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Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

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Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#491

Post by pixl97 »

_zzaw wrote: post #16
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 think you're right, partly. But I also think that a lot of the people who put up with it are the passive ones who don't really contribute much to communities anyway; they're just there. The people who do the real contributing—posting, modding, defining the culture and building the communities that Reddit benefits from—are, as far as I can tell, more likely to get a lot angrier about abusive corporate nonsense, simp…

Reddit once faked tons of users making posts. I have a feeling they'll look for ways to do it again.

I wonder how hard it would be to have a series of bots that harvest posts from other social media sites, add a little 'human' LLM magic to it, and make it look like actual people are posting lots of content?

Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#492

Post by travisgriggs »

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…

I too find this baffling. I have developed and maintain two platform native pairs of apps in use in the agriculture level irrigation control sphere. Our reasons for doing so are varied (historical, user experience, performance, desire to minimize cloud dependencies, need to really push Bluetooth and other OS assets (like location, storage, and photos)). But it is a butt ton of annoying work. From Java to Kotlin, Android to Compose, ObjC to Swift, UIKit to SwiftUI. It seems to never end. How I would love to use the a “cross platform silver bullet”, but I spent 20 years using and pitching Smalltalk in that space and am just really distrustful that that problem is truly solvable. But I’m surrounded by what seems 10:1, if not more, of web programming hoards who all use the cloud and web apps as the hammer to every problem they see. Their enthusiasm through the industry is great. I honestly am confused why I see app after app be retooled native in parallel or in replacement to a mobile web app. The variety of contexts is great enough that I’m uncomfortable ascribing it to a machivelean subtext of control. There’s too much inconsistency and incompetence betwixt the various marketing/steering levels of all the participants to see it as some universal evil plot. I feel there has to be something more general going on.

Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#493

Post by PaulHoule »

javajosh wrote: post #452
efxhoy wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at a company trying to get more people into our app. The logic is completely flawed: "we want more engagement, app users show more engagement than web users, so if we get more users from web into the apps we'll get more engagement". It's obviously completely flawed but the product people and analytics department don't seem to get it. At least we aren't doing hostile stuff to get people into the apps, yet.

A good compromise is to educate users on how to add a shortcut to their homescreen. I don't think people (including product people) know about this feature, and mobile browsers bury it. The pareto principle applies: 80% of stickiness is that icon, which you can get for 20% of the effort of an app.

It doesn't work for me.

All icons on mobile look the same to me: I mean, Android's Material Design icons really look the same to me and even the icons from iOS never really stick in my head. That "settings" icon for instance with all the gears looks like a movie poster for The Golden Compass and not a settings dialog. The App store and Adobe Acrobat and many applications have meaningless logos based around a generic triangle...

Once something gets a mobile icon I will struggle to find it, but if I want to find something on the web it is a quick search, often autocompleted when I type a few letters, or easy to find in the bookmarks or maybe my history.

Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#494

Post by unionpivo »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #436
rsynnott wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people are usually over-inclined to assume that these companies know what they're doing; that there is, somewhere, some well-thought-out master plan. Often, there isn't. Even with Twitter, which has just been a cavalcade of obviously nonsense moves for months and months, there are still believers in The Plan. I'm actually a little curious why this is; despite presumably having had interactions with poorly-run…

Because a reasonable person will have a plan. Maybe not the best plan, maybe not a master plan, but a plan. To your specific point: 'person knows what they are doing' does not equal have a 'well-thought-out master plan'

Problem in big companies is that its is filled with people that , especially the higher you go, have their own plans and agendas. Sometimes they align with each other and oftentimes some part of company is actively trying to sabotage some other part of company.

Individuals also have their own personal goals such as high bonuses or maybe high IPO, where you will sell out and become rich.

And as CEO you have to not only have a plan, but also set up initiatives for people to follow it, which is often harder than it seems. That is why it sometimes seems a company is sabotaging itself. Sometimes there is something deeper going on but sometimes they are sabotaging themselves.

Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#495

Post by rpastuszak »

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…

Easier targeting, especially third-party means higher CPM, means more advertising driven revenue. Also, you’re worth more if you can be tracked across different devices (that became more important after the so called cookie-geddon.)

Speaking as someone who worked in publishing, ad tech and built primarily for mobile (PWA or native).

Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#496

Post by rootusrootus »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #86

I am a user of the official Reddit app, even though it sucks, and I just deleted it. As an “experiment”. I’ll probably come back at some point, because I do like being in touch with some of the subreddits. But I’ll see how Reddit-free life feels for a bit. I find it really offensive that they can have such a trash UX in their app and then shut down the other apps. The Reddit UI has always felt really hostile, which i…

> But I’ll see how Reddit-free life feels for a bit.

If you're anything like me, then it feels more productive and less addicting. Turns out the longer I do without it, the less connected to it I feel, the less compelled to go back and participate some more. And I feel better using the wasted time to do something more useful with my life.

I turn off HN periodically for the same reason, when I feel like it's becoming too much.

Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#497

Post by jeltz »

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.

Having worked at some quite large companies: yes, it happens for real that they do not do stuff like that. It is likely that some team obviously has ran the numbers but that does not mean they made it to the people who made the decision.

Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#498

Post by kroltan »

indigochill wrote: post #449
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…

> apps are roughly the opposite of that Although I broadly agree with this assessment, I'd just like to add a slight nuance that, at least in my view, it's specifically _app store apps_ that are roughly the opposite. You can still, for example, install random APKs (on Android, I doubt Apple has anything similar) if you're so inclined, so they can be as user-centric as you want. It's just that the major manufacturers…

That depends on the implementation, but its just a fundamental technology difference. On the web, the default way to do things is to use a bunch of HTML elements and whatnot, which are user-agent-introspectable, even if they are modified using a blob of code.

With apps, you kind of by definition only have a blob of code. As an user and with a sufficiently advanced operating system, you can block some outside-world interactions like internet connections, but the app only has to give you a render target whose pixels can be drawn to arbitrarily. Some apps even use integrity verification features from the OS vendor to check if they haven't been tampered with, that is much harder to do on the web.

Which is incidentally why there is so much interest in high performance web programming and being able to draw arbitrary pixels to a render target (hello canvas/webgl/webgpu). Expect content blockers to become way less effective in the coming years (even ignoring the big obvious attacks like Chrome's Manifest v3).

Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#500

Post by happycube »

tetris11 wrote: post #154
chaosjevil wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a second response: to not reward AND punish the offending party. I've been recommending people to replace their content in Reddit with literal gibberish (from random generators), and then delete their accounts. Each person doing this makes Reddit data less valuable for LLMs, and eventually it means that not even Google, Amazon, Microsoft etc. would ever bother paying for API access.

I sunk 15 years of myself into reddit. I am there in all my teenage angst, and you get to see me mature before your eyes. I can't just delete. I've helped people there, and been helped. If my data is part of a corpus that betters humanity, than so be it. Hopefully one day that corpus will be released under a FOSS license.

It already is, and everything through March 2023 was archived by pushshift and there are torrents floating about.

It's about 2TB in zstd compression, so finding the needles will be interesting - but it'll probably be much easier years from now.

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