10 ms·

Reddit is full of these patterns in order to drive users from mobile web to app. Reddit mobile web really sets the bar for user-hostile UI in my opinion.

• mulmen 5y ago
  What I don’t understand is why Reddit wants us to use the app so badly. Is it just for ads? Is it data collection?
  • notjustanymike 5y ago
    Likely both. It sure as hell ain't to make your experience any better.
  • ornornor 5y ago
    I suspect it’s all that and their metrics show that mobile users are the most “engaged” so they want more mobile users to have an even higher count of engaged users. Also, it’s harder to spam notifications without a mobile app.
    • throwaway894345 5y ago
      They deliberately make their mobile web experience awful, so I don’t think that’s why (how can you trust a metric that you’re deliberately sabotaging?). I suspect mobile apps just allow for more data collection than web apps.
    • busterarm 5y ago
      I think it's time for lawmakers to start drafting up an "engagement tax" and start penalizing companies for demanding peoples' attention.
  • Cicero22 5y ago
    another possibility is to increase traffic, which I guess also increases ad revenue. It's a lot easier to tap an icon on your home screen than it is to open a browser and type in reddit and whichever subreddit you want to browse. The less friction there is, the more likely you are to be a daily user, driving their revenue.
    • joegahona 5y ago
      This is my guess — phone-screen real estate and the potential for push notifications.
  • tkiolp4 5y ago
    It’s like the Nigerian Prince email scam but the other way around : 99% of the people who receive such an email will identify the scam and ignore it. This is totally fine for the scammers. Working as expected. Now, in the Reddit scenario 99% of the Reddit users don’t mind downloading an app. It’s just us, techies, that 1% who cares. This is totally fine for Reddit. Working as expected.
  • temporallobe 5y ago
    My guess is because it’s harder to block ads through the app than it is in the browser-based version (at least in iOS). Whatever the actual reason is, the asshole design (which ironically they have an entire subreddit for) actually discourages me from using Reddit, so I’ve been using it a lot less in the past couple of years.
  • manigandham 5y ago
    Ads, tracking, notifications, with higher overall engagement due to faster and more content available.
  • Traster 5y ago
    I suspect it's for neither. It's to fulfil some metric. They either want investor money or IPO money and either way, they want people in their app because their app is way over-valued compared to monthly impressions.
  • tofuahdude 5y ago
    The answers to questions like this are always extremely simple - it is better for their business.
  • shostack 5y ago
    They get a lot more data more reliably from the app and have a lot more control of the ad surfaces and how they are served. This is more or less "social network publisher side monetization" SOP.
• JoeyBananas 5y ago
  Microsoft Windows is even worse. Constant disruptive updates, forcing you to make an account during install, ads in the start menu, that creepy "Cortana" process that you can't kill...
  • judge2020 5y ago
    One of the few good things from Windows 11 is that Cortana has been evicted (the Bing stuff is still there though). https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-11-specifications#primaryR4 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-11-specifica...
  • temporallobe 5y ago
    These are the primary reasons I moved off Windows and onto a combination of macOS and *nix. Plus, macbooks have native Thunderbolt 3 support, which is essential for near-zero latency audio production.
  • Aperocky 5y ago
    From this perspective it's amazing. I ditched Windows completely for about 5 years (coinciding with my time in Software). And had to deal with none of these problems any more, I always remember that I hated windows for some reason but can't seem to pinpoint/remember, but now you've reminded me.
    • nousermane 5y ago
      What OS did you switch to?
      • Aperocky 5y ago
        macOS and Linux.
  • LocalPCGuy 5y ago
    This may have been true when Win10 just came out, but it isn't anymore. You can schedule your updates (and if you don't, they try to schedule them for you in non-use hours), there are ways to bypass the MS account creation and just use a local account, I haven't seen an ad in my start menu in ages, even after multiple large system updates and there is not a single reference to Cortana in my Task Manager or Services (I turned Cortana off in settings). Granted, I'm aggressive at turning off startup items, managing what services run on boot, and so on, but my point is, each of the things you mention may have been true at one time, but they are not necessarily true today. edit to note: I'm not defending Microsoft's use of dark patterns, they definitely do push them out and then sometimes back off if there is enough pushback. And that is bad, and should be called out. Just aiming for accurate information here.
• rescripting 5y ago
  What is worse, is that even though I installed the official app to squelch this nonsense (the Fuck You Pattern is effective) the mobile site still prompts with "Open in the Reddit App". When I click it my iPhone opens the App Store. The App Store then has a big blue "Open" button to launch the app, but of course all context is lost and opening from there brings you to your Reddit front page.
  • bo0tzz 5y ago
    I'll one up this - I use an alternative, unofficial app for reddit. Until recently the 'open' button on their website would take me into that specific app - as you would expect - but since last week or so it's started sending me to the Google Play store page for the official app instead.
  • lonbigtech 5y ago
    What browser are you using on your phone?
    • rescripting 5y ago
      Safari, nothing fancy.
  • judge2020 5y ago
    Reddit's app registers itself as a uri handler for reddit links but (thanks to google) AMP or iframe results don't prompt the actual system uri handler that would take you to the app.
    • rescripting 5y ago
      Oh wow, is this what happens when multiple Fuck You Patterns collide?
      • nxpnsv 5y ago
        I think you just encountered the clusterfuck pattern
• glennvtx 5y ago
  The web reddit is just awful. Leave a thread open for some time, and navigation even breaks.
  • u801e 5y ago
    I just use old.reddit.com on my mobile and laptop.
    • devoutsalsa 5y ago
      Same.
    • Nition 5y ago
      Try i.reddit.com on mobile, it's easier on small screens. Click the cog on the right for options like collapsing comments.
    • navanchauhan 5y ago
      It is better to use i.reddit.com on your mobile
    • tgv 5y ago
      Try teddit.net. It's not perfect, but mostly works fine. There are extensions that will replace reddit.com by teddit.net in the URL to make it even easier.
  • pahn 5y ago
    saved reddit for me: https://teddit.net/ https://teddit.net/
  • tyingq 5y ago
    The Reddit AMP implementation on top of Reddit Web is even worse. For the first few times I encountered it, I assumed there was a bug or something that would be fixed soon.
  • pram 5y ago
    The best part is clicking a link, loading a page, and it just says “Something broke” Twitter does this too. How the fuck is it even possible?
• mikestew 5y ago
  I don't have a Reddit account, and every time I use it I am reminded why. Their patterns have taken me from "I should create an account one of these days" to "there is nothing on the Internet that I need to see so badly that I would let Reddit see anymore about me than my IP address." It's almost as if they are taunting users: "give up and create an account, or go home. Oh, and use the fucking mobile app while you're at it, or the suffering will continue." OTOH, once I get there, a lot of Reddit content makes me wonder why I bothered. :-)
  • bserge 5y ago
    Sadly, it's a humongous amalgamation of forums that has taken all the users from niche forums I used to frequent.
  • visarga 5y ago
    Reddit is diverse, there still are some good corners here and there. You need to know where to look.
    • teawrecks 5y ago
      Appending "reddit" to google searches still produce better results than the alternative of 100% autogenerated listicles. For now, at least.
      • def_true_false 5y ago
        For what it's worth, google search understands the /r/ part of the URL as well, e.g. site:reddit.com/r/linux . It still gets the time of posting completely wrong, though... To make this more ergonomic, you can add the URL as a search engine with a keyword, e.g. URL: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site:reddit.com+%s https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site:reddit.com+%s Keyword: red In Firefox you most likely want to use a bookmark with a keyword instead of their new search engine crap.
  • jalgos_eminator 5y ago
    Use the old interface available at old.reddit.com. Its mostly fine. There are some really good corners of reddit, though the popular subs have been infected with the well washed masses.
• sixothree 5y ago
  Reddit's usefulness has waned dramatically and continues to do so.
• jandrese 5y ago
  Reddit's new UI is still hilariously terrible. The day they remove old.reddit.com is the day I stop using the site. Who the hell thinks what I want when I click on an article is to bring it into a related article feed with 1.5 comments showing? If I accidentally click outside of the article area the whole thing vanishes with no way to get back where I was. I had thought these issues would be obvious and they would clean it up, but here we are months later and it is still broken from a UX standpoint. I guess all of the devs moved over to work on their bespoke media player? You know, the one that barely works half of the time.
  • bserge 5y ago
    The back button is broken, too. Was it that hard to bring you back to the comment you were reading when you clicked the link? Guess so.
    • ljm 5y ago
      And their video player is utterly fucked. The video will load and reload about 3 times before it becomes playable, on the desktop. On the mobile site, usually the video freezes and the audio track plays. Gifs will overflow and play under the UI, and that's not been fixed for over a couple of years. And now it renders Gifs inside replies and every single fucking thread has the "omg gifs!" thread voted to the top. The modern Reddit UI is a complete and utter tragedy of design and engineering. But it serves ads, so who cares. They only redesigned it so that they could make ads first-class.
    • SilasX 5y ago
      In fairness, I see that on a lot of sites now and I almost want to say that's something browsers should be fixing. "Back" should take me to the exact page state, almost as if I had been following every page in a new tab (which is what they recommend now if you want to preserve where you were). It should be instant. But on most sites it hasn't been for a while.
      • yellowapple 5y ago
        > which is what they recommend now if you want to preserve where you were And which becomes more difficult when sites break middle-clicking and other shortcuts to open links in new tabs, or when the "links" ain't actually links but just something on which they tack on an onClick() and run a bunch of JS to reinvent the concept of a link.
• qwertox 5y ago
  old.reddit.com is acceptable, with uBlock Origin and the like, and on mobile Relay for Reddit is a nice app.
• nxpnsv 5y ago
  I never use reddit on mobile, but also there the whole new reddit design thing is so terrible I just don't bother going there anymore. It's sad, there were a few really nice communities there.
• jpeter 5y ago
  I only use reddit.premii.com on mobile. That's what their mobile site should look like
• Scoundreller 5y ago
  Gmail webmail too. I’ve hit « I’m not interested » to their app prompt around 500 times in a row. Will i change the 501st? No. Then again, my ATM machine still asks me which language I want service in. It’s my hope if I choose something other than English, it calls 9-1-1, slows down the prompts and does nothing irreversible.
• jpe-210 5y ago
  The only way to browse Reddit nowadays is either through old.reddit.com or through a third-party application like Apollo. It's amazing how much content is _not_ displayed on the screen in their new clunky UI. Makes you wonder why they went in that direction.
• sbayeta 5y ago
  I use Reddit is Fun app on android and haven't noticed any changes in UX for more than 5 years. When a I rarely go to reddit.com on my pc, I can't even recognize the original site.
• surround 5y ago
  Try https://libredd.it/ https://libredd.it/ Or https://teddit.net/ https://teddit.net/
• yur3i__ 5y ago
  The cookie prompt on old.reddit.com is so obnoxious now. You can't close it and the "continue" button takes you to the new.reddit.com homepage
  • geoka9 5y ago
    I use this: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirect/dneaehbmnbhcippjikoajpoabadpodje https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...
  • NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
    I just used ublock origin to delete it. They still think they serve it, but I never see it.
• _tom_ 5y ago
  I know! Isn't it lovely? I used that to break my reddit addiction. Haven't been on for a while.
• PikachuEXE 5y ago
  I now use https://libredd.it https://libredd.it with Privacy Redirect browser extension. I don't even need to use old.reddit.com for daily browsing now. (Unless need to comment)
• brailsafe 5y ago
  I think they're trying to push it to just before the point where people actually consider how useful the content is (not very), or maybe past that point, after which they'll put out some superficial "we're sorry" bs.
• nielsbot 5y ago
  I get around this by not using their app or website at all and using an alternative Reddit client (Apollo for iOS). Wonder if they'll do the Twitter and shut down third party clients eventually.
• thenoblesunfish 5y ago
  I was initially annoyed by this, and then thankful. I have learned never to install apps of this kind, and thus the fact that Reddit has made itself unpleasant to use from a browser is a helpful little nudge away from a time-waster.