I can only imagine half of the downloads came from people trying to select the “web” option on the popup and missing.
On a serious note, it must really be a good strategy to utterly ruin the web experience, if you want to get more people on your app, because its been the hot new thing for a while. At least with Reddit, third party clients are well-supported, unlike say Twitter. I use Apollo on iOS.
Twitter UI uses a token to authenticate all operations with their own API.
When you use the mobile application the token is refreshed automatically.
When you use the web version it does the same but only if you are logged in.
It happens to me all the time. I don’t use Twitter myself but many people in my circle of friends and colleagues do. They constantly share stuff that is posted on Twitter and almost every time I click these links I get the error message because the token in my web browser storage has been invalidated, so I have to reload the page one or two times to force the UI to request a new token so I can see the content and then forget about Twitter for a couple of hours until another friend or colleague shares another link and the circle repeats again.
Am I the only one that likes the official Reddit app? I used Alien Blue before, which has actually been replaced by the official app, and there's nothing I can complain about in either. The only regression is that now there are ads, but I find them so unintrusive I don't really care.
I don't think that the new UI is intentionally bad. I can't imagine the team that pulls it off. It must be hell to work there or it's a team of sociopaths. Imagine plannings with power points on how to mess with users.
I agree that the new UI is worse, I'm just baffled by the reasons why it's the case. Probably bad management / structure.
I can say as someone who runs a small niche subreddit, users have been finding my sub at a much increased rate in the past 6 months, I suspect because of the "related subs" boxes that auto insert themselves in the new design.
If their aim was to improve the discoverability of smaller subs, they've achieved it.
In addition to that google's AMP made reddit totally unusable, after clicking on a link it kept taking me to logged out version which hides most of the comments, and sorts them by "best".
Remember that there's an https://old.reddit.com, it still works great, I use only this version now. There are browser extensions that automatically redirect you to the old version (not on mobile, unfortunately).
Yeah, I thank everyday I'm able to browse with old.reddit. Tried a few times on mobile, but it's really hard to use old.reddit on the small screen. The new web interface is OK on mobile, a bit slow.
The app is probably the only reason Reddit has any commercial value.
The website version is almost unusable without old.reddit.com and a reformatting/feature adding plug-in called RES. I have to assume there is a huge crossover between people who will seek out plugins and people who run ad blocks or VPNs. I'd love to see a breakdown of just how little Reddit make per user on ads on the web based site.
This is before we begin to discuss the major functional problems with Reddit...
- Any community over 5k-10k users dips in quality extremely quickly.
- Any unprepared sub which gets randomly hurled on to the top of /r/all will have issues for weeks if not months after.
- Geo related subs reflect the actual locations so poorly its an embarrassment to the city/country.
- The voting system which along with subscriber growth only helps speed up the hivemind effect.
- Finally powermods who seem to treat reddit as a second job, manipulating a large amount of the content based on their own personal feelings.
Well yes, that's the nature of reddit and has been since subreddits were introduced. There's always been a tension between newbies coming in and making identical posts asking identical questions and the people who've been there longer who're bored of seeing the same questions asked day after day.
Usually there's some attempt to ban the newbie posts to make the sub more interesting for the more experienced participants, but this cuts off the supply of new posters and the sub begins to decline. Alternatively more knowledgable people get bored and drift away.
I user Reddit Is Fun app religiously for the past 5 years.
The moment they decide to cripple 3rd party apps is probably when I'm quitting reddit. Don't even get me started on the new design which I opted out of.
Ironically Reddit ruining the mobile experience and pushing to use their app so badly forced me to download a 3rd party App to read Reddit (Apollo).
By doing this I no longer see any Reddit ads.
If they hadnt pushed so hard to use their app and ruin the entire Reddit mobile experience, I would still probably just be browsing on their website (which would give them some ad eyes).
Now I'll never switch back - Apollo is just awesome for Reddit.
Reddit isn’t a high enough priority in my life to warrant having a specific app for it, and I prefer a browser for most websites. I do have banking apps and a couple of other types, but it just seems like a waste of space just to browse a website.
Pretty much the only reason I have a Reddit account is so I can filter the feed.
You are right. I tried Bing and the results are without the AMP links crap. Now, I just need to figure out how to force reddit links to i.reddit.com from Bing search!
Is there a way for the content blockers on iOS to block the annoying app download banners (used by Reddit, LinkedIn, and so many others)? I would pay 99¢ for an app that did a good job of blocking all of these.
I'm amazed that Reddit still has such an open API that you can build apps that are far better than their own, and yet they make the mobile web experience so bad to try to push people toward the app.
Seems like this post got shadowbanned. It doesn't appear on the front page nor the second or third. while posts with way less points and comment activity are visible. Also the title got changed from the original one.
On a serious note, it must really be a good strategy to utterly ruin the web experience, if you want to get more people on your app, because its been the hot new thing for a while. At least with Reddit, third party clients are well-supported, unlike say Twitter. I use Apollo on iOS.