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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?

#181

Post by simias »

drawkbox wrote: post #133
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…

I agree. In general the entire website feels very lackluster, the redesign is heinously slow and the problem has to be in the frontend since old.reddit is not nearly as laggy.

Having to watch a pulsating loading icon while it's fetching a few KiB of plain text comments is frankly shameful, especially for a website that's mostly about comments in the first place (I know there weren't comments on Reddit at the very start, but I can't imagine that it would've reached that level of popularity without them).

I think it's a case of poorly aligned incentives, they clearly only want to funnel everybody to the mobile app. The website being an unusable lagfest might be a feature, or at the very least there's probably not a lot of effort put into improving it.

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

#182

Post by mangatmodi »

hutzlibu wrote: post #95
mangatmodi wrote: post #9

I worked on user tracking all my life. You can track user activities, interest etc, much better on an app. This data is valuable for in-house use and to sell it to the highest bidder.

Do you think tracking outside the app is done? Meaning collecting data even if the app is not opened? I would suspect so.

yes yes, there are third party DMPs. Phone companies, offline stores etc. all share data with these DMPs. It is quite disgusting. Particularly shady practices done by FB.

But nothing can defeat first party tracking you get with the app.

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

#184

Post by mark_l_watson »

m0guz wrote: post #130
jamil7 wrote: post #5

Yeah ads. If you're on iOS check out Apollo, made by a solo developer and does not display ads. I'm not sure what the equivalent on Android would be (someone chime in if you know).

Ads only one of the reasons. Reddit also updated Reddit Coins [0] with their new design. With this new "in-app" economy, you can use real money to buy reddit coins and give an award to post. Another revenue stream for reddit. [0] https://www.reddit.com/coins

They give me Reddit coins because I donate every month. I don’t use their app and have no trouble giving out coins for posts that I like. Sort of fun, BTW.

Now, I really wish Twitter would let me pay a monthly fee for no advertisements.

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

#185

Post by cfontes »

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.

I have this problem too, uninstalling apollo right now.

I also hate the mobile UI, I think this will work.

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

#186

Post by fencepost »

camillomiller wrote: post #132
ObsoleteNerd wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ;)

For those in the US, piles=hemorrhoids.

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

#187

Post by mcphage »

sportsaw wrote: post #165

I admit that I like Reddit for product or local-area research. But whenever I find myself filling my time by scrolling through popular subs, I end up feeling like shit. They're teeming with misanthropes and the low-IQ'd. For example "Ask Reddit: What's one thing you wish guys knew?" or whatever. Or r/WatchPeopleDieInside (you mean watch someone have a disappointed look on their face... why is this entertaining?). Red…

> Reddit is like any popular entertainment (music, film, Nascar...), with a typical bell curve of un-intellectual stimulation.

There are a lot of good subs, but the big ones ain't it.

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

#188

Post by aphroz »

thatguyagain wrote: post #44
aphroz wrote: post #33

Because they need your data. I don't understand how a website with such bad UX can rank so well when Google is now calculating CLS and other parameters like this. Reddit is a mystery to me.

Isn't it one of the most popular sites on the internet? I can't think of where on Reddit the CLS is bad, do you have an example?

It was probably very popular, but for me it has become like Quora, I don't understand how the information is structured and I find it not relevant most of the time.

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

#190

Post by culopatin »

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.

That’s the best way to get available time hours up for me. Deleted IG, FB, Reddit and I grab my phone, switch through the home screen pages, I don’t find the apps for those places, and turn the screen off. No more drifting through trash feeds of unnecessary content. It’s been great. Now I only drift through HN and my RSS feed, but at least I choose what I see.
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