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Comment by dimmke | Hacker News Reader

Reddit, making a blatantly obvious case for why third party apps are necessary on a post about stopping third party apps: https://i.imgur.com/3yEJ4oX.jpg

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It's not the first time I'm seeing this and, having worked at places that have mobile apps and a ton of UGC, this is as illogical as things get.

Mobile apps go into stores. App stores (especially the Apple app store) have many rules about UGC in apps. Including rules that may be incompatible with ToS of your service. Like the rule saying that NSFW content must not exist.

On your website, on the other hand, you're the king. You set your own rules. There's no one to tell you what can and can't be done unless you're breaking laws so hard some government notices.

So by virtue of that, there's usually LESS content available in the app than on the website. This, though? You have to look at this content in the app BECAUSE it is unreviewed? This is bonkers. This is completely backwards to everything my own experience tells me.

This is just a lame excuse to make you install the app.

I had this exact thought. I believe Reddit is the #1 app/service people point to when discussing how inconsistently this rule is applied (Reddit is simply too big to impose that kind of sanction on, even for Apple.)

I believe I encountered a situation like this before, and what it really means is that you just have to log in to see it, and Reddit is just lying to you.

I may be wrong in this case, though.

seems to work when being logged in on the mobile site. they're just really really damn pushy for that stupid app

i.reddit.com in that case

Edit: oh no, that seems to just point to the desktop old interface now. Weird.

About 2 months ago they killed the i and .compact versions of the site.

Sad :( I rarely use it on mobile and I didn't know this yet.

I bet it's only a matter of time before old goes

I get the (new) mobile site with it.

What it really means is that you accidentally went to www.reddit.com, and you should have gone to old.reddit.com.

You can also request the desktop version of the site.

It’s amazing how much worse the new redesign is. I’m not usually a “new is bad” kind of guy but it’s just way less functional. Apparently a majority of people use it at this point though, and I guess “new” is relative here.

It depends on what you’re trying to achieve with it. If you’re consuming, scrolling through content and memes and such but mostly not dwelling on things, the new one is way better than the old one. But if you’re using it as forums (announcements, discussions, that kind of thing—e.g. /r/rust for me), the new one is hopelessly bad, and the old one is rather good. Reddit is clearly not at all interested in the latter class any more.

Only a matter of time until old.Reddit goes away too

They sort of promised it wouldn't and I believe them. I would be willing to bet that in 5 years old.reddit.com still exists

>If you're seeing this message, that means JavaScript has been disabled on your browser, please enable JS to make Imgur work.

But why would I need javascript to view a JPG?

1. Because their design is bad.

2. Because the number of people who disable JavaScript is a rounding error.

Reddit's image hosting implemented blocking direct linking to image files and started substituting an HTML-ish page like imgur does a few months back. After much complaint they actually fixed it so that the image in the hijacked URL's HTML is a real image tag (<img src="ht..) with a real URL to the image file. For a while it had been a javascript defined custom html element (web components) instead of an <img>.

So at least they did that right. imgur has been failing hard at this for ~5+ years.

Their design is to control how the uploaded images are accessed and minimize the load on the backend.

They don't want hotlinking so the image data doesn't have a permanent url. They only want the backend to be responsible for sending image data. This then requires an image viewer written in javascript. This is not a bad design. This is fulfilling business requirements successfully and efficiently.

EDIT: efficient for the business not for your browser

It doesn't just require Javascript to load the image, it requires Javascript from 13 different domains (thanks, NoScript.)

- imgur.com

- btloader.com

- ccgateway.net

- cloudflare

- facebook

- google analytics

- media-lab.ai

- sascdn.com

- scorecardresearch

- stretchsquirrel

- amazon adsystem

- assembly exchange

- run.app

3 of these, imgur, cloudflare, and medialab appear to be the minimum to load the image, and also seems to make everything on the page work (upvoting, commenting, etc.)

I don't think it's efficiency even on their end they're looking for, its tracking and revenue maximization. Which is the reason I block Javascript.

EDIT: actually it seems like you just need imgur and medialab unblocked, so just 2 of the 13.

> I don't think it's efficiency even on their end they're looking for, its tracking and revenue maximization.

These are not mutually exclusive. In fact both these things are the whole point.

> EDIT: actually it seems like you just need imgur and medialab unblocked, so just 2 of the 13.

Yeah exactly.

You don't.

https://rimgo.pussthecat.org/3yEJ4oX.jpg

https://codeberg.org/video-prize-ranch/rimgo

The image "https://i.imgur.com/3yEJ4oX.jpg" cannot be displayed because it contains errors.

imgur has gone to shit as well. I'd imagine the trend is happening across most sites with surveillance as their business model.

I also don't understand why discussion of this topic rarely touches on adversarial interoperability? Explicitly published and versioned APIs are a nicety. If companies are going to choke them, then why not just use the same API the web interface uses rather than paying the Danegeld?

That error happens because your browser is broken. I had the same issue because my image viewer assumed i.imgur would always serve images but they've recently been serving redirections and html (presumably to force people to see ads).

The obtuse message seems to be Firefox's fault, but even with Chromium or wget I just get an HTTP 429. "Too many requests" from an IP I have exclusive use of, which hasn't tried to access imgur in days. No, the site is just broken because some business knob decided that breaking the site might help revenue.

It's obvious they're trying to push the app as hard as they can get away with, but I'm confused as to how "unreviewed" content relates to the viewer using the web or the app. If anything, I'd expect the opposite; app stores sometimes object to spicy content.

Yep, nearly any important posts seem to be labeled as NSFW so you won’t be able to see them other than how Reddit wants to have you see them. This is the future we paid for with enormous amounts of VC money.

I have Reddit posts auto open in Apollo but specifically went to this one in browser to see how bad it’s gotten. It’s not just an annoying pop up. You literally cannot use most of Reddit in a mobile browser now.

And I came from the link in this post which was supposed to go to old.reddit

That’s how dire things are. I have been a reddit user since 2009, almost 15 years. But I’m not a nostalgic person. As awful as it has gotten it’s still the place where most discussion on the internet happens (and has happened for over a decade.) That can’t just be replaced overnight. They’re sitting on a huuuuge amount of content that is fully indexed by search engines too. This would be a huge blow to the internet in general I think. All so they can have a Groupon style IPO.

old.reddit.com is tolerable on mobile.

I have bypassed that in the past on mobile by switching to desktop view (ugh).

Switching to old.reddit works for me.

It works for now; I wouldn't bet on it still working in 6 months. They've already killed i.reddit (the old non-shittified mobile web layout) "in an effort to streamline the experience and reduce the number of ways you can access Reddit on the web" [1].

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/11zso11/an_improved...

Reddit is making the case for why social media platforms need to be decentralized.

Or maybe just a non-venture-backed, privately owned company who isn’t beholden to shareholders and isn’t greedy? A “man and pop shop” but as a social media company.

Any owned platform is going to eventually transition to what you describe. Even nonprofits like Wikipedia wind up there.

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