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Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

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Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#581

Post by Goronmon »

ajmurmann wrote: post #556
hoorayimhelping wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Star Wars: The Old Republic is probably the biggest example.

Edit: Rift is probably another good example, though less high-profile than SWTOR.

Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#582

Post by Narushia »

veidr wrote: post #399
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…

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…

> Users can't block ads in an app.

Yeah, they can. By which I mean, they can do it right away, for the official Reddit app:

– https://revanced.app/patches?pkg=com.reddit.frontpage

– https://revanced.app/download

Or, for even less work, you can just use a pre-patched APK with the ads removed: https://github.com/revanced-apks/build-apps/releases

No need for root access nor flimsy DNS solutions.

Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#583

Post by whywhywhywhy »

MattGaiser wrote: post #61
FormerBandmate wrote: post #36

They are desperately trying to be TikTok. It will not work and has no chance of working. Look at their hilariously terrible acquisition of Dubsmash for $50 million (they converted it to a subreddit with 1.5k subscribers when they had 200 million users at their peak and touted having 25% of black teens in their acquisition press release. Every post is people saying the Reddit app sucks and asking where Dubsmash went)

> they converted it to a subreddit with 1.5k subscribers. That definitely belongs in a textbook on absurd corporate decisions. I thought you must have been exaggerating somewhere, but nope, that is exactly how it went. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubsmash https://old.reddit.com/r/dubsmash/

It's hilarious to me that Reddit is only relevant at all today because Digg 2.0's redesign was so hated that everyone from it flocked to Reddit. Then they buy a moderately successful app, completely destroy it and yet their execs are sitting there rapidly killing the ways people like to use their site and trying to force them into an objectively awful app and yet are seemingly completely oblivious to their history and why they're here in the first place.

Reddit, you are replaceable. The moment you turn off old.reddit, I'm gone. I'd definitely admit I am addicted to reddit in it's current form but new reddit and the app are just too insufferable I'll happily give it all up and find somewhere else.

Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#584

Post by Narushia »

TheFragenTaken wrote: post #304
john-n wrote: post #8

I was part of this test - I've refused to install the app for years (I prefer websites and the option to open tabs for later browsing). It was extremely annoying for a site I've used for 12+ years to treat me like that. It did massively cut my usage of Reddit (which I would consider to be quite high), I primarily access it from my phone and I all but stopped using it for the week or so I was in the "experiment".

Fortunately their app is compatible with the ReVanced project (think YouTube Vanced). It's terrible you have to recompile apk's to get a useful experience (sans ads, sharing tracking, other restrictions), but for me it's currently the only viable way to use Reddit.

If you are tired of patching the APKs yourself, you can just use pre-built APKs for less work: https://github.com/revanced-apks/build-apps/releases

Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#586

Post by ryandrake »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #473
cshimmin wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow haven't seen a "peak hn" comment like this in the wild for quite a while :) Make a sure you write everything in brainfuck too! As for myself, I'll just stop using Reddit (largely have over the last year), and do something else with the free time.

They have a point, though. In my honest opinion, more than 50% modern apps and services I've used - including e.g. Spotify, or pretty much every e-commerce site - have UI/UX strictly inferior to that of MS Access . Less functional, less ergonomic, less integrated, less useful. A lot of UI and design work that people think is creative, making a positive contribution, is actually spending millions of dollars on removin…

I think web browsers need to get back to basics and do their original job as "The User's Agent" rather than what they are today: Instead of being a tool to fetch and display hyperlinked text, they've morphed into this API platform built for web companies to control down to the pixel what users see in their browser window.

Today browsers barely give you a few blunt tools to control your own browsing experience: Javascript on/off, Styles on/off, and so on. I want a browser that 1. fetches YouTube's HTML, 2. understands it to be essentially a bunch of links to video URLs, and 3. present me a simple list of those video URLs that I can click to watch or download. I don't want my browser to act against me by being a platform where YouTube executes god-knows-what on my system to render everything the way YouTube wants and to show me things that YouTube wants and push content that YouTube wants to push. Put the user back in control.

Same for Reddit. Browser should fetch Reddit's HTML, realize it's essentially a list of links, and simply display those links, ignoring all the other shit that comes down in the site's HTML, CSS, and JS.

I realize that step #2 above is hard and probably magic at this point. But that's the direction I'd like to see browsers go. Stop adding even more APIs that companies can use to control my browser.

Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#587

Post by thombat »

unionpivo wrote: post #494
A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 onl…

An apposite war story from Nokia, just about the time the iPhone entered the market: our Lords and Masters had decided that internal competition would be a good thing, so smartphones were divided into business, entertainment, and mass market divisions with each bidding for exclusive access to the components being delivered by the the R&D and productisation teams. So it was that barcode readers ended up with "business" (use case: scan a business card) and auto focus cameras with "entertainment" (use case: selfie). With of course the result that the business phone needed an A4-sized business card held at arm's length. This absurd "strategy", probably sold in by a gaggle of consultants, was first celebrated then subject to extensive soul-searching and some tedious "lessons learned" enquiries that resulted in long PowerPoints filed carefully in NUL, rather than perhaps simply resolving next time to ask some small child working in the front line just what they thought of the Emperor's splendid new attire...

Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#588

Post by tezgon »

jeltz wrote: post #486
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…

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.

Yes, but the third party apps don't allow Reddit to take in heaps of tracking data or run ads every 3 posts, so for the company's purpose they're useless

Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#589

Post by emeril »

tazjin wrote: post #339
japhyr wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to know the conversion rate that resulted from that test, it must have been absolutely abysmal.

People refusing to use their app etc. are likely a minority. Most people are completely used to being bullied into submission by tech companies, and will happily follow along. I'd assume their goal with this isn't to convert the stragglers, it's to just close the gates to them so that they disappear from ad-view related statistics. Edit: Further to this point, the Apollo app which everyone was talking about the other…

I'm personally not confident if the signal to noise ratio took a turn for the worse (re: spam and porn posts), the site would be as a profitable/popular anymore

What I'm curious about is why didn't (and maybe they did as I'm not particularly well read in this situation) reddit just buy the apollo app for like $1M/$5M/etc. and then just modify it so it injects whatever tracking they want instead of creating this giant far more costly shitstorm?

Further, maybe the 50k paid users but perhaps there were many unpaid users using it less intensely?

Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#590

Post by Zak »

86J8oyZv wrote: post #480
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…

It’s the same reason as the third-party app API changes: prevailing forces within the company want to know that for every X API requests made, Y targeted ads were put in front of eyeballs. Most mobile browsers can block ads at this point. Plus, native apps offer more ways of gathering user data opaquely, which is worth lots of money in the eyes of finance people even if they haven’t started doing it, or if they expec…

Slack and Discord work fine in desktop browsers and do not regularly hassle users about installing a desktop app. I think Discord users often install the app for actual user-centric features that are not possible to provide from a browser (push-to-talk voice chat while playing games for Discord, as I recall).
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