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

551–560 of 657 posts

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

#551

Post by dreamcompiler »

It cannot really be that hard to teach a deep learning engine how to surf the web while tailoring itself to a given user's tastes and filtering out all the egregious crap. It should be substantially easier in fact, than teaching a DL engine how to play a video game, because all the HTML and JS that generated the page is available to the engine to reason about in addition to the pixels.

As an added bonus, it should be easy to teach the engine to "see" all the monkeyboxes and eliminate them while at the same time giving no clue to the upstream server that AI was involved in improving the human user's experience.

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

#552

Post by b112 »

nickalaso wrote: post #455
monoideism wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> while Mexico has suffered under one party rule for decades Yet now we suffer under two-party rule.

Which has been the case since almost the inception of the country, as it is a direct consequence of the First-past-the-post voting system that the US government has implemented.

It has nothing to do with first-past-the-post. You can have 10 parties, 100 parties, in fact first past the post is designed for more than two parties.

If you have people in 5 parties to vote for in your riding(district?), then first past the post is the only way it works easily! Seldom will one of those 5, get 50.1% of the vote!

And why would they? The most popular wins, the people have spoken.

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

#553

Post by EVdotIO »

clickok wrote: post #474
sixo wrote: post #331

It is pretty offensive that they say "reddit works better on the app" when the only reason for that is that they broke everything on mobile (on purpose?) in a series of badly-implemented redesigns. I'm never going to install it, and I have all but stopped reading it because these prompts are so obnoxious. That's probably +$ for Reddit though. I don't understand why companies constantly do stuff that serves only _them…

Furthermore, over the long term it can change the texture of the Reddit community. What sort of person quits using Reddit after becoming frustrated with yet another imposed hassle? What sort of person stays, or is retained by pop-up notifications and whatever other tedious blandishments their app/redesign provides? There are other sites with similar features and layout to Reddit (Voat, Ruqqus, Saidit, Raddle, communi…

I'm sure good subreddits still exists, but it has gone way past eternal September at this point and Gresham's law is in full effect. Once an organization reaches a certain size, vested interests on all sides have perverse incentives, and it starts a terminal slide to the lowest common denominator. I suspect the issue is largely in the inherent zero marginal cost to entry for most social media platforms.

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

#554

Post by weaksauce »

i use the apollo app on ios... it's quite fantastic and a much faster and better user experience. can't attest to the official reddit app though.

other than that the reddit app wants you to use it because there is no ad blocker and they can keep pulling you back in with push notifications.

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

#555

Post by aasasd »

laurent92 wrote: post #530
_zzaw wrote: post #526

Web browsing these days really feels like wandering through a market filled with panhandlers and pickpockets—you're just trying to look around, and everyone's up in your face demanding stuff in the most obnoxious way possible. As a web designer/developer, this approach offends me. At the risk of sounding like I'm taking this more seriously than I should, I believe that good design is founded on respecting ones' users…

This is extremely interesting. Could the webbrowser of the future be the one which sways the nagging boxes away, and lets you access actual content? How would we reach that? (or, as more probable: this is the end of the webbrowser, it will die of a million cuts, and all smart TVs are on specific apps, all mobiles run on apps, and the one simple-to-use website that will remain forever will be... HackerNews). Edit: And…

By now a browser is just a UI platform for a website, so if the website doesn't give you the content, the browser can't extort it from the server.

So far we can filter out some ads because for sites it's just cheaper to use off-the-shelf solutions from ad networks, which are the same for everyone, and to preserve accessibility via HTML. Enter heavy randomization or the canvas, and filters won't work. Look at Yandex: it took the fight with adblockers seriously, so uBlock's lists finally gave up—it just was no use.

If you try to use customization via CSS, on some modern sites the crazy mess of divs with cryptic classes already makes no sense and doesn't lend itself to CSS selectors.

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

#556

Post by wilsonnb3 »

hh3k0 wrote: post #261
soylentcola wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? I just went to /r/gonewild on my phone (browser) to test it out. It gave me the usual "are you 18+?" message and let me proceed to all of the amateur nudity you'd expect. (Firefox mobile, not in desktop mode if it matters).

It happens ever so often but not always -- maybe they're still phasing it in?

Yeah it only happens sometimes. They also will randomly, occasionally not let you read the comments on a post without downloading the app.

Previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21780092

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

#557

Post by vorpalhex »

suby wrote: post #548
ericbarrett wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, just went to the site and the front page is 80% alt-right conspiracy theories. Also, the second DDG result for “ruqqus” is a Qanon sub.

Agreed. I tried consistently visiting and posting for a week or two,and while I feel like the site has been getting more popular, it's not a place for adult conversations. What finally made me quit was a post of a meme involving Kamala Harris in a non-political section which was one of the most upvoted things I'd seen on the site, yet the meme itself was childish and racist. I dislike censorship, but if the initial s…

But it'll only avoid becoming voat if people invest time to grow the community into a place of meaningful discussion and beneficial discourse. There are some sub mods who are trying very hard to build welcoming (and non-political) subs but they can't do it singlehandedly.

If you want something to grow, you have to invest in it.

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

#558

Post by slaymaker1907 »

b112 wrote: post #552
nickalaso wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which has been the case since almost the inception of the country, as it is a direct consequence of the First-past-the-post voting system that the US government has implemented.

It has nothing to do with first-past-the-post. You can have 10 parties, 100 parties, in fact first past the post is designed for more than two parties. If you have people in 5 parties to vote for in your riding(district?), then first past the post is the only way it works easily! Seldom will one of those 5, get 50.1% of the vote! And why would they? The most popular wins, the people have spoken.

Why not have a runoff election or instant runoff voting?

Additionally, why do we need to have a single representative for any individual instead of say 10 people representing a larger district?

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

#560

Post by j-james »

searchableguy wrote: post #40

Use an RSS reader. You will like the lack of feeling of being forced to comment on things you don't care much about in retrospection. No tracking or ads, only content. You can filter shady sites or posts from appearing. Here are some readers. 0] https://github.com/GetStream/Winds 1] https://github.com/FreshRSS/FreshRSS 2] https://github.com/feedbin/feedbin 3] https://github.com/yang991178/fluent-reader If you like so…

Additionally, as a browser extension: https://fraidyc.at
Post reply on HN