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Scoundreller

Reddit keeps asking me if I want to download their app or Open in Safari... regardless of which browser I’m using.

Not every iOS user is using Safari!!!!

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Don't you want to view it in the official Reddit app for the best experience?

No, no I don't. And the official reddit app is not the best experience.

It’s a matter of time before they acquire the top app or two and block the rest.

Eh I doubt the Apollo guy would be interested in selling, but I've been surprised before.

They could bully him into selling, same way as Twitter has slowly strangulated 3rd party clients.

Guess it's a matter of time before I stop using Reddit then.

I already ran to Relay as an escape from Reddit's astonishingly garbage mobile browser experience. Next stop is the door.

https://reddit.com/.compact

https://i.reddit.com

That’s what use and consider to be the best reddit mobile experience. The regular reddit mobile site doesn’t seem to render on iOS Safari properly most of the time, probably by design.

To repeat myself, reddit, in most cases, should be avoided anyway so you will gain by doing so.

IIRC the official app is from them buying AlienBlue, which used to be the best one on iOS. These days it's Apollo.

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.

Weirdly, most of the features Apollo puts behind the subscription tier are features I think foster unhealthy engagement with Reddit and I'm just as happy to not have hanging over me.

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.

Same boat here, I've got Pro but have no desire for notifications.

I don't use the iOS versions, but IIRC they never really did anything with AlienBlue after the purchase, and the "official" mobile app is a totally separate project.

It was an acqui-hire. He wrote the new reddit app, too.

No he didn't. This was the developer, he's been gone from reddit for over 2 years now: https://www.reddit.com/user/jase

It's not even close to the best experience.

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.

They don't clarify who the experience is best for. Is it best for the user? No. Is it best for their business model? Most likely.

What would you recommend? I bought Reddit sync pro years ago and I'm happy with it. My only complaint is the in-app imgur browser doesn't always work.

This reminds me of Tumblr, which I'm sure none of you have heard of or remember :) But seriously it's always like "Open in the Tumblr app for the best experience." I finally gave it a try and it was a serious downgrade in my opinion!

But you did give it a try.

t. Tumblr marketing department

"so the touchbar has a steep learning curve [for you]" - Apple to me on phone asking to switch to none touchbar mbp. Also probably any website app evangelist.

Trying to annoy me into shaping my behavior into what you want means you 'win': I'll stop talking to you your web server entirely, and screw your app.

There is no site (other than my own) so unique that I can't find a replacement.

I wish they'd offer the option to open in Relay or whatever your preferred app is..the official Reddit app sucks.

After their bizarre cartoon-like remake I feel the best reddit experience is converging on none at all. In particular reading deeply into reply-heavy threads has devolved into rapidly scanning thin columns of text. They've managed to migrate the experience of reading a poorly designed website on mobile to the desktop!

I gave up and used their app after being hit with that 100s of times. Whether it is a viable long term strategy or not they probably are driving ad revenue from it, bit of a sad state of affairs if you have to be hostile to your users to build a sustainable business.

The Reddit mobile app is so shit. It would be less annoying if their app was actually usable but the website is so much easier to use. I'm so tired of them trying to force me to use their bad app, using shady practices to make me accidentally click on links that open the app.

I actually wrote some ad blocking rules to remove all of these Reddit annoyances. I've been meaning to submit them to one of the mobile-focused Adblock lists. Here are the elements that you need to hide. I like 1 BlockerX for this:

    .snackbar
    .xpromopopup
    .topbutton
    .xpromopill

You are doing God's work

I like "promo pill". That's exactly what it feels like.

I leave these on to remind me how far reddit has fallen and to generally avoid the site.

God, Reddit was the bomb 8-9 years ago!

Wish I could add those to mobile Safari :P

Install an ad blocker that supports hiding page elements. I added these to 1Blocker on iOS.

That one costs money. Is there a free blocker? I use Firefox Focus, but it does not let me add custom elements.

Adguard is free and supports custom elements. As a bonus, it’s open source. These are the rules I use:

www.reddit.com##.xpromopill

www.reddit.com##.active.xpromopopup

www.reddit.com##.amp.snackbar

www.reddit.com##.navframe > .xpromominimal.dualpartinterstitial

www.reddit.com##.xpromoadfeed

THANK YOU!

I did not know this was possible! Thank you so much!

You can also turn off the ads by opening the menu and clicking "Ask to open in App?".

They prompt you endlessly on Android as well with a huge "CONTINUE" button to install their app versus a tiny "or go to the mobile site" link to stay in the browser with just the last 2 words being the hyperlink. This annoying choice takes up fully 1/3 of the screen.

Yup, and even when you switch to old mode it frequently reverts when you use the back button. They are intentionally making the web mobile experience horrible because they think that you'll be more engaged if you use the app.

So now that reddit’s Death has begun, what’s our alternative?

Old Reddit died with the Ellen Pao fracas. New Reddit is doing well; the new web UI is still weird for people with an Old Reddit background, but on mobile you don't confuse it with the website you loved in 2008-11 -- yet it's pretty good at what it does: entertainment for the broader public.

Old reddit died well before Pao. I still get value out of Reddit, but you just have to use it in a different way now, like any community that blows up and goes mainstream.

Digg?

While I think the redesign is bloated and slower its not unusable and you can opt out of it at present.

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.

>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.

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.

Disclaimer: self-promotion

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.

Mostly happy member here. Depth is less than reddit, but discussion quality easily tops it.

How are you going to pay for it?

Happy Tildes user here. I believe Deimorz has some stated plans on how it will pay for itself (non-profit, donations, etc) but here's the thing:

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.

Even at this point, the actual bills are already covered several times over, and the site could probably easily grow to at least 100x its current size without needing any more donations. The only real question is whether I continue working on it full-time, but keeping it running isn't in doubt at all, and I can't imagine that changing. There's no investor/owner pressure that would result in it needing to shut down: https://docs.tildes.net/faq#what-if-you-dont-get-enough-dona...

It's much easier when your goal is simply "sustainable" and not "unicorn or bust".

taking out the cost of the workforce (R&D, sales, associated GnA) working on revenue generation, ie. ads, analytics, etc. i'd suppose the rest of the costs of a typical Web2.0 site (like Twitter, FB, Reddit) comes down to basically hosting only and isn't that high - can probably be easily covered by donations. Or a real example - without meaningful monetization and thus related costs, WhatApp was fine with 55 employees serving $19B worth of user engagement.

I would like to join!

Hey, I'd like an invite please. Also I would be interested in discussing your philosophy with you. I run a similar "startup". We have 2 apps in the social recommendations area (currently focused on maps/places). One is a mobile app in private beta atm. You can sign up for an invite once we go public here: BIBIMAPP.COM. The other is a crowd source mapping app. It's very rough atm and we haven't promoted it at all but you can find it here : mapbeet.bibimapp.com. Feel free to reach out to me on the email in my profile.

DM an invite plz.

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)?

Hacker News doesn't have a messaging system.

Try https://i.reddit.com. It's super barebones and hasn't been updated in years, but it's also super light and fast and still works just fine.

Despite its early iPhone-era skin which may not appeal to all, this is a great find. And so fast compared to the new mobile. Thanks

It does the same on Android asking to open in "Chrome", regardless of whether I am using Brave or Firefox. However, the click always opens in the current browser for me regardless of clicking on chrome.

Technically everyone on iOS is using Safari - Firefox, Chrome, and Edge all use the same rendering engine.

They're not just different chrome over Safari. At least networking can be different, and Chrome at least does use it's own networking code.

There is a setting in the hamburger menu to stop the pop up. I was annoyed for too long before i googled the nag screen.

To be fair, iOS offers no capability to list the browsers a user has installed on their phone. So they have to assume Safari, which is a fair assumption for 90% of users, I imagine.

Doesn’t the browser string make it clear which browser is being used?

To be fair, asking this for every single session ignoring my answer that has been the same the past 1000 times makes it a stupid, anti-user action.

I dearly hope my bank raises a flag if I decide to choose a language other than English on the ATM. I’ve only chosen it 9134 times in a row.

"Congratulations, Scoundreller, on learning a new language. As a reward we've temporarily lifted your maximum withdrawal limit!"

Not sure if joke about you choosing english and the machine being shit or just not knowing another language to make the job more authentic.

It's kind of a double joke. The machine is dumb because it doesn't remember what language you chose. The second part is that if his language suddenly changes, it's probably not him. Removing the withdrawal limit allows the person with his stolen credentials to get more money.

Just FYI, this is controlled by the ATM itself and your language choice isn’t stored nor passed onto your bank.

I'm not sure if this has changed, but I remember a Chase(?) ATM asking me if I wanted to save the setting.

Maybe it's not a thing anymore?

If you had a Chase card they could use some proprietary way of saving the language, but for other banks there's no standard way of saving the language (on the card for example), so the only solution is for the ATMs to maintain an online (since you're unlikely to return to the same ATM) mapping of card numbers to languages, and that would bring a huge liability.

Chase has a bunch of ATM settings you can configure in the web app. Auto printing receipts without a prompt is one of them.

Gmail somehow knows. Every time I click a link, it asks to open in Safari or for me to install Chrome. I check the never ask prompt, but it always asks.

Well to be fair the reddit app is wayyyyyy better than the web interface and works amazingly well.

It constantly nagged me to re-enable notifications and link redirection out of the app is spotty. Not to mention ads were more frequent. I use the old interface on all devices and I find it superior.

I have literally never had any issues and I have all notifications turned off. I have never had any issue using their link redirection. I'm using an iphone 7 and never update my OS or any of my apps.

I also like the app more than the website, and the new website over the old one.

This is such an incredibly irritating feature. Fwiw, if you're logged in, you can turn it off with an account preference toggle.

Every iOS user using any iOS browser is in reality using Safari's WebKit dressed differently.

Whatever I click on those options doesn't donejaat I want, which is to stay on the page im already on. The site is total garbage if you are not logged in to use the personalised settings and it's all over the day old.reddit.com is turned off

If someone sends you a link in Hangouts on iOS, it asks you if you want to open it in Chrome or Safari. I don't have Chrome installed, and I use Firefox on my iPhone. Deleted Hangouts after that and only use Hangouts in Pidgin on a desktop.

I like to use Safari on iOS because it supports ad blocking. Not sure if Chrome now supports it. But I see no reason to switch...

Use old.reddit.com

But that takes you to do the desktop site. Not ideal.

I prefer the alternative not-using.reddit.com

There's also https://i.reddit.com for mobile.

In most cases, reddit should be avoided at all costs anyway so you now have another excuse not to go there.

Every browser on iOS including Chrome has to use Safari's render engine

Try reddit.com/.compact

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