Hey Reddit, There’s a reason why there were a dozen alternatives to your official Reddit app.
Some of them predate the official app.
I can’t think of any other website that has that many alternative apps, much less at that popularity level
Twitter did, at one point
I don’t think there are any other for profit sites that would allow third-party apps. They data is currency to them.
They can get fucked then. I’m tired of this closed internet, walled garden attitude from large social media companies. They’ve taken the tools that people built to make information free and available, and have locked them down for their own selfish purposes. I will not give them any more of my time.
Right like how you can’t copy images from Pinterest, a site that populates all your Google Image searches. Like you fuckers didn’t create this content. You just got people to upload it to your site then blocked anyone else from accessing it without a membership and a share link.
I added a browser plugin on Firefox that blocks all Pinterest results from Google and DDG. Half the time they want you to log in just to see the page. Google is lame for including them in results.
I just wish Forefox for Android still supported desktop plugins without a massive hassle.
Kiwi
I fucking hate Pinterest. I don’t understand why anyone uses it.
Pinterest has long been a member of my uBlocklist configuration.
I honestly hope reddit keeps fucking up like this. It takes a lot of work and a long time to drive millions of casual users away from your site.
And from what I e been picking up it appears that reddit killing themselves is making for pretty good marketing for Lemmy and other reddit alternatives it kinda feels like a new era of the internet
Something had to give
Worst dark pattern ever.
This is the Reddit. com front page on a mobile browser and has been for well over a year now
The writing has been on the wall for along time.
btw clear you cookies on exit, use a password manager, stay safe.
It already did since 2 years ago, random “unverified content” bullshit login walls on popular/valuable advice, tens of megabytes of Javascript that took long to load on intermittent/unstable connections and terrible UI in general.
Don’t forget killing of .compact
I wrote .compact to run on a Motorola Droid, which was a 533MHz device with 512Mb of total ram, and a kernel which was very aggressive about freeing up this ram.
My respects to you. I really think websites and software in general need to have efficiency in mind again. Webapps should use as few resources as possible, save people’s time, their money and the planet.
Its not even hard to do. People just always reach for the most complex, overengineered things, instead of stepping back and seeing what you need.
I love component based systems. I love real time and custom user interfaces. That doesn’t mean every site needs to be a big SPA. If you’re a primarily read-only site (blog, wiki, etc), then you shouldn’t be sending huge blobs of JS just for your users to read content. As you add interactivity, you can add more JS, but think about what you’re going to do.
And there are ways around all that. Phoenix LiveView gives you an amazing system for building real time apps that are extremely thin and fast, and SurfaceUI lets you embrace Vue style components, easily
If you want your app used so much, just make it snappy damn
This is what’s amazing. They could make a good, ad-supported app, but they seem to insist they don’t need to while wondering why everyone’s angry about third party apps going away.
Reddit never needed to fix their own hilariously-bad failure of an app, they could have just bought any of the ready-made, popular, beloved third-party apps out there for far less than this fiasco is costing them now. Old Twitter did this back in the day, some of their official clients started out as successful third-party apps.
Spez is out there being an insane libelous asshole to Christian Selig when he could have just hired him.
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It’s designed to shove ads and bot posts in your face and steal your information, everything else is secondary. This is the true reason why the app is so fucking shitty and unusable for what reddit is supposed to be for.
Not surprising, since ad blockers are a thing even on mobile these days.
They can serve you ads just fine on mobile web, that’s not it. It’s that the app let’s them track your behavior far better than the web browser.
You know what’s most fucked up about all of these types of practices? It’s that they had something great and have deliberately slowly destroyed it because of unchecked greed. Same with Facebook. They had a site so great that like 60% of the people on the entire planet signed up. They’ve been making money. Reddit and Facebook make millions of dollars a month. But it’s not enough for them. Nooo. They have to make billions. They have to make enough money to buy governments and amass as much power as small nations. The men running these companies are soulless. They try to fill the hole in their hearts with money, but it will never be enough. They’ve taken something that was amazing, something that benefitted billions of people, and destroyed it to serve their own selfish greed.
They can serve you ads just fine on mobile web, that’s not it. It’s that the app let’s them track your behavior far better than the web browser.
It’s both. Firefox for Android lets you run uBlockOrigin, effectively killing the ads.
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Ads on reddit are self-served. DNS can’t block that
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I run a DNS based ad and tracking blocker on my home network (similar to Pihole) through my router, and it’s amazing what apps are totally incapable of running with those restrictions in place. Amazon’s app doesn’t work, neither does Wells Fargo. Apps that do this are absolutely predatory and need to be regulated. They harvest my data in shady, insecure, annoying, obtrusive ways, and if they or their customer’s mishandle it, I have essentially no recourse, except for maybe a $0.32 payout as part of a class action lawsuit.
Would I have given my data to Cambridge Analytica? No. Did Facebook? Yes. Was it mishandled? Totally. What recompense will I get from it? Nothing! Will it happen again? Absolutely.
me and my wife also quit using apps
every god damn company has an app. “Get a bonus if you shop using the app”, etc etc etc. it’s all about tracking us, snatching data and of course that little app icon is “easy” to click to spend more money, right? I hate it so much
with reddit gone i’ll only have my bloonsTD app and my 2 factor auth for a couple of services (net banking and a few other things)
im nearing the point where i dont really see the use for a smartphone
I legit have floated the idea of ditching my smartphone several times. I hardly do anything on my phone anymore because of how awful and predator basically every app is now, even paid apps. I might as well just get a feature/dumb phone that has LTE and just set up a hotspot for my laptop.
What the F Reddit, are you trying to speedrun the worst decisions a website can do??
They are trying what Facebook did to their Facebook chat, forcing users to use the app by banning mobile web access
I stopped using Facebook altogether because of that.
Reddit follows the enshittification.
Me too, but apparently Facebook survives without us. Turns out the most valuable Facebook users are actually retirees waiting to be scammed by shady advertisers.
And I’m curious how many facebook users have the chat app. (and how many just walked away)
I’m one of those who just walked away.
I checked out Facebook recently because I needed help moving and it was the quickest way to ask everyone I knew.
That shit is like 90 percent ads and clickbait tick tocks now. It’s fucked. I don’t understand how people can use it without becoming enraged.
iirc you can still use Facebook messenger with the m.facebook com at the mobile browser to chat
Now you can, but back then you couldn’t when they initially started their messenger app
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They don’t know that the primary use case for reddit on mobile is getting good answers from Google.
Can’t wait for Google to derank Reddit links due to this BS.
Spoofing user agents go brrrrrr
Seriously, the data mining is going to put so much load on their servers, this is whole thing screams “management considered the technology teams assessment, but decided to go forward with [dumb project codename for fucking the platform over]”
lmao, they can’t be serious
They know that many users will try to use web page once 3rd party apps stop working. They are testing how many of them they can make use their mobile app which allows them to obtain more information about you.
They are doingeverything exactly how elon did on Twitter
Such genius and innovation. He added not one, but three pop-ups telling you to log in and allow notifications. Have you ever seen such naked brilliance before? No one besides him has had the courage… except for maybe every malware site webmaster in 2002. He also sold a blue checkmark for $8! Like how does one human have such an unlimited well of brilliance?
