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I'm surprised that's their only problem with the mobile site. I purposely do not follow Reddit links because they show me a spinner for 7 seconds before showing
by colanderman 8y ago
I'm surprised that's their only problem with the mobile site. I purposely do not follow Reddit links because they show me a spinner for 7 seconds before showing the text of self posts. I can only assume that this delay to show a kilobyte of text is purposeful and meant to further steer users to the app, and not simply gross engineering incompetence, since the desktop site loads instantly.
(Though, thank you to the OP for posting an explicit desktop link so I didn't have to suffer this pause.)
At least AMP seems mostly dead. Though between cookie notices, "use our app" and "subscribe to our mailing list" popups, fixed navbars, and the damn on-screen keyboard popping up for no reason, I'm lucky to see even a single line of article text on some sites on mobile, though which line it is changes every few seconds as ads on invisible parts of the page pop into and out of existence. And then the article is shitty modern "long-form" journalism that doesn't get to the point until after 10 paragraphs describing the latte the reporter had while giving the interview. I've had better experiences reading click-bait slideshow articles than those from some so-called "professional" outlets. God I hate the modern web. Get off my lawn.
- underwater 8y agoIronically the mobile site is a full single page app, while the desktop site (or at least the old one) was mostly server rendered. It's not impossible to create a fast mobile client rendered site (Twitter have done well) but it's certainly not as easy as it is with plain old HTML.
- chii 8y agoThe Reddit .compact view is great, and should be how mobile sites work. All server render, and a tiny bit of interactivity. It's miles better than the real mobile view. Try it yourself at : reddit.com/.compact
- methyl 8y agoThe only thing wrong is the font size, should be at least 16px for better readability and usability.
- chii 8y agotry setting your browser's native font size to medium or large. It will fix up most sites' font sizes if you have issue viewing (sometimes, at the cost of bad scrolling if the site isn't doing content flowing properly).
- tgtweak 8y agoTwitter is the other major "use our app" and "please register to continue" abuser. The mobile website shows trimmed comments and the original post that cannot even be followed or scrolled through without a forced register-wall appearing.
- blt 8y agoThe new desktop site sucks too. The old one was great, information dense, no bullshit.
- mintplant 8y agoFunny that you cite Twitter here. Their mobile site tells me I'm rate limited half the time I land on it.
- charleslmunger 8y agoI figured this would get fixed one day... But still, links are sending me to a "you're rate limited" page easily over 50% of page loads.
- majewsky 8y agoThe fix is to switch the browser to "Desktop Mode" (i.e. make it advertise a desktop User-Agent). That redirects you to the desktop site, which is never ratelimited. I wonder why. cough (Note: I do this with Firefox for Android. No idea if other mobile browsers have a similar "Desktop Mode" feature.)
- pjc50 8y agoYeah, the operating assuptions of client side rendering seem to be that server-side CPU is expensive while network bandwidth and latency are cheap and the client has a fast CPU which it isn't using. I do wonder how it ever took off.
- mrguyorama 8y agoYou don't pay a dime for the amount of client's CPU you use
- vanderZwan 8y agoDepends on whether it makes the site unusable, because that will make you lose customers
- mrguyorama 8y agoSeeing less well off people making do with low quality android phones, I'm not convinced that actually is a thing that happens.
- dredmorbius 8y agoI realised the irony as I submitted that,but honestly, it's how I browse Reddit, what little I do of that any more.
- a_imho 8y agoI can only assume that this delay to show a kilobyte of text is purposeful and meant to further steer users to the app Many sites do this with GDPR opt-outs, which ironically are non compliant on multiple accounts.
- mort96 8y agoForbes literally shows a loading spinner for _minutes_ if you try to opt out, and when it finally completes, you're sent to an empty page asking you to opt back in to tracking. I used to occasionally read stuff there when an interesting-sounding article was posted to HN, but I'm not visiting that page ever again.