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Comment by napsterbr | Hacker News Reader

Ugh, Reddit. Their amp version is terrible for the exact reason you mention. I know every time I see a Reddit page on Google results that I'll make two page loads instead of one (this does make a difference on my country, where everything is slow). Then, when accessing their pages on mobile browser, there's a huge banner telling me to download their app. In this same banner there is a dark UX pattern, where the call to action, giant button is to download the app, and the tiny footer text is "continue to mobile site". And apparently it doesn't matter I clicked through the banner before, it always displays the same annoying banner.

Sorry for the rant. I'm just genuinely disappointed in what the web has become.

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My favorite is that they've recently started animating their "Get the app" button in the header. That's both immediately on page load, _and_ on an interval as you're reading, meaning it's impossible to read for more than a minute or so without an animation distracting you.

Is it just me or has the mobile web taken a nosedive in recent years? Imgur won't even let you upload images from mobile anymore without their app, reddit is getting progressively more annoying, "Get the app" buttons and modals and banners are getting progressively more prominent and dark-pattern-y, and the default for all web pages now seems to be to include <meta name="viewport" conent="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> regardless of whether the developers actually tested that their web page works on small screens, meaning web pages which would've just fallen back to desktop emulation mode in the past just simply don't work at all.

all reader mode everything

Yeah, no, my experience is that reader modes usually remove blocks of code or images or paragraphs at random. I will rather have a bad reading experience than one where I always worry in the back of my mind that some cruicial part of the content is missing.

A few too many times, I have read an article, finding it a bit vague and honestly not that good, only to find that all the code blocks or some of the images were gone.

this happens to me maybe 1 or 2% of the time

But how do you know which 1 or 2% of the time it's happening?

If you don't notice that the article is missing some paragraphs, then the article has had a bad editor.

I mostly read random people's programming related blog posts. Knowing whether the article just is kind of bad at explaining what it's trying to say, or if important parts of it is missing, is really not obvious.

If paragraphs of text go missing, maybe you notice it instantly, but if it's images or code blocks which aren't explicitly mentioned in the body text of the article and just let exist to contextualize or demonstrate what the author is talking about, how will you know that something is missing? More importantly, is it even possible to develop a heuristic which catches almost all cases where parts are missing, without lots of false positives for cases which are just inexperienced authors writing bad articles?

blogs aren't usually amp, i've never seen reader mode screw up wordpress or anything. i'll concede it's probably not ideal for code blocks though.

You can siphon off much more user data from an app than a webpage, besides you can pester the user with notifications! The users love that.

I bet there are plugins for firefox mobile to remove those animations and nag window. Basically the "continue to mobile site" just close the banner since you are already on that site.

The mobile web has always been utter trash, it's just gotten worse in the last five years as more sites have rolled out mobile versions.

Disabling Javascript helps a lot, but the "request desktop site" toggle is still frequently necessary.

Imgur is, however, deserving of special mention for actively degrading their mobile experience - direct image links redirect to the mobile site now, which loads low-resolution images.

Imgur gets another point for loading images with (third-party?) JavaScript, so that it sometimes hangs on the fancy animated loading screen and I never see the picture unless I reload.

It’s unfortunate that so much work goes into UX design but at the same time the web has been going downhill for years.

Imgur's mobile site used to be really good. Now it's awful and I refuse to use it, much less be badgered into installing their damn app.

And then, after the big modal footer, and the animated button, when you tap on a link you sometimes get another different footer appear asking whether you want to view the link in the app or continue to view it in a browser.

>Is it just me or has the mobile web taken a nosedive in recent years?

It's because "desktop" web is difficult for newbies.

People like you and I love the "desktop" web because we grew up using desktop computers. We don't mind firing up our web browser, typing in a URL and poking around for tiny menu items using CSS that's optimized for big HD desktop monitors. That's what we're used to and that's what we think is normal.

Nowadays, everybody- even your grandma- is on the inernet. Everybody's using an iPhone with a tiny screen and large fonts. Opening up a web browser to browse a website is just something people no longer do.

Grandma would much rather have an app on her home screen that connects her to the world rather than a bookmark in Google Chrome.

Not everybody is a nerd like you and me. The internet has exploded in ways we never imagined, and now we're going to have to deal with everything being optimized for the average user.

I don't know, I seem to hear now and then complaints from relatively non-nerdy people about websites are bugging them about apps or don't work or force them to use their computer because the mobile page doesn't have some necessary feature. Besides, even if everyone is using, say, Reddit, from a dedicated reddit app, links they click will still open in a web view. A link to a medium.com article will still bug you about getting the app; you're there from a dedicated app, but not from _their_ app. Similarly, if an image happens to open in an imgur.com web view instead of a dedicated image viewer, there will be "Get the app" buttons hovering over the image - again, you're visiting their content from a dedicated app, but not _their_ app.

If mobile web pages did just enough to make it obvious to their users that there are apps which the user can download, I'd believe you that it's just corporations being altruistic and wanting the best user experience for their users. They don't though. They intentionally break their mobile pages by removing important functionality, they have modals which reappear for every load trying to trick you by making the big orange "Continue" button take you to the app store, while having a tiny link which is easy to miss-click taking you to the page you're actually trying to visit, they put "get the app"-buttons _over_ the content, sometimes even with no close button, they try to distract you from the content you're trying to read by making their "Get the app" buttons fucking animate around.

This is not just corporations being altruistic and keeping their users' well-being at heart. This is corporations wanting to optimize for user interaction and data collection, and the best way to do that is to make their users use a dedicated app for just their content, where the user will always be reminded that they should check Imgur whenever they unlock their phones, they can send their users a notification about what's trending on /r/AskReddit if they detect their users haven't used their app for a while, they can make sure their users won't leave for a competitor as easily.

reddit user:

> 2) Can you stop the "Download the app" popups showing up so frequently on mobile?

spez (Steve Huffman):

> 2) They've been gone a while, but we are chasing down an issue with incognito users seeing it more often. Please let me know if that's the case, or if you are having a different experience.*

Also talking about dark patterns: https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/9ld746/you_h...

Imgur is full of coercive patterns too. On mobile it has a permenant "get app" button hovering over the content and you can't see user profiles or other social interaction stuff. It says you need to install the app to use them, even though they work fine on the desktop website.

Just went there and there's a pulsing 'use app' button on the top banner and an 'open in the official app' non-scrolling pop-in taking up the bottom 1/5 or so of the screen. So they're, uh, not gone at all.

Why in the world would anybody browse reddit on anything other than the unofficial apps? Their website is awful too.

Unofficial apps make browsing 100x faster and less annoying.

I only visit reddit when friends link off to it - I rather not be giving reddit any traffic at all if I could help it, so downloading an app just doesn't make sense for me.

This issue is compounded by the fact that you need a search engine to find old reddit posts and AMP-free DDG doesn’t have the last year and custom date filters Google does.

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