Comment by kristopolous | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kristopolous | Hacker News Reader

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The "download app" notifications on reddit are like some kind of art project to maximimally annoy you. Probably the worst offender is facebook where they have what can only be called an intentionally broken mobile website - the idea of losing the person's name if you edit a comment, the page deciding to reload you back to the main page if you switch tabs to research something or the post box clearing out if you switch focus, the comment box being nearly impossible to navigate through with the cursor, these are all profoundly egregious bugs that have been there for years.

Basically if you intend it to do something more substantive than comment a series of emojis, they have a bunch of bugs that block you.

I'm guessing someone has made the calculation that being terrible in these ways are more profitable.

Maybe people doom scroll more if the content is vapid?

I'd love to see the user stories. "Brenda is a 52 year old professional who likes commenting "Happy Birthday" to AI generated images of people with cakes. She loves multilevel marketing and buying stuff on Temu. Her husband Greg, reposts memes programmatically generated by content farms using LLMs and topic trackers"

Reddit used to have a really excellent mobile experience at i.reddit.com. It was a minimalist fast-loading mobile-first formatted version of the website. Unfortunately they shut it down not too long ago.

That was the day I stopped reading reddit.

I personally really like the old.reddit.com experience on my phone. Everything works surprisingly well. Sure you have to zoom in and scroll around and I know some people hate zooming in but it's never bothered me.

I personally can't stand apps that stop me from zooming in on things.

My sister complains about the information density of old Reddit being too high but that's exactly what I like about it!

I'm one of those people that dislike having to zoom and (importantly) pan around on a 2D canvas.

I miss Apollo.

And it literally blocks users from using messenger in the mobile browser, I need to ask for desktop website

Websites shouldn’t know if you’re on desktop because they are clearly gonna abuse that bit of information.

Web browsers were designed by naive, pre surveillance capitalism developers

A recent mobile web A/B test on Reddit will tell you when opening a link that the subreddit has not “been reviewed” and blocks access unless you open on the app or login.

They’re this close to just 100% shutting down the mobile web version.

I feel the same way about reddit. Modals are bigger than the page with unclickable buttons.

Profile/settings icon/button is rendered half way or fully out of the page.

Chat feature is completely unusable

I really think Reddit did it as a rebrand. It's somehow 20 years old and still gets teenagers.

Social media almost always skews older as it ages, beyond the natural pace of time.

AOL became mostly seniors as did Facebook and Yahoo. Reddit has not only shaken off most of the aging legacy users but had also captured a new generation of effectively children.

I personally don't like what they've done but it's worked.

The younger users view it as an app with a website as opposed to a website with an app

The formula to clear out the old people is to clear out their input area half way the first draft of their TL;DR They will just go away for a few years.

Unfortunately they have a major problem that is going to hit them soon: they rely on volunteer moderators to run the site for them, and the young people aren't doing it.

They'll LLM that, or at least they'll majorly try.

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