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Comment by breck | Hacker News Reader

Yes we all know the logged in experience is terrific.

However, the anonymous experience is (was) also terrific for very different reasons. Reddit is next to unusable on mobile safari in incognito mode. Sometimes I don’t want to be tracked. I want to read whatever I want to at the moment, without having that be associated to my name in a database somewhere, and without having related ads follow me around. It’s an intellectual freedom that to many people is non-negotiable.

Reddit is now taking money from a Chinese company, where this kind of anonymity is not possible. That’s frightening to me as a longtime reddit user, both logged in and anon.

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Uh, you know you can make multiple accounts and don't need to even associate an email, right? You can browse just as anonymously logged in as out.

I'm specifically talking about Reddit mobile on incognito mode. You are bombarded by App ads and even dark pattern modals trying to get you to install the app. Compare it to HN, which is a great experience in normal or incognito mode.

I get that I can create an anon account, but I don’t want to spend 5 minutes doing that every time I open an incognito tab.

Just need to click "Next" when there is an email prompt, still available but an hard to avoid dark pattern

It's an intellectual freedom that has no precedent throughout history. If you walked into a library in the 1950s and thumbed through a book about communism, you were probably put on a list. If you walked into a privately owned book store, the owners had a right to gossip and tell others what you purchased, and I'm sure many people unfortunately made use of that liberty. This isn't new.

There are many amazing new possibilities brought about because of the Internet. Just because Stalin (and the FBI) tracked your library habits doesn’t mean we should squash out useful functionality.

You could go a few towns over and there wouldn't be any gossip because they wouldn't know who the hell you were.

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