I do mind them promoting their app, it’s a horrible app and they’ve continually ruined their website. The only way I can stand to use reddit anymore is through Narwhal, at least until they kill their 3rd party apps API.
It’s funny, the web app used to be really good. Much better than the native app. Since then they have been making the web app increasingly worse over time, actively degrading its functionality and pleasantness to use.
The degradation seems to directly correlate with the modern-feel of the page. I'm not sure if that's intentional. It seems that modern front end fashion is a huge step backwards from earlier fashions in web development.
It's completely possible to have a "modern" page that is also nice to use; it's just that with Reddit modernness and horribleness have been conflated together and it seems like they go together.
I don't know what exactly "modern" means here, but I think FastMail, Inoreader, and GitHub should count. All three have been fast and responsive. In particular, switching from Gmail to FastMail was a revelation.
Random aside: I've long been very down on web tech, but those 3 have sort of reinvigorated my interest in web stuff.
Do you have any examples of this? Every 'modern' webapp I can think of has been an exercise in making it slower and more confusing than its old-fashioned predecessor. Especially slower. They're _so_ slow.
You can just permanently set your account to use the old layout/view. I've noticed little to no changes other than user profiles, which are the "old new" ones.
On my phone I use reddit is fun. I have no issues at all with reddit atm in terms of them fucking with my experience.
"permenantly", except for the bug where about 1 pageview in 10 it still redirects you to new reddit. I think it's something related to improperly configured (server-side) caching or something.
And that's fine. I absolutely can't stand the new layout, so if that happens I'll stop using it. Probably not good for their metrics for a 13 year user of the service to stop using it I'd guess. I don't even block ads on it. And I sometimes click them if they're relevant (which, lets face it, they are these days).
11 for me and what used to be 30-60 minutes a day (I like certain subreddits /r/programming /r/chess /r/<proglang> Etc.) is maybe 15 and not at all for days now.
I miss old reddit, nothing else really fills the niche in a unified way.
Reddit and Facebook both have some hold for me because of niche communities that they both let me aggregate/monitor/interact with easily, without going to a myriad of websites. I really don’t want to have to do that - in some cases, I’m not even sure I can find comparable replacements.
I agree, but it’s jarring going between devices (phone, iPad and computer) and the multiple interfaces. Then the repeated niggling to use the app. If I haven’t after several years, the chances are I don’t want to.
There are many situations where you are presented with the mobile or new desktop designs, such as being logged out. I have to sign in at least twice every time to use the old desktop version.
But for how long is the question. Once they remove that, my use will go way down or maybe stop entirely. I despise the new layout and it isn’t just a “doesn’t want to try something new” phase.
I actually gave up and switched to desktop on my phone - which is barely usable at all - and yet still somehow less infuriating than the shitty mobile site...
The most promising general reddit equivalent I've seen so far is tildes.net. It's the first time I've seen a fork of the reddit model with some actually fresh ideas. However, like all of the hundreds of alternatived, this site is far below the critical mass required to make browsing it regularly worthwhile.
I expect people would mostly just use the mobile web site. And there would be a lot of noise. But I can't ever see myself going to somewhere like voat.
Yeah, Voat's not an appealing alternative. There's an ActivityPub-powered, federated link aggregator in the works[1], that could work out really well as each community could have their own rules and if you don't want to federate with a particular one, just block them.
There is an alternative made by a previous reddit dev called tildes.net its invite only and quite enjoyable to use. Classic lightweight website and no trolls
I refuse to use the new design with the same contempt as I refuse to pay for picking my seat on an aeroplane (P.S. Ryanair: my girlfriend is not happy about this... but at least I get some peace and quiet right? /s).
I use Boost for Reddit (Android) and the old reddit style, and RES in my browser. I see why they are going towards the Instagram style route - people generally like what they are accustomed to; and I guess more people use Instagram than Reddit.
Yeah, I use their app on android and it's pretty bad. There's currently a bug that seems to get fixed and then reappear where if someone responds to your comment, you get an alert and when you click on the alert it takes you to the comment, but if the comment is too nested, it just takes you to the top of the thread. This makes responding to a comment in any thread with over 100 comments near impossible. Because of that, I'm using the web app currently and it's really annoying to be constantly pushed back toward a broken app.
I use a third party mobile client and am very happy with it, but I know it's only a matter of time (despite what they've said in the past) before they kill/rate limit/price the API in such a way to kill off all the third party clients.
Their mobile website has also started literally animating the "get the app" button; every minute or so, the button pulses for a bit in a deliberate (and in my case, consistently successful) attempt to make your attention move to the button they want you to click instead of the content you want to read.
The reddit community is great, but the company seems to not care about their users at all.
Reddit has been on a downward spiral for N years (depending on your perspective), yet the data is near-completely crawlable, and no user-friendly sustainable alternative has appeared. Why? The closest is lobste.rs, which is better in some ways and worse in others, and a few (names I forgot) were good but died from lack of content / user interest.
I started working on a read only script to grab stuff from reddit years ago and then they changed it so you need to go through the whole register for an api key even for read only requests which didn't work for me because I wanted users to download and run the script themselves
I've noticed this as well. Really annoying. Or any website that immediately pops up a "sign up for our email list!" and blocks you from seeing the content.
Isn't there a ton of data that most people don't even use many apps anymore? Or they install them once and then uninstall them or ignore them?
I hope we can move towards a web that stays in the web browser. Apps are becoming really annoying, especially for interactions you only have intermittently (I'm not a daily reddit user, but I go there every now and then, or it pops up on search).
I can understand a developer/company wanting to do the app route to regain control (and not having to deal with the annoying inconsistencies/hacks in different browsers/versions), but is ad / tracker blocking really the major driver of going the app route?
You can see indirect evidence for this by looking at the exponential rise in ad-blocker-blocking efforts from a wide array of sites. 'Hi, we see you're using an ad blocker. Please turn it off.' That literally did not exist several years ago, even though ad blocking has been around for decades. Companies in recent years are getting aggressively desperate as the web becomes increasingly user friendly. At the same time, mobile is still dominated by an OS developed by the the world's largest ad delivery corporation - and it behaves accordingly.
> That literally did not exist several years ago, even though ad blocking has been around for decades.
What is "several years"? This has definitely existed, say, five years ago. Not at this scale, of course, but it's not a recent invention by a long shot.
Brave is also making major progress here. It natively includes anti-fingerprinting, ad blocking, tracker blocking, HTTPS everywhere, and one-click in-session TOR windows on demand (similar to how incognito windows work for other browsers). It's also blazing fast.
From a user perspective, now is probably the best time ever to be using the web.
I'd say the worry is not just ad / tracker blocking, but loss of control.
Apple decides to start notifying on cookies or make fingerprinting harder? Poof. There goes a chunk of your ad value per user.
And who knows what any given browser vendor will do tomorrow?
Some would say "So it's like the 90s, where everyone was continually adapting as web specs were negotiated." The difference is that now there are billion+ dollar businesses directly tied to that ad revenue.
Yes. If data can be captured to apply targeted ads, each ad can be worth 2-5x as much to the company. Browser compatibility issues occur sometimes, but mobile device compatibility are always an issue for my apps. It's actually more work keeping an app working smoothly than a website, and the cost must be offset by the ad revenues
I thought modern OSes now pop up notification icons when this happens, so you can detect and punish apps that do that. Doesn't stop them from getting a snapshot of your system on first run, though.
I'm really amazed they still let the old mobile interface work for the most part. Just add ".compact" to any URL and browse almost annoyance free (newer features like video don't work, but that's not too surprising).
For the lazy, there are browser extensions that do this for you, or you can write a simple user-script in your user-script engine of choice (Greasemonkey, Tampermonkey, etc)
For the record, that tag line was an idea from their users, and chosen hey their users (through upvotes, of course). It wasn't how reddit the company sees itself, it was how its users saw it. I still remember the thread where it happened years ago.
I'll take issue with that. For all Clippy's interpretation problems (way ahead of their time), it was still trying to facilitate actions that were useful to you (not Microsoft).
Dark patterns are defined by trying to willfully get you to do something that's counter to your own intent.
What's the difference, if the result is the same? Do you not think that the employees who write big "use the app!" banners believe they're doing what's best for the user?
As for Clippy, it's not hard to design a straightforward auto-correction feature, which detects what you typed and suggests a useful addition or replacement. Google, Apple, etc., all have their own designs that work perfectly well. I have trouble seeing an animated 3D cartoon as anything other than "trying to willfully get me to do something counter to my own intent". That's a classic way to manipulate people.
You are ignoring the general population's and the industry's attitude toward computing metaphors and cartoons in the 1990s. What do you imagine is the exploitative profit motive of Clippy? Microsoft fido get more revenue when you formatted your document as a resume or whatever.
When combined with an AMP result page you might get when coming from Google, it's sometimes just impossible to view the actual content of a post without getting kicked to the app, or out to another browsing context... Reddit on mobile is a purpose-built nightmare.
1. They cycle through a couple of different messages, and the buttons get switched around
2. The wording is such that you read it twice and still aren't sure which button will just take you to the damn website
I don't mind them promoting their app, but these dark patterns truely rile me