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Comment by profmonocle | Hacker News Reader

Reddit is a really weird one to me. Their mobile site is very nice - so nice that I don't feel any desire to install the app - aside from the fact that they desperately want me to stop using it and push the app at every opportunity. (Recently they even decided to block NSFW-flagged content from the mobile site unless you're logged in - you get a box telling you to install the app to see it.)

What I don't get is why they put all the effort into maintaining a high-quality mobile site if they hate people using it this much. Just get rid of it and load the desktop version. Pop-ups saying "Reddit works better in the app" would be less off-putting if the alternative was an unoptimized desktop site, rather than a perfectly good mobile site whose only downside was said pop-ups.

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You must be using a different reddit website, the one I know is horrible. It's slow, it's buggy, videos don't always work without a refresh after waiting 10 seconds to be able to click play. The UI is all wrong:

for example, you open the comments of a post, it opens a faux-modal with a X button. You tap it, it closes the post but opens the subreddit. It doesn't go back to where you were.

Another example is how to collapse a thread on the comments you need to press the empty space beside the username?!?!

It's so slow and wrong that I've built my own front-end, but it's virtually impossible to load reddit videos correctly...

Maybe they mean old.reddit.com. I use it on mobile and it's fine. Fast, not too many pushes to change to the app, r/friends/comments works.

Twitter on mobile has become almost unusable (unable to see most content without making an account), though I've found a workaround: it's not totally broken in incognito windows, so I guess that's how I read it now.

Same with Medium, can only see posts on Incognito mode...

I actually use the old desktop version of Reddit on my phone, because I find all other versions of the site worse. All of the other ones have a bloated UI with giant elements while hiding useful elements.

My only gripe is the upvote, downvote, and " comments" buttons are a little too small compared to the other elements. Oh, and that new slide or multi picture UI sucks.

It loads quickly too. Quicker than the mobile versions, which is ironic.

The more users who download the app, the higher their rankings are. The higher the rankings, the more users see and download your app. It's very obvious why they're doing this

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