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Comment by md224 | Hacker News Reader

I still can't get over the fact that their official mobile app stops rendering comments past a certain level of nesting. There's no indication that anything is missing, no "continue this thread" link, nothing... the comments just aren't there. I don't understand how one of the world's largest social media platforms could have a mobile app that silently hides content from the user. Just blows my mind.

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It feels like increasingly they are shifting away from focusing on the comments and discussion, to trying to get readers to click, consume, leave and keep scrolling (to generate more impressions).

I'm saddened by this, and in digital battlegrounds (and I'm not using that term lightly) like /r/politics or /r/worldnews where it has been very obvious for a long time that hostile foreign nations are conducting operations there, it can result in a lot of the important meta-chatter being pushed down, or troll comments being gamed to the top without the accurate counter-response being visible anymore. This results in further distortion of the truth (or at the very least exposure to multiple sides of an argument).

Next thing you know they'll have a UI "refresh" a la Digg.

Their mobile website is equally bad. A gigantic pop-up takes up half of the screen to tell you to use their app.

Third party apps make Reddit so much more usable.

I always use https://i.reddit.com. It's their years-old mobile site and it's super fast and reliable.

Wow, thanks for that link. I was having the same problem as the parent comment, I definitely don't want their app but I also don't want a giant pop-up in my face every time I load the mobile site.

How long is that gonna stay available for mobile users?

I've been using it for like 10 years.

I'm more worried that they will eventually switch it off in favor of the new mobile site.

There is no guarantee that this will keep working indefinitely.

It’s really amazing how many major websites don’t give a shit about perf. Their old school mobile interfaces end up giving the best user experience.

Perf is user experience. It’s a feature!

> I still can't get over the fact that their official mobile app stops rendering comments past a certain level of nesting. There's no indication that anything is missing, no "continue this thread" link, nothing... the comments just aren't there.

More than that, half the time I go into a reddit profile on my desktop and try to click a link to a comment, it just doesn't work. Literally does nothing. They changed the rendering a short time ago from straight links to some type of JS, and now profiles are broken half the time.

I don't understand what you mean... The official reddit app on iOS show comments as deep as you want, as far as I can tell. They default to collapsed the further you go deep/down in subcomments, but have buttons that say things like "6 more replies".

Beyond a certain level they stop indenting, so the actual hierarchy is no longer clear, but that's necessary because there wouldn't be enough horizontal space otherwise. But the content is still all there, as far as I can tell.

Do you have screenshots?

If you have the mobile app, you can see for yourself. Here's an example:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskOuija/comments/89rukm/hey_vsauce...

If you're not by a desktop, you can verify the missing comments by viewing the link in mobile Safari (in an ironic twist, Reddit's mobile web view is actually more functional than their native app).

I wonder how many people are out there, like you, who have no idea this is going on. The terrible thing about silently hiding comments is that there's no indication that anything is missing, so most people don't even realize it's happening. The only reason I know about this is because my subreddit, /r/AskOuija, often has deeply nested comment threads (due to the nature of the subreddit). Reddit's broken mobile app is actively interfering with the functionality of my subreddit, resulting in a lot of redundant comment replies from people using the mobile app (since it appears to them that these nested comments have yet to be replied to).

In the thread you linked, someone replied:

> Mobile people stop replying it’s there just u can’t see

> mobile web view is actually more functional than their native app

Thank goodness for that! Reddit isn't so complicated that I need a special app for it. It's a website and it works well as a website. It could be better but there's nothing happening on the site that a browser can't natively handle just fine.

I don't know what to tell you, but I see the full thread on my iOS reddit app:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/tqoooN7gJ7zNKZLB3

Maybe it's an Android thing?

There are more replies to the first thread that you’re not seeing. Note the “Continue Thread” links in the web view:

https://ibb.co/nPtibn

I finally get it. Thanks for enlightening. You're right, that's... just completely inexcusable! I'm kind of shocked. Not even a message. Wow.

Holy.. didn't knew about that. WTF

If you're on iOS, I recommend Apollo for reddit, I actually was using Alien Blue for the longest time because I also hated the official app, but I switched to Apollo a few months ago and it has been great.

The non-mobile version of the sites works really well on mobile browser. What does the apps add to the browser experience?

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