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Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

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Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#481

Post by pixl97 »

hunterhod wrote: post #472
c7b wrote: post #357

There's something that I don't get about forcing mobile browser users into mobile apps - how does it make sense for the company? They're forcing themselves into a walled garden, where the gardener takes a hefty "app store tax" on your revenues and has countless levers to force you to style the app how it suits their interests, not yours. For some apps, this might still be the best way to gain traction. But if have al…

So I actually worked at Reddit a few years ago and our “cohort” got to chat with Steve as a part of onboarding. I was super nervous and I guess I wanted to appear sharper than I actually was, so I asked Steve directly “why do you push users from mobile web to the app? That’s a pretty bad experience.” Apparently there are metrics showing that mobile app users are “stickier” than web users, meaning they come back to th…

You can do push notifications to the app and gamify them opening up and reading again. FB was the masters of doing this.

Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#482

Post by kitsunesoba »

borbulon wrote: post #437
veidr wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web puts the user in control; apps (on all significant platforms currently existing) put the company in control. Yes, Google and (especially) Apple may force Reddit to comply with this or that, but Google and (especially) Apple also prevent the user from doing all sorts of things they can do with an open platform like the web. Users can't block ads in an app. Users can't block telemetry. Users can't prevent track…

Let's not forget that the in-app browser page can be injected with whatever javascript the owner of the app wants. FB/Instagram use this for tracking. There is a more comprehensive list of what apps do this somewhere; I do not remember where it is. But for FB/Meta, you can find the info here: https://krausefx.com/blog/ios-privacy-instagram-and-facebook...

Worth pointing out that not all in-app browsers are created equal, however. A huge number of apps, probably the majority, on iOS use SFSafariViewController for theirs, which is basically an isolated Safari tab that runs out of process and app developers have no access to. Furthermore, SFSafariViewController instances are unique per-app, each with their own separate set of cookies so apps can’t trick you into visiting a link to gain access to full Safari’s cookies.

IIRC Android has something similar that opens an isolated Chrome tab within apps but I have no idea how common usage of that is in Android apps.

Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#484

Post by h0h0h0h0111 »

slashtab wrote: post #262
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I’ve been using BaconReader for years. It’s going to stop working soon and I’m simply going to stop using Reddit. I used to use it for more but the last few years I only use it for porn and I recently discovered that the redgifs site is great for that. Obviously not everyone uses Reddit only for this purpose but I suspect that when the third party apps go dark redgifs will get a nice bump in new users.

Is jumping from one corporate ship to another a good idea? At some point they peak and become greedy. I don't know what's the solution. Can we have better open source alternative and people fund it? Recently I learned DPRreviews went down because Amazon didn't profit enough from it. There are way too many stories like this.

Sure - the next corporate ship will torch VC money until they can't, they'll go user hostile then the next corporate ship will have received VC money to torch to fill the void

Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#485

Post by phire »

nbar1 wrote: post #463
baq wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, this and exactly this. Their finance team probably made a projection that if they can get X% of current mobile web users onto the app, they’ll be able to extract Y% more total revenue. They have no idea that they should split users into contributors and lurkers and even if they had, they have absolutely no idea how to model their value, so they don’t, the board sees the numbers and tells them ‘ASAP’ and that’s…

> They have no idea that they should split users into contributors and lurkers Comments like this amaze me. People really think these giant corps are out here not doing things like this.

Me too. Reddit almost certainly ran those numbers.

They might have chosen to ignore them. They might have fed biased assumptions into their calculations. Project management might have messed up and deprioritized the features meant to placate that section of the userbase. Institutional churn might have resulted in the corporation forgetting that they ever did run those numbers or why they are now heading down this path.

Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#486

Post by jeltz »

hunterhod wrote: post #472
c7b wrote: post #357

There's something that I don't get about forcing mobile browser users into mobile apps - how does it make sense for the company? They're forcing themselves into a walled garden, where the gardener takes a hefty "app store tax" on your revenues and has countless levers to force you to style the app how it suits their interests, not yours. For some apps, this might still be the best way to gain traction. But if have al…

So I actually worked at Reddit a few years ago and our “cohort” got to chat with Steve as a part of onboarding. I was super nervous and I guess I wanted to appear sharper than I actually was, so I asked Steve directly “why do you push users from mobile web to the app? That’s a pretty bad experience.” Apparently there are metrics showing that mobile app users are “stickier” than web users, meaning they come back to th…

But third party app users are likely to be even more sticky. Doesn't that mean they should encourage everyone to install third party apps? No, this is just idiocy.

Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#487

Post by tuukkah »

beezlewax wrote: post #459
veidr wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web puts the user in control; apps (on all significant platforms currently existing) put the company in control. Yes, Google and (especially) Apple may force Reddit to comply with this or that, but Google and (especially) Apple also prevent the user from doing all sorts of things they can do with an open platform like the web. Users can't block ads in an app. Users can't block telemetry. Users can't prevent track…

Surely there is a way of checking api calls made by an app and blocking those? I have never looked into this mind

HTTPS means the network connections between the app and the backend are opaque to third parties including the user.

Certificate pinning means you cannot insert yourself as the backend and/or MITM the requests. The app will only communicate directly with the owner of the private key it was pinned to.

Depending on the app and OS, it may be more or less easy to change the app to remove/crack the pinning. In general, if you are not in full control of the device (root), it's not possible.

Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#488

Post by jeltz »

pixl97 wrote: post #481
hunterhod wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I actually worked at Reddit a few years ago and our “cohort” got to chat with Steve as a part of onboarding. I was super nervous and I guess I wanted to appear sharper than I actually was, so I asked Steve directly “why do you push users from mobile web to the app? That’s a pretty bad experience.” Apparently there are metrics showing that mobile app users are “stickier” than web users, meaning they come back to th…

You can do push notifications to the app and gamify them opening up and reading again. FB was the masters of doing this.

I have uninstalled several apps that I actually wanted to use due to trying to do this. I feel you probably increase engagement of the users who stay at the cost of scaring away a whole bunch of other users. I have for example uninstalled the FB app and only user their website.

Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#489

Post by kitsunesoba »

lozenge wrote: post #392
c7b wrote: post #357

There's something that I don't get about forcing mobile browser users into mobile apps - how does it make sense for the company? They're forcing themselves into a walled garden, where the gardener takes a hefty "app store tax" on your revenues and has countless levers to force you to style the app how it suits their interests, not yours. For some apps, this might still be the best way to gain traction. But if have al…

If the user follows a link to an article or video, there's a high chance it'll be the end of their reddit session, due to distraction or back button capture. There's also a high chance the browser will unload the reddit page causing a flash of no content and potentially losing the user's scroll position. After a few rounds of this the user will leave in frustration. Now they could use the tabs feature, but this is ag…

> There's also a high chance the browser will unload the reddit page causing a flash of no content and potentially losing the user's scroll position.

The funny thing about this is that this misbehavior is mostly exclusive to badly written SPAs and other heavily-JS’d sites. Plain old rendered HTML sites like old Reddit don’t flash blank and restore scroll position fine.

Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#490

Post by sxg »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #20
alwayslikethis wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is for every person like you and me, there are 10 or 100 others who put up with this crap, and reddit attracts people, centralizing communities, giving you little option for alternatives. It drains activities from forums, etc, toward itself as it is presented as a more convenient solution. I for one will try to undo my past contributions to accelerate its decline. The blackout is unlikely to work, but I hop…

I lurk in a few subreddits that have well established forums outside of Reddit (decades old with tens of thousands of users) that are the top Google results and I'm always a bit amazed that people will still post on Reddit instead of using those other forums where they will get much, much better answers.

Your own comment doesn’t include any specific examples of these communities, which I think reflects the big problem: discovery. As big as HN is, I rarely see it mentioned anywhere that’s not HN-adjacent. I’d love to hear about some of these other communities, but I do suspect they’ll each have varying features, cultural norms, and suboptimal onboarding guides for newbies. Especially if they’re decades old.

I think if you’re “in-the-know” and have grown with some of these high quality forums/communities for years, you’ll lose touch with understanding what new users need to join as the quality and depth of discussion become higher and deeper.

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