I don't have any sympathy for a site that purposely cripples the web mobile site to force you to install their app. They lock you out of pictures after around 20 so you have to go to desktop or install their crappy app. Yelp will not be missed.
And when cancelling the prompt gets you nothing, it really feels like Yelp is screaming “NO SOUP FOR YOU!”.
Not every iOS user is using Safari!!!!
No, no I don't. And the official reddit app is not the best experience.
There is no site (other than my own) so unique that I can't find a replacement.
Apollo recently moved some push notification features behind a subscription to cover ongoing costs, separate from their "Pro" one time in-app purchase, so I think Reddit is at least taking a cut from API usage by other clients.
I'd be happy to pay them, but I actually don't WANT push notifications, posting from the app, or any of the other stuff that encourages websites to pull you in deeper.
And the only reason I even use Apollo is because mobile Reddit is a nightmare UX. Literally a case study in how to make a horrid, horrible experience on the mobile web.
I already ran to Relay as an escape from Reddit's astonishingly garbage mobile browser experience. Next stop is the door.
Often when I "open in the app", I just get sent to the homepage of my app with no way to find the random post I had been trying to view.
t. Tumblr marketing department
.snackbar
.xpromopopup
.topbutton
.xpromopillwww.reddit.com##.xpromopill
www.reddit.com##.active.xpromopopup
www.reddit.com##.amp.snackbar
www.reddit.com##.navframe > .xpromominimal.dualpartinterstitial
www.reddit.com##.xpromoadfeed
I worked at reddit for almost 4 years, but quit and started a non-profit so I could work on building a site that would be able to stick to the principles I believe are important: no advertising or investors, open-source, privacy, higher-quality content, etc.
It's not incredibly active yet since it's in invite-only alpha, but it gets several hundred posts a day and is coming along well. There's more info in this blog post (including how to request an invite): https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes
Just send me an email if you're interested and I'll give you an invite. It's not intended to be much of a barrier, I just want to keep the growth controlled for now while we get base features and site culture built up.
I used to ask myself that question, then I realized it doesn't matter. Communities come and go. Slashdot used to be good. Reddit used to be good. That they're not anymore doesn't matter.
It sucks to up and leave a community once in a while, but it's not like you lose everything you did there. Social apps are intrinsically focused on the short term (past & future). It's okay to change which websites you visit once in a while.
I highly recommend Tildes. I enjoy my time there. It's pretty quiet and has very high signal, very low noise. If one day it has to be shut down because the bills can't be paid, that will suck… but there will be others.
Hopefully Tor isn't a problem. In the Age Of Snowden, I use it almost exclusively. Also might I suggest a .onion gateway (and maybe a .i2p gateway too)?
Being prompted repeatedly to open in app is certainly annoying but at present most mobile users probably use one of the apps. At least for android where 85% of your global market lives there are 7 different options nearly all of which are better than viewing in mobile firefox/chrome.
In short your experience is valid but since you probably represent a small percentage of the userbase reports of reddits death are still presumably greatly exaggerated.
On android I like Reddit is fun
Here is a thread discussing a replacement on ios
https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/5w4885/ios_replacem...
On the lighter side old reddits code was open source and lives on in voat which at present is infested with a lot of racists and alt right. Maybe we can all move over and "voat" them out of their new home like we kicked them off reddit.
I don't think people are forecasting Reddit's death so much as wishing for it and asking for alternatives they can go to instead.
I don't think Reddit will ever really die. It will persist, as a sort of night-club district from the comparatively well lit streets of Facebook and Twitter. It's not really a red light district anymore, but it's edgy enough for most people.
Maybe it's not a thing anymore?
And apps can track more details about you, yielding more revenue (or potential revenue to an acquirer).
Investors probably ascribe more value to apps-based services than web-based.
They are at a tremendous disadvantage as a 'web' experience because you're getting there through Google, Facebook, or Bing rather than landing directly on their page so they have already paid that platform to put you in front. The App means they have full control over the experience and can charge restaurants directly to move them around in the search results (more revenue).
So at some point I presume the go full "Yellow Pages" and just charge venues a monthly fee to appear at all in their pages. That works if they are generating significant foot traffic into the venue but fails if they can't connect the app/website use with the visit.
All in all I don't see how they can make a business here.
I think it's useful at this point to ask why various directories had value during their heyday. The "Yellow Pages" had value, simply because there wasn't as comprehensive a localized listing otherwise. Yelp had value at first, because the reviews and ratings combined with the location search were super useful. Unfortunately, too many people realized how valuable this was and the gaming of the system on all sides started, greatly reducing the usefulness of the Yelp directory.
Google might be able to create a such directory based solely on traffic and AI identification of the type of business? Could AI identify long lines outside of restaurants? Maybe Google should buy Yelp, which would solve the "pay Google up front" conundrum. Whatever IP Yelp has which killed the "near" searches on Google would also cease to be an impediment to Google.
I'm not sure if this is exactly it or if you're letting Yelp off the hook. Yelp was perfectly happy to try to profit from the gaming. That didn't just damage its usefulness. It damaged trust; and trust is a lot harder to get back.
Not letting them off the hook. Yelp contributed to this through their actions.
It damaged trust; and trust is a lot harder to get back.
That was a part of what I was thinking about. One advantage of the Yellow Pages: less opportunity to lose trust. I think displaying AI interpreted traffic has a key advantage over ratings: It would cost a whole lot more money to get crowds to show up day after day with smartphones, than it would cost to get people to astroturf ratings.
Google already gives you the hours that restaurants are busiest, so they basically have this info
I suspect that AI applied here would be highly useful.
Busyness wouldn't just be used as a measure of busyness. It could be used as a proxy for other qualities. Another example: There are restaurants that have ample waiting areas and others that have none. Those in the waiting area wouldn't necessarily mean the same thing to a customer's experience than the same people seated at a table. Likewise for people standing outside vs. waiting inside.
At a very basic level, throughput (Little's Law) should also be taken into account.
My point is there would be value in such proxy measures, if some AI were used for interpretation.
Google already does plenty of stuff like this, and has for years (including historical and live busyness). Hell, I haven't used Yelp in years, because their app is generally less usable, isn't integrated with Maps (for directions etc), and cripples mobile web by not letting you see most of the content. Though it's possible that the data for G Maps is only comparably rich because of my location, and that Yelp has a data advantage in many more markets.
I'm well aware. There's a cousin comment about using such data with contextual information and AI to use traffic data as a proxy for attributes like popularity and quality, instead of providing the raw data and letting users make their own inferences. This would enable a more Yelp-like UX, and might be easier for lots of users to consume.
Also, small pro-tip for anyone unaware. If you are on mobile web and on Yelp, but don't want to download the app, hold down the refresh button, and select 'Request Desktop Site' - this will load the non mobile version of the site that will not force you to download the app. The UI isn't as great as the mobile optimized site, but hey at least you can read reviews without being extorted into downloading an app.
In the top left, there's an "open in app" button. It's not very intrusive, it's just sitting there in the header to remind you that there's an app. The rest of the website looks usable, right? Nope.
Click on "open in app": redirected to app store
Click on user's avatar: redirected to app store
Click on "read more": redirected to app store
Click on one of the reactions: redirected to app store
It's dishonest because the site isn't interactive at all -- there's a huge overlay that prevents any meaningful interaction with the site. It's quite the opposite of lazy, because there's a functional site under there, they just refuse to let people use it.
The article is talking about their financial struggles but they are too cheap and lazy to maintain multiple platforms?
Er, just checked and the Google Pay Send and Request money feature is accessible from both mobile and desktop site (well, I was lazy and checked both from mobile using “view desktop site” on and off.)
So, let's not call them out for something they absolutely didn't do.
I think Pay replaced Wallet when you say as an app upgrade, but not everyone upgrades immediately or automatically; that may have been about decommissioning Wallet after the upgrade was available.
But I think it's too late.
Personally, if I'm on a web page, I am actually much more likely to never install their app if I have a bad experience.
Companies like reddit and yelp are not focused on the customer experience. They're trying to boost their KPIs. Perhaps, early on, those were customer-centric, but we now live in an age where a path to revenue is more important than ever.
So we get obnoxious nagware. The only thing is to look elsewhere.
Personally, I've never understood it, since nearly every mobile website is terrible. I prefer installing the app.
Seems like a key problem for mobile OS vendors to solve.
If you don't like it, why not?
Mobile websites are easier to install, fine to use for anything that doesn't require specific hardware permissions, and then when the user stops using them they stay gone. Not to mention they work on my Linux machine and my Windows machine and my iPad and my Galaxy. Forget apps.
I'm rarely looking at 1 restaurant at a time, I'm trying to compare 5, or 6 or 10.
The Yelp app has no means of doing that.
Also, I can't easily select some text in the app, like the name of a dish I'm not familiar with, and quickly trigger a web search in another tab to do some quick side reading.
I have the Yelp app installed, but 9 times out of 10 the browser is how I prefer to use search for restaurants.
Because of Yelp's frustrating site restrictions, I find myself often using Google instead, even though I prefer Yelp!!!!!!
How ridiculous is that!!
Browsers also seem to have better low bandwidth performance than most apps. Probably because doing constrained network communications is hard and only browsers have the billions of reps needed to practice getting it right. With most apps I find that network handling in poor network situations (like is all too common when traveling and looking for a restaurant) is inferior to most browsers.
So yeah, Yelp would definitely win me over if they kept their site browser and low-bandwidth friendly.
Yeah, you're right. Yelp sucks. But ya have to believe, in time, someone will put the user first and get the experience correct.
I'm sure the interface for advertisers must be pleasant, though.
It's akin to having to install a program on your laptop to view a website instead of using the browser.
I am not saying most users think like that, providing anecdotal feedback here.
So it's not exactly that Sony wants or is even asking for your location, it's Google telling you that if you give the sony app the BLE or wifi scanning functionality it wants, it would be possible for them to figure out where you're at.
That warning means they could, and so google is telling you, not that they are.
Downloading an app can take an unpredictable amount of time and bandwidth, and once you download it you may have to log in, remember or set a password, deal with 2FA, click a verification email, etc. .
like you don't have to do those on a website?
The only sites that need this are those where users are adding content and the site is moderated, and then login should only be required for moderated actions.
So Yelp should require a login to leave a review, but not to read one.
They're working on it but it's a hard problem because too many app developers, especially at household-name companies, have a history of acting in bad faith. When you're prompted to install an app you're really having to guess whether it'll chew batter or metered data, or attempt to exploit your personal data.
The OS vendors are offering better controls but it takes time to rebuild trust, especially when they're not sure whether the OS vendor quietly makes exceptions for major companies. Remember when Uber was violating Apple's policies and had no punishment for it? People will remember that for years even if they've had strict compliance ever since.
And if you can structure a restaurant review site for mobile, you have no business building anything.
And that's besides the other objections that I've seen others write here.
Some are more affected of the issues, some less.
> Seems like a key problem for mobile OS vendors to solve.
No.
Speaking from the experience of my spouse (fancy iPhone user) and I (low-end Android user) -- both our phones are normally out of memory. We take lots of family photos and videos, which fill up our phones and are tedious to delete or back up. So downloading a new app means first we have to delete something else.
A secondary but lesser reason is notifications. I know that every app will require a minute or two of effort to locate the notification settings and switch them all off.
Because it means I'll be prompted for the App Store password, which I probably won't remember (or will get wrong 3 times) and so will need to change it, but the process won't let me change the password to anything I've used in the past 12 months (so I cannot change it to whatever I though the password was). So I need to make up a whole new password, and that means my mail and everything else linked to the account will stop working on all my other devices and I'll need to update the account passwords on those too.
On-page search, copy-and-paste, and bookmarking deep in the content come for free.
The back button will behave predictably.
The browser engine has had a lot of bulletproofing on it; by comparison a lot of apps are unstable.
Updates are completely automatic- no "here's a 500mb update you won't get until weeks from now when you get to a Wifi hotspot."
Anyway, I guess they've done a lot of testing for the popup and it's better for their business model. Maybe they can show more ads in the app. But not sure why they can't just show the same ads on the website. The weekly digest email is actually great and it would keep me coming back to Quora, but they've ruined the whole experience.
Imagine if you were in a physical store. Then, after 2 minutes of walking around, someone suddenly pulled you aside, erected a bunch of cardboard walls around you and said “sorry, if you want to keep looking, you need to sign up for a store account!”. You’d mutter some curses and walk straight out the door, obviously; exactly zero people would say “why, sure!”.
Ever notice how you get a 404 occassionaly when going through the list of businesses? That was a scraping trap.
You better have mobile web figured out properly or you're not getting me as a customer.
No Reddit, I am not installing your fucking app. I clicked decline a dozen times in a row, get the hint.
[1] https://www.notion.so/The-Hyperreality-of-Big-Data-ae0aebb35...
What I've noticed is if you ask a random stranger what the 'best' is, you get the same generic, expensive fusion something made into a paste cuisine. If you ask their favorite, you find small, off-the-wall places with terrible selection, but amazing food.
The lack of good data on Yelp in the U.K. has indirectly hurt other players there too, when Apple maps first launched business location information was largely drawn from Yelp, which basically seeded Apple maps with very bad information. Locations were wrong, many businesses that simply didn’t exist anymore would appear. Granted it’s been years since I last checked, but in the first few years of Apple map’s operation it was a pretty significant issue. This methodology worked great in Cupertino I guess...
Google Reviews of the Pacific Ocean.
yelp's review quality has been on the decline as of late though. it used to be great
It’s really frustrating as sometimes searching for “Mexican restaurant” won’t include all Mexican restaurants in the map area. And will include random weird stuff. And it won’t show the top items.
Service Providers: Homeadvisor, Angie's List
No, it's not. Google sold Zagat in March to The Infatuation.
[1]https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/434gqw/i-made-my-shed-the...
I was recently trying to find the best fish restaurant in Key West and TripAdvisor was all over results with the same stupid results.
It's not 2011 anymore, back when the mobile web was trash because companies maintained both a desktop site and a severly gimped "m.desktop.com" site. Back then you pretty much had to have apps if you wanted to capture the mobile market.
Today, we have mature Add to Home Screen capability, GPS support, push notifications, widespread support for CSS3 hardware acceleration, PWAs, offline capabilities and much more.
You can now make Uber and Lyft trips on the mobile web. That is a use case where I had previously thought I would always need to have the app installed.
So with that in mind, why would I even want to open the dumpster fire that is Google Play/App Store in 2018? If it's a new company I haven't heard of, I am sure as hell not about to open the app store and download > 50MB on my data plan to check you out.
Feels weird to applaud add to home screen but not want the app. Also im on wifi so often that i guess 50mb to download an app is a non issue for me.
I am biased because I build native apps vs web apps but ive always preferred a rich native experience and design vs the web. To each their own!
For me, the "add to home screen" means the PWA launches in fullscreen without any browser chrome and that helps the experience a lot. My home screen gets a tiny bit more cluttered but that's an acceptable tradeoff.
>Note: This document pertains to OS X only. Notifications for websites do not appear on iOS.
[1] : https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ne...
P.S: not assuming IOS is mobile, yes assuming significant amount of mobile economy is IOS browsers
I'm rarely looking at 1 restaurant at a time, I'm trying to compare 5, or 6 or 10.
The Yelp app has no means of doing that.
Also, I can't easily select some text in the app, like the name of a dish I'm not familiar with, and quickly trigger a web search in another tab to do some quick side reading.
Often not all text in Apps is selectable and copy paste-able.
I have the Yelp app installed, but 9 times out of 10 the browser is how I prefer to use search for restaurants.
Browsers also seem to have better low bandwidth performance than most apps. Probably because doing constrained network communications is hard and only browsers have the billions of reps needed to practice getting it right. With most apps I find that network handling in poor network situations (like is all too common when traveling and looking for a restaurant) is inferior to most browsers.
So yeah, Yelp would definitely win me over if they kept their site browser and low-bandwidth friendly.
I think some apps feel nicer than a website ever could (because the app can take advantage of stuff like force touches better, and offer a nice custom usage of gestures). But some other places it really just feels like the app exists to push notifications...
This has happened to me more than once, with Quora being the latest offender. I don't mind the broken app links, but at least add a query param to the URL and set a cookie so that you don't show a popup and ruin the experience for your existing users.
Note: I'm not saying that you suck. You have an identity and worth separate from native apps.
They did this in response to Google. Their clicks from the google search results has been down for years [1]. What should they have done?
[1] https://www.seroundtable.com/yelp-ceo-on-google-interstitial...
Create a service people will actually want to use?
They got a penalty for creating a frustrating experience, so they replaced it with another kind of frustrating experience?
They did. It worked great and was awesome. One day, a large company changed it's rules removing most of the traffic pointed to it. It had to make changes. One attempt to survive was to move traffic to the app. I don't understand why trying to survive as a business is bad. Maybe people didn't want to click the close button on the app link -- I don't see how this should end Yelp and let google have more unchecked power to the small business reviews.
People would seek out Yelp directly. But even the search term "Yelp" itself it down roughly 50% since 2014, suggesting that less and less people would actively and directly seek out that page.
When I search "Chinese Restaurant XY" and Google ranks results that would hide the information I seek behind annoying interstitials lowly - then I can't blame them. They're doing something that is in my best interest as their user.
Right. Like Amazon not needing roads. Or Walgreens needing a working Pharmacological system.
"When I search "Chinese Restaurant XY" and Google ranks results that would hide the information I seek behind annoying interstitials lowly - then I can't blame them. They're doing something that is in my best interest as their user."
Ugh. Yes. That is called a monopoly.
So this is the behavior as GOOGLE:
1) Remove all traffic to site
2) Re-create same site on Google
3) Point all traffic that was in 1) to google.
4) The site will try to move traffic to mobile -- but users will just get upset at the site. Because the interstitial is hard to tap on.
Is this really all they need todo to capture users? Sad.
The sentence you replied to wasn't even tangentially related to the definition of a monopoly. It is something every search engine should do whether they have a monopoly or not, which is ranking things highly that are most useful to me. Sites hiding stuff behind interstitials just aren't.
Now Google sure aren't angels, but the "penalizing interstitials" part hardly is the evil part.
It might've been the creation of a competing product with a decent user experience that was evil. But then yelp was hardly sitting on a secret sauce. A 10 year old with 1 year of programming experience can build a review portal, and it'll likely be more pleasant to use than one that is intentionally crippled by it's owners.