Yes, but I eventually realised what it's optimised for: image posts. For some insane reason they're competing with Instagram and Reddit's co-evolved site Imgur, on which people read comments much less often.
They also really, really want you to use the mobile app, which presumably means it does something privacy-violating.
I assume you must be talking about the mobile app, rather than the "mobile experience" of the Reddit website. And it's just occurred to me that the author may have been referring to the same.
I've never used the app but I presume it is a lot better than the mobile website.
I'm actually on the other side of this - it's really easy to use their app to browse posts and read comments, where it's a bit more involved using the web interface.
Are they really forcing us to use the app for maximizing user engagement? I tend to think they can syphon more user data from an app than from a browser and that would be their motivation.
While I have my tinfoil hat on, let's continue. I think reddit gradually degraded the mobile browser experience on purpose to push users toward the app. Seriously, how hard is it to show an image without clipping it? Images were fully shown before, then you had to click on individual posts to see them without cropping. Forcing people to expand comments is another one. Before we had infinite scroll, then you had to click many times to see the full extent of comments... And then a bit later, passed a few levels of nesting you were forced to use the app.
I don't know if an app like SlimSocial (which let you use Facebook's mobile site with the embedded messenger) exists for Reddit. I hate being forced to accept "permissons" to install / use an app. Personal data is the price to pay for services nowadays.
Let's be real: the performance of Reddit's mobile app is quite good. And when I compare it to any other similar mobile site feed, the sites are always slow and janky, because browsers aren't great with handling infinite scrolling full of hundreds of videos and tens of thousands of nested comments.
I know everybody here think's it's a "dark pattern" to get people to use Reddit's app instead of site on mobile... but to me it looks like it could also be legitimate performance concerns.
I haven't tried the app yet but from the landing page I can see it being nice to use, although possibly not the best use of time!
I think part of the reason sites like 9gag have taken some share is their great mobile experience making it easy lazily browsing—however, I'm sure hardcore reddit users will hate it!
Yes, unfortunately reddit pays engineers to obfuscate use cases so they can push notifications and steal your attention. The mobile app didn't even have (lasi I checked) a (n intuitive) way to get to r/friends short of actually clicking on a link to that feed a user has posted. The lights are on but it seems no one is home
The app is only better than the mobile website because the website is absolutely terrible. I do read reddit on an app ... but not the official one, I use BaconReader.
One day I suppose Reddit will ban third-party apps for the same reason Twitter did: they're more usable than the official one and feed less surveillance back.
Kinda and I usually use reddit on mobile app because reddit website on mobile is terrible and on pc its not appealing enough. So I use mobile app. Mobile app also sucks a bit.
It's not just bad it's _unusable_ on any older mobile device. Takes 10 seconds to load a page, greets you with a "Reddit is more fun in the app" popup that takes up half the page, then will display the top 3 comments but if you scroll down it will load a random different post that they think you'll like instead of showing you more comments.
It's not just the mobile app, but a lot of the stuff on the regular reddit site is full of dark patterns. They want you to create an account to see comments below the top levels.
old.reddit.com still gives the experience that you're used to if you want to remove the redesign.
Am presuming this is distinct from the problems with the main website (i.e. they aren't trying to push people off of that too), but maybe related in the sense that it seems the strategy is to turn the website into an app instead of keeping it as a website. IMHO, this isn't a good fit for what I use reddit for, which is a collection of linked documents - where 'normal' server-rendered documents worked really well. It doesn't really need to be an app, and building it as an app bloats it for my use-case.
I'm not sure if it's due to odd FE architecture choices or if this specifically helps increase bottom-line KPIs, but there are some bizarre things like the fact that clicking on the background of a post takes you back to the subreddit via replacing history (?), which kind of breaks the idea of how you expect a website to work.
What confuses me from an architecture POV is there are glaring high-value things they could fix - like subreddit search, image hosting etc. - that get left.
Yup, but I think the website sucks because it's built to cater to their terrible app. Funny thing is half a dozen independent app makers have done it better. Hopefully Reddit doesn't try to block them at some point.
They're desperately trying to push the apps as those allow for much better user tracking.
I actually like how limited the mobile website is, if I need to solely get some information I can generally get it from Reddit. But I absolutely am discouraged from posting. To my shame I wasted much of my twenties on a Reddit ,angry arguing with people. The moment I deleted it I found myself much happier.
have you tried other apps ? Just try relay for reddit, for one day and tell me reddit's app even compares. Being able to just choose galleries, image views, or cards, and have many other aesthetical features is priceless. Reddit's app is hardly usable in my opinion, not the way I use reddit anyhow.
They also really, really want you to use the mobile app, which presumably means it does something privacy-violating.
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