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Ask HN: Why is Reddit on mobile so obsessed with making me use their app?

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Re: Ask HN: Why is Reddit on mobile so obsessed with making me use their app?

#131

Post by z9e »

nokya wrote: post #38

Reddit's obsession to constantly show me an "ad" to install the app has basically cured me from drifting and spending more time than strictly necessary on the website. I hate it so much that it triggers a negative experience everytime I visit the website and I just tend to watch links shared to me. Honestly, I thank them for that and I hope they don't remove it.

I wonder if it’s partly due to business / product people taking control and trying to aggressively push for more user engagement rather than let the engineers keep the site enjoyable to use.

Either way, it’s turned me off as well, and I thank them for it because I got a lot of free time back.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Reddit on mobile so obsessed with making me use their app?

#132

Post by camillomiller »

ObsoleteNerd wrote: post #93
nokya wrote: post #38

Reddit's obsession to constantly show me an "ad" to install the app has basically cured me from drifting and spending more time than strictly necessary on the website. I hate it so much that it triggers a negative experience everytime I visit the website and I just tend to watch links shared to me. Honestly, I thank them for that and I hope they don't remove it.

Their redesign combined with the incessant harassing app crap turned me from an hours-a-day-and-modding-some-decently-big-subs redditor to visiting for 15 minutes a couple times a week when on the dunny. Their entire site is so user hostile now it’s actually bordering on funny. They’ve become a parody of everything they set out to defeat.

Do NOT have your phone with you on the dunny and don’t spend 15 minutes on it! Make it a one minute job.

You’ll thank me when you won’t get piles ;)

Re: Ask HN: Why is Reddit on mobile so obsessed with making me use their app?

#133

Post by drawkbox »

simias wrote: post #56

Reddit has been very aggressive over the past few years to increase retention. They're barely a link aggregator anymore, they try to self-host as much content as possible. Images, videos, they even attempted to make user-pages à la Facebook (no idea if this caught on). They're competing with Facebook and Instagram, not Hacker News. On paper that's not necessarily bad, but they don't hesitate to make the user experien…

The reddit video player is one of the worst/lagging experiences of any video player since Real Player, and that had bad internet to deal with and Microsoft messing with it constantly.

I usually don't like to rag on bad but highlight good, but in reddit's video player they are obviously doing too much tracking in it or it was rushed because it is not responsive many times even on a fast connection on a massive desktop machine. It is hard to seek, hard to play/stop/pause, half the time half way through it goes to down version that is compression glitched and blurry, on and on.

If so much of the site is video, why not make that the slickest player of all time? Youtube has always known how to do this. Streaming services do as well. Open source tools are better than this. What is going on reddit with the video player? It probably has lots to do with tracking, cost savings and more but it is unwieldy right now.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Reddit on mobile so obsessed with making me use their app?

#135

Post by nepthar »

bhupy wrote: post #128
nokya wrote: post #38

Reddit's obsession to constantly show me an "ad" to install the app has basically cured me from drifting and spending more time than strictly necessary on the website. I hate it so much that it triggers a negative experience everytime I visit the website and I just tend to watch links shared to me. Honestly, I thank them for that and I hope they don't remove it.

I thought I was the only one. For a while I really struggled with a crippling addiction to Reddit, and no amount of Screen Time blockers seemed to help (it’s too easy to override). Simply uninstalling the app did the trick. In the beginning I would open the mobile browser out of compulsion, but the UI was so revolting that it’s essentially cured my addiction.

This comment is a great answer to the originally posed question :)

Re: Ask HN: Why is Reddit on mobile so obsessed with making me use their app?

#136

Post by kumarvvr »

Data collection. More data, more targeted the ads, more income.

I guess at some level, their data costs too go down with an app, when compared to a site.

Also, with constant notifications, apps have a better chance to become addictive. At some point, someone saw data of the time spent by users on their site, to that on app and thought, wow !

It allows for better gamification and better avenues for making users buy awards for posts.

I have seen more 'gold' posts than ever after the app became popular.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Reddit on mobile so obsessed with making me use their app?

#137

Post by silon42 »

johnyzee wrote: post #127
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #85

That and the layout of their "new" redesign where you go to a post and it'll show the post, 2 comments (out of 500), not even the full threads of those comments either and then just some unrelated posts and you have to click on more links just to read the actual comments and you can feel your browser choke under the weight of whatever framework they use trying to render a few bits of text. Noticed Twitter switching t…

It seems web developers these days have forgotten the virtue of keeping things simple. Everything has to be smothered in javascript, and asynchronous requests, and fluid UI that changes on the slightest interaction. I'm guessing it is a case of having a hammer, in the form of the heavy javascript frameworks, a la mode, and using it to treat every simple implementation task as a nail. HN is a great example of how play…

HN is good, but threaded NNTP/USENET is easily better than any forum (in Emacs GNUS, or even Thunderbird). There might be better forums (something topic/tag oriented).

Re: Ask HN: Why is Reddit on mobile so obsessed with making me use their app?

#138

Post by GekkePrutser »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #85

That and the layout of their "new" redesign where you go to a post and it'll show the post, 2 comments (out of 500), not even the full threads of those comments either and then just some unrelated posts and you have to click on more links just to read the actual comments and you can feel your browser choke under the weight of whatever framework they use trying to render a few bits of text. Noticed Twitter switching t…

Yeah the new layout is super heavy even on a decent machine and the old one is too 2000's...

Don't get me wrong, I love simplicity like hacker news does. But reddit's old theme just rubs me the wrong way.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Reddit on mobile so obsessed with making me use their app?

#139

Post by taneq »

hh3k0 wrote: post #107
nokya wrote: post #38

Reddit's obsession to constantly show me an "ad" to install the app has basically cured me from drifting and spending more time than strictly necessary on the website. I hate it so much that it triggers a negative experience everytime I visit the website and I just tend to watch links shared to me. Honestly, I thank them for that and I hope they don't remove it.

It's quite irritating if you browse 18+ subreddits and they stop you from seeing content, stating you need the app to see 18+ content. It's easily circumvented by replacing "www" with "old" in the URL, however, quite irritating nonetheless.

Ugh, imgur does this now too. The one time I don't want to be logged in is if I'm looking at something nsfw...

Re: Ask HN: Why is Reddit on mobile so obsessed with making me use their app?

#140

Post by GekkePrutser »

nevf1 wrote: post #37
jakevoytko wrote: post #10

Other people are saying "ads," but the story is probably more expansive. Mobile apps have better hooks for pulling people back into the app, like popup notifications. Reddit has natural lifecycle points where they can do this: when people respond to your comments or comment on your posts. They could also notify users of events like their yearly Secret Santa. I wouldn't be surprised if their engagement numbers were mu…

Yep, I think ads is just another way of saying monetization. The app has lots of annoying notifications like "You might like...", "You got 100 upvotes", etc which, when you engage with more, they make more money through ads, coins etc. Your attention, retention and engagement is a lot easier to manage and increase through an app than it is through website.

They really hurt their own monetisation by making the subscriptions too expensive though. They more than doubled in price recently. It's not worth the price anymore for me.
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