The reddit pattern doesn't work on all of us. I just use reddit less now it is less pleasant on mobile. I use it less when not mobile too as the changes there are not something I'm keen on either.
Another example is sites like Amazon and Wish changing their adverts on facebook and elsewhere to take you to the Play store instead of to the product page you were interested in if you don't have the app installed. Again this doesn't work if, like me, you either give up at that point as you weren't that interested anyway or you google the product and get to their page or a competitor's that way.
I think I'm in a minority though. I assume from the fact this behaviour is expanding, that enough people cave and install the apps it makes the few of use who do not worth losing from that sales vector.
Oh man, tell me about it. I lurk on Reddit from time to time from my smartphone and the experience nowadays is terrible. I have like half a dozen elements disabled using u-block to make it somewhat bearable. From the pulsating button at the top of every page to the multiple dialogs taking turn to harass you into installing the app...
On top of that I've noticed that the website keeps getting slower and slower to load what's effectively a few KB of plain text comments.
The state of the web in 2019 is frankly shameful. Those are tactics that you should expect from shady websites, not some of the biggest players in the field. Everybody is trying to trick you into going against your best interests.
The GDPR did a good job at highlighting that for me, suddenly all the websites in the world deployed a wealth of ingenuity to develop new dark patterns to trick you into opting into the tracking, using ambiguous controls and confusingly worded instructions.
I hope this is only a phase and we'll move away from this toxic ad-driven business model sooner or later but honestly at this point I'm not holding my breath.
>The state of the web in 2019 is frankly shameful. Those are tactics that you should expect from shady websites, not some of the biggest players in the field.
Because of ad networks, every site is now a shady website.
They are getting more and more aggressive about it too. Recently they add a full modal covering content and forcing you to “choose to view in app or browser”.
It's not aggressive, it's a multi-flank stochastic attack. They have about
5 different UIs for pushing you to the app, with different
shapes, wording and locations on screen, and they cycle between them, to stop you from learning habits like "just smash the lower left corner on the first page load"
Also, the redesign is very privacy invasive. The post has since been deleted, but it can be seen on archive.org [1]:
> Reddit has been trying to redesign their website to feel more "modern", but I have noticed that the redesigned UI also features more tracking.
> For one, the new UI (and the new userpage) features session replay tracking everywhere (recording of your mouse movements, keystrokes, and how you interact with the website), as evident by its use of the mousemove JavaScript event listener for the entire page. I found out using Luminous (this isn't an endorsement or ad), which is an extension that detects (and can block) JavaScript events. The old UI also listens for the mousemove event but not everywhere (I have only noticed it on the "submit post" page, but there are probably a few other places), though I'm not sure if this is due to session replay tracking. I cannot say for certain that the old UI doesn't have session replay or something similar, but to me it doesn't seem like it for most pages. Perhaps someone who has investigated this further can confirm or deny.
> Session replay is another form of tracking what you click on (possibly negating attempts to opt out of "regular" tracking of outbound links), can be used to fingerprint a user (how the mouse moves), and will negate attempts to delete posts and comments (for example, ones that accidentally contain personal information or passwords). Even accidentally pasting something like a password in a text box will result in the password being sent to Reddit (and/or a third party) and being stored in plain text. I don't know how Reddit manages user data internally, but with session recording it's possible that a Reddit employee playing back a session to assess user reaction to a new UI update may end up seeing your private messages or posts in private subreddits simply because it was there when you interacted with the page.
> Also, the Reddit redesign completely breaks without JavaScript enabled, to the point where you can't click on links or even see the page content.
> The old UI is still available to users, either through a setting in your account or (if you're not logged in) through old.reddit.com. You can also replace the 'www' part of the URL with 'old' on any Reddit page to get back to the old UI. I really, really hope they don't remove this.
It's a pain if you follow links to reddit that don't explicitly link the old subdomain. I think maybe if you have an account you can force it (?) but for us lurkers it's annoying. Of course I could create an account to browse reddit but then... well they've already won, haven't they?
Another example is sites like Amazon and Wish changing their adverts on facebook and elsewhere to take you to the Play store instead of to the product page you were interested in if you don't have the app installed. Again this doesn't work if, like me, you either give up at that point as you weren't that interested anyway or you google the product and get to their page or a competitor's that way.
I think I'm in a minority though. I assume from the fact this behaviour is expanding, that enough people cave and install the apps it makes the few of use who do not worth losing from that sales vector.