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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

It's not accidental at all that the first party apps suck. Any banner that says "it is better with our mobile app" should have a steaming pile of poo emoji next to it.

The whole point of the new reddit (and many other sites like Anandtech and Tony Ortega's blog) is to make you click on ads accidentally. Someday the world will wake up and realize this is not just annoying but it is good old fashioned fraud... but it will still take a while.

One advantage of a mobile app over a mobile web site is that you can use the accelerometer and other sensors to predict when somebody is going to click on something and you can trigger a layout shift and... oops!

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Agreed apart from:

> One advantage of a mobile app over a mobile web site is that you can use the accelerometer

Accelerometer API access has been available on mobile web for ~ a decade. I think it'd actually be more trouble than it's worth to listen for a "tilt" to shift the view and misdirect the user's tap. Most UI's just put the ad dangerously close to an element that's also interactive, or style the ad to look nearly identical to the other content in the feed, like reddit. It's to make you encounter ads and maybe tap on them purposefully or accidentally. They will happily take either.

In a mobile browser, this would also be not as easy as in an app because the permission would have to be requested on-demand (or on page load), if I am not mistaken.

E.g. this demo triggers a permission prompt:

https://sensor-js.xyz/demo.html

I also agree with your other points though.

It didn't trigger one on my phone...

Me neither, it just worked in chrome on my pixel 6. And in Brave it doesn't work and does not ask for permission. Both still ask for permission for using geolocation API.

For me on latest iOS it does prompt the first time then it works every subsequent time without asking again

I was wondering about Android browsers, only quickly tested this on iOS

Thank the fishes for GrapheneOS, for its sensor permission.

Disagreed on your last paragraph. The average website is constantly rescaffolding. Because of ads, lazy loading, shitty frameworks, whatever. I'm constantly clicking on ads and unintended buttons/elements because of it. It's literally why mobile newspaper websites are unusable.

So if the goal was to get clicks on ads, they'd be pushing you hard to mobile web.

The real reason is the app can get much more interesting data from you.

I think both can be correct, rescaffolding probably was the original reason for stray clicks but once identified, I'm sure profitable issues may be fixed while plausible deniability remains.

Not disagreeing with you, I can smell the incentives for this sort of behaviour, but:

> you can use the accelerometer and other sensors to predict when somebody is going to click on something and you can trigger a layout shift and... oops!

Is there anything out in production that’s provably doing this? That’s pretty aggravating if so!

It’s happened to me a few times… I think? But hard to know if it’s just “ads load slowly and I decided what to tap on equally slowly”.

I honestly don’t respect engineers who willingly work on shit like that. Not sorry.

>make you click on ads accidentally

This has been a very frustrating experience with new YouTube which now hides comments in the vertical layout. I used to pay for Premium, so it’s some random recommended video that I constantly accidentally click, it’s very frustrating, esp when it doesn’t save my location in an hours long video. It only clicked for me that it’s actually for adverts when I saw someone else’s app.

Now, instead of paying Google $10 a month for a better experience, as I was happy to do, I’ve just spent a few bucks on Vinegar and donate the $10/mo to a couple of creators I like on Patreon. I’ve been successfully converted from an extremely happy paying customer to an annoyed leech.

Great point. I downloaded the official Reddit app just to see if the negativity surrounding it was warranted. As soon as I tried to scroll past my first ad, a tap was registered and the ad website loaded. It was suspiciously erroneous in its handling of my scrolling up.

They must not have read this memo.

The official app does not support landscape view, or at least that is a big reason why I use Infinity on my tablet.

I couldn't trigger a layout shift on purpose.

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