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Comment by Lucasoato | Hacker News Reader

I really can't understand why Reddit is pushing the app so hard. I mean, keep that as an option, but why creating an awful UX for the mobile web users? You gather more data but the product is worse, less users are staying and you're losing value at the end...

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You drive high ad revenue with their mobile app, with all the data mining. The old reddit experience was destroyed to drive ad revenue, they don’t care about UX.

also, beware of reddit URLs bouncing through out.reddit.com — which tracks all link clicks on reddit across mobile and desktop (profiling interests), regardless of login state

Push notifications. Once someone is hooked on the site a notification can get them back into the dopamine feedback loop very easily. I think this is why restaurant chains have started giving people free food to install their apps too (along with all the data they can sell now.)

I think smartphones would be much less popular if people understood why corporations love "apps" so much. It's nothing like the older PC world full of software more or less for its own sake.

> Push notifications.

Do people not turn these off? When I get an unwanted notification, I immediately withdraw permissions to send notifications, or even uninstall the app

bold of you to assume that the average user knows how to disable anything on their phone

Kind of scary to imagine the experience of such an average user. "Evil" is not a bad word to describe the attitudes of such apps and services.

I suppose you need to have some idea of how the system is structured to even consider turning certain "features" off.

If your on HN you're already in a very filtered group that is less likely to be passive on abusive technology.

> You gather more data

That's it. That's the whole story. Mobile apps provide more opportunity to spy on the user.

Easy, harder for users to block the ads in apps. Apple / Google should allow add blockers for the entire OS.

Heh, Google adding ad blockers.... I think you might be on the wrong timeline.

Pihole works well here but obviously not end user friendly.

It is possible with SNI blocking to adblock on Android, even when apps use custom DNS revolvers (though not as effective). I built https://github.com/jawline/Puffer a while ago but haven't had the time to improve it much past proof of concept.

i use this on ios: https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id691121579?pt=425087...

it’s a vpn profile that just intercepts dns requests locally and screens with a hosts file

Series F funding. They don't know how to run lean and make themselves profitable so they run a grift on investors and sweet talk them with stories about high value data collection.

Increased engagement and better tracking.

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