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Comment by michaelmrose | Hacker News Reader

Reddit lives on ad revenue. Mobile web reddit is not in fact incredibly optimal which is why a bunch of third party apps exist. These third party apps make it impossible to show ads save for promoted posts which people don't seem to like. Thus the official reddit app.

I prefer "Reddit is Fun" which seems to load faster than mobile web reddit and notify me on comment replies.

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> Reddit lives on ad revenue. Mobile web reddit is not in fact incredibly optimal which is why a bunch of third party apps exist.

That's a problem that reddit creates for itself as it purposedly degrades the site's experience on mobile devices with tons of dark patterns to try to push users to install the company's official mobile app.

A primary reason why I don't switch to the app version for websites I visit (like Reddit, occasionally) is that I miss the ad and tracking blocker features I get in my browser.

Both Reddit and Twitter are intentionally designed to be annoying, so as to encourage you to install their apps. So frustrating.

Twitter had this some problem and went with the same solution of cutting out 3rd party apps. This is the age old piracy debate relived. People aren't using 3rd party apps because they want to skip ads, they are using them because they provide better functionality/user experience. Companies stupidly allow a 3rd party to take over all of their market share on mobile, and then make up complaints when they finally get around to making their own app.

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