Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 657 posts

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

#211

Post by throwaway0a5e »

halfFact wrote: post #167
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 have the issue that I find Reddit extremely useful to become proficient. I knew what problems my tomatoes were having the moment it started. I learned about blueberries needing something stronger than coffee.(and more) I learned what microcontrollers are popular in the enterprise world by lurking. I got some extremely useful information in a table form which was impossible to find in a Google search. I suppose I ju…

I completely and totally disagree. Reddit is of no benefit for anything you could just Google. Reddit's commenting dynamics create a false consensus around whatever the first thing that a bunch of people who Googled it can not disagree to. That's bad enough but when you start talking about subjects that have any degree of subjectiveness people's desire to have their world view confirmed abounds and it becomes even worse.

Pick a subject you're very familiar with the nuances of and start sorting comments by best, go straight to the bottom and among the low quality junk you'll find that there are tons of valid and well informed opinions that get rejected because they required more nuanced thought to understand than a bunch of amateurs who just googled it could muster or wasn't 100% compatible with the ideology of the group at large.

The net effect is that you get "if you just Googled it yourself" quality answers (pretty much every "open to the internet riff raff at large" platform has this problem to an extent) but sent though a filter that removes a substantial fraction of the opinions from people who actually know what they're talking about. Frankly the chans are better in this regard because the only mechanism for disagreement is to reply and the content of replies makes the nature of agreement/disagreement pretty obvious.

As bad as HN is about rejecting anything that doesn't fit it's narrow ideology about how the world works it at least usually doesn't reject things if they're technically correct. The same cannot be said for Reddit.

If you want professional advice you need to go somewhere with some sort of permanence and a higher bar to entry (i.e. the people who wind up there have actually care enough about the subject that they sought the place out), traditionally forums fill this role.

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

#212

Post by SimeVidas »

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…

The problem is that they don’t let you pay for the service.

They show that algorithmic stuff to increase engagement. Of course, if they show related content so close by, people are going to check it out more often. You can’t really argue against that.

What they could do is have a paid tier. Instead of paying with engagement, you’d pay money to have the better UI. But they don’t want to provide that option at all.

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

#213

Post by ronanyeah »

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.

The original 'they' are long gone.

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

#214

Post by sharker8 »

toddmorey wrote: post #77

It's horrible. They've made the site itself unusable on mobile. They care so much because as you browse links out to other content, they can keep you in the app using the embedded browser. And when you read that content and share it, you share reddit links, not the source links. I'm sure time in app blows away time on site for mobile users.

To turn this on its head, maybe the mobile device manufacturing duopoly has made it impossible to develop great experiences on mobile web in order to funnel more development work into their app store ecosystems? Why are we blaming reddit for this trend?

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

#215

Post by ballenf »

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.

https://selfcontrolapp.com

That blocker / screen time app (MacOS only) worked for me. Also having trusted person set the screen time password on iOS is an approach I've heard people using.

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

#216

Post by encom »

shp0ngle wrote: post #146
GekkePrutser wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

reddit’s old theme is great. And I love how different subreddits are able to customize the look. It falls apart a bit on phones, unfortunately.

>And I love how different subreddits are able to customize the look.

I absolutely hate that. If you still have a Reddit account, it can be turned off in settings. Otherwise, add this to your adblocker:

    b.thumbs.redditmedia.com/*.css

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

#217

Post by notwhereyouare »

dylz wrote: post #179
drawkbox wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It uses adaptive streaming (MPEG-DASH), iirc. Starts at a low bitrate and scales upward over time. Works great for Twitch-length stuff. For a 10 second gif-equivalent, you don't get enough scale up time.

I personally have never had it scale upward overtime. If anything, I've have it go from good quality to worse and worse quality as the video goes on

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

#220

Post by crispyporkbites »

No one has actually answered this - the short answer is that mobile users who use the app have a higher Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) that mobile users who do not use the app.

The difference is high enough that converting one user will more than cover the CLV losses of all the other users who are driven away by the popup.

The reddit marketing team will be trying to maximise CLV and A/B testing tonnes of different ways to do this.

For reddit CLV is based on ads and premium subscriptions/reddit gold, and these figures for mobile app users will be based on a number of factors including data mining, ability to send push notifications to device, control over the ad experience, avoidance of ad blockers, likelihood of returning to reddit, posting frequency etc. Using the website, especially on mobile, will make a lot of those metrics fall off a cliff when looking at CLV, and I wouldn't be surprised if an app user has a 20x or 30x CLV than a mobile web user.

Post reply on HN