Mobile browser is working fine for me.
Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?
561–570 of 658 posts
Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?
#562There'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…
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…
Shout this from the rooftops.
Phone apps delenda est
Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?
#563Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I think the problem is that people read the analyses that companies share publicly (e.g., in a press release or earnings call), and they assume that that's all they did. You should assume that any numbers shared publicly are just the tip of a giant-ass iceberg and that there were probably 10x more analyses going on internally that weren't shared. The thing that ultimately gets shared publicly is whatever avoids using…
Story time: Worked at a large multinational, and 6-7 years ago they decided they had to ape into the whole “data science” gold rush. They spent millions of dollars on hardware, software, salaries, and consulting.
After a year with not much to show for it, the VP for the silo starts to put out kudos for the team for break-even revenue impact. However, behind the scenes, the insight they were taking credit for was a common sense idea that had already been in the e-commerce team’s backlog.
Nothing surprises me when a company says that they’ve run the numbers.
Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?
#564There'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…
Sometimes you just have to destroy the site to meet your OKR goals. Who hasn't done it once or twice in their career.
Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?
#565There'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…
Its easier to collect info on users via a mobile app than via a webpage. My guess is that they're simply trying to increase what they know on their users which is the data they can monetize with their ad customers (with some small print to not get them in conflict with data protection laws).
Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?
#566Earlier 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…
You can block ads in apps. In android 11, you can have it use OpenDNS's adblocking server.
Not always, though. For instance it won't work on YouTube ads. I'd call it a hack at best.
Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?
#567Until users understand their value. Companies will treat them like aholes. If companies break your trust make them suffer. Leave. Find alternative or build them. Any user who continues to use a platform and keep getting treated like a ahole deserves it. Look at recent netflix flip on password sharing, users rewarded them by giving them more subscriptions instead of leaving and finding alternatives.
Reddit has been around for 15 years and never made one red cent of profit. Maybe it's companies that don't understand that there is not much money to be made on discussion websites. It's not like there are any reddit influencers signing multi-million dollar brand deals for doing a popular dance.
Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?
#568Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 blen…
Well it sounds like your problems go far beyond the thing we're talking about. Good luck!
Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?
#569Earlier 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.
Big (and small) companies routinely make "data-driven decisions" based on obviously-faulty data collection, bad models, or misapplication of statistics. It rarely takes some crack scientific mind to spot it, either. But they want a decision now and doing it right might take a lot longer or cost more, or the correct model might be a lot fuzzier and that makes them uncomfortable, or they've got some notion in their heads already and they'll be damned if mere numbers are going to get in the way of that, so everyone in the room's just supposed to nod along when the blatantly-biased graphs come up on the Power Point suggesting (erroneously) that we do X.
The business world runs at least as much on bullshit as the most cynical among us might think, I'd say. It's not half as clever or competently-run as one might hope, certainly.
It's a cliche that front-line workers have a better understanding of customers and products than the c-suite and that this leads to predictable blunders, because that's often true.
(I'm also not sure I'd call Reddit a "giant corp", but that's beside the point [EDIT] and anyway, to be fair, this particular discussion isn't just concerned with Reddit)
Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?
#570Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can block ads in apps. In android 11, you can have it use OpenDNS's adblocking server.
Not always, though. For instance it won't work on YouTube ads. I'd call it a hack at best.
I'm sure you're already aware of this, but for other HN users on Android, ads on YouTube are blocked when using Firefox Android + uBlock Origin + m.youtube.com -- the experience isn't as nice as the app but still totally worth it IMHO.