After I wait eight seconds for the page to load, I see your lovely reminder that I should "View Reddit in the app because I deserve the best." At the very least, you could have the decency to harass me about your app while I'm already waiting.

Also, I can load the desktop version of the site in under a second on my phone. IMO y'all should've stuck with some good old fashion HTML and CSS, especially since there's nothing dynamic about Reddit's content.

Hell, you guys could probably get away with responsive styles alone, but I get it. As a business, you find it optimal to piss off your users into downloading an app so you can send them push notifications, dig into their contacts, and find out where they're eating tacos.

Personally, I find the entire experience to be incredibly slow. Loading the front page takes multiple seconds, there is a noticeable delay between tapping a link and any form of response, and back navigations are often unexpectedly slow.

Non-SPA related, I also think that many of the touch targets are too small, or work in unexpected ways. Tapping a username collapses a comment, even though there's an arrow next to it. Tapping an image associated with a link doesn't follow the link, it expands the image (even if it is an article link). Tapping the title takes you to the comments, not the article. The only way to get to the content is to click the itty bitty domain title beneath the title. All of these behaviors are different than how the desktop view behaves. For a site that calls itself the front page of the internet, it's getting harder and harder to get to actual content.

I am going add my experiences here, in hopes someone from Reddit sees them, but they are more or less the same as everyone else's criticisms.

The reddit mobile site takes 13 seconds to load on my Nexus 6 over wifi. Then it has the nagware ad to try to get me to install the app, which only has a tiny 'go to mobile site' link directly underneath the large 'continue [to download]' button. Once reddit has finally loaded, every link will then first ask you if you want to view the link the app, before allowing you to continue. Meanwhile the UI, while cleaner, is debatably worse off UX wise as everything is now small and laggy.

So to summarize, it is terribly unperformant app, filled with dark patterns and dubious UI improvements.

On Chrome on iOS on iPhone 6, posts take too long to load, and having more than 3 gifs expanded at once crashes my browser. Also manual pagination instead of infinite scroll is a little annoying.

Works very well otherwise.