[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