what's most fucked up about all of these types of practices? It's that they had something great and have deliberately slowly destroyed it because of unchecked greed. Same with Facebook. They had a site so great that like 60% of the people on the entire planet signed up. They've been making money. Reddit and Facebook make millions of dollars a month. But it's not enough for them. Nooo. They have to make billions. They have to make enough money to buy governments and amass as much power as small nations. The men running these companies are soulless. They try to fill the hole in their hearts with money, but it will never be enough. They've taken something that was amazing, something that benefitted billions of people, and destroyed it to serve their own selfish greed.
I use it solely to talk to friends and family members who I otherwise wouldn't be in touch with. I don't participate in groups or get into arguments or anything like that. That, plus being able to dismiss things like political ads so you never have to see them (at least for now), make it acceptable for me to use. I wouldn't say it's a great experience in any way, but it isn't bad enough for me to find new ways to keep in touch with those people.
That would work with some of them, but others want to talk primarily through Facebook for now. Minimal use of it just to talk to them works for me at the moment. It could easily change if the experience gets even worse.
My main use case for facebook now is buying used shit locally on Marketplace, since they have effectively killed craigslist with it. It's where I found my motorcycle. As an actual social network experience it sucks ass.
Hah that’s actually where I got my bike from too. It’s good for that, but only when you’re looking for something I guess.
I don’t need anymore toys right now or my wife will bury me in the back yard.
I don't think everyone hates ads quite so much as some of us. I have ads blocked on pretty much everything and use YouTube only through Kiwi browser with ublock to avoid ads. Sometimes I click a link that opens the regular app and an ad starts playing. I immediately feel irritated and close it, but the intensity of irritation is sometimes a bit worrying!
Me too, but apparently Facebook survives without us. Turns out the most valuable Facebook users are actually retirees waiting to be scammed by shady advertisers.
On iOS at least, fb messenger on mobile is just a redirect to the app store to get the app, the Web messenger is not functional anymore, sadly. At least when I just tested it just now!
You have to force your iOS browser into « desktop mode » to access the web version of fb messenger on iOS. It’s just « working », not really usable through….
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.
Right like how you can't copy images from Pinterest, a site that populates all your Google Image searches. Like you fuckers didn't create this content. You just got people to upload it to your site then blocked anyone else from accessing it without a membership and a share link.
I added a browser plugin on Firefox that blocks all Pinterest results from Google and DDG. Half the time they want you to log in just to see the page. Google is lame for including them in results.
My guess is this is only for mobile users which would explain why when the OP request a desk top version of the site he can still log in. That way they can push more mobile users to the app and shove all sorts of ads down their throat and there's nothing they can do about it. You can block ads on a browser, you can't in the official Reddit app.
Shut down all the 3P apps. Prevent mobile users from being able to use their browser on mobile, forcing them to grab the official app. Load it to high hell with ads... Profit.
You can not block in the official app "yet" Wouldnt surprise me if we get some form of Revanced reddit app at some point. Same thing which youtube vanced. For me killing off the infinity for reddit app is my call to not use reddit on mobile anymore but a full switch to lemmy instead.
It actually already exists. The ReVanced project, which has continued to update YouTube Vanced after it shut down, has also expanded to other apps. I've only used their YouTube and YouTube Music apps, but I can't imagine the experience on their apps would be any worse than reddit's current app, given that it's essentially the same plus their patches to it.
To force people to use their app, of course. Facebook did that several years ago with Messenger. There’s no real reason to not have mobile browser access to it other than to try to make people use the app so it can spy on you in various ways.
Because they want you to open the app when you land on a link.
When you land in the app they can gather way more data on you, including better dwell time metrics and things like that. Also being in the app there’s no back button to return to Google or whatever, so you open the link without ad blockers, see an ad, and presumably view more posts and ads.
Plus having the app installed means notifications (they have a lot of notification types), and they can link your various accounts through your app’s unique identifier.
Also when they blocked being able to open subs with "age restricted content" on mobile browser. That doesn't mean porn either. I've been running into it for a while on discussions relating to guns or drugs/alcohol. You either have to switch to desktop mode or open the comments in the app.
you can watch subs with age restricted content on mobile browsers, but you have to log in.
But now you even have to login on desktop for age restricted subs.
And from what I e been picking up it appears that reddit killing themselves is making for pretty good marketing for Lemmy and other reddit alternatives it kinda feels like a new era of the internet
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.
The problem is that you cant really have a competitor to reddit. People want all their news sources to be in one place. Imagine if you had /r/soccer on reddit but then /r/soccer on a different site. It would be two split communities. Its kind of set up in a way that makes it hard for competitors to exist unlike other products
I am not sure everyone uses/used reddit like that. 99% of the time, when I use reddit, I type in the subreddit I want to visit, I am very rarely (typically only when I click the URL) on the main page or on things like /r/all. So for me, the main benefit of using reddit is that I don't need to log in multiple times.
RSS readers are also a way to combine news from various sites.
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...
But we need to track all your mouse movements, browsing history, eye gaze, hand shake, geolocation data, shopping habbits, political opinions, friends and family connections, to make it a better experience for you honest!
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]"
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.
Not only that but some features like Chat just redirect you to the app on Reddit mobile web, and it's too cumbersome to use the desktop Reddit chat on a mobile browser.
Yeah, so, uh, m.facebook.com has made a sudden and radical change in the last few days. I'm not sure what's going on, but it's currently not usable for me. I don't know if that's happening to multiple people.
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)
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
I've been finding websites more frequently overrule when I select "show desktop site" in a browser these days. I'm guessing that they just have one version of the website and it reorganises based on the devices aspect ratio.
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.
This is what's amazing. They could make a good, ad-supported app, but they seem to insist they don't need to while wondering why everyone's angry about third party apps going away.
Reddit never needed to fix their own hilariously-bad failure of an app, they could have just bought any of the ready-made, popular, beloved third-party apps out there for far less than this fiasco is costing them now. Old Twitter did this back in the day, some of their official clients started out as successful third-party apps.
Spez is out there being an insane libelous asshole to Christian Selig when he could have just hired him.
Yes, like I could give their beloved role model Instagram as an example. They very rarely prompt users to download their app in a small box on their website. And I still use the app because it's so snappy.
And they even have a Lite version (~2mb) in case their phone can't handle the original app.
This is such an interesting idea actually, spez please make a lite app. Look, Wall Street people have that as well!
What's sad is that they had Alien Blue to work with which was a great app. I honestly was excited for the official app to come out. It was a big let down.
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.
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)
Virtually all of reddit's content is produced by a very small fraction of the userbase.
I suspect there's a fairly large overlap between people who are fed up with reddit's bullshit, and people who actually post and create content, not just scroll.
Reddit is cutting off that content supply to get more of the scrollers.
It definitely can. Just because the website still exists doesn't mean it's still "alive". Facebook is still around and there's nothing actually relevant on it or about it.
That's nice, but I doubt enough people would use it to have a significant effect on Reddit's bottom line. It does require you to download APKs, patch them and install manually, which sounds easy to tech savvy people but isn't for the common grandma. Furthermore it's a bit bothersome cause you have to repeat it every time there's a new version (at least a new version that you want or that's required for continued access) and then there are all of those with iCrap, who can't patch apps at all.
Absolutely agree with that. Some things are worth having as apps, but when every website you visit on mobile is trying to get you to download their app, which is basically just a wrapper for the system browser with some bits of code to stop you leaving their site you know something has gone wrong.
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.
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.
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.
They know that many users will try to use web page once 3rd party apps stop working. They are testing how many of them they can make use their mobile app which allows them to obtain more information about you.
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.
Such genius and innovation. He added not one, but three pop-ups telling you to log in and allow notifications. Have you ever seen such naked brilliance before? No one besides him has had the courage... except for maybe every malware site webmaster in 2002. He also sold a blue checkmark for $8! Like how does one human have such an unlimited well of brilliance?
I hope their coffin will be full of nails, as I'm convinced that Reddit will continue to live, hobbling along like Digg before it.
A barely alive Reddit, trapped in its coffin full of nails, inside the walled garden cemetery of its own making, would be such a satisfying ending to all of this.
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.
You’re probably right, he’s speed running turning Reddit into an IPO so fast he’s destroyed everything in under a month.
Not to mention rolling back comment/account deletions to keep the comments up, he clearly doesn’t have a long term plan. This looks like a speedy cash out like he’s about to be caught red handed.
A lot of people, myself included, would have left reddit a long time ago if it wasn't for .old. The new design is crippleware. The mobile experience even worse.
Effectively just adding to a mess. There's a point when you have a really nice new car and every mess is a huge deal, then it gets really messy and so run down, but still drives and you just brush it off every little ding - that's reddit and their user base
Regardless of whether they actually said that or not, I absolutely do not doubt that they will soon. Not even an announcement. It'll just be gone one day
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.
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 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.
That is not a good reason to keep using reddit. A boycott is a boycott. If a community that you want is not available outside of reddit, why not start it here?
I find that nearly all my Reddit page views are now when I'm trying to Google what I am doing wrong in Godot. I'm trying to build a habit of looking for a Stack Overflow result instead now. That said, I strongly suspect that there is a big overlap between the sort of person who cares enough about Godot to want to connect with a community about it and the sort of person who would want to use Lemmy and other feddyverse services so I think it's only a matter of time before there is a decent Godot community on Lemmy. There's at least a few of us so far in this thread!
I also am hoping for more Gamedev groups. r/gamedev is shut down so my only hope is a community growing fast on here. the discords are... ok but not what I'm looking for. And I'm off reddit now so nothing on there will work for me.
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.
It's designed to shove ads and bot posts in your face and steal your information, everything else is secondary. This is the true reason why the app is so fucking shitty and unusable for what reddit is supposed to be for.
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?
Also, last time I tried it, you couldn't use the app without being logged in, so they get more data on you than if you were able to browse anonymously.
Its always worth to look at the amount of Data used between the official app and third party. Before unsinstalling i realised that sync for reddit had about 2 thirds the amount of tzraffic that the offical app uses...
For that sweet sweet ad revenue from my understanding
Since... It's significantly more difficult to avoid ads/data harvesting from an in-house-designed app than, say, a 3rd party browser with adblockers, or 3rd party apps that don't run ads at all
It's a common thing to do, to test how it impacts the user experience without totally changing it for everybody. The problem here is that out right just removing access to the website via a mobile browser is so painstakingly obvious and imprecise, that it baffles me why they'd even do it.
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 wrote .compact to run on a Motorola Droid, which was a 533MHz device with 512Mb of total ram, and a kernel which was very aggressive about freeing up this ram.
My respects to you. I really think websites and software in general need to have efficiency in mind again. Webapps should use as few resources as possible, save people's time, their money and the planet.
Its not even hard to do. People just always reach for the most complex, overengineered things, instead of stepping back and seeing what you need.
I love component based systems. I love real time and custom user interfaces. That doesn't mean every site needs to be a big SPA. If you're a primarily read-only site (blog, wiki, etc), then you shouldn't be sending huge blobs of JS just for your users to read content. As you add interactivity, you can add more JS, but think about what you're going to do.
And there are ways around all that. Phoenix LiveView gives you an amazing system for building real time apps that are extremely thin and fast, and SurfaceUI lets you embrace Vue style components, easily
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.
This post is from early May, so probably long before they decided to kill the API (and the actual experiment could have started long before that post).
They've been gearing up to kill the API for months, hell they first announced they would be charging back in April (prices were announced at the end of May). This has all been a coordinated scheme.
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.
It's both. Firefox for Android lets you run uBlockOrigin, effectively killing the ads.
Ads on reddit are self-served. DNS can’t block that
Some other browsers (I use Kiwi because Firefox is buggy on my phone) also let you use ublock, and sometimes I wish I couldn't use it because I hate ads so much I probably wouldn't waste as much time browsing the net if I couldn't block them :)
Kiwi in particular has full extension support, so I can run unhook for Youtube and some other stuff like dark reader. I'm sure someone will come up with some other extension that just tricks Reddit into working in a mobile browser if there is enough demand.
Guys, sign up for and use NextDNS. Sometimes you have to disable it for asshole companies like ticketmaster, but for the most part you won't see any ads anymore. Unfortunately it doesn't work for ads served from as content from the website, like Facebook does, and possibly the Reddit app. I have never and will never install the Reddit app, so I can't comment on that one.
I run a DNS based ad and tracking blocker on my home network (similar to Pihole) through my router, and it's amazing what apps are totally incapable of running with those restrictions in place. Amazon's app doesn't work, neither does Wells Fargo. Apps that do this are absolutely predatory and need to be regulated. They harvest my data in shady, insecure, annoying, obtrusive ways, and if they or their customer's mishandle it, I have essentially no recourse, except for maybe a $0.32 payout as part of a class action lawsuit.
Would I have given my data to Cambridge Analytica? No. Did Facebook? Yes. Was it mishandled? Totally. What recompense will I get from it? Nothing! Will it happen again? Absolutely.
me and my wife also quit using apps
every god damn company has an app. "Get a bonus if you shop using the app", etc etc etc. it's all about tracking us, snatching data and of course that little app icon is "easy" to click to spend more money, right? I hate it so much
with reddit gone i'll only have my bloonsTD app and my 2 factor auth for a couple of services (net banking and a few other things)
im nearing the point where i dont really see the use for a smartphone
I legit have floated the idea of ditching my smartphone several times. I hardly do anything on my phone anymore because of how awful and predator basically every app is now, even paid apps. I might as well just get a feature/dumb phone that has LTE and just set up a hotspot for my laptop.
Chinese owners need a tiktok backup plan.
You know what's most fucked up about all of these types of practices? It's that they had something great and have deliberately slowly destroyed it because of unchecked greed. Same with Facebook. They had a site so great that like 60% of the people on the entire planet signed up. They've been making money. Reddit and Facebook make millions of dollars a month. But it's not enough for them. Nooo. They have to make billions. They have to make enough money to buy governments and amass as much power as small nations. The men running these companies are soulless. They try to fill the hole in their hearts with money, but it will never be enough. They've taken something that was amazing, something that benefitted billions of people, and destroyed it to serve their own selfish greed.
What the F Reddit, are you trying to speedrun the worst decisions a website can do??
They are trying what Facebook did to their Facebook chat, forcing users to use the app by banning mobile web access
And I'm curious how many facebook users have the chat app. (and how many just walked away)
I’m one of those who just walked away.
I checked out Facebook recently because I needed help moving and it was the quickest way to ask everyone I knew.
That shit is like 90 percent ads and clickbait tick tocks now. It’s fucked. I don’t understand how people can use it without becoming enraged.
I use it solely to talk to friends and family members who I otherwise wouldn't be in touch with. I don't participate in groups or get into arguments or anything like that. That, plus being able to dismiss things like political ads so you never have to see them (at least for now), make it acceptable for me to use. I wouldn't say it's a great experience in any way, but it isn't bad enough for me to find new ways to keep in touch with those people.
I just started texting my friends and family more. It’s been better and now when I see Facebook I wonder why I ever liked it in the first place.
That would work with some of them, but others want to talk primarily through Facebook for now. Minimal use of it just to talk to them works for me at the moment. It could easily change if the experience gets even worse.
My main use case for facebook now is buying used shit locally on Marketplace, since they have effectively killed craigslist with it. It's where I found my motorcycle. As an actual social network experience it sucks ass.
Hah that’s actually where I got my bike from too. It’s good for that, but only when you’re looking for something I guess. I don’t need anymore toys right now or my wife will bury me in the back yard.
I don't think everyone hates ads quite so much as some of us. I have ads blocked on pretty much everything and use YouTube only through Kiwi browser with ublock to avoid ads. Sometimes I click a link that opens the regular app and an ad starts playing. I immediately feel irritated and close it, but the intensity of irritation is sometimes a bit worrying!
I feel you man. Ads make me irrationally angry.
I refuse to install anything Facebook related on my outcome. I was one who has to walk away.
I haven't deleted the account (yet, pretty unjused right now), but never installed an app of them. Via the browser they're already way to obnoxious.
I stopped using Facebook altogether because of that.
Reddit follows the enshittification.
Me too, but apparently Facebook survives without us. Turns out the most valuable Facebook users are actually retirees waiting to be scammed by shady advertisers.
iirc you can still use Facebook messenger with the m.facebook com at the mobile browser to chat
On iOS at least, fb messenger on mobile is just a redirect to the app store to get the app, the Web messenger is not functional anymore, sadly. At least when I just tested it just now!
You have to force your iOS browser into « desktop mode » to access the web version of fb messenger on iOS. It’s just « working », not really usable through….
Oh perfect, thanks, I didn't try that; much appreciated!
oh interesting, didn't knew about that on iOS. It was working fine on my android so I just said what I said
Android is superior for having choices!
Now you can, but back then you couldn't when they initially started their messenger app
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.
Right like how you can't copy images from Pinterest, a site that populates all your Google Image searches. Like you fuckers didn't create this content. You just got people to upload it to your site then blocked anyone else from accessing it without a membership and a share link.
I added a browser plugin on Firefox that blocks all Pinterest results from Google and DDG. Half the time they want you to log in just to see the page. Google is lame for including them in results.
I just wish Forefox for Android still supported desktop plugins without a massive hassle.
Kiwi
I fucking hate Pinterest. I don't understand why anyone uses it.
Pinterest has long been a member of my uBlocklist configuration.
I agree. I'm not downloading an app that siphons out data just to access a website.
Ultimately Reddit thinks they're too big to fail because they don't have any real competition right now.
My guess is this is only for mobile users which would explain why when the OP request a desk top version of the site he can still log in. That way they can push more mobile users to the app and shove all sorts of ads down their throat and there's nothing they can do about it. You can block ads on a browser, you can't in the official Reddit app.
Shut down all the 3P apps. Prevent mobile users from being able to use their browser on mobile, forcing them to grab the official app. Load it to high hell with ads... Profit.
You can not block in the official app "yet" Wouldnt surprise me if we get some form of Revanced reddit app at some point. Same thing which youtube vanced. For me killing off the infinity for reddit app is my call to not use reddit on mobile anymore but a full switch to lemmy instead.
It actually already exists. The ReVanced project, which has continued to update YouTube Vanced after it shut down, has also expanded to other apps. I've only used their YouTube and YouTube Music apps, but I can't imagine the experience on their apps would be any worse than reddit's current app, given that it's essentially the same plus their patches to it.
You don't have to guess. That's exactly what they said in the screenshot
To force people to use their app, of course. Facebook did that several years ago with Messenger. There’s no real reason to not have mobile browser access to it other than to try to make people use the app so it can spy on you in various ways.
Several years: like going on 15 years ago.
Fuck we're old.
Was it that long ago? I thought they locked it down about 7-8 years back. I don't know, I would just use mbasic .facebook. com when I had to.
I know it was before the 2010 Olympics at least, because they shut it off while I was dating someone I broke up with before that.
To sell ads
Because they want you to open the app when you land on a link.
When you land in the app they can gather way more data on you, including better dwell time metrics and things like that. Also being in the app there’s no back button to return to Google or whatever, so you open the link without ad blockers, see an ad, and presumably view more posts and ads.
Plus having the app installed means notifications (they have a lot of notification types), and they can link your various accounts through your app’s unique identifier.
Only for mobile and they’re already doing it.
Since Reddit removed the option to "stop asking to open in app" in mobile browseds it was clear this would be the next step.
Also when they blocked being able to open subs with "age restricted content" on mobile browser. That doesn't mean porn either. I've been running into it for a while on discussions relating to guns or drugs/alcohol. You either have to switch to desktop mode or open the comments in the app.
you can watch subs with age restricted content on mobile browsers, but you have to log in. But now you even have to login on desktop for age restricted subs.
And from what I e been picking up it appears that reddit killing themselves is making for pretty good marketing for Lemmy and other reddit alternatives it kinda feels like a new era of the internet
Something had to give
Hey Reddit, There's a reason why there were a dozen alternatives to your official Reddit app.
Some of them predate the official app.
I can’t think of any other website that has that many alternative apps, much less at that popularity level
I don't think there are any other for profit sites that would allow third-party apps. They data is currency to them.
Twitter did, at one point
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.
Can't eliminate the "I'll just do without" competition.
Like, when I got rid of Netflix... I didn't sign up for an additional new service. I just watch YouTube.
When I stopped using Facebook so much, I didn't go to another service -- I just didn't use social media as much.
because if the government gets involved and does a things then that's bad
The problem is that you cant really have a competitor to reddit. People want all their news sources to be in one place. Imagine if you had /r/soccer on reddit but then /r/soccer on a different site. It would be two split communities. Its kind of set up in a way that makes it hard for competitors to exist unlike other products
I am not sure everyone uses/used reddit like that. 99% of the time, when I use reddit, I type in the subreddit I want to visit, I am very rarely (typically only when I click the URL) on the main page or on things like /r/all. So for me, the main benefit of using reddit is that I don't need to log in multiple times. RSS readers are also a way to combine news from various sites.
I miss-cropped, OP for context:
This content is better in the app! Log in to Twitter/TikTok/Reddit to view it!
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...
But we need to track all your mouse movements, browsing history, eye gaze, hand shake, geolocation data, shopping habbits, political opinions, friends and family connections, to make it a better experience for you honest!
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.
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]"
Project Forgeddit
I'm utterly shocked and appalled. /s
They don't know that the primary use case for reddit on mobile is getting good answers from Google.
Can't wait for Google to derank Reddit links due to this BS.
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.
Not only that but some features like Chat just redirect you to the app on Reddit mobile web, and it's too cumbersome to use the desktop Reddit chat on a mobile browser.
I had no idea people actually used that feature.
There are filters for adblockers that block these mobile app banners.
This will assist me further in avoiding using Reddit on my phone.
That's what I thought. I'm actually thankful since I've been browsing it out of habit via RIF. This will all come to an end with this week.
Companies that do this absolutely annoy me. Even Facebook doesn’t do this??
Yeah, so, uh, m.facebook.com has made a sudden and radical change in the last few days. I'm not sure what's going on, but it's currently not usable for me. I don't know if that's happening to multiple people.
Oh what the hell, L Facebook if that’s the case
Are there third party Facebook apps?
Yep there are open source ones even
Think something like Friendly could be put together as a wrapper around old.reddit.com? Modifies the formatting to make it mobile-friendly.
Is it still working? I remember there was a period of time when it was unusable.
I then switched to Frost and now to SlimSocial for Facebook.
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)
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
Or use desktop site & desktop user agent
I've been finding websites more frequently overrule when I select "show desktop site" in a browser these days. I'm guessing that they just have one version of the website and it reorganises based on the devices aspect ratio.
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.
I guess they think the dwell and other telemetry info from the app will be of greater value than the ads shown on a browser.
If you want your app used so much, just make it snappy damn
This is what's amazing. They could make a good, ad-supported app, but they seem to insist they don't need to while wondering why everyone's angry about third party apps going away.
Reddit never needed to fix their own hilariously-bad failure of an app, they could have just bought any of the ready-made, popular, beloved third-party apps out there for far less than this fiasco is costing them now. Old Twitter did this back in the day, some of their official clients started out as successful third-party apps.
Spez is out there being an insane libelous asshole to Christian Selig when he could have just hired him.
Yes, like I could give their beloved role model Instagram as an example. They very rarely prompt users to download their app in a small box on their website. And I still use the app because it's so snappy.
And they even have a Lite version (~2mb) in case their phone can't handle the original app.
This is such an interesting idea actually, spez please make a lite app. Look, Wall Street people have that as well!
How can they do all the data collection then?
idk Instagram probably knows the color of my underwear but it's still pretty fast. It's an IT problem more than anything
What's sad is that they had Alien Blue to work with which was a great app. I honestly was excited for the official app to come out. It was a big let down.
Oh my, that is such a great idea, right on par with everything else they've been doing.
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.
good thing I have a plan to block reddit :-)
Do it! I blocked them in Adguard. It has saved me a few times when I've absentmindedly typed the URL into my browser out of habit.
Zero hits and zero ad impressions coming from me :)
@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)
I have a feeling its too big to die to be honest
MySpace isn't dead yet!
It doesn't want to go on the cart!
"Die" as in shut down, no, but "die" as in no longer being worth visiting, likely.
Virtually all of reddit's content is produced by a very small fraction of the userbase.
I suspect there's a fairly large overlap between people who are fed up with reddit's bullshit, and people who actually post and create content, not just scroll.
Reddit is cutting off that content supply to get more of the scrollers.
It definitely can. Just because the website still exists doesn't mean it's still "alive". Facebook is still around and there's nothing actually relevant on it or about it.
Not surprising, since ad blockers are a thing even on mobile these days.
Revanced app apparently also can patch reddit app and block ads. The thing though is that it will still collect information about you.
That's nice, but I doubt enough people would use it to have a significant effect on Reddit's bottom line. It does require you to download APKs, patch them and install manually, which sounds easy to tech savvy people but isn't for the common grandma. Furthermore it's a bit bothersome cause you have to repeat it every time there's a new version (at least a new version that you want or that's required for continued access) and then there are all of those with iCrap, who can't patch apps at all.
Absolutely agree with that. Some things are worth having as apps, but when every website you visit on mobile is trying to get you to download their app, which is basically just a wrapper for the system browser with some bits of code to stop you leaving their site you know something has gone wrong.
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.
old.reddit will prolly be next
'But they pinky promised that they wouldn't!' -Reddit users after the 30th, probably
Reddit's fucked
We can only hope.
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.
Reddit making dumb decisions?! Impossible.
That's unpossible!
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.
One day it will just be a link to download their shit pile of an app, and nothing else.
Too much salespeople see complaints like "your application is bad" and answer with "we're going to force it on you even more then".
The data they’re looking at when they make this decision is”people aren’t using our app as much as I’d like”.
lmao, they can't be serious
They know that many users will try to use web page once 3rd party apps stop working. They are testing how many of them they can make use their mobile app which allows them to obtain more information about you.
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.
It's garbage anyway, so you're better off.
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.
Vow. How shitty and very expected of them.
for real. they are just making terrible decisions. fook reddit rise lemmy
They are doingeverything exactly how elon did on Twitter
Such genius and innovation. He added not one, but three pop-ups telling you to log in and allow notifications. Have you ever seen such naked brilliance before? No one besides him has had the courage... except for maybe every malware site webmaster in 2002. He also sold a blue checkmark for $8! Like how does one human have such an unlimited well of brilliance?
That makes me wonder, has anyone seen Spez and Elon in the same room? Are we sure they aren't the same person? Stelon Muskman?
Stealon Muskman is such an appropriate name for such a demonic entity.
that would be a final nail in their coffin
I hope their coffin will be full of nails, as I'm convinced that Reddit will continue to live, hobbling along like Digg before it.
A barely alive Reddit, trapped in its coffin full of nails, inside the walled garden cemetery of its own making, would be such a satisfying ending to all of this.
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.
They said they are going to kill .old soon
Have they actually said it? I've always assumed .old wouldn't be around forever. I'm sort of surprised it's lasted as long as it has.
Spez said that they don't have plans to shut down old.reddit.com anytime soon, so I guess July 31st is the last day.
You’re probably right, he’s speed running turning Reddit into an IPO so fast he’s destroyed everything in under a month. Not to mention rolling back comment/account deletions to keep the comments up, he clearly doesn’t have a long term plan. This looks like a speedy cash out like he’s about to be caught red handed.
A lot of people, myself included, would have left reddit a long time ago if it wasn't for .old. The new design is crippleware. The mobile experience even worse.
yeah it's the only reason i have used reddit for so long. if old goes i'll def never use it again.
That would be like a sumo wrestler climbing on top of the current dumpster fire and taking a giant dump on it to add to the mess.
If they do kill off old.reddit then I think it's toast.
After completing the 3-day no-poop challenge.
Effectively just adding to a mess. There's a point when you have a really nice new car and every mess is a huge deal, then it gets really messy and so run down, but still drives and you just brush it off every little ding - that's reddit and their user base
Yeah i wouldnt be surprised
Regardless of whether they actually said that or not, I absolutely do not doubt that they will soon. Not even an announcement. It'll just be gone one day
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.
I think libreddit will stop working on July 1st as it uses the API.
Well, I guess that solves the problem of me browsing reddit on the toilet then. Just making it easier to stop using it.
The toilet?
It's where most people go to poop.
Right, like anyone here actually poops anymore. Buncha amateurs over a reddit probably pooping every day like Neanderthals.
I thought that was Reddit.
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.
Did you try sync ReVanced?
Not yet, but should work as normal sync. Not sure if it is a definitive solution however.
This happened on my device and I just said fuck it back to Lemmy.
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 have been using the iOS browser extension called ‘sink it’.. blocks promoted posts, kills the popup to use the app
Getting rid of .compact was the first step.
More nails to the coffin
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 makes sense that you'd be waiting for r/Godot
This is much more clever than I'll ever be
That is not a good reason to keep using reddit. A boycott is a boycott. If a community that you want is not available outside of reddit, why not start it here?
R/godot is also one of my missing communities en Lemmy.
I hope that, with time, we can move people over here.
I assume as Reddit becomes more and more hostile and Lemmy more and more mature things will be easier.
I find that nearly all my Reddit page views are now when I'm trying to Google what I am doing wrong in Godot. I'm trying to build a habit of looking for a Stack Overflow result instead now. That said, I strongly suspect that there is a big overlap between the sort of person who cares enough about Godot to want to connect with a community about it and the sort of person who would want to use Lemmy and other feddyverse services so I think it's only a matter of time before there is a decent Godot community on Lemmy. There's at least a few of us so far in this thread!
I also am hoping for more Gamedev groups. r/gamedev is shut down so my only hope is a community growing fast on here. the discords are... ok but not what I'm looking for. And I'm off reddit now so nothing on there will work for me.
Discord is a horrible format for a forum replacement, yeah.
I'm honestly really disappointed with how this whole situation dissolved. It's fracturing communities that have been building for over a decade.
That's because Discord is an IRC replacement, not a forum replacement (and an annoyingly siloed one, at that)
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.
Please don't bring these TikTokisms to the fediverse
Wake up in the morning, feeling like P Diddy. I got my glasses... I out the door I'm gonna hit this city...
It's designed to shove ads and bot posts in your face and steal your information, everything else is secondary. This is the true reason why the app is so fucking shitty and unusable for what reddit is supposed to be for.
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?
Harder to block ads and tracking on an app.
Also, last time I tried it, you couldn't use the app without being logged in, so they get more data on you than if you were able to browse anonymously.
all the better to spy on you, my dear.
Reddit users are product not customers.
The product is the data they mine from users. The reddit app is almost certainly loaded with telemetry and tracking.
This is data that can be sold. Likely worth more than the increased ad revenue from users who know how to block ads on their phone.
Its always worth to look at the amount of Data used between the official app and third party. Before unsinstalling i realised that sync for reddit had about 2 thirds the amount of tzraffic that the offical app uses...
For that sweet sweet ad revenue from my understanding
Since... It's significantly more difficult to avoid ads/data harvesting from an in-house-designed app than, say, a 3rd party browser with adblockers, or 3rd party apps that don't run ads at all
Now they're conducting experiments on us without our consent? Is there no low they won't stoop to?
Testing limited roll outs is actually really really common in large internet sites/apps. Done right, you'd never know.
More proof Reddit can't get anything right.
It's a common thing to do, to test how it impacts the user experience without totally changing it for everybody. The problem here is that out right just removing access to the website via a mobile browser is so painstakingly obvious and imprecise, that it baffles me why they'd even do it.
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.
Lmao this is hilarious
Worst dark pattern ever.
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.
Don't forget killing of .compact
I wrote .compact to run on a Motorola Droid, which was a 533MHz device with 512Mb of total ram, and a kernel which was very aggressive about freeing up this ram.
My respects to you. I really think websites and software in general need to have efficiency in mind again. Webapps should use as few resources as possible, save people's time, their money and the planet.
Its not even hard to do. People just always reach for the most complex, overengineered things, instead of stepping back and seeing what you need.
I love component based systems. I love real time and custom user interfaces. That doesn't mean every site needs to be a big SPA. If you're a primarily read-only site (blog, wiki, etc), then you shouldn't be sending huge blobs of JS just for your users to read content. As you add interactivity, you can add more JS, but think about what you're going to do.
And there are ways around all that. Phoenix LiveView gives you an amazing system for building real time apps that are extremely thin and fast, and SurfaceUI lets you embrace Vue style components, easily
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.
This post is from early May, so probably long before they decided to kill the API (and the actual experiment could have started long before that post).
They've been gearing up to kill the API for months, hell they first announced they would be charging back in April (prices were announced at the end of May). This has all been a coordinated scheme.
Ok, but it‘s still most likely part of the same effort to force more users into their ad experience to get good ad click/view numbers for the IPO.
It's going from bad to worse on a daily basis.
they're going truly mad if this is true
This is a new low, even in light of everything they've done recently
Link to the full discussion.
Eww I clicked on a Reddit link, warning please!
Jerboa at least just goes to it without telling you what it is. Not sure about the Lemmy UI