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Comment by user3939382 | Hacker News Reader

Nothing could be worse than the crap reddit has been doing for the last year or so to force users (or from their perspective, useds, as rms likes to say) to download its app or login. First they outright blocked viewing posts unless logged in, then they disabled that, and now brought it back so that random posts are blocked from viewing with a message "This hasn't been reviewed" whatever that means.

Someone at reddit said, hey we can't be honest with users that we're trying to force them to use our app, we need to lie to them while we're doing it!

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I'm kinda hoping that reddit will finally remove old.reddit and the old design, not that I think the new design is good but it would finally make me drop reddit from my social media addiction.

Yeah the new reddit is unusable. Not borderline unusable, but like actually useless. I can't believe they released it and I can't believe people actually use it.

The people that I know who use new reddit, don't even know old reddit exists. They chuckle and say "are you using a website from 2005?" when they see me on old reddit. One of them even works in IT.

Yes I am using a website from 2005. And it's superior in every way.

Agree nothing more hostile than going to reddit on a mobile device these days.

I ended up buying a blocker to block Reddit on my device because of the pain. It’s a shame I couldn’t stop visiting the website just from willpower though.

pihole deploy, blacklist reddit.com

what's there to buy? :)

When you’re on an apple iPhone, everything’s to buy

Maybe Elon buys Reddit next /s

Apollo has the ability to intercept clicks on reddit links and open them in the app. It works pretty well.

If you want just to browse reddit then you can do that through teddit or libreddit front-end instances. And with extensions like Privacy Redirect [1] you can do it automatically.

There are also front-ends for twitter and instagram but these seem to be most faulty - sometimes it takes a while to reach a stable instance and extension tends to overwrite manually selected instances.

Edit: seems there's already a fork of mentioned extension but it's available for manual installation [2]

[1] - https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect

[2] - https://github.com/libredirect/libredirect

Reddit is doing this because it works and has real impact on the bottom line, and effectively zero impact on user retention. As long as users continue to behave the way they do it would be fiscally irresponsible to shareholders for the company not to do it, same with Twitter.

If you don't like it the best thing you can do is to bounce and never use the product again. Users doing this en masse is the only thing that will get companies to do anything differently.

This is such a short sighted thinking, aggravating users because it makes some "user retention" metric look good.

You can either remain the central forum hub of the internet, or be replaced when the next big thing comes around. Just think how many major websites came and went during those last short 20 years.

> think how many major websites came and went during those last short 20 years.

Notably in the context of this conversation, Digg.

> Nothing could be worse than the crap reddit has been doing for the last year or so to force users (or from their perspective, useds, as rms likes to say) to download its app or login.

They’re doing pretty good… at driving away users. I rarely ever look at Reddit now, particularly compared to a couple years before the change.

i.reddit.com works for the most part on mobile (isn't great with media though).

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