[john-n]

I was part of this test - I've refused to install the app for years (I prefer websites and the option to open tabs for later browsing).

It was extremely annoying for a site I've used for 12+ years to treat me like that. It did massively cut my usage of Reddit (which I would consider to be quite high), I primarily access it from my phone and I all but stopped using it for the week or so I was in the "experiment".

[baby]

> I prefer websites and the option to open tabs for later browsing

The number of times I lost a post because when I switched app or didn’t use my phone for a while reddit would just reset to the home page… I think they really didn’t realize how much the shitty UX would enrage people against them.

[wanderingstan]

This is what keeps me on old.reddit. The new web version and the app are always losing my place.

[midoridensha]

They need to shut that down. Even better, they should make a desktop app and force users to use that instead of the website.

If they really believe in their forced-app strategy, they should bet the farm on it, not just on mobile, but everywhere.

[SllX]

Would be faster to just shut down the corporation and give the money back to the shareholders, whatever they have anyway, but your approach is not without merit, mostly in that I think it would be funny at this point.

[midoridensha]

That's basically why I'm advocating what I posted, that and also because I think it'd be a great chapter in tech history, showing how doubling down on a stupid user-hostile decision can destroy a company (assuming it does). Then, 30 years from now, people will still talk about how Reddit self-destructed when they decided they needed to control the user experience and forced everyone to use their app.

Rationally, your approach is of course better, but the current narcissistic execs aren't going to do anything like that, whereas I can certainly see them doing something as stupid and out-of-touch as forcing everyone to use their app on both mobile and desktop.

[TeMPOraL]

> Then, 30 years from now, people will still talk about how Reddit self-destructed when they decided they needed to control the user experience and forced everyone to use their app.

No. What they'll be talking about is how Reddit had too many holes in its fence, and all its cows escaped. They'll then discuss all the advancement in cattle fencing and barn construction that happened in the 30 years since.

Why do people assume Reddit C-suite and investors are being stupid or narcissistic here? That would make sense if the relationship between them and the users was a friendly one. It isn't. It's adversarial. For Reddit (as well as Meta and other social media platforms), the users are cattle. Even worse than that - they're stochastic cattle. Nobody at the top cares if you or me are having a nice experience with the site/app. They care about the value extracted from us in aggregate. To them, it's an optimization problem, and it's been apparent for a long time now that the optimum point is usually "the most shitty and abusive possible version that still clears the 'fit for purpose' bar" (the end point is more obvious when you look at goods and services that have been around for a couple decades or more, and thus subject to decades of "value engineering").

It doesn't feel as bad when they're optimizing for future value extraction, but that time is past, and Reddit is currently squeezing value out of its cattle-base.

Is it sustainable? Since when did that question mattered to the captains of the industry? "Reddit" as a brand and company matters to the users; for its leaders and investors, it's just a money making instrument that takes time to mature, but exists to be squeezed, discarded and replaced by something else.

[bjoli]

Something like that should be pretty easy to whip together with electron...

[midoridensha]

That's exactly my thinking. They can make a special Reddit app with Electron that basically recreates the website, but forces users to see lots of annoying unblockable ads while hogging lots of memory. Users trying to use the normal website will just be directed to download and install this app, and only shown a preview of the site that they can't use. What could possibly go wrong?

[jayelbe]

Sshhh, they'll hear you

[edgyquant]

Or I accidentally bump the top of screen while trying to upvote and it brings me to the top of the thread

[zo1]

For all this UX design, responsiveness, mobile-friendly talk and SAAS products for conversion funnels and what not, does no one in management ever use their own app or website on mobile? Seriously, open practically any random website on a stock chrome or Firefox on mobile and just see how horrible it is. Scrolling loses position, you randomly click stuff and shit happens, half the page is filled with a sign-up newsletter popup or a privacy banner. And wow if you have to input anything and all the nonsense you have to put up with dealing with the page or app responding to the keyboard. Or you have to scroll in an input field.

Like seriously. What is wrong with these people that designed this shit and how do we not have an alternative.

[chuchana]

"Never get high on your own supply"

[timeon]

Or clicking on some post. Nothing happening. Trying to click again, but new screen appears from original click, so your second attempt lands on some new link.

[TrackerFF]

The whole auto-refresh thing is bullshit in general. You see something interesting, and then two microseconds later it is gone because the app (or even tab) decided to refresh and bring you new content.

[myhf]

Enragement is engagement!

[Yizahi]

That's the point actually. And not only in Reddit, but in all current social networks. You must lose posts, you must always look at the fresh snapshot of posts. And it works, people are conditioned to work with ephemeral internet. Apps and sites all work like this nowadays - Facebook, Instagram, Shitter, Reddit main page, Netflix main page, even HN partially. You blink and everything is gone, here is new content for you, enjoy, but not too long and don't become attached. This drives up engagement in the population with attention disorders and promotes advertisement, since it is organically natural to see ads between ad-like endless posts.

[drewm1980]

I have had to learn to make do without cut and paste it's so flakey in Reddit. I gave up on editing posts before hitting send.

[OkGoDoIt]

Yelp started doing this years ago. They slowly cut access to their mobile site that used to work perfectly well. Sure I could install the app, but the obvious disrespect to the user pretending that the mobile site didn’t work perfectly well and that you have to install the app was so frustrating that I just stopped using Yelp altogether. And that’s saying something, seeing as I own a local theater venue and refusing to engage with Yelp hurts be more than it hurts them. But screw it, I hate being bullied by these platforms.

[weard_beard]

This is how I discovered old.reddit.com still works. And it has none of the broken javascript or A/B app pushing code in it.

[devjab]

I was on reddit before they tried updating their designs, the only reason I'm still there is because they still have the old.reddit.com frontend available. I even use it on mobile where it's not exactly practical. It's not because I have some sort of aversion to change, well, I guess I'm really uninterested in downloading apps considering I didn't even bother to try things like Apolle to see what the fuzz was about, but their various attempts at redesigns have been so bad that I would rather use old.reddit.com than them on mobile, even though it's impractical.

On a computer I see no benefits from any of the redesigns compared to old.reddit.com. I work a lot with Typescript and also React myself, and I love the language, so it's not because I dislike that sort of thing, but I think a list of links with comments just works better without being put into a virtual DOM or even just JS. HN is the perfect example of that, there has been a lot of hobby JS frontends from people, but they all work worse than the real deal and somewhat hilariously they work better than reddit's professional attempts. Now I get why reddit wants to move away from the page-reload. They want a lot of the SoMe interactivity, like their silly chat and so on, but I'm not sure who would ever want a Facebook with total strangers instead of people you actually talk with. I sure don't.

[marssaxman]

old.reddit.com is the only reason I haven't given the place up. When it goes, so will I.

[wuming2]

Could someone explain why a new web interface, albeit arguably better for mobile and actually enjoyable on desktop if the following can be forgotten, is so damn slow? When loading it appears to emerge from unknown depths and open up with a heavy sigh. Personification of a tool but this the impression it gives me every time. I thought 2020s were years when multi cores and gigabytes of memory would render everything snappy.

[kossTKR]

It's built by the idiots sons and daughters of rich people as their "my first job" project. Lots of sectors apparently function like this. Children of the elite can have play jobs, money is distributed to friends and family and everyone suffers.

There were posts on reddit about the most toxic work culture there i remember with drugs and bizarre politics straight out of some san fran sitcom.

And some quite funny posts on just how grotesquely "my first react project" the whole code base was, and still is. These people are absolutely clueless. They nuked the whole "new reddit feedback" forum with posts pointing out just how bad the whole thing was, like pulling tens megabytes of starter boilerplate in production and loops with script loads inside of them that could grind a powerful computer to a halt.

[labster]

I signed up for Reddit last year, finally. I’m a happy user of old.reddit.com. And if it goes, I go. I survived a decade without an account, and it would be easy enough to go back that way. My opinion is not that important to share.

[rampant_ai]

Old Reddit with a Stylus theme is how I've been using it for years. I'd occasionally switch to the new site just to check it's progress and while it has gotten a bit better in the last year or so, little nitpicks eventually drive me back to old.

[kevincox]

As much as old reddit is a clear winner ok desktop it is pretty awful on mobile. Personally I actually prefer the new site on mobile (although it is awful too) but I understand why sone people still prefer the old site on mobile.

[japhyr]

I would love to know the conversion rate that resulted from that test, it must have been absolutely abysmal.

[comte7092]

I’ve already been ignoring the extremely annoying spammy pop ups telling me to download the app for years.

I’m not downloading the app. I am just not doing it. Period.

[wtetzner]

I always treat those popups as a reminder to switch to old.reddit.com. The annoyance of having to do that then reminds me why I don't use reddit much.

[zuppy]

if you happen to be using safari on ios, someone just created an extension for cleaning up the mobile web version: https://apps.apple.com/ro/app/sink-it-for-reddit/id644987363...

[jackdh]

Now that they have extension support in IOS, I'm surprised RES has not been ported across.

[tazjin]

People refusing to use their app etc. are likely a minority. Most people are completely used to being bullied into submission by tech companies, and will happily follow along.

I'd assume their goal with this isn't to convert the stragglers, it's to just close the gates to them so that they disappear from ad-view related statistics.

Edit: Further to this point, the Apollo app which everyone was talking about the other day has 50000 (fifty thousand!) paid users. Reddit has hundreds of millions of monthly users. They don't care about this minority of users, they just want the shitstorm to pass so they can move on. They also don't care that there's likely a small minority of users creating most actual good content, but it doesn't matter because the site can be floated entirely by meme spam bots and porn posts and still be massively profitable.

[emeril]

I'm personally not confident if the signal to noise ratio took a turn for the worse (re: spam and porn posts), the site would be as a profitable/popular anymore

What I'm curious about is why didn't (and maybe they did as I'm not particularly well read in this situation) reddit just buy the apollo app for like $1M/$5M/etc. and then just modify it so it injects whatever tracking they want instead of creating this giant far more costly shitstorm?

Further, maybe the 50k paid users but perhaps there were many unpaid users using it less intensely?

[eastbound]

Worse than the conversion rate, Google will most certainly deindex the Reddit pages if they are not available as webpages.

But surely Reddit has already calculated that “[search query] + Reddit” is traffic they don’t care about?

[Implicated]

I’d venture to bet that they respond to google with a different version of the page, without the pop up.

[RobotToaster]

Isn't that also something Google delists pages for?

[Nextgrid]

Used to.

Nowadays Google is equally user-hostile and is happy to accommodate its peers.

[jonathantf2]

I think most news sites with paywalls do this? If you change your UserAgent to Googlebot you can bypass them.

[stevenhubertron]

Was in the same test hated it. Went to Android before Apple had default launcher selection.

[TheFragenTaken]

Fortunately their app is compatible with the ReVanced project (think YouTube Vanced). It's terrible you have to recompile apk's to get a useful experience (sans ads, sharing tracking, other restrictions), but for me it's currently the only viable way to use Reddit.

[Narushia]

If you are tired of patching the APKs yourself, you can just use pre-built APKs for less work: https://github.com/revanced-apks/build-apps/releases

[phatfish]

Revanced is the only way to stay sane while using Youtube and Twitch on mobile. The adverts and other spam are more obnoxious than cable TV.

I just hope it flies under the radar enough that Google don't start banning accounts for using it. I don't log in to the Youtube app for this reason, but I'm sure there is a line in a EULA somewhere that means they could if they wanted to.

Which reminds me, i need to backup all my email...

[WeylandYutani]

I use Revanced too but let's face it we're talking about 1% of users at best.

[bjoli]

I stopped using reddit when the .compact interface was removed. No I go back once in a while but if this goes through I will probably simply never visit.

[jacurtis]

You can still use old.reddit.com, which is vastly superior and faster than the modern reddit. It also loads videos and images inline (when you click for them to load) and it de-emphasizes comments. This allows you to work like the compact feed where you scroll through posts and only go into comments sections if you _really_ want to. It is a good alternative.

[jghn]

It's funny because I also sing the praises of old.reddit.com but would describe it/my preferences in a totally different manner. My preference would be for reddit to be as close to HN in UI format as possible, perhaps with some minor thumbnails for visual content.

What I like about the old UI is that I find it emphasizes the post titles instead of content. I *don't* feel inundated with images & videos, besides the little thumbnail. I usually just want to skim titles, not look at visual content, and I find that impossible in the new UI. And I find that it's easier to get at/see the comments than in the new UI.