They're pushing the native app hard because they want to serve you ads.
They serve tons of ads no matter the layout by vote manipulation of commercialized content. Literally the 3rd top post is a picture of a Big Mac.
Please stop asking me to use the app
101–110 of 265 posts
Re: Please stop asking me to use the app
#102At this point I'm genuinely wondering if they're about to Digg themselves into a amusingly-recursive grave. All it would take is one great, open forum site to absorb the refugees from a terrible management mistep, and they're toast. Just like Digg.
> they're about to Digg themselves into a amusingly-recursive grave
"You'll get over it"
> All it would take is one great, open forum site to absorb the refugees from a terrible management mistep
This is fundamental risk to any business that depends on a social space. The best explanation of the mechanics that create this risk is Joe Peacock's talk[1] at NOTACON 8 about the time fark.com made the same mistake... and then poured gasoline on the fire with the infamous "You'll get over it" comment being the only publicly visible response by fark.com's management.
Re: Please stop asking me to use the app
#103I'm surprised that's their only problem with the mobile site. I purposely do not follow Reddit links because they show me a spinner for 7 seconds before showing the text of self posts. I can only assume that this delay to show a kilobyte of text is purposeful and meant to further steer users to the app, and not simply gross engineering incompetence, since the desktop site loads instantly. (Though, thank you to the OP…
Ironically the mobile site is a full single page app, while the desktop site (or at least the old one) was mostly server rendered. It's not impossible to create a fast mobile client rendered site (Twitter have done well) but it's certainly not as easy as it is with plain old HTML.
Funny that you cite Twitter here. Their mobile site tells me I'm rate limited half the time I land on it.
Re: Please stop asking me to use the app
#104It's kind of fascinating that seems like there is some kind of force that drives popular web sites to eventually self-sabotage themselves out of existence. Reddit seems to be having a good go at it now. I sort of get how it happens but I can't quite understand how the level of stupidity required by management is achieved in practice to actually do it.
Create -> Monetize -> Expand -> Exploit -> Destroy It's a common commercial lifecycle for all sorts of things. You make a new thing. You find a way to make money from the thing. You expand your market for the thing by filling a need and treating your customers well. At some point you want to cash out, and start burning your userbase to make extra money. Eventually this destroys the whole thing.
That's part of it. Another cause is that companies grow and get more employees and those employees need to justify their existence by changing things up. You don't get promoted for not fixing what aint broken.
Re: Please stop asking me to use the app
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
The redesign completely kills my 12-inch MacBook by freezing Safari’s UI for a good second or two while it’s loading all that shit JavaScript. I can load actual apps faster than their content-focused website.
Same. I’m having similar although not nearly as bad issues with the new gmail. However reddit is so bad that unless they improve the performance I’ll likely just stop using it
I use old.reddit.com for now but if they remove it I’ll just stop using the site. I only use it for procrastination anyway so not a big loss.
Re: Please stop asking me to use the app
#106> now it's a floating bar at the bottom when reading comments that for some reason I can't get rid of despite the x button The x button works for me, but when I load an other page it reappears. So reddit wants me to dismiss the floating bar for every page I visit on the site. I'm curious to learn about the thinking behind building out such dark patterns. Have the reddit employees tried using the site on mobile while…
I mean they probably justify it with “the boss told me to do this, so I will because I live in San Francisco and my rent is $2500 a month and I want to keep my job”. It’s hard to make a stand when someone else will just do it.
Re: Please stop asking me to use the app
#107"You'd think only one of those is a joke. I don't know anymore."
Re: Please stop asking me to use the app
#108People are complaining about reddit here, but it applies equally to every other online company, especially bloody Medium!
It's the main reason I wish people would stop using Medium to host their blogs, because there's an uncloseable "open in app" button in the middle of the content.
Re: Please stop asking me to use the app
#109Does anyone notice that the conversion rate of reddit links drop much with the new UI? Before, the rate is about 70%, now it is 10%. For example, a reddit comment page shows 2000 views, but there are only 200 visits detected by yourself website backend stat software.
It seems designed to keep you from leaving the site. I’ve noticed on the desktop I have to go through extra steps to leave Reddit and actually follow the link. It’s frustrsting.
Re: Please stop asking me to use the app
#110I wonder what the conversion rate is for users who see the pop up for the 100th time.