Worst dark pattern ever.
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
Twitter did, at one point
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.
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 honestly hope reddit keeps fucking up like this. It takes a lot of work and a long time to drive millions of casual users away from your site.
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
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.
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
Pinterest has long been a member of my uBlocklist configuration.
I fucking hate Pinterest. I don’t understand why anyone uses 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.
Why would the owners of a website want to make it harder to browse their website
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.
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”.
This is a new low, even in light of everything they’ve done recently
Not surprising, since ad blockers are a thing even on mobile these days.
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.
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
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.
Companies that do this absolutely annoy me. Even Facebook doesn’t do this??
Are there third party Facebook apps?
I use Friendly social Browser on Android. It’s basically a wrapper for the mobile website and allows me to sort posts the way I want them, which is important to me. I don’t want the algorithm. I’ve used it for years. It works with quite a few different social media sites and doesn’t allow all the tracking. I have the Plus version and I’m allowed to turn off ads on both the app and Facebook and block “stories” and other silliness I don’t care for. I don’t know if the free version does all of that.
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
