Hacker News Reader

Comment by modzu | Hacker News Reader

then there's reddit and its giant full page ad for the app before finally redirecting me to the content once i find the tiny link to continue instead of opening the app store...

yes reddit and fb and gmail and the like are intentionally crippled when viewed on mobile. why? maybe because the data an app can suck up off your phone is much more valuable. no pesky same-origin policies!

i digress :(

View on HN

I noticed that reddit now has three separate "use our app" prompts, which don't seem to communicate so they can all appear on the same page. There's the loading-in system popup, the bottom-of-screen one, and the internal popup with a picture and two choices.

And then the bottom-bar one, instead of having two buttons, makes the entire field open the app store except for a tiny 'x' in the top right. Talk about unsubtle dark patterns.

The reddit redesign feels a lot like the Digg changes before everyone moved away. I think reddit still has a lot more going for it, and being able to opt out solves the problem, but I'm still every so slightly worried.

It hasn't been pushed very hard, but the new 'chat' feature - on a website that already had private messaging - strikes me as a fundamental misunderstanding of what reddit's value is, one bad enough that it makes me doubt for the future design of the site as a whole.

Agreed. It's only a matter of time before they get rid of the opt-out of the redesign. When that happens, I'll likely quit. I find the redesign absolutely impossible to use.

It certainly doesn't help that they've apparently adopted the game development definition of a 'beta'. (i.e. an alpha that you roll out to all users.) There are several core features of the existing site which simply haven't been implemented yet - I consider that unacceptable for an all-users beta, especially in a redesign where those features are expected.

Visiting a user page and checking 'top' simply doesn't work, with a note that it will someday. And that's made even worse because the new 'hot' on user pages has some sort of godawful logic that only shows a handful of posts from a given thread. This is painfully apparent with AMAs, where visiting the AMA account and checking all posts is a standard action - after trashing the AMA infrastructure on the business side (the Victoria mess), the same thing is now happening on the tech side.

The new redesign requires every sub to build a new theme just to maintain existing functionality, and is apparently harder to theme for also. I suspect it's an attempt at homogeneity to be more welcoming to new users, but the practical consequence is that sidebars (rules, links, info) have simply vanished. Which means more work for moderators, less info for visitors, and occasionally complete dysfunction for subs that used the sidebar for something important.

And, of course, the redesign is nakedly anti-user in much the same way as the recent TechCrunch one. It's designed to make sponsored-content ads harder to distinguish, sacrifice content space for site features space, and promote time-on-site over user choice and experience.

I retreated to a handful of low-use, well-moderated subs quite a while ago, and with the site changes tarring even those I'll probably give up soon also.

Completely agree, with all of it. I pretty much only use it for a few things that I have interest in, and don't really venture outside of there. Even then, I've tried to limit my posting and frequenting of the site; there are some weeks where the only thing I'll post is the weekly one on a sub I help moderate.

I've even gone to the point of deleting the app on my phone, and, if I have to, I'll open it in mobile browser (and deal with their shit) to check messages/etc in the morning. I need to start trying to wean myself away from it completely, if only to help kill off that online identity.

I gave up on the redesign and am now using a browser extension[1][2] that always redirects to the old design.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...

[2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...

Don't worry about trying to click the 'continue' link, just keep scrolling down and it disappears.

It's still annoying, but not as annoying as trying to click the tiny link.

I've read lots of articles from companies like Pinterest and Flipkart about how lightweight PWAs increased user engagement by some huge amount, like 200%. So why are other companies like Reddit spoiling their mobile web experience by pushing their apps so hard?

Use this link on mobile. It’s way better: https://i.reddit.com/

Oh man! And you think anyone is bad when it comes to intrusive cookies just look at the crap Reddit keeps on you!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com