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Companies all seem to want to create their own private "internet" and in a walled garden that they own completely. The goal is for people to feel like they are

Companies all seem to want to create their own private "internet" and in a walled garden that they own completely. The goal is for people to feel like they are in control of what they consume while they simultaneously lose that agency. If a person really has a choice, it should be possible to use the internet in general such that it does not generate profit for the parent company. Another way to phrase it: if content a person sees is being steered and controlled so much that a particular company always profits, then the model of providing a service to the user has conceptually been abandoned. The era of the open internet where people could freely visit different pages with a single browser is slowly coming to a close. Even trivial things like viewing tweets and other plaintext are incrementally being locked down behind apps that surveil users. For example the Reddit website has been borderline unusable for many years, especially on mobile, and that fact is well known to the relevant developers. The reason it isn't improved is obvious as the pop-ups nag: "reddit is better in the app!"

Lucasoato 4y ago
It's absurd, Reddit isn't usable from browser anymore. I've never seen a company deliberately destroying its product user experience like this just to feed a smaller portion of its services. Where are the investors? Where's the board? Do they use the product? Reddit used to be in a dominating position for everything between 4chan and Facebook, why are they trashing everything to squeeze a bit of data? If that's benefitting the company (and I'm really in doubt of that) it's just in the shortest term... You'll see a small boost in sign ups maybe, app downloads, but the company's reputation is lost forever.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dageshi 4y ago
  Reddit won, they are the internets forum there is nothing else that comes close. Given that and the fact that the majority of their users are probably on mobile now not desktop, I'm sure their investors and board are cheering them on to convert mobile users to App users, they're likely much more valuable.
  - danuker 4y ago
    To me, there's Hacker News, Stack Exchange sites, and the Fediverse. When Reddit chose to cater to "normies", I was fine with it. But when they started to become hostile to techies (the insulting mobile and new web experience, and the decay of the old UI), I just visited less. I also stopped visiting Facebook since they didn't let me paste links in IceCat. The message field would break in strange ways. So long, and thanks for all the dysfunctional JavaScript.
teraflop 4y ago
For what it's worth, http://old.reddit.com/ http://old.reddit.com/ is more or less as usable as it's always been, and has no nagging pop-ups. (There's a small "TRY REDDIT MOBILE!" banner that pops up once every few months or so if you're using a mobile browser, but that's about it.)
- Agentlien 4y ago
  You can also use third-party clients on mobile. I use rif (originally known as Reddit Is Fun).
  - CharlesW 4y ago
    Apollo is the gold standard on iOS.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    The problem is that the mobile gatekeepers are generally in bed with the scum and ban non-user-hostile alternative clients from their store, so you won't find any good YouTube clients for example.
- serial_dev 4y ago
  Do you have a similar (web based, no mobile apps) workaround for Twitter? I don't have Twitter installed on my phone as I don't want to be bothered by notifications and I don't want to see my personalized feed. But sometimes I want to catch up on some breaking news or hear a commentator's thoughts on a recent event, and Twitter is either a good place or the only place for that. Unfortunately, the Twitter web app shuts me down when I scroll too far into a page.
  - adhesive_wombat 4y ago
    You can use https://nitter.net https://nitter.net (just replace Twitter.com in the URL)
  - zakki 4y ago
    nitter.net provide the front end for twitter. Just add the username you want to read. https://nitter.net/username https://nitter.net/username
forgotmypw17 4y ago
> The era of the open internet where people could freely visit different pages with a single browser is slowly coming to a close. I prefer to think it's just taking a short nap.
gonzo41 4y ago
I generally agree, however I would offer a view that if you compare the internet to a library. Then it's still a big open place if you're willing to go looking. It's just so many people are so lazy these days they never get into the deep content of blogs of smaller forums that arn't FB or Reddit. There's stacks of really good information and internet that's not just rent seeking. It's just sadly places like Reddit (which i use) and Facebook have been so hostile to users that only the oblivious remain devotees.
gipp 4y ago
> For example the Reddit website has been borderline unusable for many years, especially on mobile I've heard this many times, but I've always had exactly the opposite experience -- the infinite scroll and poor resource management makes the performance of Reddit on desktop essentially unusable, while mobile is still paginated. As long as you switch from the awful Card view to the Compact, which should have been the default in the first place, mobile seems like a far superior experience to me. I refuse to use the app, so I can't compare there. Why do people cite the mobile web experience as being worse than desktop?
- mostlysimilar 4y ago
  The comment viewing experience on the mobile Reddit interface is quite unpleasant. My biggest complaints are: - It does full browser reloads to expand "3 More Comments" instead of asynchronously loading them, and it does this multiple times to let you see a full conversation - When you do click to read more comments the page loads are jarring and don't take you to the comment content, making you scroll to find where you were - It inserts irrelevant content (things like other posts) between the comments in a way that makes it unclear there's more to read. - Of course they also pop up at you multiple times nagging you to use their app instead. Reddit's main draw is the comment section for me. Of course in the default subs and r/popular you mostly want to avoid them, but in smaller subs they're still the heart of the community.

Lucasoato 4y ago

It's absurd, Reddit isn't usable from browser anymore. I've never seen a company deliberately destroying its product user experience like this just to feed a smaller portion of its services. Where are the investors? Where's the board? Do they use the product? Reddit used to be in a dominating position for everything between 4chan and Facebook, why are they trashing everything to squeeze a bit of data? If that's benefitting the company (and I'm really in doubt of that) it's just in the shortest term... You'll see a small boost in sign ups maybe, app downloads, but the company's reputation is lost forever.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dageshi 4y ago
Reddit won, they are the internets forum there is nothing else that comes close. Given that and the fact that the majority of their users are probably on mobile now not desktop, I'm sure their investors and board are cheering them on to convert mobile users to App users, they're likely much more valuable.
- danuker 4y ago
  To me, there's Hacker News, Stack Exchange sites, and the Fediverse. When Reddit chose to cater to "normies", I was fine with it. But when they started to become hostile to techies (the insulting mobile and new web experience, and the decay of the old UI), I just visited less. I also stopped visiting Facebook since they didn't let me paste links in IceCat. The message field would break in strange ways. So long, and thanks for all the dysfunctional JavaScript.

teraflop 4y ago

For what it's worth, http://old.reddit.com/ http://old.reddit.com/ is more or less as usable as it's always been, and has no nagging pop-ups. (There's a small "TRY REDDIT MOBILE!" banner that pops up once every few months or so if you're using a mobile browser, but that's about it.)

Agentlien 4y ago
You can also use third-party clients on mobile. I use rif (originally known as Reddit Is Fun).
- CharlesW 4y ago
  Apollo is the gold standard on iOS.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  The problem is that the mobile gatekeepers are generally in bed with the scum and ban non-user-hostile alternative clients from their store, so you won't find any good YouTube clients for example.
serial_dev 4y ago
Do you have a similar (web based, no mobile apps) workaround for Twitter? I don't have Twitter installed on my phone as I don't want to be bothered by notifications and I don't want to see my personalized feed. But sometimes I want to catch up on some breaking news or hear a commentator's thoughts on a recent event, and Twitter is either a good place or the only place for that. Unfortunately, the Twitter web app shuts me down when I scroll too far into a page.
- adhesive_wombat 4y ago
  You can use https://nitter.net https://nitter.net (just replace Twitter.com in the URL)
- zakki 4y ago
  nitter.net provide the front end for twitter. Just add the username you want to read. https://nitter.net/username https://nitter.net/username

forgotmypw17 4y ago

> The era of the open internet where people could freely visit different pages with a single browser is slowly coming to a close. I prefer to think it's just taking a short nap.

gonzo41 4y ago

I generally agree, however I would offer a view that if you compare the internet to a library. Then it's still a big open place if you're willing to go looking. It's just so many people are so lazy these days they never get into the deep content of blogs of smaller forums that arn't FB or Reddit. There's stacks of really good information and internet that's not just rent seeking. It's just sadly places like Reddit (which i use) and Facebook have been so hostile to users that only the oblivious remain devotees.

gipp 4y ago

> For example the Reddit website has been borderline unusable for many years, especially on mobile I've heard this many times, but I've always had exactly the opposite experience -- the infinite scroll and poor resource management makes the performance of Reddit on desktop essentially unusable, while mobile is still paginated. As long as you switch from the awful Card view to the Compact, which should have been the default in the first place, mobile seems like a far superior experience to me. I refuse to use the app, so I can't compare there. Why do people cite the mobile web experience as being worse than desktop?

mostlysimilar 4y ago
The comment viewing experience on the mobile Reddit interface is quite unpleasant. My biggest complaints are: - It does full browser reloads to expand "3 More Comments" instead of asynchronously loading them, and it does this multiple times to let you see a full conversation - When you do click to read more comments the page loads are jarring and don't take you to the comment content, making you scroll to find where you were - It inserts irrelevant content (things like other posts) between the comments in a way that makes it unclear there's more to read. - Of course they also pop up at you multiple times nagging you to use their app instead. Reddit's main draw is the comment section for me. Of course in the default subs and r/popular you mostly want to avoid them, but in smaller subs they're still the heart of the community.