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Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

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Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#551
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 what am I missing?

AdBlock

Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

On Android the shortcut icon is derived from the favicon, so material design doesn't apply. (There is also a "badge" for the browser app itself).

One way or another there are a bunch of Google-app icons that all look the same to me. Third party apps on iOS or Android generally have nondistinct icons: I have many icons that are basically a letter like "H" with no indication that one of those icons controls my stereo and another one does something else. I use Microsoft' RDP on my iPad all the time and I struggle to find the icon not least because the colors blend into the background but it is just some arrows without stems like the logo of some british railway from the 1970s.

I find myself deleting apps aggressively because the junk apps make it hard to find the few apps I really use, most of all I use the web as much as I can because it is so easy to find anything on the web.

Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#553
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the way a certain MassiveCorp talked about the acquisition of my previous workplace, lead less experienced employees to believe they were doing so in order to diversity their offerings in that area. Guess how long we lasted before being "brought into the fold".

3-6 months?

Just over a year, as the comments below guessed (congratulations! Prizes coming your way!).

Not many people got fired though, only a few managers (who to be fair, were a bit useless). Most others left "voluntarily" after the corp changes were made (you know, the ones that definitely weren't going to be made). It wasn't so bad though, we all got a good deal.

Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#554
post #363
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…

You’re assuming there is some cohesive strategy here. It’s better to look at what often happens in practice at a more practical level. Some exec will be constantly getting pressure to make his mobile app growth chart keeping going up. So instead of doing customer research finding out what people want, having a product vision, market research (“why do people like Apollo?”), making the app so good that Redditors tell o…

There's also a huge disconnect between what power users want and what the ad-viewing cannon fodder will tolerate. Headlines this week say that Netflix cracking down on password sharing has been hugely successful driving new signups.

Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#555
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…

Couple of reasons: - Push notifications to reengage the user - Collect more data - you can spy way more on a user using the app than on the web - Bypass adblockers

All this makes losing customers who are not willing to make the transition to the app worth it.

Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Um, no, people who play WoW already play WoW, and you are really trying to convince everyone who doesn't want to play WoW to play a game that is designed to be very similar. Is that really the goal though? You can have a successful MMO without killing wow. Warhammer Online, Guild Wars 2, etc. were all great games from the business perspective.

> Warhammer Online, Guild Wars 2, etc. were all great games from the business perspective. OP said: > all these mmos were popping up saying they were the "WoW killer" Guild Wars and WHO weren't positioned as WoW killers. They were positioned as WoW alternatives that prioritized or PvP or had an endgame that revolved around PvP. Which is probably why they did well - they offered something that WoW wasn't good at inste…

What's an example then of a game that fits the original argument?

Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how I discovered old.reddit.com still works. And it has none of the broken javascript or A/B app pushing code in it.

Could someone explain why a new web interface, albeit arguably better for mobile and actually enjoyable on desktop if the following can be forgotten, is so damn slow? When loading it appears to emerge from unknown depths and open up with a heavy sigh. Personification of a tool but this the impression it gives me every time. I thought 2020s were years when multi cores and gigabytes of memory would render everything sn…

It's built by the idiots sons and daughters of rich people as their "my first job" project. Lots of sectors apparently function like this. Children of the elite can have play jobs, money is distributed to friends and family and everyone suffers.

There were posts on reddit about the most toxic work culture there i remember with drugs and bizarre politics straight out of some san fran sitcom.

And some quite funny posts on just how grotesquely "my first react project" the whole code base was, and still is. These people are absolutely clueless. They nuked the whole "new reddit feedback" forum with posts pointing out just how bad the whole thing was, like pulling tens megabytes of starter boilerplate in production and loops with script loads inside of them that could grind a powerful computer to a halt.

Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#559

Imgur did something similar. They kept removing functionality to the point where you can't comment at all on the mobile browser website. I don't use imgur on my phone anymore... mission accomplished?

The irony in this story being that Imgur was originally just an image host

Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This just seems to be the strategy they teach at business school, and it never works. I remember in the 2000s, all these mmos were popping up saying they were the "WoW killer". Um, no, people who play WoW already play WoW, and you are really trying to convince everyone who doesn't want to play WoW to play a game that is designed to be very similar. It never made any sense. But I guess if you are a business exec, and…

It's something that does work in other industries. If fantasy books are big you pay someone to write another fantasy book. If people start buying crossovers, you build a crossover. The difference is that these are replaceable, consumable or temporary. With 'platforms', it's not enough to make something similar to something that someone likes, you have to make something that displaces something someone likes. How some…

In the case of social network platforms, you have to do more than than convince someone to switch one person at a time. Using one social network platform over another is a group decision and you have to convince an entire group to switch at the same time. It does me no good to switch platforms if the people who I interact with are still using the old one.

This means you need more than just a better product; you need some inciting event that forces entire groups of people off the old product at the same time. Something like that product deciding to destroy the tools people use to access it...

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