51–60 of 657 posts
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.
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.
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.
Maybe I need that on HN :p
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.
I'd love to be proven wrong though; what websites see daily, recurring, long time active usage?
Also not to be underestimated is that a mobile app will always have better UX than a website. Think of the subtle things like page transitions. Navigating Reddit still causes full-page reloads, whereas on the app it's a much more organic process. Speed is also an important factor.
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 experience worse to achieve this. If you want to link a video hosted on reddit, there's no straightforward way to only link the video and not the full reddit thread. Here's a random example from the frontpage:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Whatcouldgowrong/comments/ici161/wc...
No way to share just the video, you have to share the garbage comments as well. Of course many video sharing sites are the same, but Reddit was supposed to be a link aggregator at first, not Youtube-but-worse. They've added a photo gallery feature lately with the same limitation: you can't just link the gallery, you have to link the full comment page. I suspect that they did that specifically because they couldn't really prevent people to share the URL to the image directly since that's a standard feature of the web, so by adding galleries they can "lock in" the content. At least they don't do referrer checks, I suppose... Well, not yet.
And yeah, as you point out, the mobile experience on a browser is atrocious. Especially if like me you're only a lurker: if you're not logged in you can't even browse a subreddit, it forces you to install the app (or alternatively, you can go to i.reddit.com that still works and is much faster to boot).
Vanilla Reddit is effectively becoming less pleasant to use that those shady streaming websites that change their domain names every month to evade copyright enforcement. At least those website usually manage to stream SD video reliably.
Basically Reddit tries to become Instagram for people who think they're too cool for Instagram, and it shows.
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.
Maybe I need that on HN :p
https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/
Check no proc option too.
Funny, they make me not read reddit on mobile with their insistence on using the app. But the real reason is tracking and spamming you with notifications to get "engagement".
I still use old.reddit.com. Such an improved experience, even on mobile where the format doesn’t fit. So maybe that’s why they want you in the app? They know their website is terrible?
Funny, they make me not read reddit on mobile with their insistence on using the app. But the real reason is tracking and spamming you with notifications to get "engagement".
I still use old.reddit.com. Such an improved experience, even on mobile where the format doesn’t fit. So maybe that’s why they want you in the app? They know their website is terrible?