Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access? • Hacker News Board

Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#601

Post by TheCoelacanth » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 4:22 PM UTC

Zak wrote: post #590

86J8oyZv wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I don't think either of those apps are ad-supported, so there are completely different incentives.

Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#602

Post by fennecfoxy » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 4:31 PM UTC

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...

Can't always do that, though. Apple gets especially angy if you're injecting necessary stuff into the page, we found as a general rule they'll fail your app approval for anything like that (unless you're a big boi like FB I guess).

Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#603

Post by weaksauce » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 4:31 PM UTC

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)

> Look at their hilariously terrible acquisition of Dubsmash for $50 million

gah that's frustrating. they could have bought apollo for 10 million probably. (in his own words that would have been life changing money) but instead they go down a darker path.

Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#604

Post by nortonham » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 4:38 PM UTC

benatkin wrote: post #17

People don't complain as much when Apple does stuff like this.

what reddit is currently doing is worse than any recent apple mistakes I can think of.

Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#605

Post by Macha » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 4:45 PM UTC

Goronmon wrote: post #581

ajmurmann wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lord of the Rings Online, Archeage, Tera, Wildstar, Kingdoms of Analur, City of Heroes, The Matrix Online are all from that era of every MMO trying to be the WoW killer and needing to supplant WoW for their business model to work.

What's funny is WoW has declined so much but is still clearly a viable business, but I'm sure things like LOTRO, City of Heroes and Tera peaked at higher levels than current WoW. But the WoW of their time was on like 10-12million subs so that was a failure.

Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#606

Post by cloverich » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 4:54 PM UTC

bombolo wrote: post #286

chaostheory wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They ended that way too early. There is so much good content to write about now. I know it’s hard to transition, but do you really need (near) the full cast still?

Too early? It was always "oh now piedpiper fails… oh we saved it, we are rich again"

I've seen a few shows go through this kind of death phase, and have always been curious about the internal writing dynamics that leads the team towards these bite sized episodes without an overarching story line of interest. Especially because it seems like such a staple of good shows to have an overarching story, then a few concurrent story lines, with a final dose of single episode dynamics. I'd think they have to know they are breaking away from an established successful formula and instead trending towards the show being cancelled, I just wonder if its on purpose, or they just can't get the good writers back, producers meddling, or what.

Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#607

Post by ziggrat » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 4:55 PM UTC

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…

Its the ads

Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#608

Post by freedomben » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 4:56 PM UTC

Narushia wrote: post #582

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…

> 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.

any recommended links to learn more about revanced? the best I can find from their website is that they're a continuation of the "vanced" project but it doesn't say what that was and I haven't had luck on google. It's clear that they have something to do with providing patched apps, but is revanced a framework? is it a library? is it a person or group that does the patching?

Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#609

Post by CapstanRoller » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 5:01 PM UTC

matkoniecz wrote: post #403

mandmandam wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP didn't claim that. You're giving a very uncharitable reading of the argument. Fact is, the best people on Reddit have been leaving for many years. There have been many purges, of many scales. The fact you didn't hear about them helps demonstrate OPs point (their actual point, not the one you put in their mouth). And those purges are just one thread in a long tapestry of disrespect towards moderators and users of t…

They claimed that "The people who do the real contributing—posting, modding, defining the culture and building the communities that Reddit benefits" were driven off ("these people have been purged already over the past 2-3 years.") Only some small groups were actually driven off.

>Only some small groups were actually driven off.

Small groups and individuals can be extremely important. It's less about the raw numbers of 'how many did we gain/lose' and more about 'what kind of tone are we setting'.

When Reddit allowed /r/the_donald to flourish, what sort of message did that send? When there was a purge in/of leftist communities, what sort of message did that send? Politically, what Reddit allows is actually quite narrow, and it's trending toward mainstream sanitized neoliberal center-right (aka 'advertiser-friendly').

When Reddit started to corral everyone into one shitty app by breaking the mobile web experience, what message did that send? And now, what message is being sent with this API cash-grab?

Reddit's positioning is constantly chafing against Reddit's core demographic. The people who operate Reddit don't understand what they want (aside from $$$), don't understand their customers/content providers, and now seem unwilling to even listen to their customers/content providers.

Many messages stacked up over the years eventually form a story. What's the story of Reddit?

Re: Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?

#610

Post by Izkata » Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 5:01 PM UTC

tuukkah wrote: post #487

beezlewax wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

It means the payload is. HTTPS alone doesn't have any special considerations for hiding the domain, which I think is visible so the request can be routed correctly. And since a lot of ad-blocking is based on domain, that ought to work.