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Comment by petee | Hacker News Reader

Yes! I can't wait till its gone altogether. The whole AMP experience from an end user, really sucked. Pick a reason, but nearly every article always has something broken, missing, or misrepresented. Fifty percent of the time I would either need to click the original link, or give up on the content.

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I used to Google things on mobile and append `site:reddit.com` to filter out SEO-laden blogspam and zero in on the familiar confirmation bias of other reddit addicts. Then I had to tolerate the following antipattern of the modern web:

1. tap a Google search result link

2. tap the tiny "i" icon on the left side of the stupid AMP page header to display the actual URL of the page I'm trying to navigate to

3. tap the displayed URL itself in the AMP header

4. close reddit's "this looks better in the app!" bottom banner

5. scroll down and tap "VIEW ALL X COMMENTS"

So fast. So usable.

On the bright side, this rigmarole has really done wonders for my productivity because I've simply stopped bothering.

Reddit mobile is deliberately terrible, amp or not. They want you to use their app.

Use "old.reddit.com" (old style, best on desktop but ok on mobile) or "i.reddit.com" (minimalist, for mobile) if you want something usable.

If you log into Reddit you can configure reddit.com to use the old interface. (at least for now).

No you can't, it will pretend to accept your preference and then randomly reset it after a few days.

Weird. I've been using it for months with non-issue. Another comment suggested that maybe it doesn't last on mobile?

Anecdotally, that has not been the case for me. Logged in from any device, I see the old reddit.

For me on Safari, if I leave that tab open, ok, old for awhile. But if I open a new tab, I get the new garbage regardless of my “settings”.

Only option left is to find a content blocker for iPhone that auto-redirects www to old.

It’s really awful, but I’m hopeful these anti-patterns and other Reddit issues (because what is a preference cookie anyhow!?) accelerate alternatives.

I've used it for a couple of years without it resetting

That works on desktop, not on mobile.

Sure it does. I’m defaulting to old reddit without old in the url while browsing on mobile.

Yes, but every couple days it switches back and you have to “request desktop site”.

And it forces a super wide layout that requires either zooming out microscopic font size or scrolling horizontally for every line of text.

there's also this browser extension to always do that with reddit links, being logged in or not: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...

Even old.reddit.com, coming from a google search kinda sucks. Only top level comments, after a few comments there is a more comment button then a GIANT section for posts from the same subreddit, then finally the rest of the comments. You basically have to go to the nav bar and hit enter (to get the context of coming from a google search out of the site).

> close reddit's "this looks better in the app!" bottom banner

I hate that. It's self-fulfulling really isn't it, may as well simply read 'this banner not present in the app'.

A bit like those joke signs warning you not to steal/deface the sign.

At least they stopped with the "you deserve the best"

Very true.... I’ve suffered the exact same process for years. Step 2 is the worst, not sure why but sometimes it’s incredibly hard to tap the i button.

New reddit is is a very strange design. I always thought the way it hides comment threads as a link to a new page was just a mobile thing, but no, that’s the design.

The old site is so so much better. Trying to get to it from a google search is infuriating, especially if you are trying to view multiple results. Imagine doing the above steps 5 times for 5 different results!

Sadly Reddit has been A/B testing changes where they decide to hide the X button in that banner.

To be fair, Reddit itself is mostly to blame for the UX hellhole it's become. AMP certainly doesn't help but they have made so many shortsighted decisions recently wrt app nags etc completely of their own accord in their ongoing weird push towards engagement/monetisation.

I don’t go anywhere without my “turn off AMP” and “kill dickbars” bookmarklets.

Can you publish them please?

    javascript:(function()%7B(function%20()%20%7Bvar%20i%2C%20elements%20%3D%20document.querySelectorAll('body%20\*')%3Bfor%20(i%20%3D%200%3B%20i%20%3C%20elements.length%3B%20i%2B%2B)%20%7Bif%20(getComputedStyle(elements%5Bi%5D).position%20%3D%3D%3D%20'fixed')%20%7Belements%5Bi%5D.parentNode.removeChild(elements%5Bi%5D)%3B%7D%7D%7D)()%7D)()

  javascript:var%20url%20=%20false;var%20links%20=%20document.getElementsByTagName('link');Object.keys(links).forEach(function(key)%7Bif(links%5Bkey%5D.rel%20!==%20'canonical')%7Breturn;%7D;url%20=%20links%5Bkey%5D.href;%7D);if(!url)%7B%20alert('No%20Canonical%20URL');%20%7D;if(url)%7Bdocument.location%20=%20url;%7D;

Many thanks!

How do I use this?

Google bookmarklet

It is better in the app, just usually not one of their creation...

I wish people understood how much power and information apps installed on phones had compared to websites.

“Nudging” to install an app you use to collect a ton more data because you intentionally broke the website is fucking evil.

Maybe someone has a Reddit app that isn’t a data mining jerk. IDK. But if not, I still prefer to give no one extra data over just not giving it to Reddit.

What information do apps have access to (without asking permission) that websites don't have?

I am also happy the AMP reddit links are gone - because it was a way to bypass my reddit block on my phone.

To get a quick readable version you always add a i. to the URL, so i.reddit.com. I am afraid of the day they will remove that.

On my iPhone I setup a shortcut that will take a reddit url and open it natively in Narwhal. It's very handy and I'm not a huge fan of the official reddit app.

You could've just used Firefox and old Reddit.

I changed to FF mobile just because of amp..

Ain't going back either, the URL bar is at the bottom. It's magical ^^

The pre-amp world was also completely utterly terrible though.

Do you remember mobile news websites circa 2015? It was full of so much ad tech that if a site didn't make your phone hot and crash the browser the best experience you could possibly get would be a couple ad and email form click throughs, maybe a video fading in over the entire content like some trashy mobile app, followed by a scroll jack, a backbutton jacking, then more videos just magically appearing in between paragraphs pushing them apart like some kind of infestation, it was just utterly unusable.

The text that you were lucky enough to catch would quickly fly up and down the screen as more ads start rendering and load in at every div tag with multiple jingles and voice-overs for car insurance and refinancing playing out of your phone all at once. You think "well maybe I really don't care that much about what that diplomat said after all". It was a complete waste of time. They were almost all like this as if there was some secret competition among the news sites, like as if some coveted award was at stake for the craziest most unusable experience.

I do recall, but the problem is the of the list of prior-issues you present, half those issues still persist in AMP, minus motion/fading effects. There are still so many ads it bogs down; ads break up content; there are articles indicated as text but masquerading as videos surrounded by ads. Alot of AMP articles are simply a link telling you to continue to the full page! All seems like new forms of the same old.

I'm not sure how its even possible, but I encountered one page I swear hijacked the back button.

The back button hijacking is easy. You can "push" something into the "navigation stack" and then detect the "state change" of the back button. There's a few pretty simple ways to do this without magic.

The website you're thinking of that does it is slashdot, sorry for the bad news. It's long been merely a shadow of the past.

Amp initially didn't allow JavaScript. It had a bunch of restrictions.

I honestly think it was good people doing it for a good cause but then the corporate meat grinding machine had to process it and they turned it into a power play and data mining operation.

Once again, the solution is inescapable both for /. and the goog; take big money out of tech. Every significant computer revolution basically started on that premise. Time to roll it again. Consolidated power breeds incompetency.

Our most noble task in life is to make the necessary possible and then inevitable

Ah thanks, I didn't realize they allowed JavaScript now....I thought part of the AMP was to prevent such nonsense, no wonder it's broken

I dont check /. anymore, one of the major news outlets

It's not AMP's fault that some sites refuse to limit themselves to AMP's good practices.

I had been under the impression that part of the AMP ecosystem or whatever was to enforce those practices. Otherwise, what's even the point of AMP? If anyone can do anything we're just back to the junk web again

Until last year or so, Google intentionally gave a worse version of google search when using Firefox on Android. I installed a user-agent-spoofer to pretend to be Chrome, and I got the perfectly functioning page. But then I also got results including AMP links, so quickly disabled the extension and went back to the old ugly result page...

9 out of 10 times AMP pages in Firefox failed to be scrollable. Like the static/fixed top and bottom banner somehow screwed up scroll behavior.

Isn’t this just your average news site on the web though?

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