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Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

I don't agree, for one b/c Reddit is a links aggregator and opening links works best in a full browser instead of a shitty in-app web view, plus it's the little things like ability to copy/paste or go back to a previous page, that are sometimes emulated in native apps, but never work well.

But even if you think Reddit works better in a native app for you, that's by design. Reddit is making the web experience shitty on purpose, to drive users to their app.

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"Reddit is a links aggregator" feels pretty inaccurate. Some subreddits, especially the big and lowest common denominator ones may be mostly link sharing, but most of the ones I'm on are communities sharing questions, opinions, jokes, images, and stories.

Yup. Playing a difficult Minecraft pack the first stop is r/feedthebeast to look at other people's advice. Later I'd return with questions most of which will be FAQs. Example, last week I made Project Ozone 3's fluid container that has an infinite amount of any liquid you put inside it. First question I had was, how do I empty this to put something else in? Because if the answer is "You can't" I need to pick very carefully what to use it for. The trouble with the correct answer "Shift left click a Gauge Dropper in the UI" is that I thought I'd tried that. So did lots of people, but Reddit has a comment thread patiently walking us through each step and yup, it works.

You can simply configure web pages to open directly in browser.

And a dedicated app is able to handle certain links better than native browsers, like RES on desktop. One example would be to directly open the image instead of Imgur page.

Also if we're talking about Android, I don't feel webview is too much different from a native browser now; all the histories, auto-fills are shared with my main browser (Chrome). Of course, it is just my PERSONAL use case.

There are many many hugely active communicates which are far more than link aggregators on reddit. Communities with 100s of 1000s or subscribers.

You missed one critical feature: tabs.

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